Who Controls Our Schools? How Billionaire-Sponsored Privatization Is Destroying Democracy and Enriching the Charter School Industry
A report/ebook on the corporate takeover of K-12 schools.
(Editor's note: AlterNet has covered the school privatization story in great detail. Over time, we became alarmed at what we were seeing. The Independent Media Institute, AlterNet’s parent organization, has published an ebook, Who Controls Our Schools? The Privatization of American Public Education. What follows is a summary of its findings and recommendations.)
The Problem
America’s public schools, which over the 20th century came to embrace the promise of equal opportunity for all children, are at a historic crossroad. Once the heart of our democracy and a bastion of local accountability, our K-12 schools now bear the scars of a nearly twenty-five year assault from a cadre of very wealthy ideological reformers who seek to privately run them using taxpayers funds. Their most popular tool to dismantle this public good? Charter public schools, especially those run by corporate franchises, which now educate millions of students.
The growth of charter schools nationwide (whose numbers have increased exponentially since 2000) would not have occurred without a handful of heirs to the world’s largest family fortunes and other billionaires directing their tax-exempt foundations use their wealth to remake public schools in a corporate image. Critics have called it a virtual conspiracy while charter school promoters see themselves as K-12 education’s saviors. Either way, the result has been the creation of a little understood, parallel, privatized system within the public school system.
Charters often reject the most difficult-to-educate students (special needs, English-language learners, etc.), who are shunted to struggling, underfunded traditional K-12 public schools. The impacts have not just been academic, though, in many instances, charters have failed to fare any better on standardized tests than the schools they’ve supplanted. A charter establishment has emerged and has ushered in changes in law and governance that are fundamentally anti-democratic, from operating secretively and without transparency to sidelining locally elected school boards. Bringing the profit motive into non-commercial public education has created a business model that is frequently prone to nepotism, self-dealing and corporate enrichment, diverting multi-millions from classrooms into private hands.
The billionaire-led large-scale privatization of America’s public schools has become central to the education landscape in many cities across the nation. The charter industry, dominated by chains and franchises with national ambitions, but also filled with players whose income and careers benefit as charters grow, shows few signs of slowing down. Few Americans understand how dire the consequences of a wholesale privatization of our public education might be—or how close we are to seeing just such a fate set into motion. Recent high-profile criticism, such as television host John Oliver’s scathing but comedic profile that Who Controls Our Schools? How Billionaire-Sponsored Privatization Is Destroying Democracy and Enriching the Charter School Industry | Alternet:
