Sunday, January 30, 2022

THIRD WORLD USA
'Disgusted with our government': Families frustrated after child tax credit expires
YOUR GOVERNMENT FAILS YOU

Phil McCausland
Sun, January 30, 2022

When the payments stopped coming, a mother in Milwaukee had to decide between buying diapers and baby formula for her newborn or paying for the Wi-Fi her sons needed to attend online school.

In Chicago, a mom used the last of the cash she had saved from the payments to rent a hotel room for herself and her 2-year-old daughter after their apartment’s heat was unexpectedly shut off and the temperature dropped to 9 degrees.

A West Virginia woman who instructs low-income people about parenting and domestic violence said the end of the payments meant she and her kids were applying for financial support and eating meals of potatoes, beans, canned foods or pancakes.

Between July and December, the expanded child tax credit provided parents a cross the United States a small financial reprieve from the pandemic’s economic turbulence. On the 15th of each month, parents who signed up received payments of up to $300 per child under age 6 and $250 per child ages 6 to 17.

Many said it gave their families a little room to breathe.

“I received $500 and every month I figured out what the household needed, whether it was gas, school supplies, toiletries, rent or the electric bill — whatever,” said Savanah Brooks, 36, the Milwaukee mom who gave birth to her daughter earlier this month after having to take unpaid time off work because her pregnancy was considered high risk. “It gave us just a little cushion and made life a little easier.”

Savanah Brooks (Sara Stathas / for NBC News)

The expiration of that benefit, however, and Congress’ inability to pass the Build Back Better agenda that would have cemented the child tax credit for an additional year has left many parents in the U.S. — particularly those struggling to make ends meet in the pandemic’s choppy economy — overwhelmed.

The half-dozen parents in states across the country who spoke to NBC News expressed feelings of deep anger, intense dejection, simmering resentment and a fierce frustration with politics and Washington, D.C., as debate over the future of the expanded child tax credit remains on a gloomy trajectory.

That fight continues despite data showing the policy moved millions of children from poverty and a recent study concluding that providing financial support to a low-income family boosts children's brain development. The expiration of the expanded child tax credit is expected to thrust millions of children back into poverty and increase child hunger.

Kristen Olsen, 41, the West Virginia mom of three, said that since she’s returned to working in an office, she’s struggling with the addition of child care costs on top of a $75 rent increase in January. The rising price of groceries and the need to meet her electric, water and car payments added to the burden. The child tax credit, however, made her feel able to meet her family's basic needs.

Today, she’s back to juggling payments, hoping none of her bills get too far behind. The loss of the child tax credit, she said, felt like “a cruel joke.”

“It’s like saying, ‘Here’s how your life could be, this is what it would be like if you didn’t have to worry so much every month, here’s how it feels to know you can pay your bills,’” she said, “and then they just pull the rug out from under you.”

The question that parents, advocates and politicians are now asking is whether the proverbial rug is going back into storage or if there is a future for the tax credit that guarantees income for families across the U.S.

In the meantime, however, parents emphasized that life has become noticeably harder without it, even though just six weeks have passed since the last payment.

Krystal Peters. (Courtesy Krystal Peters)

“I’m just very disgusted with our government, with Congress because these men and women are dangling this life in front of us,” Krystal Peters said from her hotel room in Chicago, where she was staying with her 2-year-old to escape the cold. “Just figure it out. All I got is anger and disgust right now. They’re stealing dignity from us, they’re making us feel hopeless, so maybe just forget it. They’re going to do whatever they want anyway.”

'An extreme long shot'


It remains unclear what Congress may do, however, especially as Democrats contend with the demands of Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., whose essential vote in an evenly split Senate can decide the future of the Build Back Better agenda.

Manchin had previously proposed work requirements on those families that receive the expanded child tax credit, and he has signaled his desire to lower the income threshold as well.

A member of Congress familiar with the ongoing negotiations said that there appeared to be two avenues forward: accepting the limitations that Manchin has proposed, including possibly work requirements, or pushing a bill forward independent of the Build Back Better agenda and trying to find some compromise with 10 Republicans to get to a 60-vote threshold. The trouble is that the more liberal wing of the House would also likely have to be convinced to pass it through that chamber, and that may prove to be difficult.

To progressives, the work requirements would be more than a complication for negotiations, the member said. Their view is that it would play on stereotypes of low-income people who receive welfare and embolden efforts to place similar requirements on other safety net policies — such as Medicaid and the program commonly known as food stamps.

