Jennifer Berkshire and I interviewed Charles Siler about his inside knowledge of the privatization movement.
Jennifer is co-author of the important new book (with Jack Schneider) called A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door.
As you will learn in the interview, Charles was brought up in a conservative environment. He studied at George Mason University in the Koch-funded economics department (you can read about it in Nancy MacLean’s excellent book Democracy in Chains, which I reviewed in The New York Review of Books). He worked for the Goldwater Institute and lobbied for ALEC and other billionaire-funded privatization groups.
At some point, he realized he was on the wrong side, promoting ideas that would do harm, not good. He wanted to do good.
He said unequivocally that the goal of the privatizers is to destroy public education. They promote charter schools and vouchers to destroy public education.
He explains that school privatization is only one part of a much broader assault on the public sector. The end game is to privatize everything: police, firefighters, roads, parks, whatever is now public, and turn it into a for-profit CONTINUE READING: The Dark Secrets of the Privatization Movement: An Interview with Charles Siler | Diane Ravitch's blog