To Starve the Beast, We Must Drown the Children

[proud2BlibKansan]

Waiting For SuperFraud
By Michael T. Martin

Public schools have to fail. There is no alternative. So give up trying to argue otherwise with facts and logic.
The mockumentary Waiting For Superman made this clear. Funded by millionaires, the movie told the story of some privatized schools in Harlem portrayed as saviors of children otherwise condemned to public schools. Privatized schools mostly funded by hedge fund millionaires on Wall Street. They spent two million dollars to promote the film nationally. Another major film titled “The Lottery” told a similar tale: children in Harlem desperate to escape public schools. Funded by more millionaires.

State Senator Bill Perkins, who represents the people of Harlem, tried to put profit restrictions on these privatized schools. So the millionaires spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to run an opponent against him in the November, 2010, election. The people of Harlem voted overwhelmingly to re-elect Perkins.

One of the supposed heroes in the mockumentary was Michele Rhee, the caustic head of Washington, D.C., schools. She subsequently was the focus of the November, 2010, mayor’s election in D.C., campaigning for the existing mayor who appointed her, promising to resign if he lost. The people of D.C. voted him and her out.

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After President Clinton was elected in the early 1990s, Reed Hundt, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (1993-97), asked H.W. Bush’s Secretary of Education Bill Bennett to support legislation that would pay for internet access in all classrooms and libraries in the country. “I asked him to support the bill in the crucial stage when we needed Republican allies. He told me he would not help, because he did not want public schools to obtain new funding, new capability, new tools for success. He wanted them, he said, to fail so that they could be replaced with vouchers, charter schools, religious schools, and other forms of private education.”

more . . . http://www.schoolsmatter.info/

[Kennah]

1. Do it, and decrease the surplus population.

[csziggy]

2. Before Thanksgiving I was talking to my Mom about schools in my old hometown

They have a charter military school, an International Baccalaureate program at the public school, numerous private church schools and a couple of charter schools. Mom is upset because she found out that the military school, which is essentially a charter school and taxpayer funded, will not take ROTC member unless they met all the grade requirements. She feels that since taxpayers are funding the military schools, they should have to take ALL the military recruits in ROTC.

Mom did not realize that all charter schools are that way, that they only take and keep the students they select, not all comers like the public schools are required to do. She also did not realize that charter schools are completely out of the control of the local school boards. She thought if there was a problem with the charter schools, complaints to the elected school board members or to the county commission members could get something done.

She also had not realized the scam that charter schools pull by leasing themselves their facilities, paying themselves for production of lesson plans, then asking to be bailed out when the funds they get from local governments are not sufficient to pay themselves their exorbitant fees.

Mom used to be informed about the local schools, while she had children there. But that even her grandchildren are out of school and she gets all her news from Central Florida right wing controlled media, she has not clue. And it is people like that who are making a lot of the decisions about the schools, not those who are truly informed about what is really going on.

[galloglas]

3. End all

1) privatized schools for profit
2) all corporate person-hood
3) tax breaks for corporations

Make all:

1) capitalists loss ALL their capital in the event of corporate failure or liability
2) guarantee all children free education though the baccalaureate level, via federal law
3) school districts provide "equivalent facilities and services" to their student population, with any funding shortages made up by state or federally mandated levies against the wealthier school districts

[LWolf]

4. He wanted them to fail. Open and transparent,

the agenda since the Reagan administration has been to destroy public education. The American public has gone along with that agenda, and the end is in sight.

[proud2BlibKansan]

5. Yep. They are getting what they wanted.

And it's pretty frustrating to watch.