Stand Up for Public Education

From my friends at the Network for Public Education:


January 21-27 is School Choice Week, a multi-million dollar campaign funded by right-wing groups like the Koch Brothers, The American Federation for Children, ALEC and the Walton Foundation. The endgame is to replace public education with privatized systems of schooling. Read what the Center for Media and Democracy had to say here about School Choice Week.

We need YOU to help us tell the public the truth about so-called School Choice. And so we created a powerful campaign for you to use and share here.


Right Now
 
1. Send a letter to your Governor telling him or her that you support public education, not privatized education with vouchers, voucher-like tax credit schemes, charters and online schools. In just a few seconds you can send that letter by clicking here.
 
2. Go here to put a PRO-PUBLIC SCHOOL frame on your Facebook profile picture for the week.  Just move your cursor down on the image and click "use frame."

3. Watch and share this wonderful video of Arizona School Board President, Linda Lyon, unmasking what school choice has done in her state. Please share it on Facebook and go to the NPE twitter account (NetworkforPublicEd) and tweet it out. It is pinned to the top.



4. Join the Thunderclap sponsored by the #WeChoose campaign for public schools. Click here.

5.Go here to find a toolbox of resources to share all week. We will continue to post new material to share. Every day this week we ask you to go to the site and take action. Each action is designed to tell the truth about School Choice Week and its supporters.
 
On Friday you will receive another email from us asking you to send a letter to your legislators asking them to stop a backdoor voucher triggered by the recent tax reforms. More on that to come.
Here is the real choice we face.


Either we support public schools governed by our elected neighbors or we let state governments dole out tax dollars to parents to shop for schools.
We can't have both. 

Editor's Note: Arizona has the worst/most lenient charter law in the country.  Here's how it's playing out via the Washington Post.
Arizona has no cap on charter schools and allows charter owners to opt out of procurement requirements and accounting guidelines required of other state agencies. Statutes even mandate that the state auditor general cannot monitor charter schools — but the lack of transparency goes much further than that. Charter schools have been allowed for years to systematically submit false and incomplete spending data to the state, making it impossible to detect waste and fraud.
There are no mechanisms in place for detecting charter waste and fraud in Arizona. Google “Arizona charter school fraud” and you will not find a single instance where a charter owner has been held accountable for the misappropriation of public funds in the 21 years that charter schools have been operating in Arizona.

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