Submitted by Elaine Magliaro Guest Blogger
In May, David Sirota penned an article for Salon titled Selling out Public Schools. In it, he said that Mitt Romney, President Obama, and both of our major political parties were “assaulting public education.”
Sirota wrote:
On the Republican side, the Washington Post reports Mitt Romney just unveiled “a pro-choice, pro-voucher, pro-states-rights education program that seems certain to hasten the privatization of the public education system” completely. On the other side, Wall Street titans in the Democratic Party with zero experience in education policy are marshaling tens of millions of dollars to do much of what Romney aims to do as president – and they often have a willing partner in President Barack “Race to the Top” Obama and various Democratic governors.
Funded by corporate interests who naturally despise organized labor, both sides have demonized teachers’ unions as the primary problem in education — somehow ignoring the fact that most of the best-performing public school systems in America and in the rest of the world are, in fact, unionized. (Are we never supposed to ask how, if unions are the primary problem, so many unionized schools in America and abroad do so well?) Not surprisingly, these politicians and activists insist they are driven solely by their regard for the nation’s children — and they expect us to ignore the massive amount of money their benefactors (and even the activists personally) stand to make by transforming public education into yet another private profit center. Worse, they ask us also to forget that in the last few years of aggressive “reform” (read: evisceration) of public education, the education gap has actually gotten far worse, with the most highly touted policies put in place now turning the schoolhouse into yet another catalyst of crushing inequality.
Sirota says that charter schools and vouchers are one of the five most “prominent” of these policies. I would agree. There has been an education movement afoot for a many years whose aim is less about reforming public schools and more about the privatization of public education. One of the first steps in the “reform” process is funneling public money away from traditional public schools to “privately administered” charter schools and to private schools via tuition vouchers.
A Look at the New Student Voucher Program in Louisiana
Stephanie Simon (Reuters) has reported that Louisiana is “embarking on the nation’s boldest experiment in privatizing public education.” She wrote, “Starting this fall, thousands of poor and middle-class kids will get vouchers covering the full cost of tuition at more than 120 private schools across Louisiana, including small, Bible-based church schools.” Louisiana’s voucher program, which is said to be the most sweeping in the country, will “shift tens of millions of dollars from public schools to pay not only private schools but also private businesses and private tutors to educate children across the state.”
Governor Bobby Jindal and State Superintendent of Education John White, both of whom pushed for the voucher program, “promised to hold the private schools accountable for student achievement.” Yet, it has been reported that “money will continue to flow to scores of private and religious schools participating in Louisiana’s new voucher program even if their students fail basic reading and math tests…”
Casey Michel (TPMMuckraker) reported in July that students in every public school in Louisiana are subjected to standardized testing, but “voucher students — who will bring an average of $8,000 in tuition from ‘failing’ public schools to many that are affiliated with religious denominations — will only need to face testing if their new school has taken an average of 10 students per grade, or if the schools have accepted at least 40 voucher students into the grades testing.”
Simon said that according to new rules, “schools will not be penalized for poor scores on state standardized tests if they have fewer than 40 voucher students enrolled in the upper elementary or secondary grades.” Even if their voucher students fail to “demonstrate basic competency in math, reading, science and social studies,” the private schools will continue to receive state funds. Superintendent White estimated that 75 percent of the 120 private schools participating in the voucher program would “fall into this protected category.”
Participating schools that have more than 40 voucher students will be given a “numerical grade from the state based on their voucher students’ test scores.” Schools that score less than 50 on a 150-point scale will not be allowed to enroll more voucher students. Those schools will, however, still “continue to receive public money indefinitely to serve students already enrolled.”
Opponents of the voucher program say that their biggest concern is “the fact that the students may be transferring, on the taxpayers’ dime, to a school that will score worse than the one from which they left. That is, a student can leave a public school if it scores a ‘C’ or below on state standardized testing — but if the new private school scores the minimum of 50, the equivalent of a D-minus, it could still recruit new voucher students.”
Some of those who are critical of the new voucher program have voiced concerns about accountability procedures. Donald Songy, a representative of the Louisiana Association of School Superintendents, questioned the provision “that a private school wouldn’t be in trouble unless it scored less than 50, whereas a public school is labeled a failure if it scores less than 65.”
Now millions of tax dollars originally earmarked for Louisiana’s public schools will go to pay for private school tuitions—even if the voucher students in those schools are not achieving academically. Does this voucher program look like it could be the solution to the problem of failing schools in Louisiana?
Regarding Education in Private and Religious Schools Participating in Louisiana’s Voucher Program
It has been reported that most of the 120 educational facilities that will participate in the voucher program are Christian schools. Should citizens of Louisiana be concerned about what is being taught in private and religious schools that their tax dollars are helping to subsidize?
