Tom Ultican has awarning for thegreat state of Texas: Protect your public schools and your children!
The Corporate Reformers are coming to Texas to privatize public schools.
The privatizers are landing on Texas because they have failed everywhere else.
They tried to grab Massachusetts in 2016, and got their rear ends kicked out in a referendum they lost overwhelmingly.
They thought they owned New York because of the millions they gave Cuomo, but when the Republicans lost control of the State Senate, the billionaires came up empty.
They got kicked out of Maine and Nevada.
They spent $60 million in California and lost both statewide races.
So why not flood Texas with charter schools?
Governor Greg Abbott and Lt. Dan Patrick are Choice supporters but had to forget about vouchers.
No wonder the charter industry, the entrepreneurs and grifters think that Texas is fertile territory for snake oil.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This article is deeply disturbing. The whole portfolio model is a corporate assault on public schools designed by billionaires that seek to monetize our students. The main goal is to exclude the public from the decision while billionaires steal public money from public schools. Instead, they buy compliance from complicit government representatives. It is totally a top down scheme to move public money into private pockets while they make more money by continuously data mining students. Parents should be revolting against such a devious, crooked scheme to destroy democratic public education.
Schools do not need “super-geeks” to tell them what to do. Schools are so much more than data collection sites. The schools that have served us well are schools that focus on the needs of students, not corporations or billionaires. Privatization has failed to deliver on its promises so now impatient billionaires want to impose a hostile takeover on targeted schools and districts.
My grandson attends a school in a district with a large number of poor, mostly Hispanic students in suburban Houston. The district is feeling the pressure of being rated by testing over which they have little control. As I have said before, our young people deserve more than being a line item in some billionaire’s portfolio, especially when doing so is not helpful to their education or social-emotional development. Targeted schools must be defended from such a cynical, dystopian agenda. BTW “radical market theorist” may be my new favorite expression. It summarizes the totally unfounded belief that the “market” can solve social problems.
“The main goal is to exclude the public from the decision while billionaires steal public money from public schools.” I might add, The goal is to bamboozle, distract and fool the public with words like “for America” and “accountabilty” and “fixing” so that billionaires can hide behind their smoke screen of “philanthropy” while stealing massive money from the public schools. They can steal AND get patted endlessly on the back.