Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger
In recent years, we have heard and read a lot about the failure of public schools in the United States. “Our schools are failing” has almost become a mantra with members of the media, many of our politicians, and the advocates of school reform. I have seen few people who have questioned the assertions made by the media, elected officials, and school reformers that schools in this country are not adequately educating our youth and that our educational system is a total and abject failure.
Many of those who criticize our public education system offer charter schools and the privatization of public schools as solutions to the “education problem” in this country.
I’m a retired public school educator. I have known and am friends with many current and former public school teachers. I know that there are many fine classroom practitioners working in our public schools today…and many excellent schools where our children receive a quality education. I am aware that there are also many schools where children may not be receiving the highest quality education. (What often go unmentioned in the media are the real reasons—including poverty—why some schools in this country may be failing.)
One problem with the “our schools are failing” mantra—as I see it—is that all our schools are lumped together in one basket labeled “failing.” How did this come to be? Do we Americans really believe that NO public schools in this country provide their students with an adequate education? Do we believe that all schools need to be reformed? If not, do we believe that even the schools which are actually doing an estimable job of educating their students need to be reformed?
I think it is time we start taking a good look at the individuals and organizations that are behind the push to establish thousands of charter schools and to use taxpayer money to fund private and religious schools as the means of raising the quality of education in this country.
ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council)
Last May, education historian Diane Ravitch wrote the following about one group that has been driving the school reform movement:
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.
Ravitch continued:
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.
ALEC Exposed provides a wealth of information about how—through ALEC—“corporations, ideologues, and their politician allies voted to spend public tax dollars to subsidize private K-12 education and attack professional teachers and teachers’ unions…” (You can find the information in Privatizing Public Education, Higher Ed Policy, and Teachers–the ALEC report prepared by The Center for American Democracy.)
Michelle Rhee and StudentsFirst
In addition to ALEC, there is another organization called StudentsFirst that has been helping to spearhead the effort to “reform” our public schools. According to Stephanie Simon, Michelle Rhee, founder and CEO of StudentsFirst, 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.” Simon added that Rhee, the former chancellor of the D.C. public schools, “has vowed to raise $1 billion” for StudentsFirst, and “forever break the hold of teachers unions on education policy.”
Simon continued:
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.
In January the National Opportunity to Learn Campaign published its review of Rhee’s StudentsFirst State Policy Report Card for 2013:
Here’s an excerpt from the summary of the campaign’s review:
On Monday, the pro-privatization education group StudentsFirst, led by former D.C. public schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, released a State Policy Report Card, ranking states and giving each a letter grade based on their implementation of a slew of education reform policies. Rather than focus on issues facing students and families, particularly those affected by unequal access to school resources, the policy benchmarks in the new report reveal StudentsFirst’s obsession with charter schools and de-professionalizing the teaching profession. The report pushes policies that are either untested or disproven — but happen to be welcome in the halls of right-wing think tanks and politicians.
The National Opportunity to Learn Campaign listed five reasons why the StudentsFrirst Report Card is “a veritable wish list for privatization advocates and a recipe for failure for everyone else”:
1. Ironically, It Ignores The Needs of Students
2. It Opposes Personalized and Student-Centered Learning
3. It Argues That We Don’t Have Enough Quality Teachers… While Advocating That We Lower the Bar for Teacher Preparation
4. It Continues the Disastrous High-Stakes Testing Drumbeat
5. It Advocates “Equal Funding” and “Equitable Access” for Charter Corporations and Private Schools, Not Students
The DeVos Family
In May of 2011, Rachel Tabachnick wrote an article for AlterNet about the DeVos family, a wealthy family that has “remained largely under the radar, while leading a stealth assault on America’s schools” that has the “potential to do away with public education as we know it.”
Quoting Tabachnick:
Vouchers have always been a staple of the right-wing agenda. Like previous efforts, this most recent push for vouchers is led by a network of conservative think tanks, PACs, Religious Right groups and wealthy conservative donors. But “school choice,” as they euphemistically paint vouchers, is merely a means to an end. Their ultimate goal is the total elimination of our public education system.