In her article Louisiana’s Bold Bid to Privatize Schools, Simon told of New Living Word—a school in Ruston that is willing to accept the most voucher students—more than 300. The school has a top-ranked basketball team—but no library. Simon explained how the students spend most of their school days “watching TVs in bare-bones classrooms.” She said, “Each lesson consists of an instructional DVD that intersperses Biblical verses with subjects such chemistry or composition.”
Simon also wrote of another school that is planning to make room for potential voucher students: “At Eternity Christian Academy in Westlake, pastor-turned-principal Marie Carrier hopes to secure extra space to enroll 135 voucher students, though she now has room for just a few dozen. Her first- through eighth-grade students sit in cubicles for much of the day and move at their own pace through Christian workbooks, such as a beginning science text that explains ‘what God made’ on each of the six days of creation. They are not exposed to the theory of evolution.”
According to Simon, there are private schools in Louisiana that have been approved to receive state funds that “use social studies texts warning that liberals threaten global prosperity; Bible-based math books that don’t cover modern concepts such as set theory; and biology texts built around refuting evolution.” Many of the schools “rely on Pensacola-based A Beka Book curriculum or Bob Jones University Press textbooks to teach their pupils Bible-based ‘facts,’ such as the existence of Nessie the Loch Ness Monster and all sorts of pseudoscience…” (14 Wacky “Facts” Kids Will Learn in Louisiana’s Voucher Schools)
Here are some examples of the “historical facts” that children may learn in these religious schools in Louisiana–courtesy of The Society Pages:
• Humans and dinosaurs co-existed.
• God designed “checks and balances” to prevent environmental crises, so chill! After all, “Roses are red, violets are blue; they both grow better with more CO2.”
• “Rumors” of foreclosures, high unemployment, homelessness, and general misery during the Great Depression are just socialist propaganda.
• Unions just want to destroy the accomplishments of “hardworking Americans.”
• Mormons, Unitarians, and Catholics = bad.
• And then there’s the history of racial/ethnic relations: “God used the ‘Trail of Tears’ to bring many Indians to Christ” and “Through the Negro spiritual, slaves developed patience to wait on the Lord and discovered that the truest freedom is freedom from the bondage of sin.” No, seriously — I didn’t make those up.
Opinions on the School Voucher Program
Education expert Diane Ravitch wrote the following about the school voucher program in Louisiana:
Bear in mind that public education is level-funded, so all these millions for vouchers and charters and online schooling and tutoring will come right out of the public school budget, making classes more overcrowded, closing libraries, shutting down services for students that need them.
Ravitch also wrote about the American Legislative Exchange Council’s links to the movement to privatize public schools in the The Washington Post:
A recent article in the Newark Star-Ledger showed how closely New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s “reform” legislation is modeled on ALEC’s work in education. Wherever you see states expanding vouchers, charters, and other forms of privatization, wherever you see states lowering standards for entry into the teaching profession, wherever you see states opening up new opportunities for profit-making entities, wherever you see the expansion of for-profit online charter schools, you are likely to find legislation that echoes the ALEC model.
ALEC has been leading the privatization movement for nearly 40 years, but the only thing new is the attention it is getting, and the fact that many of its ideas are now being enacted…
Charles P. Pierce wrote the following on his Esquire blog in July:
One wave of education “reform” demands almost continual high-stakes testing. Another wave of education “reform” demands that public money go to private for-profit “schools.” Now, the new wave of education “reform” demands that the high-stakes testing not count in the new for-profit “schools.” But this never has been about education. It’s been about destroying the public schools and protecting the right of people to marinate in superstition and nonsense.
*****
What is your opinion about the movement to privatize public education? What is your opinion about public money being spent to pay student tuitions at religious schools? Do you think that some school “reformers” are out to destroy public schools in this country?
SOURCES
Both Obama and Romney are assaulting public education. Five threats, in particular, stand out (Salon)
Louisiana’s bold bid to privatize schools (Reuters)
Louisiana sets rules for landmark school voucher program (MSNBC/Reuters)
Vouching for Failure in Louisiana Schools (Esquire)
Louisiana sets rules for landmark school voucher program (Chicago Tribune)
Louisiana’s Voucher Standards Called Into Question (TPMMuckraker)
Louisiana vouchers going mainly to church-affiliated schools (The Town Talk)
Despite criticism, Louisiana OKs accountability plan for school vouchers (The Town Talk)
Vouchers and the future of public education (Washington Post)
Ravitch: A primer on the group driving school reform (Washington Post)
14 Wacky “Facts” Kids Will Learn in Louisiana’s Voucher Schools (Mother Jones)
Some of Christie’s biggest bills match model legislation from D.C. group called ALEC (New Jersey On-Line)
A Close Look at Some Evangelical Textbooks (The Society Pages)
Ravitch: I don’t understand Michelle Rhee
By Valerie Strauss
4/18/2012
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/ravitch-i-dont-understand-michelle-rhee/2012/04/17/gIQADZK4OT_blog.html
Excerpt:
This was written by education historian Diane Ravitch for her Bridging Differences blog, which she co-authors with Deborah Meier on the Education Week website. The item was first published on April 17. In their blog, Ravitch and Meier exchange letters about what matters most in education. Ravitch, a research professor at New York University, is author of “The Death and Life of the Great American School System,” a critique of the flaws in the modern school reform movement that she just updated.
