Privatizing Public Schools - Arguments don't pass the reality test

http://www.alternet.org/education/why-arguments-privatizing-public-schools-fall-flat?akid=12560.294211.Jwp60t&rd=1&src=newsletter1028422&t=17

Timmy gets a confusing lesson in corporate education reform, starting with the rightwing mantra: “Public schools have failed.”
“But I like my public school,” Timmy protests.
A top rightwing think tank has devoted more than $30 million to spread the message that public education is failing. According to a report by One Wisconsin Now, the Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation is a major underwriter of this propaganda effort. Bradley spent millions on shoddy research, media punditry, and a lobbying campaign to promote the idea that public schools have failed and to push school vouchers and other privatization schemes as the “solution”.
Large, national charter-school chains have been major of the beneficiaries of the campaign to fix “failing” public schools. Among them, Rocketship––“a low-budget operation that relies on young and inexperienced teachers rather than more veteran and expensive faculty,” according to a report by economist Gordon Lafer for the Economic Policy Institute.

Rocketship experienced high test-scores when it opened its first school in California in 2009. But those scores have rapidly declined, calling into question the lasting value of the schools’ test-prep focus, and prompting a painful self-examination chronicled in the Education Week article “ Growing Pains for Rocketship’s Blended-Learning Juggernaut.”
Two of Rocketship’s five schools have fallen below state test-score goals. “Ironically, by Rocketship’s own standards, they would need to build another school nearby to compete with and replace their own failing schools,” the website Stop Rocketship notes.