Duncan Ready to Bribe Districts to Create 5,000 Charter Schools

And so it would be left to neo-liberals to put the finishing touches on the conservative effort to cede urban schooling to corporate control.

All Dunc needs to get it done is to do away with the local school boards, which he has called for, that could stand in the way of the Gates-Broad plan for urban reform schooling. Does Obama have another bribery fund to pay cities to hand over control of public institutions to mayors and their appointed stooges who have been bought by the Oligarchs?

The million dollar bribery offer story from Libby Quaid, Arne's private press agent at the AP:

By LIBBY QUAID
AP Education Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Barack Obama intends to use $5 billion to prod local officials to close failing schools and reopen them with new teachers and principals.

The goal is to turn around 5,000 failing schools in the next five years, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Monday, by beefing up funding for the federal school turnaround program created by the No Child Left Behind law.

Obama doesn't have authority to close and reopen schools himself. That power rests with local school districts and states. But he has an incentive in the economic stimulus law, which requires states to help failing schools improve.

Duncan said that might mean firing an entire staff and bringing in a new one, replacing a principal or turning a school over to a charter school operator. The point, he said, is to take bold action in persistently low-achieving schools.

"Our students have one chance - one chance - to get a quality education," Duncan said in a speech Monday to the Brookings Institution think tank.

"If we turn around just the bottom 1 percent, the bottom thousand schools per year for the next five years, we could really move the needle, lift the bottom and change the lives of tens of millions of underserved children," Duncan said. . . .

As George Schmidt, editor of Substance News, likes to remind us, Duncan is renowned for making up his own facts. Here is a good one, George: there's just over 40 million children total in the public schools in the U. S. Five percent of 40,000,000 would 2,000,000 students, rather than "tens of millions."