“So, either way, it’s an extreme long shot,” the member added.


Still, its continued lapse could be dire for Democrats ahead of a tight midterm election that could decide control of the House and the Senate.

While it seems unlikely that a bipartisan proposal could come together in the Senate, there is some interest among Republicans to create some kind of similar payment for families despite many of the party emphasizing the policy's cost.

Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, proposed a bill last year to create a form of the child tax credit, but it would be paid through the Social Security Administration and would make massive changes to the tax system, as well as slash federal welfare and social programs to pay for it.

Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., who has led negotiations for the child tax credit and championed the idea for years, said in a call with reporters that finding a compromise with Republicans would not be the preferred route, but it could be a pathway forward if all else fails.

While he strongly disagreed with the way Romney would fund his proposal, Bennet said that it showed there was some bipartisan interest.

“The policy is the same, and I think that creates an important basis for a bipartisan negotiation,” said Bennet, who last week sent a letter to President Joe Biden with four other Democratic senators urging him to secure an extension to the child tax credit. “If Build Back Better doesn’t pass or if some new version of reconciliation doesn’t get done, I do think we’re going to have to consider doing this on a standalone basis — and I look forward to having that conversation with Democrats and Republicans to get it done.”

Congress may also not be the only avenue by which states could see some relief.

As politicians on Capitol Hill have faltered, some state legislatures are picking up the baton and taking a look at what provisions they could change at the state levels to provide a similar tax credit.

Samantha Waxman, a senior policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ State Fiscal Project, said that six states have so far created proposals that mirror some elements of the policy, but many may have been waiting to see what happens with the Build Back Better negotiations before passing their own form of the tax credit.

So far, Massachusetts is the furthest along in pursuing the policy. In the state’s latest budget proposal, the Legislature converted dependent exemptions for children 12 and younger into a fully refundable child tax credit that covers two kids at $180 per child.

“States are taking the initiative, especially with all the revenue surpluses they have and saying, ‘We have the means in our state, families are really struggling and the child tax credit is a great way that we can continue to help families while they’re still being harmed by the pandemic,’” Waxman said.
A rejection or a foundation?

The open question is whether the anger and frustration felt among many parents could be turned to advocacy that might move the needle in Washington.

Advocates said that it has been a difficult time to organize and to continue pushing for legislative change. After Donald Trump’s presidency, the protests against the police killing of George Floyd and the pandemic, they said it has become a challenge to get people to show up to protest or ask for them to send another letter or make another phone call to senators and members of Congress.

“People are just trying to take care of their families,” said Dorian Warren, the president of Community Change, a national progressive advocacy group. “And then you ask them to come to this rally and bring their mask, and they’re just like, 'no.' I don’t think that’s because they don’t believe in the ideas, but because they don’t know if it’s really going to matter, and everyone is just completely exhausted.”


Julie Kerksick, the senior policy advocate for Community Advocates Public Policy Institute, a Wisconsin-based progressive advocacy organization, has a career spanning more than 40 years in which she’s pushed for tax credit reform to help low-income families.

She said watching the debate among Democrats over Build Back Better has been dispiriting, especially once it became clear that expanded child tax credit would be allowed to expire.

“For us, it has been absolutely devastating to see it come to nothing, and then, apparently, just sit on a shelf,” she said. “I just don’t know how many more times we can try to make the case.”

Warren, however, remains upbeat about the future of the expanded child tax credit. It just may take longer than most had hoped.

He said that no matter what happens, policymakers will be able to pull immense data from the six months that the credit was available to families, which will drive conversation in the future.

“Maybe, just maybe, in an optimistic way, what we learned the last six months of the child tax credit sets a floor and a foundation,” he said. “That will make things different for the next fights to be had. Because it’s going to be really hard to continue to argue against the mounting evidence of the actual impact of this expanded program.”

To: Minister Wilkinson, Minister Guilbeault, and Minister Freeland

Don’t give Big Oil a multi-billion dollar lifeline

Minister Wilkinson, Minister Guilbeault and Minister Freeland: 

Don’t give Big Oil a multi-billion dollar lifeline — fund real climate action, workers, and communities instead. Say no to the carbon capture and storage tax credit.

Campaign created by
Adriana Laurent

Why is this important?

Natural Resources Minister Wilkinson is considering rubber-stamping a multi-billion dollar tax credit for Big Oil to invest in carbon capture — a fantastical, false climate solution. [1]

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is touted by the Oil and Gas lobby as a way of cutting emissions, by capturing carbon before it escapes into the air. But hundreds of climate experts are sounding the alarm: CCS is flawed — in fact, it actually increases emissions. And it’s economically risky and hasn’t been proven at scale. [2-4]

This greenwashing tactic is flying under the radar of the public because it sounds good on paper — it might even be tricking MPs and policymakers. With the federal budget expected as early as next month, we have a small window to raise the alarm and expose Big Oil’s last ditch attempt to save their dying industry.

The first step is a massive petition, signed by all of us. Together we can send a loud message to the federal government: Don’t give Big Oil a multi-billion dollar lifeline — fund real climate action, workers, and communities instead. Sign now.

Sources:
[1] https://www.theenergymix.com/2022/01/19/carbon-capture-tax-credit-likely-for-2022-budget-wilkinson-says/
[2] https://thenarwhal.ca/carbon-capture-explainer/
[3] https://financialpost.com/commodities/energy/academics-urge-canada-to-ditch-carbon-capture-tax-credit-letter
[4] https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/2021/12/20/beware-of-false-solutions-to-the-crises-of-climate-change-and-plastic-pollution.html

SIGN PETITON HERE



Charter schools: What you need to know about their anticipated growth in Alberta
Alberta Premier Jason Kenney, March 20, 2020. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jason Franson


July 7, 2020


In Alberta, the once-radical idea of charter schools, placed largely on the back burner for the past two decades, has been brought back to the fore under Premier Jason Kenney’s United Conservative Party (UCP). The party’s Choice in Education Act will come into force Sept. 1, after the government passed it June 24.

Under the new act, individuals will be able to bypass the local school board and apply directly to the provincial government to seek to establish a charter school. This follows a move last fall by the newly elected UCP to remove the cap (previously 15) on the number of charter schools in the province.

In Alberta, there are now 13 charter school authorities operating more than 20 schools or campuses — for instance, the province lists seven Calgary schools run by the Foundations for the Future Charter Academy.

These recent developments provide the opportunity to better understand what charter schools are, how they’ve been taken up by advocates of educational reform and how their re-emergence and promotion under the UCP reflects the influence of neoconservative and neoliberal ideologies in education.



Roots of charter schools

Charter schools emerged largely from the Chicago School of Economics, inspired by the ideas of prominent thinkers like Milton Friedman. Friedman argued state “monopoly” over public education was problematic, and thus education should be instead subject to consumer choices and the dynamics of the free market.

While differing based on country and context, charter schools can be understood as a hybrid type of school — both public and private. Individuals or groups may seek to establish a school under a particular educational philosophy or approach. This charter then guides the administration and organization of the school.

To date, Alberta’s charter schools include a schools for children who are “academically gifted,” an Indigenous school and a school for children learning English.

As public institutions, however, charter schools must still abide by the policies, rules and regulations set out by the government. In this way, these schools can be seen as offering students and parents choice different from the local public school.

With funding is typically determined on a per-pupil basis, if parents decide not to choose a particular charter school, it may then close. Charter schools are also subject to competitive market pressures and often have to raise capital funding for expenses such as the school building or transportation themselves. That means charter schools may turn to fundraising from community-based or corporate sources. In the U.S., for instance, some charter schools can be run as for-profit entities.
Entry into Alberta

Charter schools, once hailed as a solution to the numerous apparent failures of the public education system, arrived in Alberta with the first school opening in 1994, just two years after the first charter school opened in the United States.

Up until recently, discussion around their future or promise in Alberta has been somewhat ambiguous. But since the UCP was elected last year, the provincial government has sought to revive charter schools as part of broader educational and public sector reforms.



‘School choice’

As the UCP government’s throne speech outlined, the party stresses expanding school choice. For instance, new legislation makes it easier for parents to home-school since they will no longer need Alberta school board supervision to do so.

Last fall, the UCP also removed the word “public” from Alberta’s public schools boards, a move that can be critically viewed as an attempt to obfuscate the demarcation between public and private schools.

Sept 10, 2019 — 7 branded themselves as Edmonton Public Schools. 
... to undermine public education, which is the first step in privatization," she said.

Kenney, himself a product of elite private schooling, appears focused on the expansion of more privatized forms of education.

Charter advocates contend that as schools of choice, they offer students more specialized and meaningful educational experiences.

Critics often respond that choice is already available in public school systems and that charters don’t demonstrate any significant improvements in performance, and may in fact further segregate students, leading to greater educational inequalities.

Educational labour unions remain unsupportive as well, as charters often seek to hire non-unionized teachers.

Nevertheless, the evidence remains mixed as to whether charters provide any significant improvements to student achievement. The research and policy landscape is often contentious and heavily influenced by competing interest groups.
Privatization

In Canada, charter schools only exist in Alberta — a province with a history of school choice policies. As I discussed in my research into the development of Alberta’s charter schools, their existence can be largely attributed to political ideas rather than educational developments in the province.

Charter schools were first introduced in Alberta under former premier Ralph Klein’s Progressive Conservative Party in 1994. Here, Klein in front of a campaign poster in February 2001.
 THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld

In 1994, when charters were first introduced in Alberta, it was under a provincial government focused largely on values of individualism, consumerism, privatization, commercialization and deficit reduction. Charter schools emerged as they fit in under this particular political and economic ideology.

Today we see many of the same values once again on the rise in Alberta at the same time as charters and “school choice” ideas are being amplified.

Neoconservative and neoliberal advocates of educational reform in particular continue to push them forward — as witnessed in the United States under President Donald Trump and U.S. Education Secretary Betsy Devos.

Read more: What cyber charter schools are and why their growth should worry us
Educational reforms and democracy

While educational reforms can and must occur in response to a changing world, public schools are meant to be resistant to political changes because they represent our core democratic values and are meant to develop to serve the needs of a diverse society.

Perhaps most importantly then, the debate over charter schools points to the fundamental political nature of public education.

Recent pre-pandemic educational reforms proposed in Ontario for mandatory online courses were seen by many educators, parents and students not as learning improvements, but rather as reforms motivated by a Conservative government with similar neoliberal politics, ideas and value systems.

Ontario also touted its “enhanced” (mandatory) online learning as offering “more choice.” Those advocating school vouchers and the expansion of charter schools in Ontario have used the same rhetoric.
Education as industry?

With Alberta’s charter schools set now to expand, as I asserted in 2015, it is worth noting that to date, the rest of Canada has continued to largely — though not entirely — resist calls for “school choice” that imply forms of privatization.

Nevertheless, across Canada, chronic public underfunding of education has forced school boards to seek tuition revenue and promote for-profit curriculums.

The presence of privatization looms large and when education is defined as an industry, there will always be those who seek to profit from it.

As Canadians, the rejection of charter schools demonstrates our collective commitment to the some of the most important core principles of public education, including access, quality and equity. The idea of charter schools allows us to think deeply about our core values surrounding public education and the many promises which it’s asked to uphold.


Author
Michael Mindzak
Assistant Professor, Faculty of Education, Brock University

SEE

May 28, 1997 — Yet the contractors costs in four of the five schools were higher than the Board's own staff by an average of 10%. The fifth school contract bid ...



Eugene Plawiuk. “I have no intention of increasing funds to schools, they should be looking for corporate partnerships.” &#8212Gary Mar, Alberta Minister of ...

Peter McLaren, ‎Ramin Farahmandpur · 2005 · ‎Education
Eugene Plawiuk (1999) suggested that globalization driven by neoliberal economic policies seeks to “recreate public education in the corporate image, ...
by SJ Ball2007Cited by 841 — In both cases, the trend towards privatization of public education is hidden. It is camouflaged by the language of “educational reform”, or introduced.
66 pages

by B Froese-Germain2016 — The Canadian Teachers' Federation (CTF) believes strongly that public education must remain independent of privatization because it undermines educational ...
60 pages



Why the movement to privatize public education is a very bad idea

By Valerie Strauss
July 14, 2016

Samuel E. Abrams is the director of the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. He has written a new book, “Education and the Commercial Mindset,” that details how and why market forces have come to rise in public education and become important in corporate school reform.




Renowned progressive educator Deborah Meier wrote an interesting review of the book on her blog. She wrote in part:

This is a book that you should rush out and buy/read. The author, Samuel E. Abrams, is currently the director of the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education, Teachers College, Columbia. When I first saw the title and the source, I did not think it would be a book I would be enthusiastic about.