The decades-long campaign to end public education is propelled by the super-wealthy, right-wing DeVos family. Betsy Prince DeVos is the sister of Erik Prince, founder of the notorious private military contractor Blackwater USA (now Xe), and wife of Dick DeVos, son of the co-founder of Amway, the multi-tiered home products business.
According to Tabachnick, the Devoses, who are big contributors to the Republican Party, spent millions of dollars “promoting the failed voucher initiative in Michigan in 2000.” Following that defeat, Tabachnick claims that the family decided to alter its strategy.
Tabachnick:
Instead of taking the issue directly to voters, they would support bills for vouchers in state legislatures. In 2002 Dick DeVos gave a speech on school choice at the Heritage Foundation. After an introduction by former Reagan Secretary of Education William Bennett, DeVos described a system of “rewards and consequences” to pressure state politicians to support vouchers. “That has got to be the battle. It will not be as visible,” stated DeVos. He described how his wife Betsy was putting these ideas into practice in their home state of Michigan and claimed this effort has reduced the number of anti-school choice Republicans from six to two. The millions raised from the wealthy pro-privatization contributors would be used to finance campaigns of voucher supporters and purchase ads attacking opposing candidates.
Dick DeVos advocates “stealth” strategy, Heritage Foundation, December 3, 2002
Last April, Daniel Denvir wrote an article for City Paper about the push for a school voucher program in the state of Pennsylvania. He said that names on the fliers of “legislative hopefuls” sounded like the names of “homegrown” candidates. He said that a “different picture” emerged when one followed the money:
…that of a statewide campaign, funded by wealthy donors, to stack the Pennsylvania primary battles on April 24 in favor of those supporting school vouchers, which allocate taxpayer funds for private and religious school tuition. The pro-voucher political action committee (PAC) Students First — funded by Pennsylvania hedge-fund managers and American Federation for Children, a Washington, D.C., pro-voucher group headed by Amway heiress and major right-wing donor Betsy DeVos — emerged on the state’s political scene with a bang for the 2010 elections. And they are back to spend big in 2012.
Lawrence Feinberg, co-chairman of the anti-voucher Keystone State Education Coalition, said, “I see a move by essentially a handful of very wealthy people who want to privatize public education for a wide variety of reasons. Not the least of which has to do with crushing labor unions, but they also want tax dollars going to private and religious schools.”
School Reform and The Profit Motive
In his Salon article The Bait and Switch of School “Reform,” David Sirota writes about the profit motive behind some of the reforms being advocated by “Big Money” interests.
Sirota:
As the Texas Observer recently reported in its exposé of one school-focused mega-corporation, “in the past two decades, an education-reform movement has swept the country, pushing for more standardized testing and accountability and for more alternatives to the traditional classroom — most of it supplied by private companies.”
A straightforward example of how this part of the profit-making scheme works arose just a few months ago in New York City. There, Rupert Murdoch dumped $1 million into a corporate “reform” movement pushing to both implement more standardized testing and divert money for education fundamentals (hiring teachers, buying textbooks, maintaining school buildings, etc.) into testing-assessment technology. At the same time, Murdoch was buying an educational technology company called Wireless Generation, which had just signed a lucrative contract with New York City’s school system (a sweetheart deal inked by New York City school official Joel Klein, who immediately went to work for Murdoch.
Such shenanigans are increasingly commonplace throughout America, resulting in a revenue jackpot for testing companies and high tech firms, even though many of their products have not objectively improved student achievement.
At the same time, major banks are reaping a windfall from “reformers’” successful efforts to take public money out of public schools and put it into privately administered charter schools. As the New York Daily News recently reported:
“Wealthy investors and major banks have been making windfall profits by using a little-known federal tax break to finance new charter-school construction. The program, the New Markets Tax Credit, is so lucrative that a lender who uses it can almost double his money in seven years…
“The credit can even be piggybacked on other tax breaks for historic preservation or job creation. By combining the various credits with the interest from the loan itself, a lender can almost double his investment over the seven-year period.
