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)
The reform movement is already failing
By Diane Ravitch
August 23, 2011
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2011/08/23/the-reform-movement-is-already-failing/
Excerpt:
In my nearly four decades as a historian of education, I have analyzed the rise and fall of reform movements. Typically, reforms begin with loud declarations that our education system is in crisis. Throughout the twentieth century, we had a crisis almost every decade. After persuading the public that we are in crisis, the reformers bring forth their favored proposals for radical change. The radical changes are implemented in a few sites, and the results are impressive. As their reforms become widespread, they usually collapse and fail. In time, those who have made a career of educating children are left with the task of cleaning up the mess left by the last bunch of reformers.
We are in the midst of the latest wave of reforms, and Steven Brill has positioned himself as the voice of the new reformers. These reforms are not just flawed, but actually dangerous to the future of American education. They would, if implemented, lead to the privatization of a large number of public schools and to the de-professionalization of education.
As Brill’s book shows, the current group of reformers consists of an odd combination of Wall Street financiers, conservative Republican governors, major foundations, and the Obama administration. The reformers believe that the way to “fix” our schools is to fire more teachers, based on the test scores of their students; to open more privately-managed charter schools; to reduce the qualifications for becoming a teacher; and to remove job protections for senior teachers.
The reformers say that our schools are failing and point to international test scores; they don’t seem to know that American students have never done well on international tests. When the international tests were first launched in the 1960s, our students ranked near the bottom. Obviously these tests do not predict the future economic success of a nation because we as a nation have prospered despite our mediocre performance on international tests over the past half century.
The last international test results were released in December. Our students ranked about average, and our leading policymakers treated the results as a national scandal. But here is a curious fact: low-poverty U.S. schools (where fewer than 10% of the students were poor) had scores that were higher than those of the top nations in the world. In schools where as many as 25% of the students were poor, the scores were equal to those of Finland, Japan and Korea. As the poverty rate of the schools rose, the schools’ performance declined.
An objective observer would conclude that the problem in this society has to do with our shamefully high rates of child poverty, the highest in the developed world. At least 20% of U.S. children live in poverty. Among black children, the poverty rate is 35%.
Reformers like to say — as they did in the film “Waiting for ‘Superman’” — that we spend too much and that poverty doesn’t matter. They say that teacher effectiveness is all that matters. They claim that children who have three “great” or “effective” teachers in a row will close the achievement gap between the races. They say that experience doesn’t matter. They believe that charter schools, staffed by tireless teachers, can close the gap in test scores.
Unfortunately, research does not support any of their claims.
Take the matter of charter schools. The definitive national study of charters was conducted by Stanford University economist Margaret Raymond and financed by the pro-charter Walton Family Foundation and the Dell Foundation. After surveying half the nation’s 5,000 charter schools, the study concluded that only 17% got better test results than a demographically similar traditional public school; 37% got worse results, and the remaining 46% were no different from the matched public school. An eight-state study by the Rand Corporation found no differences in results between charter and regular public schools. On federal tests, students in charter schools and regular public schools perform about the same.
The overwhelming majority of charter schools are non-union. They can hire and fire teachers at will, and teacher attrition at charter schools is higher than in regular public schools. Many studies have shown that charters have a disproportionately small number of students with disabilities or students who don’t speak English. Yet, despite these structural advantages, they don’t get better results. Furthermore, right-to-work states where unions are weak or non-existent don’t lead the nation in academic achievement; most are middling or at the bottom on federal tests. Brill simply refuses to acknowledge these inconvenient facts because the charter movement is a central part of the “reform” claims.
A false paradise and the height of folly to accept this article for its face value. It is certainly well meaning and the comments (wow) very extensive and heavily weighted with concern and sincerity. But consider that “previous” (historically based) “reformers” are presumed to apply to the current wave of (similarly misguided?) reformers. This is an unsubstantiated appeal to history as a standard for a categorical base for reform attitudes in the past, and essentially commits a fallacy of composition. Today is based upon money objectives; control; power; and a process of building succession into markets. The scope and scale of this incentive has never existed before, and the desperation of massive financial “survival” tactics to sustain itself by accessing mass market revenue streams has never been technologically possible either. It is a critical mistake to think that MONEY and capital advantage is not going to outlast popular defenses by the (somewhat incrementally retiring) education professionals. It is a mistake to think that money interests are not buying influence and actual appointments, as well as political office itself…in its lust and addiction to predatory capital resourcing & colonization. And it is a mistake to think that the process isn’t already deeply entrenched right under our noses:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/02/private-firms-eyeing-prof_n_1732856.html
Privatizing Public Schools: Big Firms Eyeing Profits From U.S. K-12 Market
Reuters | Posted: 08/02/2012 10:16 am Updated: 08/02/2012 12:18 pm
By Stephanie Simon
“NEW YORK, Aug 1 (Reuters) – The investors gathered in a tony private club in Manhattan were eager to hear about the next big thing, and education consultant Rob Lytle was happy to oblige.
Think about the upcoming rollout of new national academic standards for public schools, he urged the crowd. If they’re as rigorous as advertised, a huge number of schools will suddenly look really bad, their students testing way behind in reading and math. They’ll want help, quick. And private, for-profit vendors selling lesson plans, educational software and student assessments will be right there to provide it.
“You start to see entire ecosystems of investment opportunity lining up,” said Lytle, a partner at The Parthenon Group, a Boston consulting firm. “It could get really, really big.”
Indeed, investors of all stripes are beginning to sense big profit potential in public education.
The K-12 market is tantalizingly huge: The U.S. spends more than $500 billion a year to educate kids from ages five through 18. The entire education sector, including college and mid-career training, represents nearly 9 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, more than the energy or technology sectors.
Traditionally, public education has been a tough market for private firms to break into — fraught with politics, tangled in bureaucracy and fragmented into tens of thousands of individual schools and school districts from coast to coast.
Now investors are signaling optimism that a golden moment has arrived. They’re pouring private equity and venture capital into scores of companies that aim to profit by taking over broad swaths of public education.
The conference last week at the University Club, billed as a how-to on “private equity investing in for-profit education companies,” drew a full house of about 100.
OUTSOURCING BASICS
In the venture capital world, transactions in the K-12 education sector soared to a record $389 million last year, up from $13 million in 2005. That includes major investments from some of the most respected venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, according to GSV Advisors, an investment firm in Chicago that specializes in education.
The goal: an education revolution in which public schools outsource to private vendors such critical tasks as teaching math, educating disabled students, even writing report cards, said Michael Moe, the founder of GSV.
“It’s time,” Moe said. “Everybody’s excited about it.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/02/private-firms-eyeing-prof_n_1732856.html
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…and this process has not regressed; it has incrementally transgressed into the e-text books, e-curriculum; and every asset of institutional educational systemics is sucked into this process from A to Z in a process of path dependency and capital intensive interest baring debt.
The process is not failing; it is becoming blindingly normalized.
Joel Klein’s Misleading Autobiography
What the former chancellor of New York City schools’ sleight of hand tells us about education reform
Richard Rothstein
October 11, 2012
http://prospect.org/article/joel-kleins-misleading-autobiography
Excerpt:
This is a story about a story, of how a fiction about impoverished children and public schools corrupts our education policy.
The fiction is the autobiography of Joel Klein, the former chancellor of the New York City Department of Education. Appointed in 2002 by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Klein transformed the city’s public-school system by promoting privately managed charter schools to replace regular public schools, by increasing the consequences for principals and teachers of standardized tests, and by attacking union-sponsored due process and seniority provisions for teachers. From his perch as head of the nation’s largest school district, Klein wielded outsize influence, campaigning to persuade districts and states across the nation to adopt the testing and accountability policies he had established in New York. Deputies he trained when he was chancellor now lead school systems not only in New York but also in Baltimore, Chicago, New Orleans, Newark, and elsewhere.
Klein resigned in 2010 to develop a new division at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation to sell tablet-based curriculum to public schools. His prominence in national education policy, though, has not diminished. He is chair of the Broad Center, which is funded by Los Angeles billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad to train and place school superintendents who’ve been recruited not only from the education sector but also from leadership positions in government, the military, and corporations. The center’s graduates have included the Obama administration’s assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education, state school superintendents in New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Delaware, and district superintendents in Charlotte, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, Seattle, and dozens of other cities. Earlier this year, Klein co-chaired, with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, a Council on Foreign Relations commission that concluded that the country’s public schools are in such crisis that they threaten national security. Klein has also become a contributor to The Atlantic; his latest piece, in August, denounced “ideological foes of business’ contribution to the public good” who resist efforts of private firms to sell innovative products to public schools.
