Julian Vasquez Heilig is a scholar of race, inequity, charter schools, and TFA. He also writes a brilliant blog, that is informative and entertaining because of his skillful use of graphics.
In this post, Heilig explores the sordid history of school choice.
Vouchers, he says, have two purposes: profit and discrimination against children of color. (They also get rid of unions.)
This has been demonstrated in the U.S. over many years and internationally.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It is shocking that Milton Friedman gave the privateers a “road map” on how to discriminate and establish separate and unequal schools based on race. All of the representatives that support charters should get a copy of how the free market is designed to promote segregation. We should make sure the media gets access to this information; it is indeed a sordid history!
Oh, that many of our currently popular Truth In Film filmmakers out there will step up to make HONEST movies about the history of school choice.
Where is Michael Moore when we need him? He was elected to the school board of Flint, Michigan, when he was only 19. He knows what is happening.
may he FEEL our call 🙂
CROSS POSTED AT
http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Truth-Why-vouchers-and-sc-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Betsy-Devos_Children_Corporations_Discrimination-170202-708.html#comment643341 WITH THIS COMMENT:
The oligarchs need to Get ’em Young! ”
This is my mantra, and it should go VIRAL… AS THE PLOY TO END DEMOCRACY BY ENDING PUBLIC EDUCATION!
“Vouchers violate the American ideal of democracy because they transfer educational decisions from the public domain (through school boards and elections) to private management companies and organizations. This has already occurred in charter schools run by private charter management organizations that refuse public input into teaching and curriculum decisions. These organizations often prioritize profits over learning, using public tax dollars to hire inexperienced, teachers, and pocketing the difference. By permitting entirely private schools, vouchers would further decrease public accountability and create a wall between the public and the education sector, thereby diminishing democracy and the role of education as a public good;” writes Frank Adamson of Stanford University. He also says: “The best way to stop Trump’s plan to privatize public schools is to say no to vouchers, .”
“It is critical to understand that the debate about education vouchers is nested within a larger battle over labor. Vouchers can disenfranchise teacher unions because they disperse teachers across many types of institutions and constrain their capacity to collectively bargain”
AND…
“Trump and DeVos’s proposed voucher system promises to concurrently segregate students by class, ethnicity, and ability level while socially ostracizing individual students based on their ethnicities and identities. This system–driven by underlying agendas of marginalizing labor and generating private profit–will violate three core American principles: the separation of church and state, meritocracy, and democratic participation. In Chile, hundreds of thousands of people have marched in the streets to recapture public education after the vouchers decimated their system; U.S. citizens would do well to protest a national voucher policy before losing public education as a foundation of and for democracy.”
Submitted on Thursday, Feb 2, 2017 at 5:39:10 PM
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
The entire “education reform/choice/voucher/charter school” movement has from its very beginnings been rooted in racism. The movement, of which charter schools are the profit-making part, has always had resegregation of America’s schools as its core agenda. Reports from the NAACP and ACLU have revealed the facts about just how charter schools are resegregating our nation’s schools, as well as discriminating racially and socioeconomically against American children, and last year the NAACP Board of Directors passed a resolution calling for a moratorium on charter school expansion and for the strengthening of oversight in governance and practice. Moreover, a very detailed nationwide research by The Center for Civil Rights Remedies at UCLA shows in clear terms that private charter schools suspend extraordinary numbers of black students.
The first outcry for resegregation “reform” in the guise of vouchers arose immediately after the 1954 Supreme Court ruling on Brown v. Board of Education in which the Court declared that separate but equal was inherently unequal and ordered racial integration of the public schools. That ruling triggered “white flight” from public schools to private schools — but parents quickly realized that the tuition cost of private schools was more than they wanted to pay out-of-pocket. That realization led political and private resegregationists to the concoct the “reform” of vouchers, and to sell it to eager parents by deceptively marketing it then —and still today — as merely giving parents free “choice.”
But the 1950’s voucher crusade faded away when it became clear that because of school attendance boundaries no more than a few token blacks would be attending formerly all-white public schools. In 1972 when the Supreme Court finally ordered busing to end the ongoing de facto segregation, the reform movement rose from its grave and has been alive ever since then trying new tactics to restore racial segregation because it’s unlikely that the Court’s racial integration order can ever be reversed. When it became clear in the 1980’s that vouchers would never become widespread, the segregationists tried many other routes to restore racial segregation, and the most successful has been charter schools because charter schools can be sold to blithely unaware do-gooder billionaires as well as to unscrupulous profiteers who recognized charter schools as a way to divert vast amounts of tax money into their own pockets and into the pockets of supportive politicians at every level of government.
An essential part of the strategy to mask their underlying motives has been for segregationists to sell the public on the necessity for charter schools because public schools are allegedly “failing.” With all manner of “research” that essentially compares apples to oranges against foreign nations’ students, and with the self-fulfilling prophecy of dismal public school performance generated by drastic underfunding of public schools, and with condemnation of public school teachers based on statistically invalid student test scores, the segregationists are succeeding in resegregating education in America via what are basically private charter schools that are funded with public money.
The Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education has issued a warning that charter schools posed a risk to the Department of Education’s own goals. The report says: “Charter schools and their management organizations pose a potential risk to federal funds even as they threaten to fall short of meeting the goals” because of the financial fraud, the skimming of tax money into private pockets that is the reason why hedge funds are the main backers of charter schools.
The Washington State Supreme Court, the New York State Supreme Courts, and the National Labor Relations Board have ruled that charter schools are not public schools because they aren’t accountable to the public since they aren’t governed by publicly-elected boards and aren’t subdivisions of public government entities, in spite of the fact that some state laws enabling charter schools say they are government subdivisions. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A “PUBLIC CHARTER SCHOOL” because no charter school fulfills the basic public accountability requirement of being responsible to and directed by a school board that is elected by We the People. Charter schools are clearly private schools, owned and operated by private entities. Nevertheless, they get public tax money.
Even the staunchly pro-charter school Los Angeles Times (which acknowledges that its “reporting” on charter schools is paid for by a billionaire charter school advocate) complained in an editorial that “the only serious scrutiny that charter operators typically get is when they are issued their right to operate, and then five years later when they apply for renewal.” Without needed oversight of what charter schools are actually doing with the public’s tax dollars, hundreds of millions of tax money that is supposed to be spent on educating the public’s children is being siphoned away into private pockets.
Charter schools should (1) be required by law to be governed by school boards elected by the voters so that they are accountable to the public; (2) a charter school entity must legally be a subdivision of a publicly-elected governmental body; (3) charter schools should be required to file the same detailed public-domain audited annual financial reports under penalty of perjury that genuine public schools file; and, (4) anything a charter school buys with the public’s money should be the public’s property.
NO PUBLIC TAX MONEY SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO GO TO CHARTER SCHOOLS THAT FAIL TO MEET THESE MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS OF ACCOUNTABILITY TO THE PUBLIC.