Dear Deborah,
I am trying to understand Michelle Rhee. She has allied herself with the most right-wing governors in the nation, yet she claims to be a Democrat. She has worked with Republican Rick Scott in Florida, Republican John Kasich in Ohio, Republican Chris Christie in New Jersey, Republican Rick Snyder in Michigan, among others. Any governor who wants to cut teachers’ rights and benefits can call on her to stand with him. Wherever there is a governor eager to dismantle and privatize public education, she is there at his side.
In Indiana, she stood with Republican governor Mitch Daniels as he successfully pushed through voucher legislation. In almost every state where charter legislation is under consideration, she is there to promote the glories of privatization. She is active in Georgia and Alabama and many other states, where the charter movement is likely to do serious harm to rural, exurban, suburban, and fragile urban communities, where the public schools are central to the local community.
A friend in Alabama went to an event sponsored by Rhee’s organization, StudentsFirst. Rhee’s representative told the 20 or so people at the meeting: “Alabama’s charter legislation will not allow for-profit operators to manage charter schools. Period.” Except that her statement is not true. The Alabama legislation says that after the charter is awarded to a nonprofit, it may turn full management and instructional responsibility over to a for-profit operator. It cannot be a spirit of civic generosity that motivates for-profit corporations to lobby the Alabama legislature to pass the bill. Why would Rhee’s representative be so misinformed, or why would she seek to mislead?
I am troubled that Rhee thinks that teachers are the biggest problem facing American education. Attacking teachers seems to be her hallmark. I was at an event on Martha’s Vineyard last August when Rhee repeated a story she has often told: three “great teachers in a row” closes the achievement gap. I was waiting for her to say it, and I quickly chimed in to say that it is an urban myth. While writing my last book, I tried to discover if there was any district or any school that had actually closed the achievement gap by providing “three great teachers in a row.” Certainly teachers make a difference, and no one would dispute that it is wonderful to have three great teachers in a row. But no one has ever figured out how to achieve this feat in an entire district. Certainly Rhee didn’t when she was chancellor in the District of Columbia.
Rhee has turned this urban myth into a national crusade against teachers. If scores are low, she suggests, it is because the students have lazy, incompetent teachers who should be fired. She achieved national notoriety in Washington, D.C., for her readiness to fire teachers and principals whom she judged to be unworthy. You may recall the infamous cover of Time magazine, where she posed sternly with a broom, ready to sweep clean the District of Columbia’s public schools. She did clear out a large proportion of the professional staff in the D.C. schools, and she did impose a new teacher evaluation system called IMPACT.
However, the benefits of her innovations are questionable. For one thing, the federal NAEP tests in 2011 showed that the D.C. public schools have the largest achievement gap of any city tested by that program; the D.C. black-white achievement gap is fully double the gap in the typical urban district. For another, USA Today documented a major cheating scandal in the D.C. public schools during her tenure. At the center of the scandal was a principal Rhee had repeatedly singled out, honored, given bonuses, and promoted. He resigned.
Of all the images of Rhee, the one that sticks in my head is when she invited a PBS film crew to watch her fire a principal. She said to the crew: “I’m going to fire somebody in a little while. Do you want to see that?” Of course they did, and they filmed it.
In another infamous incident, Rhee told an audience of young teachers that when she was a teacher, she controlled her restless class by putting duct tape on their mouths; when the tape came off, their lips were bleeding. Apparently, the audience found that act of child abuse very funny.
Today Rhee is a national figure. Her organization claims to have a million members, though it has been suggested that anyone who goes to her website is automatically registered as a member. StudentsFirst sends out deceptive email solicitations — I received one myself — asking the recipient if you want to see a great teacher in every classroom. Rhee’s name does not appear anywhere on the email. If you answer yes, you are registered as a “member” of StudentsFirst. I don’t understand this kind of deceptive marketing on behalf of someone who claims to be concerned about education.
Nick,
Siphoning money away from public schools to private schools is not going to solve the problem of failing schools. Our schools are a reflection of our society. We should address the many societal problems that are the causes of failing schools. I believe that early childhood educational programs for children who live in poverty and/or crime-infested neighborhoods would be one attempt at addressing those problems.
