This picture of what's going on in education policy today may be cartoonified, but unfortunately it's not as exaggerated as we might want to believe. Public School Shakedown offers
the big picture in a nutshell:
In the past decade, public funding for education has significantly declined. Yet cuts to public schools budgets aren’t because the resource pie is shrinking – in fact, the past twenty years has seen historic highs in the country’s gross domestic product. Cuts to public school budgets are because the pie is being unequally sliced, with corporations and the super-wealthy getting richer and richer. For example, despite massive school closings in Philadelphia, the city’s budget for charter schools increased by $107 million. Government give-aways to corporations through tax breaks and loopholes depress the amount of state aid available for schools. With padded budgets, these corporations and their philanthropic arms foot the bills for school privatization, from charters to vouchers to the political lobbyists that propel school privatization laws forward. Not only are public schools suffering, they are being systematically divested from, siphoning funding and resources to private schools and the corporations that fund them.
And students and teachers alike pay the price.