Current Environment Provides Opportunity to Intensify Resistance to Charter Schools
Funding Private Enterprises With Public Funds Must Be Outlawed. Defund Charter Schools.
Now is not the time to divert even more public funds to private businesses like charter schools. Disaster capitalism has harmed the public interest and public schools in many ways. The nation’s public schools have been suffering budget cuts for years and now with the “COVID Pandemic” they will experience deeper funding cuts. Yet the federal government and state governments continue to funnel huge sums of public funds to segregated non-profit and for-profit charter schools that operate without transparency and close regularly.1
Society does not need more privatization and more pay-the-rich “school choice” schemes. Society needs a public authority that provides the human right to education with a guarantee in practice, which means fully-funding all public schools and making sure high-quality public schools are available to all for free in every neighborhood.
There is no shortage of money to make this happen. In the last few weeks alone the private Federal Reserve has printed several trillion dollars to save the ultra-rich again. And the real value produced by real workers in the real economy is more than enough to ensure a free world-class public education system controlled by a public authority worthy of the name.
Funding “free market” arrangements in education while letting the nation’s public schools go under-funded is especially absurd given the repeated failure of the “free market” to produce stability and success for all. The “free market” ensures only chaos, anarchy, and violence. With each and every economic recession, slump, crisis, and depression, “free market” ideology loses what little credibility, if any, it has left. For all intensive purposes, “free market” ideology is dead in the water; it stands completely discredited.
Treating education as a commodity or consumer good, or pretending that CONTINUE READING: Current Environment Provides Opportunity to Intensify Resistance to Charter Schools | Dissident Voice
