http://dailycensored.com/2010/02/15/wal-mart-set-to-skim-off-free-labor-in-detroit-high-schools-students-fight-the-road-to-serfdom/
The following statement was written by students at the Frederick Douglass Academy and read at the recent kick-off event announcing a program that would place 30 students in jobs at Wal-Mart. The students would get credits, Wal-Mart free labor. This is the initial phase of the program, proposed at 4 Detroit High Schools.
Save Frederick Douglass Academy
We the students of Frederick Douglass Academy are not going to accept the attack on our education! Allowing Walmart to come into our school, set up elective “classes,” and the offer 30 Walmart jobs, is an insult. Rob Bobb has brought Walmart into at least four high schools in Detroit. Bobb’s plan for education in DPS is to charterize the District. His plan would mean the end of public education in Detroit.
If Walmart succeeds in our school, it will become a Walmart Charter School. Frederick Douglass Academy will become a school in which the only aspiration of the students can be working for Walmart and climbing the ladder of the Walmart institution to someday become a supervisor or manager. We can NOT allow our school, and our district to become Walmart job feeders, and places which are only there to kill our dreams and aspirations.
The Frederick Douglass Affirmation proudly states “We are determined to get the root of success, not just the fruit of success.” When we decided to come to this school, we were deciding to make our dreams and aspirations a reality. We came here to learn and grow. We wanted our lives to have meaning, and we were going to be somebody. Frederick Douglass Academy was built to create leaders. Its purpose is to give students the opportunity to get a real education and get into schools like U of M. Frederick Douglass Academy is a beacon of hope for many Detroiters. We cannot let our hopes be trampled. We deserve MUCH more than Walmart.
http://www.educationsector.org/publications/big-box-how-heirs-wal-mart-fortune-have-fueled-charter-school-movementBig Box: How the Heirs of the Wal-Mart Fortune Have Fueled the Charter School MovementAlthough the Walton foundation devotes some resources to traditional school districts, most of its giving supports school choice, from charter schools to private school vouchers and tuition tax credits, because of John Walton's belief that “empowering parents to choose among competing schools will catalyze improvement across the entire K–12 education system.”
Walton money helped fund the legal defense of the Cleveland, Ohio, school voucher program that permits low-income students to attend private and parochial schools at public expense that was upheld in a landmark 2002 U.S. Supreme Court case. It has funded grassroots political campaigns to establish and expand voucher programs in Washington, D.C., Milwaukee, and other cities. It has funded researchers sympathetic to school vouchers. Before he died in a plane crash in 2005, John Walton had become one of the nation's leading private funders of school choice initiatives. In 1998, Walton and Wall Street financier Theodore Forstmann made $50 million personal contributions to create a Children's Scholarship Fund that has provided grants to help pay private-school tuition for 70,000 low-income students, and he contributed $2 million to an unsuccessful voucher initiative in Michigan in 2000.
But most of the foundation's largesse in education—80 percent or some $50 million a year—supports charter schooling. That money has been instrumental to the expansion of the charter school sector. “Walton money has played a strategic role in the charter school movement at a critical point in its development, helping to increase the number of schools, build an advocacy support network, and fund supportive research,” says Jeffrey Henig, a professor of political science and education at Teachers College, Columbia University, who is writing a book about the politics of charter schooling, and who is one of the few charter school experts in the nation who does not receive funding from the Walton Family Foundation.
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