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)
Oops: That was me above. I had changed my tag to make a point about anonymity on a previous thread, and forgot to change it back.
Lark: So that, hey, a proper grounding in the English language… is now thought… passe?
I think you are blinded by ideology. The purpose of language is to convey ideas, the particular form (or language) is superfluous. I work with many people that are not native English speakers, with heavy accents, broken grammar and missing from their vocabulary words a third grader would know. But they are brilliant scientists, and I regard any difficulty in communication more my fault than theirs: They have at least spent years trying to speak English, by comparison I have made nearly zero effort to learn Arabic, Chinese, French, Greek, Polish, Russian or Spanish.
What you think of as “proper” English is an unnecessarily complicated language, and what you think of as corruptions of that language are for the most part simplifications in tense, grammar, slang, pronunciation and spelling that should be made to help English along in becoming the global language.
That is a good thing, not a bad thing. English is a difficult language to learn; the only reason it is even a candidate for a universal language is due to our economic and scientific pre-eminence after WW II. That pre-eminence is declining as many other countries recover and develop economically and scientifically. If you like the idea of English remaining the most common global “second” language a century from now, I suggest you embrace the changes that make it easier for non-native speakers to learn.
Get over yourself. What it sounds like is immaterial, the only thing that matters is if you understand their idea, and they can understand yours. All else is window dressing.
The Empire Michelle Rhee Built
By Charles P. Pierce
1/7/13
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/michelle-rhee-corporate-public-schools-010713
Excerpt:
One problem with the education “reform” industry is not merely that it generally looks at “education” as though it were a commodity, like soybeans, and that the problems with how we educate a great many children of our fellow citizens can be solved if we just refine the delivery systems for the product. In other words, most education “reform” proponents treat “education” as though it exists in a vacuum unaffected by the factors — like, say, joblessness and poverty — in the real world outside the classroom. (How many prominent school “reformers” have stepped up and said anything about the increasingly effective campaign by the NRA to arm public school teachers? Thought so.) Thus do we come to the second problem with the education “reform” movement — it is shot through root and branch with patent-medicine remedies pitched by for-profit grifters and hustlers.
They have their own genre of richly financed propaganda, like 2010’s Waiting for Superman and this year’s Won’t Back Down. There are an awful lot of hedge-fund gunslingers involved in the movement toward charter schools, a phenomenon about which, to his eternal credit, Bob Somerby — who actually has taught in the public schools — has been banging his tin drum at The Daily Howler for some time now. (It should also be said that Somerby’s knee does not jerk. He readily gives some reform programs, and even some of Rhee’s work, the props he thinks they deserve.) Some of the hustlers, alas, have the ear of this administration, and one of those people is Michelle Rhee.
Rhee’s entire (and very lucrative) career as a proponent of educational “reform” is based on her time as chancellor of the public schools in Washington, D.C. Between 2007 and 2010, she did everything that sends a thrill up the leg of the “reform” community. She bashed teachers, scapegoated principals, and shined up her own armor for public consumption every chance she got. She also instituted a system of standardized testing by which Michelle Rhee would be able to judge the awesome awesomeness of Michelle Rhee.
Standardized testing is a crack cocaine of education. It is rife with problems. It is also a multimillion industry without which might not exist, among other things, The Washington Post. A reliance on standardized testing as a metric for progress is generally a reliable “tell” that “reform” has ended and that the grift has begun. A reliance on standardized testing as a metric for progress — and, it should be said, as a Procrustean scoreboard to judge whether a teacher, an administrator, or a school system are doing their jobs properly — almost guarantees that some finagling with the numbers will take place. It is a sub rosa way to install a corporate model on public education and, since the corporate model for everything in this country right now is a moral and ethical quagmire, it encourages cheating on a massive scale. Hence, the very real possibility that the empire built by Michelle Rhee, tough-talking “reformer,” may be built upon a wilderness of crib sheets.
“They have their own genre of richly financed propaganda, like 2010′s Waiting for Superman and this year’s Won’t Back Down.”
Elaine,
This propaganda designed as “feel good movie-making” had me infuriated from the time I first heard of them. Rhee is a con artist shill for the Plutocracy.
Robin,
One of the most educationally destructive things that school reform has brought us is the craze for high stakes testing. Education should be about meeting the needs of our children–not about prepping them for some multiple choice tests that don’t provide us with a true picture of all that our children know and all that they have learned.
Excellent article Elaine…..
Robin,
I was a public school teacher for more than three decades. We always taught phonics in the primary grades–as did my friends who teach/taught in other school districts. We didn’t throw phonics in to obscure sight word orientation. Through the years different methods for the teaching of reading came into vogue…and often went out again. Some old methods even returned with new names. Many teachers continue to use both phonics and word recognition…multiple approaches to teach their students how to become literate. There is no one method that is best for all children. Children must learn how to “read words.” It’s just as important that they learn to comprehend what they read.
I wish we had more teachers like you today, Elaine.
My daughters and I would watch Sesame Street from the time they were toddlers until about the fifth grade and they retained what they learned, even my Learning Disabled daughter. We also watched Zoom, Mr. Rogers and the Electric Company.
When I babysat my grandchildren and my oldest Great-granddaughter we would watch PBS and we talked about what she saw on t.v. Sadly my daughter (her Grandmother) and her Mother never had the time to do this with her.
