On an unseasonably frigid Thursday in November, Julian Vasquez Heilig, who is both a professor at California State University Sacramento and the California NAACP education chair, stood before an audience of labor leaders, Democratic officials, and policymakers and drew a direct line from economist Milton Friedman to the hyper-segregation of schools today.

An energetic, controversial presence on social media and the author of the blog Cloaking Inequity, Vasquez Heilig is also on the board of Diane Ravitch’s Network for Public Education, which opposes charter schools, teacher evaluations, the use of assessments and data, and a host of other mainstream education reforms.

Friedman, Vasquez Heilig told attendees at the two-day Summit for Civil Rights, had called for the privatization of U.S. schools, but today’s charter school operators had taken things a step further. They had told him as much at a gathering they invited him to attend in New York, presumably the inaugural symposium of the Coalition of Community Charter Schools in October.

You have this cabal of people who truly believe that vouchers and charters are about civil rights, and they’ve created this motley alliance with people who are interested in privatization and profit,” Vasquez Heilig said. “That cabal is organized by a set of industrialists” including Bill Gates and the Koch Brothers.

Read the full article by Beth Hawkins about school choice from The 74