I receive regular updates from “In the Public Interest” and find them to be very valuable. I learn about privatization of schools, prisons, libraries, and virtually everything else that is usually considered to be public. I urge you to sign up and receive updates. Unlike my blog, their emails are typically once a week or once every two weeks, aggregating many stories from across the nation.
In the Public Interest is a national think tank that studies public goods and services and sends out a few emails that are helpful for people tracking privatization and trying to protect the common good.
- Weekly privatization report: A scan of privatization-related news clips organized by sector (Education, Criminal Justice/Immigration, Infrastructure, etc.) sent out every Monday morning. Sign up here.
- Our weekly newsletter: Analysis of privatization issues (like private prisons, public-private partnerships, charter schools, etc.) and stories that lift up the value and importance of the common good. You’ll learn something every time. Sign up here.
- Cashing in on Kids: A twice-a-month scan of news clips and analysis tracking the movement to privatize public education. Sign up here.
See https://www.propublica.org/article/how-teach-for-america-evolved-into-an-arm-of-the-charter-school-movement
It’s funny you mention the word “privatization”, because Sec. of Ed. Betsy Devos, in an interview with THE 74 posted a couple days ago, denies that such a thing as “privatization” of existing public schools even exists, when she was directly asked about it.
Indeed, she insists that “doesn’t even know what that (privatization) means.”
Near the end of the interview, she responds to a question about how her opponents accuse her of promoting “privatization”:
“Privatization? I don’t even know what that means.”
https://www.the74million.org/article/74-interview-education-secretary-betsy-devos-on-freedom-scholarships-why-parents-deserve-more-school-options-the-noisy-status-quo-protecting-cabal-fighting-her-agenda/
Betsy also accuses the opponents of her efforts — which, according to her, do not include “privatization”, because, again, that’s a meaningless term — as being part of “a very noisy, status-quo-protecting cabal that is keeping kids from having a better chance and a better future.”
That “cabal” presumably consists of folks such as Dr. Ravitch and all those agreeing with Dr. Ravitch.
I find Devos’ professed ignorance of what her opponents refer to as “privatization” to be disingenuous beyond belief.
Prior to becoming Sec. of Ed., she spent 20 years in her home state of Michigan successfully pushing for:
1) the turning over as many previously public schools and students to private schools or to privately-managed, so-called charter schools (the vast majority of these for-profit, unlike every other state which has these charter schools) — schools that are not accountable to the public via democratically-elected school boards, not transparent to the public, and which don’t educate all the public (eschewing and/or kicking out the most expensive and difficult subsets of students … i.e. Special Ed.) …
… and also for …
2) closing down as many public sector schools — or traditional public schools — as possible.
In the process, Devos must have heard lodged against her— and heard it tens of thousands times — the characterization or accusation her and her billionaire allies doing all this constitutes “privatization” of previously existing public schools.
Since then, in her capacity as Sec. of Ed., she has spent the last 2 1/2 years doing the same thing on a national level, with that “privatization” accusation lodged thousands of more times at her.
Her now denying any knowledge of “privatization” — and exactly what her opponents mean by “privatization” — is akin to a politician in the Deep South during the 1850’s, or in the Confederacy during 1861-1865 saying,
“Slavery? I don’t even know that that means.”
Thanks Diane…very worthwhile sites.
Nice of you to provide this means of signing up for In the Public Interest.