Detroit Sends out Layoff Notices to ALL 5,466 Public Teachers, page 2

Originally posted by evilod

Originally posted by Skerrako
We are watching the demise of America's public education system, to be replaced by corporate owned charter schools.

And as DPS sheds about 8,000 students a year, the city’s charter schools network is flourishing. Charters are publicly funded but independently run schools whose faculty are typically not unionized.

I definitely feel for those that are losing their jobs, but it sounds like the public school system is simply failing in Detroit. If there's another system that is clearly doing much better, then it seems to make sense to go with it rather than the one that is failing and unable to be funded.

Sigh. Does the term "engineered crisis" mean anything to you?

The charter system is not better. it is in fact demonstrably worse. Its costs to the taxpayer are equal (since charter schools are paid for by the government just like a public school) if not higher (corporate overhead). However the parents and community have absolutely no say in the staff or curriculum, and the government cannot regulate these schools any more than it could another private business.

That is, all the cost with none of the obligation. And since these are private, corporatized ventures, the goal is not providing a service to the community, but meeting a bottom line. Devoid of an obligation to the community, these schools are then free to jack up costs to the taxpayer while also delivering substandard education.

And in a situation like Detroit or Dayton or New Orleans, the charter cchools have a monopoly on education.

Not only are these "Schools" worse, they're actually the CAUSE of the problem - remember, engineered crisis.

See, these are part of the big privatization sweep - that is, the agenda to put public resources into private (corporate) hands. Since these people have money, they have more political power than the people in any given school district, city, state, whatever scale you want. So they pressure the governments to cut education, attack teacher's unions, allow corporate "sponsorship" of everything from cafeteria food to textbooks, basically anything to undercut the public system's ability to provide. The system starts to falter, and the politicians, now trained in the notion that the answer to a faltering system is to attack it harder, defund more, union-bust more, privatize more, until finally the situation reaches crisis levels.

Then you fire all the teachers, sell the facilities to a corporate entity, and let them run the show. Because after all, we ALL know the government should be run like a corporation... Like Enron! The teachers will get re-hired at vastly cut wages with no protections, services for the students will be substandard and usually agendized, and no culpability will be held to the new owners by the public.