“No wonder JPMorgan Chase announced this week it was creating a new $325 million pool to invest in charter schools and take advantage of the New Markets Tax Credit.”
SOURCES
Ravitch: A primer on the group driving school reform (Washington Post)
Activist targeting schools, backed by big bucks (Reuters)
5 Ways Michelle Rhee’s Report Puts Students Last (National Opportunity to Learn Campaign)
Right-Wing Campaign to Privatize Public Ed Takes Hold in Pennsylvania (AlterNet)
Big corporate money in support of school vouchers hits primary races statewide. Will it tip the scales in Philly? (City Paper)
The bait and switch of school “reform” (Salon)
The Deep Pockets Behind Education Reform (Forbes)
Privatizing Public Education, Higher Ed Policy, and Teachers (The Center for American Democracy)
Gene,
Thanks for the article about Weingarten.
Elaine,
I had no doubt that the monies were not made unavailable. That would result in massive law suits to deprive teachers of benefits accrued and paid for. Transferability to other plans? I can see how that could be limited by contract. Why someone would do that though is a mystery. I’d like to see the standard union contract for the state Boron is talking about. I’m betting the specifics are a bit different than portrayed.
Gene,
If one leaves teaching, one can withdraw one’s money that’s in the pension system and invest it in a personal retirement fund.
Boron,
In Massachusetts, teachers can pay into the teacher pension system if they taught somewhere else before coming here. You can purchase up to ten years of prior service in other states.
Let’s set aside the issue of a poorly negotiated benefits package for now. That can be due to a number of factors ranging from incompetence at negotiation by union leaders to leverage by the state due to an inherently unequal bargaining position.
“In my opinion the union is to blame for keeping salaries below market. They get their dime either way and so it makes little difference to them.”
So let me get this straight . . . strangling the wages of their members – something that would drive people to not join the profession and thus decreasing both their membership roles and ergo their operating capital as determined by gross membership dues paid – is somehow in the best interests of the unions.
I don’t think I buy that logic.
Higher salaries and more members equates to more money for the unions. More money is more money. I don’t know of any organization that wouldn’t like more money to use in fulfilling their various goals.
Public education is a public infrastructure and you get what quality the community is willing to pay for out of their taxes. It will fail to attract quality instructors with substandard pay and restrictive benefits as long as the pols cheap out and attempt to drive teachers to privatized education which can operate at higher cash flow levels than public education but conversely come with a built in discrimination against the poor who cannot afford pricey tuitions and a built in corporate/corporatist agenda that is suspect at best. Thomas Jefferson said in a letter to George Wythe dated August 13 1786, “I think by far the most important bill in our whole code is that for the diffusion of knowledge among the people. No other sure foundation can be devised, for the preservation of freedom and happiness…Preach, my dear Sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish & improve the law for educating the common people. Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us against these evils [tyranny, oppression, etc.] and that the tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.” He also said to James Madison in a letter dated December 20, 1787 that “Above all things I hope the education of the common people will be attended to ; convinced that on their good sense we may rely with the most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty.” His reasoning? I think can be best summed up in what he said to Charles Yancy on January 6, 1816: “If a nation expects to be ignorant & free, in a state of civilisation, it expects what never was & never will be.”
If you think corporations determining who gets educated (by controlling the market) and what gets taught is a better idea? Keep in mind a corporation has no duty to either the public or to even the truth if it serves their bottom line of maximized profits. Privatized education is a bad idea.
Also, see Tony C’s comments regarding corruption vis a vis feathering nests and the necessity of unions. I know union leaders in several different unions across several different industries and fields. Some are indeed corrupt and often incompetent weasels, but a great many of them – the majority – just want a better deal for employees.
Nick: I was trying to follow your train of thought on your 4:30 comment but I ran out of breadcrumbs.
Kind of proves my point about the shallowness of your thinking.
I did get as far as my family seeing corruption and abiding it. These were blue collar people, and standing up to union bosses was too intimidating for them. Can you understand that? And, they worked in a closed shop and had no choice to be part of the union.
Apparently, then, you do not understand the meaning of the word “abide.” Perhaps you should stick to words you understand. To “abide” means to “tolerate.” If they did not stand up to union bosses, and they remained in their jobs, then they WERE tolerating the corruption.
To say one “cannot abide” a situation means they cannot tolerate it and will take action to end it; either by reforming the situation or withdrawing from it.
As for “blue collar,” Yes, I can understand that. I grew up there.
Nick: I was pretty sure you were a “There is no spirit” guy. Thanks for confirming.
Yes, I am an atheist. A non-supernaturalist, to be more general (since some faiths believe in supernatural karma, magic, afterlife, and / or spirits but not a supreme being).
I have stated that (approximately) one hundred billion times on this blog, I am surprised you required such vague “confirmation.” If your belief in your “spirit” provides you some false comfort, I think everybody is entitled to their drug or delusion of choice, up to the point that it does harm to others.
“I was pretty sure you were a “There is no spirit” guy. Thanks for confirming.”
Tony,
Don’t you understand that God hates unions? That’s the extent of my proof, except for some people in my family, that unions are evil. If you dare to question this God will strike you down and you would be attacking me.
Elaine,
Great link to the Downey article. Privatization is all about the money, not performance.
dog damnit, I hate it when I misspell a word.
did I mention its elemental?
Gene H:
my wife and I were talking about teachers this morning [she is a teacher] and discussing the retirement plan in our state. It is state funded and she pays into it [a good portion of her salary] but it is not portable and so teachers are stuck after a certain amount of time.
She says teachers are getting the shaft right now, her sister is a teacher in a contiguous county and has not had a raise in 5 years. We were commenting that the teachers union is this state fought for a state funded retirement but what that has done is to litterally chain teachers to their jobs in order to have a decent retirement.
With people being unwilling to leave the profession it has caused administrators to treat teachers with very little respect. And it has, in my opinion, led to lower salaries than would apply in a free market. In my opinion the union is to blame for keeping salaries below market. They get their dime either way and so it makes little difference to them.
In most cases union leadership is more concerned with the feathering of their own nests and see the rank and file as a path to power and money.
Randi Weingarten Arrested For Protesting Philadelphia School Closure Hearing (UPDATE)
“NEW YORK — Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, was arrested Thursday afternoon for blocking a school reform hearing in Philadelphia, an AFT spokesperson told The Huffington Post.
Weingarten reportedly stood outside the meeting of the Philadelphia School Reform Commission, in which the group was supposed to decide which Philadelphia Public Schools would close. Weingarten, whose AFT is the second-largest teachers’ union in the country, made a surprise visit to fight school closures.
AFT spokesman Marcus Mrowka told The Huffington Post that Weingarten was arrested with 18 other community activists for blocking the entrance to the meeting. He added that Weingarten was in handcuffs.
[Scroll down to read the UPDATES.]
The Philadelphia police department would not confirm the arrest, because the protest was ongoing. “I don’t have any information at this point and probably won’t until it’s all dispersed,” Lieutenant John Stanford said when reached by phone.
“There was a rally outside the building and they were probably blocking the entrance for about 20 minutes until police arrested them and escorted them away,” Mrowka said. “She’s in custody now.”
Weingarten and teachers’ unions throughout the country have protested school closure as a tool for reforming schools. Currently, the nation’s largest cities are deciding which schools to close in a purported effort to save money and improve academic outcomes. But research shows that it’s hard for school districts to recoup the closure savings they project, and a study from the University of Chicago’s Urban Education Institute found that only 6 percent of students displaced by closed schools performed better in their new academic environments.
Activists have also protested school closures on civil rights grounds, saying that they disproportionately affect black and Hispanic families.
“Kids have suffered cut after cut,” Weingarten said at the protest, according to Mrowka’s notes. “The powers that be don’t care about opportunity for children.”
“The people of Philadelphia have come up with a plan to improve schools and it has been ignored,” Weingarten said, according to Mrowka.