P.S. I’m not upper middle class folk. I never reached that stratum of society. I was a public school teacher for many years.
Oh yes..Michelle Rhee should be on the FBI Most Wanted List. While all the upper middle class folks here pontificate, their children in well funded schools, Rhee has the temerity to want to give poor kids that same opportunity. OFF W/ HER HEAD!!
AY,
“Are you surprised that the WSJ is covering up its affiliation with ALEC?”
That must have been a rhetorical question. Surely, you know what my answer would be.
ALEC Education “Academy” Launches on Island Resort
by Dustin Beilke — February 2, 2012
http://www.prwatch.org/news/2012/02/11272/alec-education-academy-launches-island-resort
Excerpt:
Today, hundreds of state legislators from across the nation will head out to an “island” resort on the coast of Florida to a unique “education academy” sponsored by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). There will be no students or teachers. Instead, legislators, representatives from right-wing think tanks and for-profit education corporations will meet behind closed doors to channel their inner Milton Friedman and promote the radical transformation of the American education system into a private, for-profit enterprise. (ALEC has claimed no corporate reps will be there but it has refused to let the press attend to see this claim for itself.)
***
What is ALEC Scoring on Its Education “Report Card?”
Little is known about the agenda of the ALEC education meeting taking place at the Ritz Carlton on Amelia Island. The meeting is not open to the public and recently even the press has been kicked out of meetings and barred from attendance. So to understand the ALEC agenda with regard to education, it is important to examine ALEC’s education “scorecard.”
Imagine getting a report card from your teacher and finding out that you were graded not on how well you understood the course material or scored on the tests and assignments, but rather on to what extent you agreed with your teacher’s strange public policy positions. That is the best way to understand the American Legislative Exchange Council’s 17th Report Card on American Education released last week.
The report card’s authors are Matthew Lardner, formerly of the Goldwater Institute, and Dan Lips, currently of the Goldwater Institute and formerly of the Heritage Foundation. They give every state’s public schools an overall grade based on how they rate in 14 categories. Homeschooling, alternative teacher certification, charter schools, private school choice, and virtual learning make up 7 of the 14 categories. Of the other seven categories, two rate the states’ academic standards and the other five have mostly to do with the way states retain “effective” teachers and fire “ineffective” ones.
ALEC’s education bills encompass more than 20 years of effort to privatize public education through an ever-expanding network of school voucher systems, which divert taxpayer dollars away from public schools to private schools, or the creation of new private charter schools with public funds, and even with private online schools (who needs actual teachers when you can have a virtual one?). The bills also allow schools to loosen standards for teachers and administrators, exclude students with physical disabilities and special educational needs, escape the requirements of collective bargaining agreements and experiment with other pet causes like merit pay, single-sex education, school uniforms, and political and religious indoctrination of students.
States where students score well on tests but where ALEC’s legislative agenda around school choice, charters, merit pay, de-unionization and alternative certification have not yet taken hold get low grades. States where elected officials are gung-ho for ALEC’s agenda but the students are not faring so well are still graded generously.
Ranking Policy, Not Performance
While ALEC’s report card and its many appendices weigh in at hefty 130+ pages, it is markedly slight on evidence that school choice, charters, or firing more teachers improve student performance. Indeed, the report card itself even makes this case by also ranking each state’s students’ performance on the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP) exam, the largest and most accepted national, standardized assessment of student knowledge in several subject areas.
Massachusetts, Vermont, New Jersey, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, North Carolina, Kansas, New Hampshire and New York comprise the top 10 states in NAEP performance. Among them, only Colorado is among the 13 states ALEC gives a B or better on its report card. Vermont, even though it scored number two on the NAEP, is tied for dead last for policy with a D+. Missouri, ALEC’s star pupil with an A-, scored 47th on NAEP.
Elaine,
Are you surprised that the WSJ is covering up its affiliation with ALEC? But then again in comparison this is the least of the Murdock News Empires troubles……
Forces behind the privatization of education
May 12, 2012
http://www.workers.org/2012/us/privatization_of_education_0524/
Excerpt:
The basic formula behind the drive for for-profit education varies little from state to state: Close public schools, open privately managed schools, cut the budget. It is usually coupled with the negation of union contracts and lower wages and benefits for school workers. While charter schools are paid out of public tax funds, they are exempt from many state and local regulations, especially those protecting work conditions and employee rights.
According to a January report from the National Education Policy Center and Western Michigan University, 35 percent of all U.S. charter schools are operated by private education management organizations (EMOs), accounting for about 42 percent of all school enrollment. By 2010, there were around 5,000 charter schools in the U.S., with around 1.5 million students.
