the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Jan 10, 2011
ICEF, a charter school company in deep financial trouble, announced in early December that it is now able to keep operating 15 Los Angeles schools–only thanks to 10.5 million dollars in private donations.
The biggest donor was businessman and former L.A. mayor Richard Riordan with 2.2 million dollars. Other donors included real estate billionaire Eli Broad with two million dollars, and Bill Gates with half a million dollars.
Gates and Broad have been spending millions of dollars to campaign for charter schools–privately run schools that get their money from public school funds. These billionaire bosses claim that private management of public schools will provide a better education for children, especially in working-class neighborhoods.
This simply isn’t true, as ICEF itself shows. It can’t even keep its doors open, without a multimillion-dollar bailout.
In other words, as bad as the public schools are–after receiving the same public money the public schools receive, this charter school company can’t even do with it what the public schools themselves can do!
These no-good billionaires have already built themselves up by stealing from us. They need to keep their grubby hands off our public schools!