When it launched its web site ALEC Exposed, the Center for Media and Democracy brought national attention to the American Legislative Exchange Council and the factory it runs, pumping out pro-corporate boilerplate bills and pushing them through state legislatures with the help of their Republican members.
This week, CMD launched a new project, OutsourcingAmericaExposed.org:
"Across the country, for-profit companies are engaged in a hostile takeover of our schools, roads, prisons, drinking water, and even government itself," the site explains. CMD's Outsourcing America Exposed project "will give taxpayers the tools they need to identify these privatizers and profiteers, their eye-popping salaries ... and how taxpayers can take back control of public assets and public services.
The first company featured in the brand new Outsourcing America series just happens to be the nation's biggest school-privatization bully, K12 Inc.
K12 has served as corporate chair of ALEC's education committee, and in that role it has pushed state legislation to help drain money from public education budgets and pave the way for profiteers to cash in on public school budgets.
Worse, K12 uses that money for virtual public charter schools.
As the local schools in rural areas close under intense budget pressure, K12 moves in to substitute online schooling for real bricks-and-mortar schools, flesh-and-blood teachers, football teams, school musicals, and the rest of the community functions of real-world schooling.
The results have been disastrous.
As CMD notes in its report, hedge fund manager Whitney Tilson announced in September that he was shorting K12 stock, because the company's results were so lousy:
"K12's aggressive student recruitment has led to dismal academic results by students and sky-high dropout rates, in some cases more than 50% annually," Tilson wrote. And, he added, "there have been so many regulatory issues and accusations of malfeasance that I'm convinced the problems are endemic."
K12 is the poster child for the school-privatization fraud.
Read more at CMD's Outsourcing America web site.
And watch a fun video on privatization here:
Photo: www.audio-luci-store.it, Creative Commons licensed.
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