The name EMOs was coined by Wall Street after its name for Health Maintenance Organizations. HMOs were the health insurance industry’s business model for increasing profits by denying services. The first EMO was legalized in Minnesota in 1991, but financial deregulation in the 1990s provided Wall Street with the incentive to get into the education business. Recently, the Obama administration has pumped hundreds of millions of dollars of federal “education” money to facilitate the privatization drive.
Charter schools drain money away from local public school districts. Unlike public schools, EMOs can dismiss students who have “disciplinary problems” or even refuse to admit them.
Charter schools are not obliged to provide instruction in English as a second language. National studies have shown that EMOs are more likely to increase school segregation and isolate students by race and class than public schools.
A 2010 Western Michigan University-sponsored study found charter schools spent proportionately more on administrative costs than traditional public schools and less on instruction. It found that student support services averaged $858 per year for public schools compared to $517 for charters.
Elaine,
Why am I not surprised that ALEC is involved up to its ears in this anti-union privatization mess?! Holy Crap!
ALEC Exposed: Starving Public Schools
Julie Underwood, The Nation, August 1-8, 2011 (CommonDreams)
http://www.parentsunited.org/news/alec-exposed-starving-public-schools/
Excerpt:
Public schools,” ALEC wrote in its 1985 Education Source Book, “meet all of the needs of all of the people without pleasing anyone.” A better system, the organization argued, would “foster educational freedom and quality” through various forms of privatization: vouchers, tax incentives for sending children to private schools and unregulated private charter schools. Today ALEC calls this “choice”—and vouchers “scholarships”—but it amounts to an ideological mission to defund and redesign public schools.
The first large-scale voucher program, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, was enacted in 1990 following the rubric ALEC provided in 1985. It was championed by then-Governor Tommy Thompson, an early ALEC member, who once said he “loved” ALEC meetings, “because I always found new ideas, and then I’d take them back to Wisconsin, disguise them a little bit, and declare [they were] mine.”
ALEC’s most ambitious and strategic push toward privatizing education came in 2007, through a publication called School Choice and State Constitutions, which proposed a list of programs tailored to each state. That year Georgia passed a version of ALEC’s Special Needs Scholarship Program Act. Most disability organizations strongly oppose special education vouchers—and decades of evidence suggest that such students are better off receiving additional support in public schools. Nonetheless, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Florida, Utah and Indiana have passed versions of their own. Louisiana also passed a version of ALEC’s Parental Choice Scholarship Program Act (renaming it Student Scholarships for Educational Excellence), along with ALEC’s Family Education Tax Credit Program (renamed Tax Deductions for Tuition), which has also been passed by Arizona and Indiana. ALEC’s so-called Great Schools Tax Credit Program Act has been passed by Arizona, Indiana and Oklahoma.
ALEC’s 2010 Report Card on American Education called on members and allies to “Transform the system, don’t tweak it,” likening the group’s current legislative strategy to a game of whack-a-mole: introduce so many pieces of model legislation that there is “no way the person with the mallet [teachers’ unions] can get them all.” ALEC’s agenda includes:
§ Introducing market factors into teaching, through bills like the National Teacher Certification Fairness Act.
§ Privatizing education through vouchers, charters and tax incentives, especially through the Parental Choice Scholarship Program Act and Special Needs Scholarship Program Act, whose many spinoffs encourage the creation of private schools for specific populations: children with autism, children in military families, etc.
§ Increasing student testing and reporting, through more “accountability,” as seen in the Education Accountability Act, Longitudinal Student Growth Act, One-to-One Reading Improvement Act and the Resolution Supporting the Principles of No Child Left Behind.
§ Chipping away at local school districts and school boards, through its 2009 Innovation Schools and School Districts Act and more. Proposals like the Public School Financial Transparency Act and School Board Freedom to Contract Act would allow school districts to outsource auxiliary services.
ALEC & Battle Over Public vs. Private Education
by Bob Sloan
June 13, 2012
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/06/13/1099650/-ALEC-Battle-Over-Public-vs-Private-Education
Excerpt:
Over the past few years an ongoing discussion has developed over public education in the United States. Certain factions in America believe public education is foundering and unable to deliver quality academia. This belief has been advanced by others who understand there are huge profits that can be had through privatizing education – from elementary to college levels. Differing opinions and beliefs have led to a major ongoing battle over whether or not to privatize our schools.
For more than 200 years our society prospered and flourished due to public education systems – basic education from early life through college. Many of the evolving technologies that helped the U.S. prevail in the Second World War were developed by students who attended public schools and universities. Our space exploration program was advanced in part by those who learned through public education and used that knowledge in this program. More recently the computer software and hardware development industries were born out of public education and technologies crafted by graduates of our public school system.
