Here is a summary of a recent mayoral forum in Minneapolis, sponsored by MinnCAN.

MinnCAN is a spinoff of ConnCAN and 50CAN, organizations that promote school choice and look askance at public education. To be fair, they are quite happy to take public dollars, but to run their schools with rules that are very different from those that govern public schools, which are not allowed to pick their students or exclude those with low scores.

The candidates who came before the group in Minneapolis were singing the same song:

It goes like this: Our public schools are broken, our experienced teachers are no good, what we need is what the far-right think tanks have been advocating for fifty years:

Pressurizing teachers, “school choice,” standardized testing, “accountability”, charter schools, and vouchers.

School choice is the answer! No evidence needed.

Innovative? No, this is the status quo. This is the agenda of the Bush-Obama era.

With enough of this ideology, Minneapolis can destroy its public schools, replace them with privately managed charter schools and vouchers. And in short order, Minneapolis will look like Milwaukee, which has a charter sector, a voucher sector, and a withering public sector. Note that the public schools of Milwaukee has more students with disabilities than the other two sectors. And on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, Milwaukee is one of the nation’s lowest performing urban districts.

Is this what is called a Race to the Bottom?