This Country is Making a Giant Leap Backward

to before the days of Brown v. Board of Education with the drive toward school privatization and putting in unqualified "teachers" (i.e., Teach for America) to teach inner-city youth. Of course these students are primarily minority.

The NAACP is now seeing through this push for charter schools for what it is, and it isn't pretty.

By the way, Milton Friedman is the one who came up with the idea for vouchers in private schools as a way to circumvent the Brown decision.

Back in the mid-Nineties, devious right-wing activists at the Bradley Foundation, in Milwaukee, hit upon a “wedge” issue designed to wreck the alliance at the core of the Democratic Party’s urban base. Blacks and public employee unions – particularly teachers – were the foundations of Democratic power in the cities. Aware that African Americans revered education but were often in conflict with largely white teachers unions over issues of racism and community control, the Bradley gang, under president Michael Joyce, created out of whole cloth a “movement” for publicly-funded vouchers for private schools. No such Black community “demand” had ever existed, but well-aimed infusions of millions of dollars among opportunistic politicians like Cory Booker, a first term city councilman who aspired to become mayor of Newark, New Jersey, grafted Black faces onto a Hard Right corporate scheme to divide key progressive constituencies: Blacks and unions.

Ah, yes, the Bradley Foundation, another one of the "usual suspects" trying to run our country into the ground.