Klein and his allies hold teachers primarily responsible for the achievement gap between disadvantaged and middle-class children. In a 2010 “manifesto,” Klein and one of his protégés, Michelle Rhee, the former schools chancellor of Washington, D.C., summed up their campaign like this: “The single most important factor determining whether students succeed in school is not the color of their skin or their ZIP code or even their parents’ income—it is the quality of their teacher.”
As proof, Klein—and others for him—cites his life story in what has become a stump speech for his brand of school reform. Again and again, Klein recounts his own deprived childhood and how it was a public-school teacher who plucked him from a path to mediocrity or worse. He offers his autobiography as evidence that poverty is no bar to success and that today’s disadvantaged children fail only because they are not rescued by inspiring teachers like those from whom Klein himself had benefitted.
This has become conventional wisdom in national education policy. As Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has declared, “Klein knows, as I do, that great teachers can transform a child’s life chances—and that poverty is not destiny. It’s a belief deeply rooted in his childhood, as a kid growing up in public housing. … Joel Klein never lost that sense of urgency about education as the great equalizer. He understands that education is the civil-rights issue of our generation, the force that lifts children from public-housing projects to first-generation college students. … In place of a culture of excuses, Klein sought [as chancellor] to build a culture of performance and accountability.”
Here is Klein’s autobiographical account in his own words, faithful to original context, culled from numerous speeches and interviews that Klein has given and continues to give:
I grew up in public housing in Queens and grew up in the streets of New York. I always like to think of myself as a kid from the streets, and education changed my life. … I stood on the shoulders of teachers to see a world that I couldn’t have seen growing up in the family that I grew up in.
My father had dropped out of high school in the tenth grade during the Great Depression. My mother graduated from high school and never went to college. No one in my family had attended college … or knew about college. I had no appreciation of reading or cultural activities. …
By most people’s lights, we were certainly working-class, poor. … I grew up in a pretty unhappy household. …
Teachers set expectations for me that were not commensurate with my background or my family’s income. …
Nobody in [my] school said to me, ‘Well, you grew up in public housing, your parents don’t read, you’ve never been to a museum, so we shouldn’t expect too much from you!’ … I wanted to play ball, I had a girlfriend at the time. I thought school was OK, a little overrated but I thought it was OK. … Mr. Harris, my physics teacher at William Cullen Bryant High School, saw something that I hadn’t seen in myself. … I realized, through him, that the potential of students in inner-city schools is too often untapped. We can fix that. Demography need not be destiny.
From the day I took the job as chancellor of the New York Public Schools, friends told me that I would never fix education in America until you fix the poverty in our society. … I’m convinced now more than ever that those people have it exactly backwards—because you’ll never fix poverty in America until you fix education.
I reject categorically the principle that poverty is an insurmountable impediment, because I see that we have surmounted it time and again.
I never forget and never will forget who I am, where I came from, and what public education did for me. I am still the old kid from Queens.
The lesson Klein, Duncan, and others draw from this autobiography is that poor children today fail because their teachers, unlike the 1950s Mr. Harris, are overprotected by union contracts, have low expectations for poor students, and so barely try to teach them. To correct this, Klein and others who call themselves “school reformers” hope to identify ineffective teachers and replace them with new ones who rest their security not on union rules but on an ability to rescue children from material and intellectual deprivation.
Unlike a politician’s biography, which gets vetted by the press, Klein’s account has never been questioned. That’s too bad, because in nearly every detail the story he tells is misleading or untrue. The misrepresentations call into question the reforms he and his acolytes promote.
As a policy analyst, I have often criticized those who dismiss the powerful influence of poverty on academic achievement and the belief that better teachers can systematically overcome that influence. In making this critique, autobiography influences me as well, because as it turns out, Klein and I grew up in similar circumstances—third-generation, educationally ambitious, Queens, New York, Jewish households, with parents who had nearly identical jobs and incomes. I’m just a few years older than Klein. We attended neighboring schools; I even had the same physics teacher, Mr. Sidney Harris, whom Klein credits with his rescue. We both attended Ivy League colleges (he went to Columbia, I to Harvard), but unlike Klein, I have always considered myself lucky to have come from an academically motivated family and would never dare suggest that I had material or intellectual hardships that were in any way comparable to those faced by poor minority children from housing projects today. Some of my teachers were superb, some not so, but with backgrounds like ours, Klein and I would probably have succeeded no matter what shortcomings our schools might have had.
