Recent news articles claim that Arizona is a “leader in innovation” when it comes to private businesses like charter schools. Arizona is said to be amazing because it is ensuring “freedom” for parents to “choose” from an exciting array of charter schools to send their kids to, and this is all thanks to a legal […]
President-elect Joe Biden recently nominated Miguel Cardona to serve as the next U.S. Secretary of Education. Hardly anyone in education circles has heard of or spoken about Cardona, let alone in an open and serious way. For weeks there was endless speculation and confusion surrounding the “top potential pick” for this position. All kinds of […]
The post Charter School Promoters Comfortable with Cardona first appeared on Dissident Voice.
Unlike public schools, private businesses like charter schools spend millions of public dollars a year on advertising and marketing. Putting aside widespread fraud and corruption in the segregated charter school sector, this is an enormous waste and abuse of public funds, especially at a time when public schools are being starved of much-needed public funds […]
From the very beginning, more than 35 years ago, the idea and practice of charter schools was conceived and gradually executed by those with abundant cultural, social, political, and economic capital. Charter schools are not the product of grass-roots forces, as the public has often been led to believe. They never have been. Charter schools did not arise as a result of ordinary everyday people coming together and saying: “hey, we need charter schools, let’s make it happen.” Charter schools did not emerge from the ground-up.
Now is not the time to divert even more public funds to private businesses like charter schools. Disaster capitalism has harmed the public interest and public schools in many ways. The nation’s public schools have been suffering budget cuts for years and now with the “COVID Pandemic” they will experience deeper funding cuts.
It is no surprise that many are exploiting the “COVID Pandemic” to advance their narrow self-serving agendas. Charter school advocates are no exception.
Crises often generate instability, chaos, and confusion that can make it easier for such forces to get away with antisocial policies and arrangements that would be far more difficult to implement under normal conditions.
While private businesses like non-profit and for-profit charter schools have been seizing enormous sums of public money for decades,1 they continue to seize hundreds of millions of public dollars during the “COVID Pandemic”—a move that further undermines the nation’s public education system and economy.
Advocates of privately-operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools have never stopped working to funnel as much public money as possible from public schools into their own private pockets, even if this means undermining the education and future of students attending those public schools. This massive transfer of public funds from public schools to charter schools also undermines teachers’ working conditions and has a negative impact on society, the economy, and the national interest.
The DeVos Department of Education’s new “Proposed Rules” for federal regulations of “Distance Education and Innovation” (85 FR 18638) will effectively open the floodgates for online education corporations to put public brick-and-mortar schools out of business by streamlining “adaptive-learning and other artificial intelligence” technologies that repla
Public law and private law are separate spheres of law that operate according to different standards and relationships.1
Private law governs relations between private citizens, whereas public law governs relations between individuals and the state. This distinction is critical. Private law does not concern society as a whole; public law does.