Chicago, which also employs AFT teachers, is currently considering what would be the largest wave of school closures in its history. On Wednesday, the city’s “Commission on School Utilization” issued its final report, which concluded that Chicago Public Schools could shutter about 80 schools. It found that “closing schools and moving students … are only justifiable if, as a result, students are moved into better educational environments,” echoing the UEI research. The report also concluded that “CPS has a responsibility to ensure … the safety of students who are being moved.”
UPDATE: At around 8:15 p.m., Weingarten tweeted that she had been released from custody, saying: “we must continue the fight for fixing&ensuring great public schools for all kids-in Philly &US.”
UPDATE: 9:25 p.m. — In an interview following her release, Weingarten said she knew blocking the meeting would get her arrested, but she saw it as a last resort. Along with a community group, Weingarten said she had vainly tried to get a meeting with the SRC and Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter.
“They refused to listen and would not even consent to a meeting with us,” Weingarten said. (Nutter and the SRC could not be reached late Thursday.) Even during strike conditions in Chicago, Weingarten said she was able to converse with the other side.
Weingarten said she sees the school closure plan as siphoning money away from public schools, since the plan doesn’t touch charter schools. “This was really a plan to eliminate public education,” Weingarten said. “This is not about how to fix public schools, but to close them — not how to stabilize but to destabilize public schooling.”
Weingarten called the closings immoral. “When the powers that be ignore you and dismiss you, then you don’t have any choice but try to resort to civil disobedience to try to confront an immoral act,” she said.
So she joined parents and union activists to form a group of 19 people who blocked the entrance to the meeting. She said she intentionally told Philly teachers not to join, lest they lose their teaching certification, and discouraged parents who are undocumented immigrants from participating.
“The road to justice is long and the fight is not over tonight,” Weingarten said. “Some schools were saved tonight, but at the end of the day, what I am told is that by all of us doing this together, reflecting on all the four corners of the community, people throughout the country are talking about it.”
___________
Those pesky unions only looking out for the teacher’s interests!
Elaine,
“These “rankings” put Louisiana and Florida (both bottom 10 on the NAEP), for example, far ahead of ”
And at that point, I snorted coffee.
Students First? Michelle Rhee’s report card: Is the issue more choices or better choices?
by Maureen Downey
January 10, 2013
http://blogs.ajc.com/get-schooled-blog/2013/01/10/michelle-rhees-report-card-whats-the-benefit-of-more-choice-if-there-arent-good-choices/
Excerpt:
All the discussion about expanding school choice through private school tax credits, charter schools and vouchers glosses over a critical caveat: More choices don’t necessarily lead to better choices.
Earlier this week, Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst organization released a report card on state education policy determined in large part by the extent of school choice afforded families and the effort to dismantle teacher unions.
By focusing on public policy, the StudentsFirst report card looked more on State Houses than schoolhouses. Georgia earned a D-plus because StudentsFirst felt the state doesn’t go far enough in providing information and choices to parents.
While the StudentsFirst report card considerations are extensive, they don’t include student outcomes, which is why Louisiana dramatically outscores Massachusetts, the state that leads the nation in academic comparisons.
StudentsFirst awards its highest marks to Louisiana ( B-), Florida (B-) and Indiana (C+). Massachusetts earned the same grade as Georgia, a D-plus.
My first reaction on reading the StudentsFirst report card: Does it matter whether a state offers parents more choices or gets rid of unions if neither impacts student achievement?
Does StudentsFirst believe parents would prefer their children attend school in Louisiana over Massachusetts because Louisiana offers wider school choice and weaker teacher unions?
Here’s what another report card — issued by the Council for a Better Louisiana — said about Louisiana’s academic performance: “On the most recent national skills test, NAEP, Louisiana ranks 50th among states in the number of 4th graders who read at the proficient level. And, there has only been a dismal 5% gain in the past 17 years for 4th graders reading at the ‘Basic’ or above level. Just as disconcerting, the number of 8th graders reading at the ‘Basic’ or above level has only increased by 1% in the past 11 years. Both 4th and 8th graders in Louisiana, however, now score significantly better in math than in 1992.”
