LA Teachers Showdown: A Deep-Pocket $ Push, To Deep-6 Public Schools
"The Deep-Pocket Push to Deep-Six Public Schools." The backstory to the showdown in Los Angeles between teachers and billionaires. By Sam Pizzigat, Common Dreams, Jan. 20, 2019. EXCERPTS: Back during the 1960s and 1970s, in cities, suburbs, and small towns across the United States, teacher strikes made headlines on a fairly regular basis. Teachers in those years had a variety of reasons for walking out. They struck for the right to bargain. They struck for decent pay and benefits. They struck for professional dignity.
Now teachers in Los Angeles, America’s second-largest school district, are striking, the latest high-profile walkout in a new surge of teacher strikes that began last year. Teachers in L.A. are striking, in a most fundamental way, against how unequal America has become. They’re striking against our billionaire class.
In Los Angeles, our billionaires have been up to no good. They’ve essentially staged an unfriendly takeover of the L.A. board of education, shoveling mega millions into the campaigns of school board candidates pledged to advancing an agenda that funnels public tax dollars to “charter schools” that have next to no accountability to the public.
The demands of striking L.A. teachers “for smaller classes, more support staff, safer schools, community schools, and charter school oversight,” explains Peter Greene, a long-time union activist with 39 years experience teaching, “are not about making their working conditions a little better, but about keeping public education alive and healthy.”
Public education and plutocracy, educator activists in L.A. and nationwide increasingly understand, do not mix. Public schools do not thrive when billionaires prosper.
The ultra wealthy don’t send their kids to public schools. They don’t use public parks either or ride public buses. They have no need for basic public services, period, and resent having to pay taxes to fund them. The right-wing billionaire Walton family heirs to the Walmart fortune, for instance- essentially see public schools as “an island of socialism in a free-market sea.”
Other deep pockets see public education as a vast profit opportunity. Charters can give private, profit-making businesses direct access to public tax dollars. They also reflect basic “free-market” ideology: Instead of having communities democratically decide how their schools operate, let’s have charter schools — operating “free” from government interference. As well, the vast majority of public school teachers belong to teacher unions, and charter schools remain largely unorganized...https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/01/20/deep-pocket-push-deep-six-public-schools
More: https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/01/18/swelling-tide-major-teacher-strikes-shifting-our-politics-against-charter-agenda
- "Billionaires have plenty of reasons to subvert free, universal public education. And the rest of us have plenty of reason to support the striking teachers of Los Angeles," the author writes.
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Amid fierce debate over whether charter schools are good for black students, the heirs to the Walmart company fortune have been working to make inroads with advocates and influential leaders in the black community.
The Walton family, as one of the leading supporters of America's charter school movement, is spreading its financial support to prominent and like-minded black leaders, from grassroots groups focused on education to mainstream national organizations such as the United Negro College Fund and Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, according to an Associated Press analysis of tax filings and nonprofit grants data.
Charter schools, which are publicly funded and privately operated, are often located in urban areas with large black populations, intended as alternatives to struggling city schools. Black enrollment in charters has doubled over the course of a decade, to more than 760,000 students as of 2015-16, according to the latest federal data, but the rise also has been marked by concerns about racial segregation, inconsistent student outcomes, and the hollowing-out of neighborhood public schools.
- Charter pre kindergarten class taught by teacher Michelle Garnett, at Alice M. Harte Charter School in New Orleans, 2018. Charter schools, which are publicly funded and privately operated, are often located in urban areas with large black populations, intended as alternatives to struggling city schools. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
While some black leaders see charters as a safer, better alternative in their communities, a deep rift of opinion was exposed by a 2016 call for a moratorium on charters by the NAACP, a longtime skeptic that expressed concerns about school privatization, transparency and accountability issues. The Black Lives Matter movement is also among those that have demanded charter school growth be curbed.
When NAACP leaders gathered to discuss charters in 2016, a group of demonstrators led the Cincinnati hotel to complain to police that they were trespassing. The three buses that brought the 150 black parents from Tennessee on the 14-hour road trip were provided by The Memphis Lift, an advocacy group that has received $1.5 million from the Walton foundation since 2015..
Like U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and many other deep-pocketed billionaire philanthropists, the Walmart heirs- one of America's richest families- embrace charter schools and education reform as an avenue to help the neediest. The Walton foundation is in the midst of a $1 billion pledge dedicated largely to expanding charters, which they see as investments to find better ways to educate those who struggle in traditional school systems.
Andre Perry, an education policy expert at the Brookings Institution, said the Walton foundation's reliance on black faces to makes its case for charters suggests that they're exploiting black people for a "white agenda." "It's a sad thing that education reform is about how much money you have and not about what connection you have with black communities." More, http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/walmart-heirs-money-influences-black-charter-schools-debate/ar-BBRnVel?ocid=HPCOMMDHP15