Klein is right that “demography need not be destiny.” Human nature and environments are variable, children are complex, and so although disadvantaged children on average perform more poorly than typical middle-class children, some disadvantaged children do better and some do even worse than their circumstances would seem to predict. A few respond exceptionally well to teachers and schools. Some poor parents are literate, take education unusually seriously, seek the best out-of-school enrichment, and read to their children at home. These are the few low-income minority children whom some high-profile charter schools serve. It’s when poverty combines with chaos at home, adult illiteracy, neglect, unaddressed health issues, constant dislocation, and a neighborhood pervaded by addiction and crime that most children in these environments become, in sociologist William Julius Wilson’s phrase, “truly disadvantaged.” It’s these children whose academic performance we must help to improve and who are the target of most self-described school reformers.
For Klein’s life story to serve his argument, he can’t merely have grown up in a housing project but in a home that failed to support middle-class values of academic ambition and striving. To support his program, he’s had to suggest he had an “inner city” upbringing on “the streets” and was raised in a dysfunctional home we typically associate with the truly disadvantaged. This is where his misrepresentations and distortions come in. The discrepancies matter because they go to the heart of what’s wrong with his reform agenda.
Educational values were not absent from Klein’s family. His father, Charles Klein, like many of his generation, left high school during the Depression, but the notion that his parents couldn’t read or didn’t know about college is misleading. His mother, Claire Klein, was a bookkeeper. With fierce competition for scarce jobs, Charles did well enough on a civil-service exam to land work at the post office, remaining for 25 years in a secure job he hated to ensure he could send his children to college. This was not the commitment of semi-literate parents with little knowledge of higher education.
Indeed, while serving as assistant attorney general in the Clinton Justice Department, and before becoming schools chancellor, Klein recalled how he was inspired to become a lawyer: He sometimes skipped school, he told an interviewer, so his father could “take me to the federal courthouse in Manhattan, and we’d just watch cases.” This is not the typical father-son activity of public-housing residents with “no appreciation of reading or cultural activities.”
Klein graduated high school at 16, because, like me, he was placed in a New York City program that compressed three years of junior high school into two. These “special progress” classes, at Klein’s Junior High School 10 and my nearby Junior High School 74, were not for would-be truants and gang members but for academically advanced students with ambitious parents who were impatient with the regular curricular pace. Special-progress classes were even more racially and academically segregated from other students than their contemporary version, “gifted and talented” programs that retain middle-class parents in the public-school system by separating their children from most low-income and minority-group peers. Klein may recall that he was not academically engaged until inspired by his high-school physics teacher. But in the 1950s, you weren’t assigned to seventh-grade special-progress classes unless you were already performing well above grade level.
News Corp. Education Tablet: For The Love Of Learning?
by David Folkenflik
March 08, 2013
http://www.npr.org/2013/03/08/173766828/news-corp-education-tablet-for-the-love-of-learning?ft=1&f=1019
Excerpt:
The educational division of the media conglomerate News Corp., called Amplify, unveiled a new digital tablet this week at the SXSW tech conference in Austin, Texas, intended to serve millions of schoolchildren and their teachers across the country.
Amplify promises the tablet will simplify administrative chores for teachers, enable shy children to participate more readily in discussions, and allow students to complete coursework at their own pace while drawing upon carefully selected online research resources.
News Corp. chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch views the digital tablet as part of a push to modernize the educational system. But he has another goal in mind as well. The media mogul is counting on future revenues from his educational branch to help shore up the finances of his newspaper and publishing division as it is split off later this year from the conglomerate’s vast holdings in television and entertainment.
And as a result, News Corp.’s initiative is stirring both interest and controversy.
In the past few years, Murdoch has described education as a market worth hundreds of billions of dollars. At a May 2011 event in Paris, Murdoch noted that the fields of medicine, finance and media have all accelerated their adoption of technology. But schools have failed to share such advances, he said.
