Etc.

Scary shit in the privatization effort against public education:

t’s not surprising, then, that the ALEC Education Task Force’s industry co-chair is an executive of Connections Academy, a company which makes money both in charter-style public schools and fully for-profit private schools. Until it was bought by a global conglomerate in the fall, Connections was an asset of Apollo Global Management, LLC, a New York private equity firm much like Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital.

#Just behind the focus-grouped rhetoric of “school choice” and “freedom” is a whole network of capital and the most extreme of free market ideology. Before the ALEC privatization initiative was struck down by the Supreme Court in May, the GCSC was chaired by Dr. Ben Scafidi, who serves as a fellow at the the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, founded by economist Milton Friedman and billed as “the nation’s leading voucher advocate.” Friedman maintained that “vouchers are not an end in themselves; they are a means to make a transition from a government to a free-market system." It was Friedman who used the Washington-backed 1973 coup in Chile to force privatization of that country’s education system. Riotous protests now fill Chile’s streets, with students decrying the economic “segregation” of the world’s first privatized system. “Segregation” is an apt term, as Friedman’s 1981 privatization plan for Chile was initially incubated in the Jim Crow South in response to Brown v. Board of Education.