Since voters nearly always reject privatization initiatives on the ballot Republicans and Democrats, both in the pay of charter school sugar daddies, are obliged to make it happen without them. In the maze of double dealing we call legislative processes, leading Democrats in most state legislatures have thrown their bipartisan weight behind school privatization bills. Georgia and its leading black Democrats are no exception.
As voters wise up across the country, they have rejected almost every school privatization proposal put before them. Last November Georgia’s governor Nathan “let’s make a” Deal threw a constitutional amendment at voters that would have closed 120 mostly black public schools and given them to a statewide charter school district which in turn would be privatized in 2018. Deal’s rotten deal on education was thrown back, thanks in part to many Georgia Democrats who enthusiastically support handing public education over to private profiteers, just not Republican ones.
But if privatization is not the will of the people, it IS the will of the one percenters and their stooges in both parties. Both Obama Secretaries of Education were enthusiastic privatizers. A Democrat, the First Black President came into office vowing to close 5,000 public schools in his first term. He used $4 billion in one-time stimulus money to do just that, dispersing more qualified black teachers, disempowering more parents, and delivering more children into the profitable hands of charter school crooks – I mean entrepreneurs, than any president before him, and shattering the cohesion of thousands of neighborhoods where the public school had been a kind of anchor.
Donald Trump gave us Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education, the sister of Blackwater founder Eric Prince and a militant Christian billionaire who has championed religious and charter schools in Michigan and resisted laws that would oversee or regulate them. DeVos is so ignorant she imagined that historically black colleges and universities were the result of black choices, rather than white philanthropy and black self-help in an era when institutions of higher learning would not admit black students. DeVos sponsored multiple voucher and charter school referenda, and they all failed.
But again, privatizing education is an elite bipartisan project, much too important to allow voters to get in the way. Since Georgia voters rejected the privatization amendment on the ballot, state legislators in their infinite wisdom have decided to put high heels and lipstick on the pig and grease it through that state’s brief legislative session this year. Georgia has a Republican governor and Republican majorities in both houses of its legislature, but many rural Republicans have begun to see that the privatizations will hit them next after black and brown communities.
So it fell to the state’s leading black legislator, House Democratic leader Stacey Abrams of Atlanta to go to the well of the state house, point to the pig’s pretty lipstick and heels, and endorse the privatization bill HB 338, and encourage those in her caucus to vote for it.
To be fair, there are Democrats in Georgia and elsewhere who say they oppose school privatization. But they’re members of a party that takes big money from the privatizers and because of career or other considerations they will not, they cannot break with the privatizers.
There’s another party in Georgia, the only political party that doesn’t take money from the privatizers, and the only party that stands explicitly against school privatization as nothing more or less than a new kind of grand theft. It’s the Green party, and unless the state legislature finds a way to keep us off the ballot, the Georgia Green party will have its first seats in that body in 2018.
For Black Agenda Radio, and for the Georgia Green Party I’m Bruce Dixon. F
The following is a talk that Michael Steven Smith gave on July 27, 2021 at a book party in New York City’s Lower East Side sponsored by the New York City chapter of the National Lawyers Guild t
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(This article originally appeared in Truthout.)
