From NOEBIE.net
The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) has released a special report on its year-long investigation into charter schools spending in the United States. You can access the full report “Charter School Black Hole” here.
The report reveals that over the last twenty years, $3.7 billion has more or less evaporated, with no transparency or accountability.
Dianne Feeley writes for Solidarity.
Since the state of Michigan took over the Detroit Public Schools (DPS) at the end of the 1990s, the system has lost more than 100,000 students. The state’s “efficient management” built up a $483 million debt.
Read More: A Recipe for Killing a School System | Solidarity
Paul Buchheit at Common Dreams takes a look at The Project on Government Oversight’s latest report on privatization. They found that in 33 of 35 cases the federal government spent more on private contractors than on public employees for the same services. The authors of the report said “Our findings were shocking.”
For the U.S. Postal Service, for instance, it costs less than 50 cents to send a letter to any remote location in the United States. For an envelope with a two-day guarantee, FedEx and UPS charge about four to five times as much.
USPS is so inexpensive, in fact, that Fedex actually uses the U.S. Post Office for about 30 percent of its ground shipments. As Ralph Nader notes, the USPS has not taken any taxpayer money since 1971, and if it weren’t required by an inexplicable requirement to pre-fund employee benefits for 75 years, it would be making a profit. Instead, this national institution has been forced to cut jobs and routes and mailing centers.
In other words, privatization places profits over people.
Read the entire article: How Privatization Degrades Our Daily Lives | Common Dreams | Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
In this superb two-minute video, actor- activist Danny Glover champions the need for a vibrant public Postal Service and asks the public to join with him in A Grand Alliance to save it.
Danny Glover: Our Postal Service from A Grand Alliance on Vimeo.
Adopting a “school reform” agenda that encourages privatization actually makes the problems worse, according to a new study.
“In pushing these efforts, politicians, rightwing think tanks, chambers of commerce, and, most of all, the American Legislative Exchange Council are actually creating the very problem of failure in the school system they claim their privatization plans will help address.”
Read about it: Scathing Report Finds School Privatization Hurts Poor Kids – In These Times.
Newly elected APWU President Mark Dimondstein is determined to oppose creeping privatization by the Postal Service.
“If you put post offices in Staples stores and pay the workers $8 or $9 an hour, it’ll lead to closing post offices and a shift to non-union poverty-wage jobs from living-wage union jobs.”
Read More: New postal union leader seeks to halt latest privatization scheme » peoplesworld.
Kevin Moore and Rachel Cohen hack through the lies being used to promote charter schools in Chicago.
One of the biggest misconceptions about charters is that the funds to run them come from private sources. While charters do receive donations and some private grants, 75 percent of their total funding comes from public resources.
Another lie that charter school opponents are unmasking is the claim that charters perform better than neighborhood schools. In reality, according to researchers on the forum panel, 80 percent of charter students showed no improvement or a worse performance in reading, compared to students in traditional public schools. For math, the figure was 63 percent.
Read More: Unmasking the Chicago charter scam | SocialistWorker.org.