White House Defunds Public Schools & Funds Private Schools
Mar 27, 2019
The White House has a very serious problem: Rich individuals can’t own public schools. Rich people can only own private schools.
So how can the White House convince you that the public school system is broke? If they can convince you it's broke, then more public money can be given to private friends.
The answer is simple: Break the system.
This week, Trump asked Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to cut the education budget by $7 billion, or 10 percent of its current level of funding. At the same time, it asked to raise charter school funding by $60 million.
In January of 2019, more than 30,000 Los Angeles teachers went on strike for the first time in 30 years over school funding, pay raises, and classroom size. LA teacher’s union President Alex Caputo-Pearl accused the city of wanting “to starve our schools in order to justify cuts and justify handing more schools over to privately run charter schools.”
What is a charter school? It is a publicly funded, yet privately operated organization. It is the fruit of lobbyists working hard in high places. Its owners are government contract seekers. Most charter schools have employees who are not protected by unions, exist in very little oversight, and build inadequate facilities, especially for people with disabilities.
As part of the proposed White House budget cuts, DeVos seeks to eliminate all $18 million in federal funding to the 272,000 children of the Special Olympics, an education group tasked to eliminate stigma and stereotypes for people with disabilities.
Meanwhile, the Trump budget seeks $500 million in total federal aid to charters, a $60 million increase from current funding. Congress has agreed twice under Trump to boost that funding.
This is how it works. Little by little, congress helps rich friends with expensive lobbyists. They’ll spin it by all kinds of names. They'll say it's a fix to the broken system they spent time breaking. That it is smarter, or better, or less fat, or more American, or boorishly just say eliminating public education is “freedom,” as DeVos literally is now saying.
But at the end of the day, it’s your money being re-allocated to rich friends on fat contracts.
And what's the end result of all of this? Robots. Pretty much. You paying someone to manage their fleet of teacher drones. Hey Siri, how do you spell unchecked capitalism?
