School Choice: Philanthropy or Predatory Capitalism by Cheryl Binkley
Originally posted at: http://3rdmillenniumteacher.blogspot.com/2017/02/school-choice-philanthropy-or-predatory.html
Betsy DeVos, Bill and Melinda Gates, Alice Walton, Eli Broad, the Koch brothers and other billionaires each have the money to endow Many schools. Yet, they have been spending vast sums of money to dictate the structure of public schools and how communities run them.
If what they wanted was to provide educational opportunities, they could have created their own string of free schools in key locations -- based on their own fortunes, not tax dollars. Their endowed schools could have been the laboratories for innovation they claim to want. Their endowments could have offered free education to those students they claim to want to save. Their added money could have improved the economies of the poor communities they claim to want to help.
None of them have done so. Instead they have spent billions of dollars creating thinly veiled PR firms to malign public schools and purchasing public officials, all in an attempt to lay claim to tax dollars others have paid. Instead of paying tax dollars that could fund those public schools they so viciously criticize, they have tried to take the tax dollars working people pay to educate the community's children.
This latest push for "School Choice" is just another round in their ongoing fight to access other Badass Teachers Association: School Choice: Philanthropy or Predatory Capitalism by Cheryl Binkley: