Dear Michelle Rhee, Your School Privatization Schemes Were Hatched By Southern Segregationists

School privatization schemes, hatched during the racist Southern backlash against the 1954 Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education decision, are now both undermining the urban public schools that many African-American students attend by siphoning taxpayer money off in neo-voucher schemes that fund white-dominated wealthy suburban schools and are also funding a new segregation regime that discriminates against LGBT students and even teaches that they are hated by God. Michelle Rhee's national pro-school privatization group StudentsFirst appears to be all for it.

Following the election of New Jersey's new U.S. Senator, Cory Booker, StudentsFirst head Michelle Rhee emitted a series of chirpy congratulatory tweets which proclaimed, among other things, that "education is the civil rights issue of our time".

Rhee might just have a point, but as an article from the October 2013 issue of Rolling Stone explores, through their support for school privatization schemes Rhee and Booker (who enthusiastically endorses StudentsFirst) might not be on the better side of the issue.

In The Hidden War Against Gay Teens Rolling Stone's Alex Morris explores the growth of taxpayer-funded Christian fundamentalist schools, funded by neo-voucher schemes in 12 US states, that actively practice anti-gay discrimination, barring LGBT students from attending and even teaching that they are hated by God.

So where did these voucher schemes come from ? As it turns out, the original idea seems to trace back to a reactionary plan, hatched by staunch pro-segregationist racists such as Georgia Governor Herman Talmadge, that was never implemented but was designed to privatize all of Georgia's public schools in order to thwart to desegregation mandated by the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling.

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http://www.talk2action.org/story/2013/10/18/13397/601/Front_Page/Dear_Michelle_Rhee_Your_School_Privatization_Schemes_Were_Hatched_By_Southern_Segregationists