However, I discovered immediately that the author taught for a number of years at NYC’s Beacon High School, which I know and respect. So I decided maybe my biases were unfair. Indeed I was wrong to be wary. Chapter One should be a must for all those who want (or should want) to understand the period we are in and the issues confronting us. If you can’t imagine reading the whole book — start there. Then decide.

Actually every chapter that follows is important including one on charters with a focus on KIPP — which Abrams is more sympathetic to than I am. But like the rest of the book he presents the issues with lots of documentation and data, and he presents KIPP fairly. He covers considerable territory with some historical background on every topic he deals with for those who love it. His final chapters on schooling in other distant lands focuses on the Nordic nations with a lot, of course, on Finland.

You can see the rest of her review here, and below is the Q & A I did with Abrams about his book and the privatization movement:

Q) The education privatization movement has been growing for years. Why did you decide to write the book now — and can you explain exactly what the movement encompasses. I think people hear the phrase but don’t really understand it.

A) My decision to write this book goes back a decade. I had written a thesis on for-profit school management for a master’s degree in economics and education at Teachers College, Columbia University. My adviser, Henry M. Levin, recommended I turn the thesis into a book. Though daunted by the prospect of doing so, I forged ahead because I was and remain convinced that advocates of the free market had taken their argument too far. Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and their many disciples were certainly right that the free market efficiently allocates resources in many domains. But they were wrong to contend it does so in all domains. In the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall, this is the argument that won over so many policymakers. All government services — from waste collection and postal delivery to corrections and schooling — laissez-faire exponents contended, could and should be outsourced to private providers. This outsourcing is what defines privatization.

Where there is sufficient transparency for proper contract enforcement, the free market works beautifully, and privatization thus makes good sense. We don’t begrudge a restaurateur or bookseller a profit because we as consumers can easily judge the quality of goods, service and ambiance provided and, thus, decide whether to return. Likewise, privatizing the delivery of discrete goods and services is justifiable. For a school district, in this light, to outsource bus transportation or textbook provision to for-profit enterprises is understandable and efficient.


However, where there is insufficient transparency for proper contract enforcement, the free market fails. Laissez-faire enthusiasts neglected to differentiate discrete (that is, easily measurable) from complex services. In the case of schooling, which is a classic complex service, the direct consumer is a child, who is in little position to judge whether classes are being properly taught. The parent, taxpayer and legislator are at a necessary distance. And standardized testing as a check on quality is rife with problems. It isn’t merely that teachers and principals under tremendous pressure to raise test scores can correct wrong answers on bubble sheets, as documented in Atlanta most notably, but they can also give students more time to complete tests and lend help in the process. More fundamentally, heavy reliance on standardized testing leads to teaching to the test, which means crowding out instruction in subjects that aren’t tested, particularly art, music, crafts and play, which are fundamental to a well-rounded education.


Predictions on Wall Street a generation ago that for-profit school managers — educational management organizations (EMOs), to be precise — could do a far better job in managing schools than municipalities and would, thus, be running 10 to 20 percent of the nation’s K-12 public schools by 2010 were way off. EMOs by that time would be running 0.7 percent of the nation’s K-12 public schools. Wall Street underestimated the challenge of managing public schools and overestimated the appeal of EMOs to parents and taxpayers. Investors in firms such as Edison Schools — launched in 1992, taken public by Merrill Lynch in 1999 and running 133 schools (including 20 in Philadelphia alone) by 2002 — accordingly got crushed, as I explain in my book.

Yet Wall Street was implicitly right that policymakers would embrace a bottom-line approach to assessing school quality and favor substantial choice for parents. The bottom-line approach has meant annual testing in reading and math in grades three through eight and one year at the secondary level. Choice has meant a proliferation of nonprofit charter schools. We started with two in Minnesota in 1992. We now have nearly 7,000 across 41 states and the District of Columbia. Whether such outsourcing to nonprofit school managers has been wise is another matter.

Q) Please carry on with that thought, whether it has been wise to turn over schools to nonprofit managers. There are some who argue that even nonprofit charters are part of the privatization movement because they do not have to operate like public institutions in terms of transparency and accountability to the public. And some courts and labor boards have said they were in effect private institutions for certain purposes. What do you think of this sort of thinking?

A) Privatization takes the form of nonprofit as well as for-profit school management, as privatization technically means outsourcing the provision of government services to independent operators, whether nonprofit or for-profit. Insufficient transparency and, thus, accountability can become problems. While nonprofit charter operators must file 990s with the IRS documenting expenses and salaries, for instance, many are less detailed in their reportage than they should be. Moreover, these charters report only indirectly, if at all, to elected school board members.

Yet there are far greater issues with outsourcing school management to nonprofit charter operators: First, this outsourcing generates the atomization of school districts, meaning the diminishment of neighborhood schools and the civic involvement such neighborhood affiliation involves; second, this atomization makes for navigational challenges for many parents, who either have a hard time finding the right school for their children or getting them there day after day when the school is across town; third, this atomization translates into “good schools” and “bad schools,” with students who can’t succeed in the “good schools” concentrated in the “bad schools,’ which are often default neighborhood schools, where learning can become far harder given the negative effects struggling students can have on other students. In sum, such outsourcing leads to opportunities at high-performing schools for some students but leaves many others behind.

Privatization accordingly amounts to a flawed response to state failure, not a solution. The solution calls for investing the resources necessary to make all neighborhood schools solid in the way all neighborhood schools are solid in middle- and upper-class suburbs, with well-paid teachers, good working conditions and smaller classes. But we have to go further than that. We have to invest in quality preschool, with college-educated teachers, so children show up to school ready to learn. We have decades of evidence of the positive impact of quality preschool. It’s expensive, but only in the short run. We likewise must invest in school-associated medical, dental and counseling services, which are also expensive but only in the short run. Privatization has brought many bright, dedicated agents of change, but it diverts us from addressing our state failure squarely.


Q) So how do we address our problems — especially now that it seems we have made something that needs improvement even worse?

A) The first step we should take is to drop the annual testing in reading and math in grades three through eight and one year at the secondary level mandated by No Child Left Behind (NCLB) 15 years ago and reaffirmed in somewhat different terms by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) several months ago.


The mission of this testing — to identify and eliminate deficiencies in the academic achievement of underprivileged children — represents the noblest of democratic ideals, as I write in my book. But this regular testing has done little more than repeatedly identify deficiencies. In the process, the pressure to boost test results has led to stressful test prep for students and teachers alike, and it has constricted curricula, cutting time for important subjects on which students aren’t tested. Even former secretary of education Arne Duncan conceded in 2014 that testing is “sucking the oxygen out of the room in a lot of schools.”

Instead of census testing, with all students assessed, we should employ sampling, with high-quality exams given to random samples of students. We already do this with the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), given every two years in reading, writing, math and science to small but significant samples of students in grades four, eight and 12 in all states. At the state level, we should add periodic tests for samples of students in history, geography, foreign language, art, music, and physical fitness and agility.

This may strike some as soft-headed, but this thinking derives implicitly from the revered managerial theorist W. Edwards Deming, who transformed the Japanese auto industry with his emphasis on high-quality sampling as well as collaboration between management and labor. Moreover, this thinking derives explicitly from the practice of Finnish school leaders. The Finns, renowned for their first-rate public school system, test only 10 percent of students in ninth grade each year in approximately two subjects, and they cover the whole curriculum in this manner over a 10-year period, from math and reading to art and music.

Making this change would cost nothing. In fact, it would save us a lot of money as well as time spent on preparing, proctoring and grading exams. And we’d get that oxygen back in the classroom that Duncan identified as disappearing. As a result, children would get a richer education, and teachers would regain their autonomy as professionals.


 Valerie Strauss is an education writer who authors The Answer Sheet blog. She came to The Washington Post as an assistant foreign editor for Asia in 1987 and weekend foreign desk editor after working for Reuters as national security editor and a military/foreign affairs reporter on Capitol Hill. She also previously worked at UPI and the LA Times. Twitter

SEE

May 28, 1997 — Yet the contractors costs in four of the five schools were higher than the Board's own staff by an average of 10%. The fifth school contract bid ...



Eugene Plawiuk. “I have no intention of increasing funds to schools, they should be looking for corporate partnerships.” &#8212Gary Mar, Alberta Minister of ...

Peter McLaren, ‎Ramin Farahmandpur · 2005 · ‎Education
Eugene Plawiuk (1999) suggested that globalization driven by neoliberal economic policies seeks to “recreate public education in the corporate image, ...
by SJ Ball2007Cited by 841 — In both cases, the trend towards privatization of public education is hidden. It is camouflaged by the language of “educational reform”, or introduced.
66 pages

by B Froese-Germain2016 — The Canadian Teachers' Federation (CTF) believes strongly that public education must remain independent of privatization because it undermines educational ...
60 pages