Massachusetts students ranked first among states in 4th grade reading and in 8th grade mathematics, and tied for first in 4th grade math and 8th grade reading in the 2011 NAEP tests…
Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the Economic Policy Institute, had a different reaction to the inaugural StudentsFirst report card than Millar and Morgan.
From his blog:
Michelle Rhee and her misnamed school privatization organization, StudentsFirst, recently issued a report card on the nation’s schools that has been roundly criticized, and rightly so. Rhee ranks all 50 states and the District of Columbia by how closely they hew to her vision of school “reform,” which involves high stakes testing, maximizing the number of charter schools, expanding voucher programs that use tax dollars to pay for private schools, and eliminating teacher tenure and pension plans.
Rhee is so keen to reduce the pensions of teachers and their reward for longevity that she makes their elimination an “anchor policy” and gives it triple weight in her ranking methodology.
She also cares deeply about and grades the states on removing school governance from local control and the influence of democratically elected school boards. She prefers giving governance instead to the kind of mayoral control or state control that put her in charge of the D.C. school system under Mayor Adrian Fenty. That gets triple weight, too.
Curiously, despite Rhee’s love of high stakes testing, student performance as measured by the gold-standard test of student achievement, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), plays no role in her ranking of the states. These “rankings” put Louisiana and Florida (both bottom 10 on the NAEP), for example, far ahead of high-achieving states like Massachusetts, Minnesota, and New Jersey, all of which ranked in the top three on the NAEP.
Michelle Rhee Uses Care2 to AstroTurf Edu-Privatizers
4/17/11
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/04/17/967799/-Michelle-Rhee-Uses-Care2-to-AstroTurf-Edu-Privatizers
Excerpt:
The only way edu-privatizers can make money on education is by cutting the cost of “human capital”. Eliminate experienced, higher paid teachers, end contracts and churn short-term, inexperienced, untrained, Teach for America clones in and out of schools. Rhee’s corporate deformers impose this model under the guise of “saving” children from poor teachers. Their standard marketing tactic casts teacher’s unions as anti-reform for protecting teacher seniority.
Everyone in the education profession knows that poor, inner city schools NEED experienced teachers, not 5 week trained TfA neophytes, who quit after 6 mos to 2 years and leave a wake of chaos in inner city classrooms. Nor do they need the constant instability and uncertainty of having teachers who can be fired on a whim.
NO OTHER profession has had experience devalued like the teaching profession (e.g., do you want a heart surgeon who has 20 years of experience or who has 1 year of experience cutting your chest open?). White, upper class communities will never accept staffing their children’s schools with inexperienced teachers, nor do these corporate reformer’s own children go to schools with inexperienced teachers or TfA clones.
Special Report: Class Struggle – How charter schools get students they want
By Stephanie Simon
Feb 15, 2013
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/15/us-usa-charters-admissions-idUSBRE91E0HF20130215
Excerpt:
(Reuters) – Getting in can be grueling.
Students may be asked to submit a 15-page typed research paper, an original short story, or a handwritten essay on the historical figure they would most like to meet. There are interviews. Exams. And pages of questions for parents to answer, including: How do you intend to help this school if we admit your son or daughter?
These aren’t college applications. They’re applications for seats at charter schools.
Charters are public schools, funded by taxpayers and widely promoted as open to all. But Reuters has found that across the United States, charters aggressively screen student applicants, assessing their academic records, parental support, disciplinary history, motivation, special needs and even their citizenship, sometimes in violation of state and federal law.
“I didn’t get the sense that was what charter schools were all about – we’ll pick the students who are the most motivated? Who are going to make our test scores look good?” said Michelle Newman, whose 8-year-old son lost his seat in an Ohio charter school last fall after he did poorly on an admissions test. “It left a bad taste in my mouth.”
Set up as alternatives to traditional public schools, charter schools typically operate under private management and often boast small class sizes, innovative teaching styles or a particular academic focus. They’re booming: There are now more than 6,000 in the United States, up from 2,500 a decade ago, educating a record 2.3 million children.
