Billionaire-Funded Charter School Juggernaut Hits Roadblock in Los Angeles
Teachers union organizing in hostile charter environment, while L.A. school board blocks "out of touch" plan by billionaires.
Over the past decade and longer, there has been a massively funded effort by the wealthiest people in America to replace public education and elected school boards with a privatized charter-school system. Walmart’s Walton Family Foundation justcommitted an additional $1 billion to the cause. The result has been a highly successful juggernaut leading to more than 6,700 charter public schools in 42 states and Washington D.C., and funded by taxpayers, with nearly 3 million students.
Co-mingling substantially public funds with private dollars, leveraging the advantage of its own set of rules and laws enabled by state legislatures—which eliminated most public accountability — school privateers have run roughshod over school systems in many American cities. New Orleans, Detroit, Milwaukee and Philadelphia are just a small number of urban areas with a heavy presence of publicly funded private charters. Charter advocates and their deep-pocketed investors and supporters, using aggressive lobbying and campaign contributions of many wealthy supporters, have established strong footholds in Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, California and many other states. In California, there are now an estimated 500,000 students in 1,200 charter schools.
Along the way it became clear that a key tactic of privateers has been the scapegoating of public school teachers and locally elected school boards. The attack on teachers, so clearly articulated in the slick propaganda film, Waiting for Superman, attempted to hold teachers responsible for widespread poverty-induced school failures, which of course, were fundamentally out of their control. The formula for rapidly expanding non-union charters includes undermining teachers unions, and followed the overall game plan of a larger right-wing strategy by Walmart, the Koch brothers and others to weaken or eliminate public employee unions.
The larger goal? To get private access to $500 billion in taxpayer funds spent Billionaire-Funded Charter School Juggernaut Hits Roadblock in Los Angeles | Alternet:
