New National Map Shows That Education Privatizers Have Burrowed into Almost All 50 States
Charter schools, voucher programs, private school tax subsidies and more.
Only three states do not have some form of privatized K-12 education in their public schools, a new nationwide map and accompanying analysis has found, showing how much the charter school and school choice movement has grown in recent years.
Those states are North Dakota, Nebraska and West Virginia, the only states given an “A” grade by the Network for Public Education, a non-profit that opposes privatization, loss of local control, over-testing of students, and other non-governmental efforts that seek to commoditize public schools.
All the other states and the District of Columbia have some mix of charter schools, charter authorizing authority outside local school districts, online charter school, voucher programs where taxpayers pay for private schools, tax credits for sending children to private schools or educational savings accounts, which is another form of a voucher program, according to the NPE State Report Card 2017.
“Our goal for the School Privatization Explained project was to arm public school advocates with the facts,” said Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education (NPE) and a former high school principal from New York. “Those who wish to turn our public education system into a private education system have been quite clever in disguising their intent. Our one-page fact sheets ‘rip off the mask.’”
The Network for Public Education was co-founded by Diane Ravitch and Anthony Cody, both longtime educators and advocates of traditional public schools. The group supports numerous policies that would improve public schools but is opposed to private sector efforts to infiltrate K-12 schools via various corporate management and marketing schemes.
“You know what we oppose,” Ravitch says on the website. “High-stakes testing; privatization of public education; mass school closures to save money or to facilitate privatization; demonization of teachers; lowering of standards for the education profession; for-profit management of schools.”
“We want advocates to have facts at their fingertips,” Burris said. “We want them New National Map Shows That Education Privatizers Have Burrowed into Almost All 50 States | Alternet:
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