In cities and suburbs from Pennsylvania to Colorado to Arizona, charters and traditional public schools are locked in fierce competition – for students, for funding and for their very survival, with outcomes often hinging on student test scores.
Charter advocates say it’s a fair fight because both types of schools are free and open to all. “That’s a bedrock principle of our movement,” said Jed Wallace, president of the California Charter Schools Association. And indeed, many states require charter schools to award seats by random lottery.
But as Reuters has found, it’s not that simple. Thousands of charter schools don’t provide subsidized lunches, putting them out of reach for families in poverty. Hundreds mandate that parents spend hours doing “volunteer” work for the school or risk losing their child’s seat. In one extreme example the Cambridge Lakes Charter School in Pingree Grove, Illinois, mandates that each student’s family invest in the company that built the school – a practice the state said it would investigate after inquiries from Reuters.
ARRAY OF BARRIERS
And from New Hampshire to California, charter schools large and small, honored and obscure, have developed complex application processes that can make it tough for students who struggle with disability, limited English skills, academic deficits or chaotic family lives to even get into the lottery.
Among the barriers that Reuters documented:
* Applications that are made available just a few hours a year.
* Lengthy application forms, often printed only in English, that require student and parent essays, report cards, test scores, disciplinary records, teacher recommendations and medical records.
* Demands that students present Social Security cards and birth certificates for their applications to be considered, even though such documents cannot be required under federal law.
* Mandatory family interviews.
* Assessment exams.
* Academic prerequisites.
* Requirements that applicants document any disabilities or special needs. The U.S. Department of Education considers this practice illegal on the college level but has not addressed the issue for K-12 schools.
Many charters, backed by state law, specialize in serving low-income and minority children. Some of the best-known charter networks, such as KIPP, Yes Prep, Green Dot and Success Academy, use simple application forms that ask little more than name, grade and contact information, and actively seek out disadvantaged families. Most for-profit charter school chains also keep applications brief.
But stand-alone charters, which account for more than half the total in the United States, make up their own admissions policies. Regulations are often vague, oversight is often lax – and principals can get quite creative.
When Philadelphia officials examined 25 charter schools last spring, they found 18 imposed “significant barriers,” including a requirement from one school that students produce a character reference from a religious or community leader.
At Northland Preparatory Academy in Flagstaff, Arizona, application forms are available just four and a half hours a year. Parents must attend one of three information sessions to pick up a form; late arrivals can’t get in. “It’s kind of like a time share (pitch),” said Bob Lombardi, the superintendent. “You have to come and listen.”
Traditional public schools have their own built-in barriers to admission, starting with zip code: You don’t have to write an essay to get into a high-performing suburban school, but you do have to belong to a household with the means to buy or rent in that neighborhood. Many districts also operate magnet or exam schools for gifted students, some of which admit disproportionately fewer low-income and minority students.
Yet most of the charter schools that screen do not set themselves up as elite academies for the gifted. They bill themselves as open to all. For two decades, that promise of accessibility and equity has been the mantra of the charter school movement. It’s proved a potent political argument as well, as advocates have pressed to expand the number of charters and their share of public funding.
Michelle Rhee Allies With Corporate Pals To March On LA Schools
February 16, 2013
http://crooksandliars.com/karoli/michelle-rhee-allies-corporate-pals-march-l
Excerpt:
If you ever had any doubts that StudentsFirst was anything other than a corporate front, guess again. In 2011, StudentsFirst received $1 million from the Walton Family Foundation, $7 million from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, and $250,000 from the Doris and Donald Fisher Education Fund. The Walton family are the Wal-Mart founders and owners. Laura and John Arnold are a young couple from Texas with a lot of money and a vision to “go big.” John Arnold made most of his money as an Enron trader, so I’m sure former Enron employees are simply thrilled to know that someone who walked away with the big bucks is now looking to score on charter schools. In addition to his charitable giving, Arnold manages a hedge fund now. The Fishers are the founders of The Gap, and spend millions each year toward inserting charter schools in various districts.
