With the Walton billionaires doubling down [3] in their efforts to accelerate the charter school industry and with the Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings, throwing in $100 million [4] to privatize traditional public schools, one might think that the U.S. Department of Education would be a major line of defense for America’s public schools educating the most underserved students or even a bold investor in sustainable community schools that are truly public.
One would be wrong.
The U.S. Department of Education, as with the education agencies of many states, has been co-opted by the spending frenzy of the billionaire class.
It’s not just the Waltons and Hastings using their fortunes to undermine public education: Eli Broad has pledged nearly a half billion [5] dollars to privatize the public schools of Los Angeles. They are mounting a radical–or really a reactionary–effort to remake public schools into private enterprises, and charters are a key component of the transition the billionaires seek.