Privateers and Public Education: They Want the Money | Firedoglake

Privateers and Public Education: They Want the Money | Firedoglake:

Privateers and Public Education: They Want the Money

by Glenn W. Smith

Message scrawled on temp classroom, Pershing Jr. High

It’s not hard to pierce the rotten veil of today’s so-called public education reformers. Some corporate hacks see all that money spent on public education and, as is their habit, they set out to get it.
First, they embarrass teachers and schools with ridiculous, destructive high-stakes tests and rigged “accountability” measures. Second, create an awkward, exploitative alliance with home-schoolers and religious-based private schools to advance corporate-owned alternatives: vouchers, charter schools and virtual schools.
Let’s put it plainly. This conservative reform movement has come to bury public education not to save it. It is no more complicated than that. It’s simple, but it’s a hard message to communicate because to most Americans it seems so un-American it can’t be true. But it is true.
Chicago teachers, who have reached a tentative agreement in their dispute with Rahm Emanuel’s privateers,