Return of Wisconsin’s Massive School Privatization Plan

By Rebecca Kemble,

Public school privatization troops were out in force yesterday in the Wisconsin State Capitol as the Senate Education Committee held a public hearing on SB 76, a bill that undermines the authority of local schools boards to approve charter schools, and dips into their pockets to pay for the insult.

The proposal comes in the wake of a failed attempt last session to create a state-wide charter school authorizing board that would have forced local school districts to accept and pay for charter schools they did not want.

The current proposal is more nuanced, but no less invasive. For charter schools that would operate as part of the school district known as “instrumentality” schools, SB 76 bars a school board from considering the financial impact of a charter school on students in the rest of the district, and removes input from teachers in the decision. It also forces school districts to allow “high performing” charter schools to open new schools in the district whether the community wants it or not.

Emotions ran high during the four-hour hearing on the bill, as public school defenders clashed with charter proponents. Sen. Alberta Darling (R-River Hills) authored the substitute amendment to the bill, which was only released two days before the hearing. The legislative council memo explaining the meaning of the legalese in the amendment was not available at the time of the hearing, so many people were unaware of what it meant.

more

http://www.progressive.org/wisconsin-massive-school-privatization-plan