Since the early 90’s there has been a relatively unknown network of foundations, think tanks, politicians and organizations (tax exempt) actively pursuing what can only be described as a take-over of public education. The purpose behind this endeavor is access to and control of over half a trillion dollars spent annually on education. In order for the public to endorse a switch from public to privately operated education it has been necessary to convince that public that there is a need for such a transfer. This private education “network” I describe has used political connections to reduce funding for public education in every state in the U.S. Subtly this changed the landscape of public education; by keeping it from evolving. Freezing salaries to teachers, larger classes, less personal or one-on-one tutoring of students, reductions in transportation upgrades, charter schools, vouchers and fewer books are some of the initiatives used to attack public education.
The national spokes-organization for this attempt at privatization is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) with funding from Charles and David Koch and their family foundations. Koch’s money is combined with funding from other foundations representing the interests and agenda pursued by conservatives – including privatization of public education; DeVos, Scaife, JM Olin, Bradley, Coors – and of late, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. ALEC’s members include companies who will profit off of the software they manufacture for “long distance learning.” A study by the liberal group ProgressVA, found that ALEC had been involved in writing bills that would:
“Encourage school districts to contract with private virtual-education companies.”
The Wall Street Journal Covers Up ALEC Link To Anti-Union School Privatization Law
Media Matters
July 24, 2012
http://mediamatters.org/blog/2012/07/24/the-wall-street-journal-covers-up-alec-link-to/187296
Excerpt:
The Wall Street Journal this morning failed to report ties between the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and controversial “parent-trigger” legislation that would allow parents to take over and convert public schools to charter schools. They also failed to report that the Journal’s parent company, News Corp, is a member of ALEC. The Journal’s treatment of the legislation also cited no criticism of the proposal, which has been described as an effort “to manipulate parents into letting [the charter school lobby] privatize more public schools.
In the July 23 article, the Wall Street Journal reported on legislation that, according to the article, “empowers parents to take control of a school if enough of them sign petitions” and convert it into a charter school. But the article failed to mention that the proposal is based heavily on model legislation developed by ALEC, a controversial right-wing group that was recently exposed as a significant influence in the pro-charter movement in Georgia.
What You Need To Know About ALEC
By Diane Ravitch on May 1, 2012
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/Bridging-Differences/2012/05/dear_deborah_since_the_2010.html
Dear Deborah,
Since the 2010 elections, when Republicans took control of many states, there has been an explosion of legislation advancing privatization of public schools and stripping teachers of job protections and collective bargaining rights. Even some Democratic governors, seeing the strong rightward drift of our politics, have jumped on the right-wing bandwagon, seeking to remove any protection for academic freedom from public school teachers.
This outburst of anti-public school, anti-teacher legislation is no accident. It is the work of a shadowy group called the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC. Founded in 1973, ALEC is an organization of nearly 2,000 conservative state legislators. Its hallmark is promotion of privatization and corporate interests in every sphere, not only education, but healthcare, the environment, the economy, voting laws, public safety, etc. It drafts model legislation that conservative legislators take back to their states and introduce as their own “reform” ideas. ALEC is the guiding force behind state-level efforts to privatize public education and to turn teachers into at-will employees who may be fired for any reason. The ALEC agenda is today the “reform” agenda for education.
ALEC operated largely in the dark for years, but gained notoriety because of the Trayvon Martin case in Florida. It turns out that ALEC crafted the “Stand Your Ground” legislation that empowered George Zimmerman to kill an unarmed teenager with the defense that he (the shooter) felt threatened. When the bright light of publicity was shone on ALEC, a number of corporate sponsors dropped out, including McDonald’s, Kraft, Coca-Cola, Mars, Wendy’s, Intuit, Kaplan, and PepsiCo. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation said that it would not halt its current grant to ALEC, but pledged not to provide new funding. ALEC has some 300 corporate sponsors, including Walmart, the Koch Brothers, and AT&T, so there’s still quite a lot of corporate support for its free-market policies. ALEC claimed that it is the victim of a campaign of intimidation.
Groups like Common Cause and colorofchange.org have been putting ALEC’s model legislation online and printing the names of its sponsors. They have also published sharp criticism of ALEC’s ideas. This is hardly intimidation. It’s the democratic process at work. A website called alecexposed.org has published ALEC’s policy agenda. Common Cause posted the agenda for the meeting of ALEC on May 11 in Charlotte, N.C. The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards has dropped out of ALEC and also withdrawn from the May 11 conference, where it was originally going to be a presenter.
A recent article in the Newark Star-Ledger showed how closely New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s “reform” legislation is modeled on ALEC’s work in education. Wherever you see states expanding vouchers, charters, and other forms of privatization, wherever you see states lowering standards for entry into the teaching profession, wherever you see states opening up new opportunities for profit-making entities, wherever you see the expansion of for-profit online charter schools, you are likely to find legislation that echoes the ALEC model.
