Privatizing Public Education - There is Money to be Made
If you read nothing else about the takeover of our public schools by people who want to control the system (and some who want to make a buck), please read this article from The Nation Institute. It is probably one of the best written and in-depth articles around.
Highlights:
Highlights:
- If the national movement to "reform" public education through vouchers, charters and privatization has a laboratory, it is Florida. It was one of the first states to undertake a program of "virtual schools" — charters operated online, with teachers instructing students over the Internet — as well as one of the first to use vouchers to channel taxpayer money to charter schools run by for-profits. (More on Florida which has continued it fall in education AND business rankings. Scientology in charters in Florida.
- But some in Florida are fighting back against these reforms and winning. Lamenting this series of defeats, Patricia Levesque, a top adviser to former Governor Jeb Bush, spoke to fellow reformers at a retreat in October 2010. Levesque noted that reform efforts had failed because the opposition had time to