Schools Matter: The Spellings Privatization Machine Shifts Gears

Schools Matter: The Spellings Privatization Machine Shifts Gears:

The Spellings Privatization Machine Shifts Gears

With some uncertainty as to how long it will take for North Carolina citizens to ride her out of the state on a rail, Margaret Spellings is wasting no time implanting Koch Brothers' stooges into what has been one of the best public university systems in the nation.  If Spellings is left to do what she was put in charge to do, we will witness the replacement of public servants with crony profiteers, privatizers, and fascist hacks who circulate among the power centers of the Old Confederacy.

As in Cecil Staton, who Spellings recently named as Chancellor of East Carolina University:

As a five-term Republican member of the Georgia Senate, Staton moved millions in taxpayer dollars to Mercer, the private university that employed him. He authored a voter ID bill that a federal judge likened to a "poll tax." He was also notorious for pushing police crackdowns on immigrants.

Most bizarrely, he was involved in an email scandal, in which the then-senator allegedly used afake account and name to spread attacks about a political rival.

"We know Ms. Spellings was a political appointee who has had nothing really to do with advancing academia," N.C. NAACP president William Barber told Ball. "Now it seems birds of a feather flock together."

And if there are no positions to fill, then she is intent to let her handlers create new positions, as with this newly created position:

So it begins: Yesterday, new UNC president Margaret Spellings announced the appointment of Andrew Kelly to a newly created position called "senior vice president for strategy and policy." The school will pay him $245,000 a year.

A UNC release notes that Kelly was a research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute from 2002-2005, and returned to AEI in 2009 as a research fellow in education policy studies. He Schools Matter: The Spellings Privatization Machine Shifts Gears: