Wall Street bankers are stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from our kids every year. [1]

That’s not a misprint. As part of all the financial shenanigans they engaged in that broke our economy, they managed to entrap school districts around the country in “interest rate swaps” that were sold as ways to guarantee steady income for the critical job of educating our kids. Instead they turned out to be massive drains on school budgets, for example, costing Philadelphia $331 million [2] and Chicago $150 million (and another $36 million every year). [3]

In turn, that financial pressure on school districts (exacerbated by the drop in tax revenues from the Great Recession) has opened up opportunities for Wall Street banker-funded corporate takeovers of our public schools. For-profit charter schools, often online-only, have cropped up nationally, siphoning off critical public school investments, short changing our children’s future to line the pockets of private, usually out-of-state, corporations dedicated primarily to the bottom line.

Parents and teachers around the country have been desperately fighting back against this tidal wave of Wall Street-backed education “reform”. They know we need investment in our public schools so that every child has a quality teacher and access to a well-rounded education that includes history, music, arts, PE and vocational training, NOT investment in Wall Street corporations whose motivations have little to do with kids and everything to do with manipulating state regulation to protect their interests.

A key figure in this fight is prominent public school advocate, Diane Ravitch, whose new book, Reign of Error: the Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools, shows how people are fighting back and winning. YOU CAN HEAR AND INTERACT WITH HER LIVE in a forum sponsored by the Our Schools network on Wednesday Oct 16th at 8pm EDT/5pm PDT. RSVP here.