How These 5 Famous Billionaires Are Dismantling Black Public Schools
“These heavy-handed tactics require a suspension of democracy that would not be tolerated in a white suburb.”
The biggest racists in the US aren’t running around with white hoods and burning crosses. They’re running Fortune 500 companies and burning public school systems across the country in favor of privately-run, publicly-funded charter schools.
While none of the famous billionaires on this list are dues-paying members of racist groups, they’re engaging in actions that prey on the linchpins of the black community — public K-12 schools. Education reform by itself isn’t overtly racist, but when looking at the actions of these billionaires with a wider lens, it becomes apparent that the effort to privatize public education is primarily taking place in minority communities.
The charter school movement is particularly insidious, as it’s essentially a form of institutionalized racism veiled in altruism. In reference to the charter takeover of the New Orleans, Louisiana school district, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch put it this way:
“These heavy-handed tactics require a suspension of democracy that would not be tolerated in a white suburb, but can be done to powerless urban districts where the children are black and Hispanic,” Ravitch told In These Times. “That model requires firing all the teachers, no matter their performance, allowing them to reapply for a job, and replacing many of them with inexperienced TFA recruits. That model requires wiping out public schools and replacing them with privately managed schools that set their own standards for admission, discipline, expulsion, and are financially opaque.”
While charter schools have lately been able to brag on themselves as reports tout their higher test scores in math and reading compared to public schools, these studies leave out the fact that many charters refuse to help struggling children and instead dump them into public schools, in order to boost their own statistics. According to NY Chalkbeat, charter schools in New York City suspended 11 percent of students during the 2011-2012 school year, while public schools suspended just 4.2 percent. In fact, 11 NYC charter schools suspended as many as 30 percent of students that year. The charter suspension rate is likely higher, as charters don’t have to report in-school suspension rates.
The push for more charter schools isn’t based on a desire to better educate kids, but for the more mundane purpose of higher corporate profit. As the Washington Post pointed out, charter schools, on average, don’t do any better or worse when compared side-by-side with their public counterparts. In fact, if one were to replace the erroneous invisible “composite” public school student that Stanford University used in their report comparing charter and public school test scores with actual public school students, the results would likely be in favor of public schools.
So why the push for privately-run, publicly-funded charter schools?
The model of education reform is threefold — first, corporate education “reformers” push for “Common Core” standards by which to evaluate all students nationwide, while ignoring factors like geographic location, ethnic background, and economic well-being of different student bodies.
Next, harsh standardized testing that evaluates student performance based on these flawed standards and practically guarantees high failure rates is pushed onto schools — many of which depend on funding from property taxes, meaning that schools in affluent white suburbs are in a better position to succeed based on these standards than inner-city schools in neighborhoods with low property value.
Finally, schools are labeled as “failing” due to the lopsided evaluation process, and privately-run charters are forced onto inner-city populations, paving the way for the privatization of public education in predominantly black and latino communities.
Here are 5 white billionaires who are speeding along that process.
1. Mark Zuckerberg
Not many people are aware of the Facebook billionaire’s foray into education reform. Nonetheless, Zuckerberg did, in fact,spend $100 million in an attempt to establish charter schools in Newark, New Jersey in a joint effort with Governor Chris Christie and Newark mayor Cory Booker. After Zuckerberg’s donation, Booker used the $100 million to start a foundation, 5 Famous Billionaires Dismantling Black Public Schools:
