Devastating Report Condemns Corporate Reform as Civil Rights Fraud
Anthony Cody May 16, 2014
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 charter schools.
These policies have resulted in school closures and the expansion of more selective charter schools in the communities represented by this coalition – predominately low-income communities of color. The report’s authors point out that in spite of prominent reformers donning the mantle of the modern “civil rights movement,” corporate reform is no ally.
First, it is appalling that anyone would dare to equate the billionaire-funded destruction of our most treasured public institutions with the grassroots-led struggles for racial equality to which many of our elders and ancestors made heroic sacrifices.
Second, we simply cannot tolerate anyone telling us these policies are for our own good. Because we are the students they claim to be doing this for. We are the parents and fam- ily members that they claim to be helping. The communities they’re changing so rapidly are our communities, and our experience with school closures and charter school expansion confirms what an abundance of research has made quite clear: these policies have not produced higher-quality educational Save Our Schools March – Corporate Reform = Civil Rights Fraud:
SOSers joined the masses of people who assembled in the Selma, Alabama on March 6th-8th. Among the many highlights that came with participating in such an event were the inspiring speeches offered by Rev. William J. Barber II. Many may know the work of Rev. Barber through his courageous work in the Moral Mondays movement out of North Carolina. His words reminded us that the difficulties faced b
