By RUTH CONNIFF
ProfitShip Learning
A top rightwing think tank has devoted more than $30 million to spread the message that public education is failing. According to a
report by One Wisconsin Now, the Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation is a major underwriter of this propaganda effort. Bradley spent millions on shoddy research, media punditry, and a lobbying campaign to promote the idea that public schools have failed and to push school vouchers and other privatization schemes as the “solution”.
Large, national charter-school chains have been major of the beneficiaries of the campaign to fix “failing” public schools. Among them,
Rocketship––“a low-budget operation that relies on young and inexperienced teachers rather than more veteran and expensive faculty,” according to a
report by economist Gordon Lafer for the Economic Policy Institute.
Not all charter schools are bad. Some offer high-quality, alternative models classrooms that are enriching for kids. But over the last decade, the charter school movement has morphed from a small, community-based effort to foster alternative education into a vehicle for privatizing public education, pushed by free-market foundations, big education-management companies, and profit-seekers looking for a way to
cash in on public-education funds.