“Today’s classroom looks almost exactly the same as it did in the Victorian age: a teacher standing in front of a roomful of kids with only a textbook, a blackboard and a piece of chalk,” Murdoch said.
The person Murdoch hired to lead his charge, Joel Klein, is familiar in education circles. Klein is a Democrat and served as assistant attorney general under President Clinton. He was chancellor of the New York City school system for more than eight years for Mayor Michael Bloomberg. He’s easy to pick out at Amplify’s offices in midtown Manhattan. He’s the only person dressed in a suit and tie in a workspace that more closely resembles a startup — replete with people confidently volleying at a pingpong table and piloting miniature helicopters overhead as their CEO walks by.
“Critics and others have said, ‘You know … technology has been around a long time, but it hasn’t changed the learning experience,’ ” Klein told NPR. “It’s not about hardware, it’s not about devices, it’s really about learning.
“And if this does what I believe it will do — which is enhance the teaching and learning processes — then it’s going to be a home run.”
A sneak peak revealed an Android tablet with a firm silicone jacket (designers say they have to expect pupils to be as careless with the tablets as they are with traditional textbooks). It is customized with apps for teachers to help them run quizzes and determine pupils’ progress with ease while containing all of their coursework in a single, 10-inch device. It comes loaded with Amplify’s curricular materials that satisfy so-called “Common Core” requirements mandated in all but five U.S. states. If Amplify wins the rights to carry most texts electronically — admittedly a tough nut to crack, given how warily publishers view e-books — the tablet can truly serve as a digital backpack.
Other companies, including such giants as Apple, are trying to sell school districts on the value of their tablets, too. Stephen Smyth, president of Amplify’s Access division that creates the digital platforms on which its curricular material is delivered, argues that his company’s tablet is distinctive because it is designed to allow students to interact with teachers instantaneously.
“These devices are connected,” Smyth said recently. “If you go to Best Buy or a retailer and buy a tablet off the shelf, it can’t do this. Really, what we’re trying to solve here is actually how to have teachers use tablets in the classroom environment.”
But some critics question what problem the tablets from Amplify — and its competitors — are solving. Some teachers union officials argue that Amplify’s efforts are part of a disturbing effort to lure politicians with technology that promises to enable teachers to handle more students per class — and thus reduce how many teachers school districts will need to employ.
Leonie Haimson, executive director of the nonprofit Class Size Matters in New York City, said Klein and Murdoch “believe that public school kids should have larger classes, and instead of getting personalized instruction via their teachers, should do it via a computer.”
The tablet may well function perfectly well on its own terms, Haimson said, but she contends that Amplify’s goal is less about helping schoolchildren than about turning a profit.
Gene
I’m afraid that’s a med in very short supply in today’s world.
Where did I put that bottle of Emetrol? (mumble mumble mumble)
Scrutiny on Murdoch’s School Reform Agenda Grows
Dana Goldstein
July 21, 2011
http://www.thenation.com/blog/162201/scrutiny-murdoch-school-reform-agenda-grows
Excerpt:
If you watched Rupert Murdoch’s weak-sauce testimony in front of the British Parliament Tuesday, you might have felt just a teensy bit sorry for former New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein, who sat directly behind Murdoch the entire afternoon, pouting.
Sure, Klein is probably earning more money than God in his new role as executive vice president at News Corp. But the Justice Department attorney turned data-and-accountability school reformer signed up with Murdoch to get out of the harsh political limelight and help News Corp. make a mint selling educational technology products to school districts. Instead, Klein now finds himself heading up the company’s internal response to the explosive phone-hacking scandal, which has tainted nearly every august institution in British society, from Fleet Street to the Cameron government to Scotland Yard.
The FBI is currently investigating News Corp. to learn if its illegal and unethical activities victimized any American citizens, or penetrated the company’s US holdings, which include Fox News, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post.
But what’s been less well understood is the impact the scandal might have on Murdoch’s attempt to make a profit off the American public sector, most notably through seeking to provide technology services, such as data-tracking systems and video lessons, to public school districts.
Last November, shortly after hiring Klein, News Corp. acquired Wireless Generation, an education technology firm that had worked closely with Klein during his tenure as chancellor on two projects: ARIS, a controversial (and buggy) data system that warehouses students’ standardized test scores and demographic profiles; and School of One, a more radical attempt to use technology to personalize instruction, reorganize classrooms, and reduce the size of the teaching force.
