What’s really behind the charter school amendment referendum?
Corporate greed.
Jeff Faux wrote for AlterNet 15 October 2012,
Education Profiteering: Wall Street’s Next Big Thing?
Wall Street’s involvement in the charter school movement is presented as an act of philanthropy, but it’s really about greed.
He reviews some of
the evidence that charter schools don’t improve education,
especially when forced on states.
Then he gets into why so much money is flowing into charter schools
anyway.
Education privatization would not, per se, create a net new stimulus
for the economy. But by diverting large existing flows of money from
the public to the private sector it would create new profit-making
ventures that could be capitalized and transformed into stocks,
derivatives and leveraged securities. The pot has been sweetened by
a 39 percent federal tax credit for financing charter school
construction that can double an investor’s return in seven years.
The prospect of new speculative opportunities could well recharge
the animal spirits upon which Wall Street depends.
Some “liberal” privatization promoters claim that charter schools
should not be considered private. But that’s an argument the
management companies that run the schools only use when they are
asking for more government funding. At the same time they argue in
courts and to legislatures that as private enterprises they should
not be subject to government audits, labor laws and other
restrictions.
These companies rent, buy, and sell buildings; make contracts for
consulting, accounting and legal services, food concessions, and
transportation; and pay their managers far more than public school
principals earn. In cases where city governments have given land to
charter schools, for profit real estate companies have ended up
owning the subsidized land and buildings. In states where charter
schools are required to be nonprofit, profit-making companies can
still set them up and then organize a board of neighborhood
residents who will give them the right to manage the school with
little or no interference.
In 2008 Dennis Bakke, CEO of Imagine Schools, a private company that
managed 71 schools in eleven states, sent an email to the firm’s
senior staff. It reminded his managers not to give school boards the
“misconception” that they were “responsible for making decisions
about budget matters, school policies, hiring of the principal, and
dozens of other matters.” The memo suggested that the community
board members be required to sign undated letters of resignation.
“It is our school, our money, and our risk,” he wrote, “not theirs.”
Yet in Georgia it’s our tax money they want to use to fund those
“public” private charter schools.
That’s the “large existing flows of money” they want to divert
into their profiteering pockets.
No wonder ALEC is so big into charter schools!
And look who else:
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“I think for base politics, the red meat Democrats, the red meat Republicans, they like to see a good squabble and they saw one.”
Laverne Lewis Gaskins is with Obama For America. She said “it was a decisive victory for President Obama. I think he was clear in his message. He was able to articulate the future that he has for America.”