ALEC has been leading the privatization movement for nearly 40 years, but the only thing new is the attention it is getting, and the fact that many of its ideas are now being enacted. Just last week, the Michigan House of Representatives expanded the number of cyber charters that may operate in the state, even though the academic results for such online schools are dismal.
Who is on the education task force of ALEC? The members of the task force as of July 2011 are here. Several members represent for-profit online companies, including the co-chair from Connections Academy; many members come from for-profit higher education corporations. There is someone from Jeb Bush’s foundation, as well as right-wing think tank people. There are charter school representatives, as well as Scantron. And the task force includes a long list of state legislators, from Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.
Quite a lineup. Common Cause has asked why ALEC is considered a “charity” by the Internal Revenue Service and holds tax-exempt status, when it devotes so much time to lobbying for changes in state laws. Common Cause has filed a “whistleblower” complaint with the IRS about ALEC’s status.
The campaign to privatize the schools and to dismantle the teaching profession is in full swing. Where is the leadership to oppose it?
Diane
Indiana School Voucher Law Upheld, Ruled Constitutional
By CHARLES WILSON 01/13/12
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/14/indiana-school-voucher-la_n_1206364.html
Excerpt:
INDIANAPOLIS — A judge upheld Indiana’s school voucher law on Friday, rejecting opponents’ arguments that the largest such program in the nation unconstitutionally uses public money to support religion.
Marion Superior Court Judge Michael Keele said the School Choice Scholarship program doesn’t violate the state constitution because the state isn’t directly funding parochial schools. Instead, it gives scholarship vouchers to parents, who can choose where to use them. That was essentially the argument made by the program’s supporters.
About 4,000 children are enrolled in Indiana’s school voucher program, making it the nation’s biggest.
Indiana State Teachers Association President Nate Schnellenberger said opponents would keep fighting the law. The union had backed the lawsuit brought by teachers and religious leaders.
“The ruling from the judge does not shake our confidence and it will be appealed,” he told The Associated Press.
But officials with the Institute for Justice, which represented two parents who wanted to use the vouchers, said they believed the ruling would stand. Attorney Bert Gall said similar laws in Wisconsin and Ohio had been upheld, and the U.S. Supreme Court had also affirmed the constitutionality of vouchers.
“Today’s ruling is a resounding win for Indiana parents and students, and it is a major defeat for school choice opponents,” Gall said in a news release.
The ruling also dismissed arguments that the program unconstitutionally took funds from public schools and sent the money to private schools. Keele wrote that the Indiana Constitution clearly authorized “educational options outside of the public school system.”
Thanks Elaine. I am familiar with Michelle Rhee and her StudentsFirst group. She is dangerous, especially because there is so much money behind her privatization ideas.
rafflaw,
I wanted to include more information in my post–but I thought it would be too long. Here’s an excerpt from and a link to an article about Michelle Rhee that you might find interesting:
Activist targeting schools, backed by big bucks
By Stephanie Simon
May 16, 2012
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/16/us-usa-education-rhee-idUSBRE84F03J20120516
Excerpt:
(Reuters) – During her tumultuous three years at the head of the Washington D.C. public schools, Michelle Rhee set off a lot of fireworks.
She’s still doing it – on a national stage.
Rhee has emerged as the leader of an unlikely coalition of politicians, philanthropists, financiers and entrepreneurs who believe the nation’s $500 billion-a-year public education system needs a massive overhaul. She has vowed to raise $1 billion for her national advocacy group, StudentsFirst, and forever break the hold of teachers unions on education policy.
StudentsFirst has its own political action committee (PAC), its own SuperPAC, and a staff of 75, including a cadre of seasoned lobbyists Rhee sends from state to state as political battles heat up. She has flooded the airwaves with TV and radio ads in a half dozen states weighing new policies on charter schools, teacher assessment and other hot-button issues.
To her supporters, Rhee is a once-in-a-generation leader who has the smarts and the star power to make a difference on one of the nation’s most intractable public policy issues.
But critics say Rhee risks destroying the very public schools she aims to save by forging alliances with political conservatives, evangelical groups and business interests that favor turning a large chunk of public education over to the private sector. She won’t disclose her donors, but public records indicate that they include billionaire financiers and wealthy foundations.
Rhee says she has only one goal: to make sure all children get a great education.
“We are about fighting for kids,” Rhee said. “And whoever is standing in the way … we are willing to go up against those folks because we can’t maintain the status quo.”
Few would argue that the status quo is working. In urban school districts nationwide, on average just one in four 10-year-olds is proficient in reading, and one in four 13-year-olds is at grade level in math. Many big-city districts have dropout rates of 50 percent.