The acquisition put Klein, who was set to supervise Wireless Generation, in an awkward position vis à vis city ethics regulations. The Times reported:
Conflict-of-interest rules set strict limits for city employees, both during and after their tenure, which could make Mr. Klein’s transition a tricky one. City employees are never allowed to disclose confidential information about the city’s business dealings or future strategy, and they cannot communicate with the agency for which they worked for one year after they leave. The rules also bar them from ever working on matters they had substantial involvement in as city employees.
It seemed unlikely Klein would be able to fully follow those mandates when, in May, the city Department of Education renewed its contract with Wireless Generation, asking the company to provide testing materials and software. Last month, New York State moved to award Wireless Generation a $27 million no-bid contact to create a state student data-tracking system similar to ARIS—despite the fact that many New York City principals have decided not to use the $80 million software, which doesn’t track helpful day-to-day information on attendance, behavior or homework completion.
Bruce,
I see you’ve been busy!
*****
Plutocracy with a Philanthropic Face
Posted on September 10, 2011
by Sam Pizzigati
http://inequality.org/plutocracy-philanthropic-face/
Excerpt:
But plutocrats today don’t all spout crude libertarian bromides or even play footsie, as the Kochs have, with sloganeering from our segregationist past.
Indeed, many of our mega rich bear little resemblance to the brothers Koch. These more enlightened plutocrats seem to obsess over philanthropy, not profits. They do their sliding in and out of foundation board rooms, pledging their support, at one high-minded symposium after another, for initiatives sure to bring “efficiency” and “innovation” to our society’s most pressing problems.
This may be plutocracy’s future face, what plutocracy, in the 21st century, really “looks like.” What will this plutocracy really do, for — and to — us? We have one clue from the ongoing high-stakes battle over reforming America’s public schools.
“The hottest cause among Wall Street hedge-fund managers these days is not financial reform,” as the Toronto Globe and Mail’s chief U.S. political writer, Konrad Yakabuski, noted earlier this month. “It’s education reform.”
Billionaires, of course, have every right as citizens to advocate whatever public policy stance and vision they choose. But, in a deeply unequal America, these billionaires don’t just have rights. Their immense fortunes give them enormous power, more than enough to dominate, not just advocate.
“A few billion dollars in private foundation money, strategically invested every year for a decade, has sufficed,” notes education analyst Joanne Barkan, “to define the national debate on education.”
Three billionaire foundations set the pace for this defining, one funded out of the Microsoft fortune, one out of Wal-Mart, and one out of the AIG insurance empire. The Gates, Walton, and Broad foundations don’t agree on every single educational policy twist. But they do all follow the same basic script.
America’s public schools are failing poor kids, this script’s storyline posits, because too many ineffective teachers are staffing our classrooms. We need to test kids to identify — and replace — these ineffective teachers. We need to hire good teachers, pay them extra if they perform well, and keep subjecting students to standardized tests to make sure these good teachers keep performing.
Teacher unions, the storyline continues, will fight these reforms. But real reformers can beat back the unions — by shutting down “failing” schools, for instance, and replacing them with publicly funded, privately managed “charter schools.” Such charter schools will succeed because they don’t have to worry about due process, seniority, or any other teacher union contract niceties.
This entire approach to school “reform” rests on two seldom defended assumptions. The first: that poor kids would learn just fine if only they only had better teachers. The second: that student scores on standardized tests give us all we need to identify better teachers.
But independent education researchers have repeatedly exposed the emptiness of both these assumptions. The research consensus, one recent survey relates, has concluded that teaching likely “accounts for about 15 percent of student achievement outcomes.”
Out-of-school factors — poverty dynamics that range from homelessness and hunger to home and neighborhood instability — make four times more impact.
And high-stakes standardized tests can be gamed, add researchers like Harvard’s Dan Koretz, by drilling students in “test-taking strategies that pollute testers’ ability to see what the students actually know.”
