I Write Letters

So, the New York Times has an article where they bemoan the fact that Wall Street financiers could not buy 3 New York State Senate elections for "educational reformers":

They were the candidates of riches, flush with hundreds of thousands of dollars from Wall Street investors who believed in the promise of charter schools.

But when the election results came in on Tuesday, all three State Senate candidates supporting education reform — Basil Smikle, Lynn Nunes and Mark H. Pollard — lost by huge margins, with none cracking 30 percent of the total vote in primary contests against union-backed rivals.

The three New York races amounted to some of the country’s first proxy wars between labor groups and Wall Street financiers pushing for education reform, and in the end, the time-tested union machine prevailed.

You see the message here: something is wrong with America if a bunch of rich pukes from Wall Street cannot buy elections in order to privatize an essential public service, in this through for-profit charter schools, and generate taxpayer subsidized profits.

It's worked so well for prisons, and for military contractors, that we must feed our children to feed the Wall Street beast yet again.

In any case, it pissed me off enough to write a letter to the editor on the subject, which is almost certainly not going to get published:

I found the article one sided. While it is clear that unions played a role in the elections, you make it sound as if this was somehow unfair, while relegating those who donated, "hundreds of thousands of dollars from Wall Street investors" to these candidates who lost as somehow simply being people of good will, "who believed in the promise of charter schools."

The promise of charter schools that attracts " Wall Street investors" is its creation of an educational-industrial complex and its associated revenue streams.

There have been numerous studies of charter schools over decades, and they do not meaningfully outperform public schools in properly constructed studies.

There are real problems in our schools, but neither the mindless focus on test scores nor bringing Wall Street profiteers into the equation are the solution.