GUEST: Jasmine Gripper, Early Childhood Campaign Coordinator & Statewide Advocate for the Alliance for Quality Education, discusses the need to defend public schools against a hostile, corporate takeover.
Ms. Gripper never wavered from her basic theme, that children deserve better than charter schools run by billionaire investors.
So many things about our society are troubling, but racism in education has to be one of the worst. Public schools are starved in funding by the states and by the federal government. Rich districts therefore end up with obscenely more money than poor districts, since local property taxes play an ever increasing role in paying for schools.
None of this is the fault of teachers or students. But the inequity is used to sell corporate controlled charter schools to people of color. Starving the public schools creates an opening for billionaires like Bill Gates and the Walton Family to come in and privatize inner city schools. Instead of schools being controlled by parents and the community, they are run like factories to return the highest profit to investors.
