Walmart Heirs Look to Privatize Arkansas Education

Timothy Birdnow

The Walton family is working to privatize education in Arkansas.

According to the Leftist rag Salon:

The Alabama Education Association did the research and described the empire that the Waltons have constructed in service to their goal of owning and privatizing the public schools of Arkansas. In the Walton plan, there will be no "public schools,” only privately managed charter schools and vouchers for religious schools.

The AEA report lays out the Walton Empire of Privatization in detail, with their bought and paid for think tanks and academics:

Although this report includes a lot of names, it is just one slice of the nationwide effort to plunder our public schools. These organizations have a vast infrastructure and deep pockets that can seem daunting, but our students are counting on us to stand up and speak out.

While they may have more cash, we have the power of numbers and common sense. Arkansas’s taxpayers and students would be better served by investing our scarce resources to improve our neighborhood public schools and helping all of the students who attend them.

In what universe are students better served by failing public schools? And it is not as if the students are going to be left high and dry because there are no public schools; they will be given vouchers to attend private facilities. There will be more private facilities and they will need teachers. Oh, and those facilities will be more responsive to the needs of the student and to the wishes of the parents. But I am making too much sense here.

If the heirs to the Walmart fortune want to encourage private education and discourage abusive government brain washateria, that is their right in America. I hope they succeed.

I love this bit of stupidity:


As old as the country itself?  If we ever needed evidence that these people are ignoramuses and not fit to educate our children it is that last statement. We did not have mandatory free education in America until after the Civil War and especially the coming of John Dewey. Prior to that there were some scattered public schools, mainly in New England, but you still had to pay to attend.

America was educated almost exclusively by the private sector until the Progressive era.

Arkansasliteracy.org claims that fifteen percent of Arkansans over sixteen cannot read, despite mandatory public education. If true, that is a horrendous failure rate by public educrats. It shouldn't surprise us;  Albert Shanker, former boss hog of the American Federation of Teachers, once famously stated:


Now, I'm not saying there aren't dedicated teachers; quite the opposite. But so many are trapped in a bad system that does not serve either their interests nor the interests of the children they are supposed to serve.

So let us applaud the efforts by the Walton family to return to what served this country so well. Something must be done; America's experiment with public education has been a horrible failure.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 11:55 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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