Nashville School Board members Amy Frogge and Will Pinkston took to the blog Seattle Education to issue a warning about the Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) housed at the University of Washington Bothell.
Here’s some of what they had to say:
CRPE’s list of “senior research affiliates” reads like a Who’s Who of special interests determined to tear down public schools and replace them with publicly funded, privately run charter schools. As members of the local school board in Nashville who are fighting against the devastating effects of school privatization, we are writing this column to advise Washington public education advocates — including the leadership and faculty at UW Bothell — that you have an enemy in your midst.
Here’s how they describe the CRPE’s role in recent Nashville education battles:
Political and business interests aligned with the charter movement seized on the CRPE compact to attempt a wholesale privatization of Nashville’s public school system. Some even shamefully referred to their plan as “New Orleans without the hurricane” — a reference to the charterization of Crescent City schools in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. CRPE, led by pro-privatization director Robin Lake, cheered the effort.
Fortunately, the voters of Nashville ultimately rejected CRPE and Lake’s agenda by overwhelmingly electing and re-electing a strong pro-public education contingent to the Nashville school board. Yet the well-funded CRPE threat persists, in our city and elsewhere in the U.S.
The post goes on to alert Washingtonians of what Frogge and Pinkston describe as a clear threat to public education. The warning is well worth a read.
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