Glen Ford, the Executive Editor of The Black Agenda Report (www.blackagendareport.com), will
speak this coming Saturday at the University of Minnesota in the Carlson
Building on the West Bank Campus. Ford will
discuss the on-going attack on public education, carried out by politicians of
both parties, championed by front groups with misleading names like “Students
First,” and funded by billionaire philanthropists, hedge-fund managers, and
corporate foundations.
Ford has carefully detailed the history of the corporate
reformers as they have carried out their neo-liberal agenda aimed at
privatizing our system of public education.
This effort to put corporations in control of the almost $600 billion
spent on public education in the United States has led the so-called reformers
to justify their cause by cloaking it in the language of the Civil Rights
Movement. The privatization reforms are
being carried out with the argument that “education is the Civil Rights issue
of our time.” By extension, the
billionaires, hedge-fund managers, bankers, and CEOs are claiming the title of
Civil Rights leaders!
This is not just a Republican led effort, as Glen Ford has
pointed out, “on education, Obama’s
first term is Bush’s Third.” Ford
explains, “Obama has advanced the corporatization of the public schools
beyond Bush’s wildest dreams, methodically constructing a national, parallel
system of charter schools that, in practice, undermine and subvert the
traditional public schools. In some places, they have replaced, or soon will
replace, the public schools. The hedge funds and billionaires are ecstatic!”
Come to the PEJAM forum this Saturday
to hear more from Glen Ford. This forum
will include a member of the Chicago Teachers’ Union to explain how the
education reforms have played out in Chicago, and we will wrap up with a Q and
A for both guests.
WHAT:
PEJAM Eduation Forum Featuring Glen Ford
WHEN:
Saturday, Oct. 27, 2012, from 1
pm to 3 pm.
WHERE: Carlson Building on the West
Bank Campus of the U of MN.
