Billionaires Love Charter Schools
From the very beginning, more than 35 years ago, the idea and practice of charter schools was conceived and gradually executed by those with abundant cultural, social, political, and economic capital. Charter schools are not the product of grass-roots forces, as the public has often been led to believe. They never have been. Charter schools did not arise as a result of ordinary everyday people coming together and saying: “hey, we need charter schools, let’s make it happen.” Charter schools did not emerge from the ground-up. Nonprofit and for-profit charter schools, which have a well-documented track record of failure and closure, have been a top-down capital-centered phenomenon from the very start. Their history shows that they have nothing to do with advancing the public interest, improving schools, or closing the “achievement gap.” Nonprofit and for-profit charter schools have mainly made certain people richer.
Not surprisingly, we regularly hear and read about the big influence of the ultra-wealthy in the segregated charter school sector. Naturally, these major owners of capital seek to conceal their narrow private interests behind high ideals. To prevent people from seeing charter schools as pay-the-rich schemes, for example, they try to portray charter schools as bona fide down-to-earth “opportunities” that “empower” parents to “choose” the type of school they want their child to attend (even though it is actually charter schools that choose parents and students, not the other way around). In other words, charter schools are a benign and welcome form of “educational freedom” and consumerism. The public is supposed to overlook the fact that charter schools have increased problems instead of solving problems and just blindly support CONTINUE READING: Billionaires Love Charter Schools | Dissident Voice
