Several years ago, the Walton Family Foundation and the Gates Foundation decided that it was not enough to open new charter schools. No, they had to devise mechanisms to make sure that school officials put charters on an equal footing with public schools and that the public didn’t care whether schools were run by their elected school board or a private board of directors.
The Gates Foundation created something called “the Gates Compact,” paying districts to treat public and charter schools the same.
The Waltons played a different angle. To advance their agenda of embedding charters and wiping out any differences between public schools and charter schools, they pushed for the adoption of a common enrollment form. The two sectors are intermingled, and neither students nor parents know which schools are public and which have private or corporate management.
In Oakland, where a slate of pro-public school parents won the last school board election, the board voted to eliminate the OneApp system.
Jane Nylund, a parent activist in Oakland, sent the CONTINUE READING: Good News from Oakland! | Diane Ravitch's blog