The Charter School Juggernaut - CounterPunch.org

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

69% : Somehow, as if by magic, public schools were failing kids in the US and A Nation
68% : Remember when journalists were supposed to name the names and tell the facts objectively without supporting a questionable alternative to public schools.
61% : Attacks against teacher unions and public schools were not far behind.
59% : A certain level of testing students is necessary, but not for use in destroying public schools.
59% : When privatization of schools accelerated with support of the political right and neoliberals, teachers and their unions were less and less able to mount defenses against the juggernaut of the attack on public schools.
58% : In many places, largely in urban areas, public schools were in decline.
55% : In many ways, teachers, public schools, and teacher unions were like the antiwar movement of the 1960s and early 1970s, fighting rear-guard battles against right-wing and neoliberal interests.
53% : There was less blood loss in the march toward privatizing public schools in the US than during the American Revolution, but the intent to destroy yet another public function and institution of government was there.
52% : That frenzy began in the 1980s and took off, in a largely bipartisan effort, to turn public schools into testing centers.
50% : Charter schools are publicly funded schools that don't answer to the public like public schools, are operated privately and for profit, and can turn away students that public schools must accept.
48% : Kill off public school after public school throughout the US and a major source of unionism, and teacher unions in particular, began to wither.
47% : Even a casual observer could see the trends in the demise of jobs, the growth of prisons, the growth of charter schools, and the decline in support for public schooling in the US.
47% : When I recently encountered a journalist who writes for the Boston Globe's offshoot, Rhode Map, about his consistent support of charter schools in Providence, Rhode Island, and suggested he read one (for example, Diane Ravitch's The Death and Life of the Great American School System, 2010) of the many scholarly writings about charter schools, he scoffed at my suggestion and related that some alternative had to be championed against largely failing schools in that city.
46% : The full-court press* against public education began in earnest during the Reagan administration.
37% : Public schools seemed to work pretty well when the economy grew, mostly, following World War II and into the 1950s and 1960s.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.