MTA report details new threats to public education
MTA report details new threats to public education
The MTA has released Threat from the Right: New Tactics Emerge as Privatizers Regroup, the fourth in a series of reports over the last several years that focus on the major challenges that exist as anti-government forces and corporate interests continue their assault on public education and unions.
This addition to the Threat series provides an update on the issues we face as the coronavirus crisis unfolds — and as right-wing education “reformers” turn to new tactics and strategies to undermine the public good, both locally and nationally.
As this Threat report was being prepared, the rapid spread of COVID-19 and the need for social distancing closed the doors of our schools and forced students, faculty and staff from their higher education campuses. The pandemic has driven millions of Americans into unemployment and brought widespread economic devastation — taking an especially heavy toll on low-income communities, families of color, and immigrants.
The situation — and the need to address it with an agenda that focuses on the common good and creating a better society as we emerge from the crisis — makes the issues raised in the latest Threat from the Right report all the more vital.
The deeply researched report explores the newest iterations of the numerous hard-edged privatization schemes that put the interests of billionaires and corporations over the well-being of students and our communities.
Previous volumes in this series — in 2013, 2016 and 2018 — have catalogued the decades-long efforts by right-wing donors and groups, joined by their ideological and corporate allies, to privatize ever more areas of government and silence unions. Together, the reports serve to expose the organizational, financial and legal assaults being waged as part of the drive to grab more control of the public money spent in Massachusetts and other states on preK-12 schools, colleges and universities, and other essential services.
Threat from the Right: New Tactics Emerge as Privatizers Regroup was written as the result of a new business item passed by the delegates to the 2019 MTA Annual Meeting of Delegates.