More corporate philanthropy funds flowed to StudentsFirst via Education Reform Now, which was used as an incubator for StudentsFirst until their non-profit approval was received. Recently, StudentsFirst replaced their founding board with a new board. Those new members include Bill Cosby, Jennifer Johnson (COO of Franklin Resources, Inc), Joel Klein, former chancellor of New York Public Schools and now Executive VP for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation (Educational Products Division), and Jalen Rose, former NBA star, ESPN commentator and founder of the Jalen Rose Leadership Academy, a charter high school in Detroit.
Now why on earth are corporations so interested in charter schools? I’ve said here many times that they see education as an emerging market. Clearly Rupert Murdoch does, and so do many venture capitalists, which is why educational philanthropy grants read like venture capital proposals. Hedge fund managers love charter schools too, as Kristin Rawls at AlterNet explains:
Thanks to a little discussed law passed in 2000, at the end of Bill Clinton’s presidency, banks and equity funds that invest in charter schools and other projects in underserved areas can take advantage of a very generous tax credit – as much as 39% — to help offset their expenditure in such projects. In essence, that credit amounts to doubling the amount of money they have invested within just seven years. Moreover, they are allowed to combine that tax credit with job creation credits and other types of credit, as well collect interest payments on the money they are lending out – all of which can add up to far more than double in returns. This is, no doubt, why many big banks and equity funds are so invested in the expansion of charter schools. There is big money being made here — because investment is nearly a sure thing.
And it’s not just U.S. investors who see the upside of investing in charters. Rich donors throughout the world are now sending money to fund our charter schools. Why? Because if they invest at least $500,000 to charters under a federal program called EB-5, they’re allowed to purchase immigration visas for themselves and family members — yet another mechanism in place to ensure that the money keeps rolling in.
When media makes a big deal out of Michelle Rhee tromping around LA trumpeting about how much she cares for public schools, remember that she is merely facilitating even more big tax breaks for her corporate keepers.
I’ve been studying patterns of giving to education reform on the right and on the left. They’re not much different, largely because their ultimate goals converge. Lefties will make some soft murmurs about keeping schools public while conservatives will say straight out that their goal is breaking unions and privatizing education. If lefties were serious about keeping schools public, they would have gotten behind the idea of magnet schools within existing school district structures and managed by the districts. Instead they’ve all embraced the sainted public-private partnership as some excuse for handing our kids’ education to corporate interests.
The only ones no one is really thinking about seriously are the kids. Common Dreams reports:
Corporate school reformers promote privately operated but publicly funded “charter schools” as one of the key components of their profit-friendly approach to solving what they call the failure of traditional public schooling, but a new investigative report from Reuters shows that many such institutions disregard their own promises of inclusion and equal opportunity by creating barriers to needier students while targeting for enrollment those most likely to pad test scores or otherwise enhance their own promises of “success”.
nick,
If walking helps you to invigorate your sense of humor, I’d say that you have many more miles to go before you sleep…many more miles to go before you sleep.
🙂
OS,
Your story about having no flight response reminds me of the stories my son told me about his fellow Marines in Afghanistan. The ANA, Afghan National Army guys told them that the Army would run away from the shooting while the Marines were too crazy and ran towards the shooting!
Gene, Bruce,
I had to smile at this bit of doggerel in Bruce’s comment: “and the people run for cover
to flight; or fight.”
A couple of days ago we were discussing problem situations over on Daily Kos. I mentioned my late wife was Head Nurse of the cancer unit of a big hospital and never backed down from a problem. When there was a bomb threat or fire, she would run toward the problem, not away from it.
A friend replied to that comment, “I know your family and your wife. The flight response is nonexistent.” I had not thought of it that way.
I don’t relate well to flight, unless it is an airplane.
Well Bruce all I can tell you is that if you’re bothered by meandering threads, then you won’t be happy in a free speech blog like this one that has the absolute minimum of moderation and encourages free speech above all. However, one of the secrets of comedy is repetition. Good show.