Turning the tide on corporate education - corps seek to profit at taxpayer expense have armies of lobbyists and politicians in Congress ready and waiting to do their bidding

Michelle Rhee (Hyungwon Kang/Reuters)

If there's a dollar to be made by taking a public service provided by the government, privatizing it and inserting an unnecessary middleman to suck up profits at taxpayer expense, there will always be a corporation for that. The fact that these corporations who seek to profit at taxpayer expense have armies of lobbyists and politicians in Congress ready and waiting to do their bidding is bad enough, even when there is a progressive movement there to fight against it. But when this conservative shift toward private profit in any service is viewed by the public and the media as the progressive alternative to the status quo, that service may not be long for this world.

That is exactly the concern with the fate of public education. It goes without saying that the conservative movement seeks to eviscerate funding for public education, for the sake of both profit and theocracy. But the bigger danger is the fact that the trend toward corporate, for-profit education is frequently seen as the progressive alternative to the current education system. Groups such as Michelle Rhee's StudentsFirst and others that seek to "reform" education by introducing for-profit charters and weakening teachers' unions are often supported by popular Democratic politicians and philanthropists, such as Mayor Cory Booker of Newark, a rising star in Democratic political circles and a current director on the board of Democrats for Education Reform, another group dedicated to the agenda of weakening unions and privatizing education. This popular support, combined with major support from the financial sector, has allowed the for-profit education agenda to spread like wildfire across the country, with unions and progressives who support public education a step behind in fighting back.

Fortunately, the tide may be turning in a significant way. The popular petition site Change.org, commonly seen as a site dedicated to building popular support for progressive causes, was recently pressured into allowing their promotional contracts with both StudentsFirst and another group with a similar agenda, Stand For Children, to expire. While the promotion of petitions by these two groups had rankled public education advocates for some time, a line in the sand was crossed when the site promoted a petition by StudentsFirst targeting Chicago's public school teachers, who had just voted to authorize a strike. This petition galvanized the progressive community, which responded—how else?—with a petition of its own asking Change.org to, at the very least, not interfere in ongoing labor disputes. The heap of progressive pressure ended up forcing Change.org to publicly announce that they would not be renewing their contracts with StudentsFirst and Stand For Children.

rest at http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/07/01/1103066/-Turning-the-tide-on-corporate-education?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+dailykos%2Findex+%28Daily+Kos%29&utm_content=Google+Reader