They’ve already targeted the school board and elected officials. Now, teachers, parents, and progressive education activists fed up with the top-down approach of Mayor Daley’s Renaissance 2010 initiative are taking their frustration to private funders who support the plan.

On Saturday, members of the emerging Grassroots Education Movement demonstrated at the doorstep of a Chicago McDonald’s location to voice their opposition to the corporation’s $1 million-plus investment in the iniative. They then headed across the street to a local Walgreens, which also backs the Renaissance 2010 Schools Fund.

Jackson Potter, a teacher at Pilsen’s Social Justice High School and a member of the Caucus of Rank and File Teachers (CORE), told us this week that the goal is to “open another front” on the burgeoning school reform movement “so those who are driving the policy are held accountable.”

As we’ve noted, a proposed plan to close or reorganize 22 schools has galvanized teachers, parents, and community groups, particularly after they were brushed off by the school board and city officials. Together, they are trying to counter the mayor’s push to outsource schools.

At the current pace, 50 percent of the school system could be under private management by 2020, according to CORE, a coalition of teachers, union members ,and community activists. The Sun-Times reported today on their overreaching concern:

Opponents of Mayor Daley’s plan to close 70 troubled schools by 2010 and open 100 new ones say the closings will displace many low-income students in favor of more-affluent ones.

NewsTips.org’s Curtis Black recently laid out a long and justifiable list of reasons for the reformers’ distrust. “Without public oversight and accountability, they say, the district’s decisions on building, repairing, closing and privatizing school facilities are arbitrary, opaque, and unfair,” Black writes. Meanwhile, State Rep. Cynthia Soto (D-Chicago) has tried to buy the reform community some time by introducing legislation establishing a one-year moratorium on school closings.

“We want the big corporations who’ve been undermining the neighborhood schools to pull out,” Potter told us. “People involved in schools, not corporate big wigs, should make the decisions.”