Choosing Democracy: Why Do Billionaires Want Charter Schools ?

Why? Harold Meyerson expresses this well in this piece below.  The short answer for me is—because a system that socially engineers inequality is profitable to billionaires. Much more profitable, for sure, than the Waltons raising workers' wages, for starters, as Meyerson aptly notes.

Ranked third by Business Insider for family-owned enterprises, they are certainly well poised to be the rising tide that lifts many, many boats out of poverty.  Same with all the others listed as The 21 biggest family-owned businesses in the world.

School boards, such as in the recent LAUSD School Board battle, are the battleground for this fight against the billionaires, as this story tells.  So please be aware of this deliberate campaign to erode the public good and how this is bad for democracy.

Finally, remember that which may be good for the individual (or individual family) is not necessarily that which is good for the collective.

Thanks to Duane Campbell for sharing.

Angela Valenzuela

Choosing Democracy: Why Do Billionaires Want Charter Schools ?

by Harold Meyerson

The billionaires, apparently, we shall always have with us — even when
we decide how to run the state-funded schools where they rarely send
their own kids.

In the Los Angeles school board elections earlier this month, a number of billionaires,
including Eli Broad, Netflix founder Reed Hastings and two Walton family siblings,
poured millions into the campaigns of two charter-school advocates. These
billionaire-sponsored candidates defeated two badly outspent opponents
who took a more cautionary stance on expanding charters, lest they
decimate the school district’s budget. In total, pro-charter groups
outspent teacher unions, $9.7 million to $5.2 million. (In the 2016
state legislative campaigns, the charterizers outspent the unions by a
far larger margin, $20.5 million to $1.2 million.)

Though a number of the billionaires who’ve involved themselves in the charter cause are conservatives and Republicans, the actual election battles they join almost always pit Democrat
against Democrat — in part because nearly all big cities are now
overwhelmingly Democratic. In California, where Republicans’ numbers
have ebbed past the point of power, the lion’s share of billionaires’
legislative campaign contributions have gone to more centrist Democrats,
who not only are reliable votes on charter issues but also often oppose
environmental and other measures advanced by their more progressive
colleagues.

Charter billionaires have settled on a diagnosis, and a cure, that
focuses on the deficiencies of the system’s victims, not the system
itself.

Of all the issues billionaires could choose, why charters, and why now?
One reason commonly adduced is that they’ve noticed something troubling:
Public school graduates lack the skills necessary for employment. Many
of those needed skills, however, are the kind that students acquire in
vocational educational programs, not at charter schools.

That there are huge problems in the education of low-income students is
beyond dispute — but this is hardly a recent development. The real
recent development is the rising share of such students as the middle
class has waned.

If the Waltons, say, decided to redirect more of their fortune to
raising Wal-Mart workers’ wages, that in turn might enable hundreds of
thousands of families to have more economically secure and stable lives,
which could have a greater effect on student performance than
charterization.

It’s hardly fair, of course, to tar all billionaire charterizers with
that kind of brush. But the fact is that they have emerged as a force at
a time when our staggering levels of economic inequality have become a
widely acknowledged problem. That’s not just a coincidence.

Indeed, we have to go back to the economic polarization of pre-New Deal
America to find a time when the super-rich felt so compelled to better
the lot of the poor, as they understood it. Andrew Carnegie, who grew
mightily rich by building the American steel industry, famously
established libraries in thousands of cities and towns. Though, unlike
today’s charter backers, he wasn’t draining off funds that could go to
public libraries in the process.

What Carnegie and today’s pro-charter rich have in common is a belief in
individual betterment — but not only that. They also share a fierce
opposition to collective betterment, manifested in their respective
battles against unions and, in many cases, against governmentally
established standards and services.

Living in separate eras when the middle class was — and is — embattled
and the gap between rich and poor was — and is — immense, billionaires
have largely shunned the fights that might truly narrow that gap:
raising the minimum wage, making public colleges and universities free,
funding sufficient public investment to create genuine full employment,
reviving collective bargaining and raising progressive taxes to pay for
all of that.

As the billionaires see it, it’s the lack of skills, not the
dysfunctions of the larger economic system that they (or their parents)
mastered, that is the cause of our national woes. Pure of heart though
some of them may be, the charter billionaires have settled on a
diagnosis, and a cure, that focuses on the deficiencies of the system’s
victims, not the system itself. How very comforting for them.

Harold Meyerson is executive editor of the American Prospect. He is a contributing
writer to Opinion.