Devastating Report Condemns Corporate Reform as Civil Rights Fraud
As the 60th anniversary of Brown vs. Board of Education arrives, a report has been released by the Journey 4 Justice Alliance, a coalition of community, youth and parent-led organizations, which declares corporate education reform a civil rights fraud.
"Death by a Thousand Cuts: Racism, School Closures and Public School Sabotage, Voices from America's Affected Communities of Color," ought to be required reading for every citizen and policy maker in the nation. While the nation is capable of identifying racism in the words of an 80 year old basketball team owner, we seem to have lost the ability to stop the re-segregation of our schools, and those who claim to be "civil rights" leaders are sometimes contributing to the problems.
The report begins by explaining the source of destructive policies:
Right-wing conservatives have long sought to eliminate public goods such as public education, and dismantle organized labor, especially teachers' unions. Thus, for decades they have advocated - often successfully - for cutting spending to public schools. They have also long pursued the replacement of public schools with non-unionized, privately managed schools that receive public funds, either through a voucher system or a system of charter schools. Their privatization proposals received little support until they were joined by billionaires willing to invest heavily in education reform such as Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and the Walton family; members of the business community, especially Wall Street and large corporations, who realized there is considerable profit to be made by outsourcing education to private management; and Democratic policymakers who bought into (or were at least willing to promote) the unproven assertion that privatization and "school choice" would create improved educational opportunities for students. As a result of this political shift, there emerged a well-organized and extraordinarily well-funded group of individuals and organizations that has exploited any political opening they could find to destabilize neighborhood public schools - almost exclusively within communities of color - and instead promote the expansion of charterDevastating Report Condemns Corporate Reform as Civil Rights Fraud - Living in Dialogue - Education Week Teacher: