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If you live in Washington State, and you're politcally savvy, you have to find the recent charter school media blitz astounding. I'm not talking about Eastern Washington, the substate that wanted to elect Pat Robertson as President. The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer have unleashed a furious assault on charter school opponents, cheerleading for charters through articles and editorials.
I don't oppose charter schools in princple. I believe in genuine "school choice," and public schools suck. Moreoever, public schools suck more every year, because they're enemies include liberals as well as conservatives. Liberals who claim to support public education have done a great job of shouting down school choice, but they never lift a finger to fix the serious problems that are eroding public schools from within.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in Seattle, where invading Republicans would be lucky to find any booty left by King County Democrats. But the booty keeps replenishing itself in the form of tax dollars.
Last year, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen bankrolled a charter school initiative. The liberal establishment was amazingly silent; scarcely anyone objected, let alone campaigned against it. But the measure was still voted down.
Now, Bill Gates has become Washington State's most charter school backer. In fact, Gates is involved with a series of major education initiatives that are designed to punish kids and reward corrupt adults.
Visit the Seattle Times and P-I online and type "charter schools" into their search/archive functions. The propaganda they've been churning out is simply revolting.
So who's taking a stand against Gates? The newly reformed Seattle School Board officially opposes charter schools - but their opposition is nothing more than tokenism. In fact, they're all Microsoft whores, too, including the two Green Party candidates who recently snuck into office on a carpet of lies.
Having already allowed public schools to be effectively privatized, it's probably too much to hope that citizens will beat back corporate charters. But what's the use of voting for Dennis Kucinich or Howard Dean, if Americans don't even give a damn about children?
Have we fallen so low that we'd allow our children to be handed over to the likes of Bill Gates?
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