In a stock market prospectus uncovered by education author Jonathan Kozol, the Montgomery Securities group explains to Corporate America the lure of privatizing education:
....“the education industry represents the largest market opportunity” since health-care services were privatized during the 1970’s.... From the point of view of private profit, one of these analysts enthusiastically observes, “The K–12 market is the Big Enchilada.”1
...because the noble intentions of some of the pioneers of the charter school movement (to create laboratories that prove what all educators know: that creativity, individual attention, and curricular relevance are the roots of good education) took shape so recently, and because there are some good charter schools, many progressives are disoriented in the current climate...Liberals who support the idea of charter schools give cover to politicians who champion privatization schemes...
Charter schools are, according to Kozol, a bridge toward vouchers:
"In the long run, charter schools are being strategically used to pave the way for vouchers...We already have the privatization of the military, as we’ve seen with the private military contractors in Iraq; we’ve seen the privatization of the prison system. Well, the next step is the privatization of public schools....In rare occasions, a charter school created by teachers in the public system and in collaboration with activist parents in the community have had at least short-term success.... They tend very quickly—even when they’re started by teachers with the best intentions—to enter into collaboration with the private sector."
* more than one million children attend some four thousand charter schools nationally.
* The Chicago Teachers Union has shrunk by 10 percent since the onset of Renaissance 2010, a program to break away one hundred schools from the Chicago Public School District.
*In Los Angeles 7 percent of children in public school attend charter schools.11
*Joel Klein, chancellor the New York public school system, has announced his intention that all of New York’s schools should be charters.
*In New Orleans, 57 percent of public school students attended charter schools at the end of 2007...
There is now a three-tier school district;
select students attend publicly funded charters,
others attend state-run schools (the Recovery School District) with a student-to-teacher ratio as high as 40:1 in some schools and no local school board to complain to,
still another group attends the least desirable Orleans Parish schools, where there is a security guard for every thirty-seven students.16
"Teachers who are committed to social justice should put themselves in the camp of those who have fought through direct action for equal access to quality public education. Our role models should reach from the former slaves who forced the Freedmen’s Bureau to create the first public schools in the South and the students who pushed for integration of the public school system during the civil rights movement, to the undocumented students fighting for access to public universities in the United States today.
As long as we have a system built on inequality, the policy makers will attempt to use schools to institutionally and ideologically buttress the division between the haves and have-nots. They will mostly succeed. But in the struggles to come for genuine equality, access to schools to meet the needs of every single child, not a select few among those who live in poverty, will be a call and a slogan of our movements. For the vast majority, this means quality education in public schools. Those who join that fight will determine what the word “quality” means, and will have an opportunity to force these concessions from policy makers until people decide that concessions are not enough."
More, with documentation:
http://normsnotes2.blogspot.com/2009/02/charter-schools-and-attack-on-public.html