Black Agenda Report
Black Agenda Report
News, commentary and analysis from the black left.

  • Home
  • Africa
  • African America
  • Education
  • Environment
  • International
  • Media and Culture
  • Political Economy
  • Radio
  • US Politics
  • War and Empire
  • omnibus

Leading Black Democrats Love School Privatization Too
Bruce A. Dixon, BAR managing editor
08 Mar 2017
🖨️ Print Article

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

privatization
School Privatization

Related Podcasts

Some Early Lessons From the Los Angeles Teacher Strike
Bruce A. Dixon , BAR managing editor
Some Early Lessons From the Los Angeles Teachers Strike
25 January 2019
Corporate media absolutely won’t tell you this, but this year’s Los Angeles teachers strike is the latest chapter in the long running struggle agai
school closings in Chicago
Bruce A. Dixon , BAR managing editor
One Year After Chicago Closes 50 Public Schools, Chicago Teachers Union Assesses the Lies and Lasting Damage
28 May 2014
A couple years ago, we at Black Agenda Report wondered why the closings of 40 public schools over three years
byrd school i think
Bruce A. Dixon , BAR managing editor
Why Isn't Closing 129 Chicago Public Schools National News?
27 February 2013
It's an obvious question, with an easy answer. Our nation's bipartisan political elite have decided to privatize public education. They know the only…

More Stories


  • Black Agenda Radio
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley
    Black Agenda Radio April 18, 2025
    19 Apr 2025
    In this week’s segment we discuss New York state proposals to change rules on discovery, the sharing of evidence between defense attorneys and prosecutors.
  • Ecuador
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley
    Ajamu Baraka on Ecuador's Elections, U.S. Intervention, and Afro-Ecuadorian Human Rights
    18 Apr 2025
    Ajamu Baraka is a Black Agenda Report contributing editor and director of the North-South Project for People(s)-Centered Human Rights, a project of the Black Alliance for Peace. He recently…
  • Alliance to protect Khalif's law
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley
    New York Politicians Prepare to Weaken Kalief's Law
    18 Apr 2025
    We are joined by Conrad Blackburn, policy counsel and staff attorney in the Criminal Defense Practice of the Bronx Defenders. The Bronx Defenders is a public defender non-profit organization and a…
  • Anthony Rogers-Wright
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley
    "Abundance" and the Democrats' Neo-Liberalism
    18 Apr 2025
    We’re joined by Anthony Rogers-Wright, a Black Agenda Report contributor and a climate/environmental liberation and racial justice advocate, writer, and policy expert. He is an active member of the…
  • Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist
    Western Nations Join the United States in Repressing Dissent
    16 Apr 2025
    Trump is not unique in the collective west. As the crisis of capitalism deepens, "democratic" states intensify repression and criminalize dissent.
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us