Rhee argues the problem isn’t a lack of funding: Average spending per student has more than doubled since the early 1970s, even after accounting for inflation, to about $10,500 a year. Yet test scores have improved only modestly.
Schools don’t need more money, Rhee says; they need to be held accountable for how they spend it.
Rhee wants all teachers to be evaluated in large measure by how much they can boost their students’ scores on standardized tests. Scores are fed into a formula that rates how much “value” a teacher has added to each student over the year. Rhee says teachers who consistently don’t add value should be fired; those who do well should be rewarded with six-figure salaries.
She has also successfully pushed legislation in several states, including Florida, Michigan, Nevada and Tennessee, to abolish seniority systems that protect veteran teachers and put rookies first in line for layoffs without regard to job performance.
Also high on Rhee’s agenda: giving parents more choices. She calls for expanding charter schools, which are publicly funded but often run by private companies. She wants to let parents seize control of failing public schools and push out most of the staff. She also supports tax-funded vouchers, which can be used to pay private and parochial school tuition, for families living in neighborhoods with poor public schools.
Great links Elaine. It is amazing that an entire state can be this wrong headed and basically not care about thousands of students.
Louisiana Gives Us a Taste of Mitt Romney’s Education Policy
—By Kevin Drum
Mon Jul. 2, 2012
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/07/louisiana-gives-us-taste-mitt-romneys-education-policy
How the GOP’s New Education Policy Embraces the Market and Abandons Objective Standards
Ed Kilgore
July 9, 2012
http://www.tnr.com/blog/plank/104748/how-the-gops-new-education-policy-embraces-the-market-and-abandons-objective-stand
Excerpt:
We all got a good laugh at the recent befuddlement (reported at TNR by Amy Sullivan) of a conservative Republican legislator from Louisiana who withdrew her support from Gov. Bobby Jindal’s school voucher program when she realized that its open door to public support for religious schools was not limited to those catering to Christians.
But the underlying principle of Jindal’s initiative—and arguably of Mitt Romney’s little-discussed proposal to convert the bulk of federal K-12 education dollars into vouchers—is no laughing matter. No-strings vouchers based on the idea that “the market” or the wishes of parents are an adequate or even ideal form of “educational accountability” could reflect a sharp U-turn in the standards-and-accountability trend in U.S. education that Republicans and conservatives until recently championed. Indeed, Jindal’s (and Romney’s?) agnosticism about the quality of schools receiving public funds represents an abandonment of the very idea of “public education” other than as a mechanism for subsidizing private choices.
What’s drawing attention in Louisiana is the realization that a lot of the schools benefitting from vouchers were poorly staffed and equipped, and offered not only sectarian instruction but questionable handling of educational basics…
Louisiana’s Worthless Accountability Plan for Voucher Schools
Education Talk New Orleans
7/25/2012
http://edutalknola.com/2012/07/25/louisianas-worthless-accountability-plan-for-voucher-schools/
After all that fanfare about accountability, John White has crafted a completely worthless accountability plan for the voucher schools. It’s a shame that so many people on the BESE can’t read. All but 2 Board members voted to support the plan. Only members Lottie Beebe and Carolyn Hill voted to reject this plan and send White back to the drawing board to correct some of the concerns presented by various members of the public.
Worthless parts of the plan:
If a school has less than 10 students per grade, the students results will not be reported publicly
Unless the school has 10 participating students per grade level taking tests AND 40 students total voucher students in the school, the test results will not be reported
Schools will only be required to score above 50 on the Scholarship Cohort Index
John White can waive any provisions of the policy without seeking approval from BESE (Board of Elementary and Secondary Education) or the Legislature
This plan is problematic because it promotes gaming the system. The plan clearly says the schools will determine how many seats they will accept. All a school has to do is enroll 9 students per grade or less than 40 students total. John White said that this plan ensures that all schools are accountable. However, based on the criteria released, 75% of the eligible voucher schools will not fall under the guidelines of the accountability plan crafted by John White.
Over the past 4 years the Combined results for the voucher schools in the pilot program have had between 52-72% of it’s students fail to reach basic on the iLEAP and LEAP tests. What’s the purpose of a pilot if you ignore the results and expand the program even though it’s proven to be a failure?
The first stated purpose in the plan is “a common standard for student performance across the system of traditional public, charter public, and non public schools.” However, the plan as adopted completely ignores that purpose. Students in voucher schools will NOT be retained as public school students in 4th and 8th grades if they fail the LEAP test. Public schools are given a letter grade of A, B, C, D, or F, but voucher schools will NOT receive a letter grade. The State Superintendent can’t waive any part of the accountability system for public school, but he can waive any provision in the accountability plan for voucher schools. Another purpose of the adopted plan is to uphold the public trust when public funds are involved. Clearly the accountability plan presented makes a mockery of the public trust.