If drilling fails, the high stakes in high-stakes testing — “pay for performance” bonuses and promotions — create systemic incentives for cheating. Massive testing scandals have already surfaced in Atlanta, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C., three cities where billionaire foundations have wielded massive influence.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6d-awoF1o0
Papantonio: Texas Schools Ban Critical Thinking
Published on Nov 13, 2012
If you saw an article on the Internet telling you that schools in Texas were trying to ban the teaching of critical thinking, you’d probably think it was an article written by The Onion. But the sad and scary truth is that Republicans in Texas are actually writing laws that would ban school teachers from teaching their students how to look at facts, analyze data, and form conclusions based on observations. Essentially — they are trying to prevent children from developing critical thinking skills. Mike Papantonio talks about the dark ages mentality of Texas Republicans with Danny Weil, an investigative journalist with Truthout.
Texas GOP Declares: “No More Teaching of ‘Critical Thinking Skills’ in Texas Public Schools”
http://truth-out.org/news/item/10144-…
Corporate Attack on Education, Chomsky
School Vouchers and Privatization: A Reference Handbook (Contemporary Education Issues) [Hardcover]
Danny Weil (Author)
“The book covers everything from school vouchers to little-known market-based educational reforms like for-profit management of public schools, commercialism in the classroom, philanthropic tuition sponsorships, faith-based charities, educational tax credits, corporate curriculum, and advertising as well as exclusive agreements between companies and schools. It includes case studies of two well-established voucher systems: the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program and the private national voucher policy in Chile, a program started in l973. The book also includes a chronology, directories, bibliographies, and other reference content.”
Published on Jan 21, 2013
Danny Weil is a teacher, author and journalist who is an expert on privatization and charters.He writes for “Truth Out” “Daily Censored” and other publications. At an education conference on Privatization of Public Education and the Unions in San Francisco he discusses the corporate financialization of public education and and how this is destroying the public education in the United States along with the role of the education unions in confronting this frontal attack on public education.
The presentation was made on January 19, 2012 and was sponsored by United Public Workers For Action with the title “Public Education, Privatization and The NEA/CTA, SEIU and AFT/CFT and What Can Education Workers, Students & Parents Do To Defend Public Education?”.
Production of United Public Workers For Action
http://www.upwa.info
Mickey Huff, a professor at Diablo Valley College and director of Project Censored as well as a co-host of the KPFA Project Censored show gave a report on the media coverage and framing of charters and privatization.
Mickey Huff:
Sorry about that one…Mickey Huff’s video title:
Mickey Huff Of Project Censored On The Media And The Media & The Attack On Public Education
Corporate Shills, Propaganda And The Media Agenda For Education Privatization with
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXhtevXvj-M&feature=player_embedded
Mickey Huff, a professor at Diablo Valley College and director of Project Censored as well as a co-host of the KPFA Project Censored show gave a report on the media coverage and framing of charters and privatization.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdSZ_6kcgEY&feature=player_embedded
Author and historian Gray Brechin reports on the organized selling off of the University Libraries and the export of brains. According toBrechin, this plan is to make the UC a privatized corporation for billionaire regents and the corporations.
Brechin outlines the history of UC and how the now rapid push for profits through privatization threatensa great public university built over generations by the people in California.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFJBof1tEfs&feature=player_embedded
Professor George Wright from Skyline Community College who is also a member of AFT 1493 puts historical context into the present privatization and destruction of public education. He also looks at how capitalism in the post war period has driven the present crisis. George Wright is also on the Steering Committed of United Public Workers For Action which hosted the conference. It was held on January 22, 2012 at Laney College in Oakland.
A more complete document is at
http://www.upwa.info/documents/GREENHUT-Wright.pdf
“Teacher Bashing Has To Stop”
CTC Fired Lawyer Carroll on Conflicts Of Interests & Lobbyists
Whistleblower and Fired Commission On Teacher Credentials lawyerKathleen Carroll on 1/22/2012 made a presentation on Conflicts Of Interest, Lobbyists & Privatization Of California Public Education.
For further video on Kathleen Carroll go to:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56SWb4z5-l4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLa6YCVB-8A
These presentations took place at a conference on January 22, 2012 sponsored byUnited Public Workers For Action and titled The Attack On Public Educationand Privatization.
United Public Workers for Action
Videos From Laney Conference On The Attack On Public Education And Privatization
1/22/2012
United Public Workers For Action
http://www.laborvideo.org
http://www.upwa.info/documents/1-22-12EducationConf.htm