The Squandered Brilliance of Our Disposable Youth

Abstract

This chapter addresses the education inequities in the United States, and distinguishes between “public schools” and “charter schools.” Though the chapter recognizes that this is itself controversial, and charter schools have taken to referring themselves as public schools, for the sake of clarity it is important to be able to distinguish between the two. While the charter schools' efforts have been primarily directed at Black and Brown communities thus far, the chapter unveils the school privatizers' ultimate targets, which are set much more broadly than that. It examines the impact of school privatization on public school systems and the harms caused by school privatization in communities of color. The chapter then takes a look at Corporate America and Wall Street, and analyses how they can always profit from new markets and expandable markets. Ultimately, it reveals how the ultra-wealthy maintain education inequities to ensure that there will be millions of poorly educated, low-skill individuals who are essentially forced to accept the low wages to survive.