This past weekend, representatives from Texas AFT and the Houston Federation of Teachers (HFT) attended the 10th-annual Network for Public Education conference in Washington, D.C. The conference was primarily focused on the privatization attacks against public schools, particularly the attempts to implement private school vouchers in other states.
The September 1, 2023, episode of CounterSpin was an archival show, featuring interviews with Alfie Kohn, Diane Ravitch and Kevin Kumashiro on education and media.
The sensible backlash to nonsensical political maneuvers is growing, led by wonderful groups like the Network for Public Education. School choice is being exposed as, for the most part, a partisan, corporate scheme. The blatantly unconstitutional public support of religious schools will not stand in an increasingly non-religious society.
The simple answer is the destruction of our democratically governed public schools. The concept of “the money follows the child” plays nicely into the rightwing, libertarian goal of having families, not taxpayers, pay for K–12 education.
According to a 2023 report by the education advocacy group Network for Public Education, about half of Florida’s charter schools are run by for-profit companies, compared with 17 percent nationwide.
The officials all spoke of the need to return to a “classical” education, which has become a dog whistle for Christian nationalists who oppose efforts to teach children about racism and gender diversity in the classroom, as a report by the Network for Public Education showed.
Choice for choice’s sake—originally a secondary rationale for charters—has become the go-to line of charter school proponents. Meanwhile, measures of academic performance have faded into the background as a justification for school options. Nevertheless, for years, the question of whether or not charter schools academically out-perform traditional public schools has gnawed at the industry like an annoying uncle who insists on having the last word in every family debate.
Carol Corbett Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education described the end game that Republicans are aiming for: "It will be a stratified system, where wealthy kids receive the absolute best education; kids in the middle will probably receive a decent education; and kids that are poor and disadvantaged will sit in a big room in front of computers with someone standing at the door keeping them in."
The NPE Grassroots Education Network is a nationwide network of over 195 grassroots organizations that have joined together to preserve, promote, improve, and strengthen our public schools.
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