Hi Elaine.
Marxism properly understood is about targeting human consciousness. And I did not know that until researching why what had worked in the past was being shut down under Race to the Top and what had been controversial was being expanded. And all the language about “Just enough content knowledge.” Following up on all that eventually took me back to Uncle Karl. Here’s a basic explanation I did some months ago http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/political-primer-101-what-is-the-marxist-theory-of-the-mind-and-why-does-it-matter-in-2012/
On reading most schools in fact do not teach phonics systematically because phonetic reading bolsters the abstract mind. The current theories prevailing in education are to keep everything concrete and in context. Symbol systems like using letters for sounds are math symbols that do not reflect something “real” again fuel the logical, rational mind. That’s not me saying this. I am simply relaying what psych and sociology and ed professors have said is the reason they push a whole word or look-say emphasis.
Now obviously being honest about the lack of a systematic phonetic orientation or the insistence kids will read only words made known to them or ed schools now insisting words be taught as a whole or by syllable would not be politically popular. So phonics gets thrown in to obscure the sight word orientation.
Most of the reading methods being pushed under the Common Core track back to Marie Clay or Fountas & Pinnell. It is called Guided Reading but it all tracks back ultimately to psycholinguistics and Wilhelm Wundt. One of the founders of the field of psychology in the 19th century.
Trust me. I wish there was no link to Uncle Karl and that the actual Common Core implementation was a skit as humorous as Duck Soup. But those are not the intentions or the plans and the skullduggery here is bipartisan. Your descriptions of the Corporatism links are right on the money. In fact I heard Joel Klein speak about that sub that is now known as Amplify. I wrote a post about his claim that we are seeking “new kinds of minds.”
I do not think any politician has the right to be selling that goal,
“What often goes unmentioned…”
There is not enough consistency in our public schools, even in the same town. The schools in wealthy areas receive more money from local and state taxes and the poorer areas get much less.
In red states public education doesn’t seem to be encouraged and many children are either being educated by ignorant parents, or going to charter schools which or other so called privatized schools which have no minimum standards for educators.
We need to address these problems.
Ah yes, the poverty concept for explaining the failures of some of the urban public schools in America; this concept may work for the public schools serving rural America, but not urban America. Here’s why:
In his book entitled Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (1967), Dr. Kenneth B. Clark asserts a different view of why urban, public schools in America are failing:
“The public schools in America’s urban ghetto also reflect the oppressive damage of racial exclusion. School segregation in the South had, for generations, been supported by law; in the North, segregation has been supported by community custom and indifference. It is assumed that children should go to school where they live, and if they live in segregated neighborhoods, the schools are, as a matter of course segregated. But the educational crisis in the ghettos is not primarily, and certainly not exclusively, one of the inequitable racial balances in those schools. Equally serious is the inferior quality of the education in those schools. Some persons take the position that the first must go before the second does; others, that the reverse is true. What is clear is that the problem of education in the urban ghetto seems to be a vicious cycle: If children go to school where they live and if most neighborhoods are racially segregated, then schools are necessarily segregated, too. If Blacks move into a previously white community and whites then move away or send their children to private or parochial schools, the public schools will continue to be segregated. If the quality of education in the Black schools is inferior to that in white schools, whites feel justified in the fear that the presence of Blacks in their own school would lower its standards. If they move their children away and the school becomes predominantly Black, and therefore receives an inferior quality of education, the pattern begins all over again. The cycle of systematic neglect of Black children must be broken, but the powerlessness of the Black communities and the fear of indifference of the white community have combined so far to keep the cycle intact.”
Furthermore, Dr Clark asserts:
“Are Blacks such-in terms of innate incapacity or environmental deprivation-that their children are less capable of learning than are Whites, so that any school that is permitted to become integrated necessarily declines in quality? Or has inferior education been systematically imposed on Blacks in the nations ghettos in such a way as to compel poor performance from Black children-a performance that could be reversed with quality education? The answer to these questions is of fundamental importance because the flight of whites from the urban public school system in many American cities is based on the belief that the first is true and the second is false.”
Although this book was written more than 45 years ago, has anything changed? Saint Louis and Chicago Public School systems have been experiencing this phenomenon for decades……………….the Flight continues…and so does school quality…
“Although this book was written more than 45 years ago, has anything changed? Saint Louis and Chicago Public School systems have been experiencing this phenomenon for decades……………….the Flight continues…and so does school quality…”
RWL,
Dr. Clark was a wise and prescient man.
@Elaine
Get your children out of the public schools… even the colleges and universities… and fast!
If you really want the straight skinny, the go-to source is Atlanta attorney Ms. Robin Eubanks… of the Invisible Serfs Collar blog.
http://InvisibleSerfsCollar.com
Robin’s a very concerned mom. And she’s extremely well-researched. I’d suggest you give her a shout, as she’s quite friendly, open and honest about sharing her findings.
P.S. – The teachers and parents themselves are being hoodwinked – with the teachers facing the loss of their J-O-B-S and benefit packages if they don’t bend over and become complicit in the fraud and criminality of it all. The superintendents and principals, the same – if they don’t comply and produce the expected ‘results’… their middle class statuses [if not their ‘upward mobility’]… and their career pathways are blocked… or else they are literally ruined [devastated financially]!
“Marxism properly understood is about targeting human consciousness. And I did not know that until researching why what had worked in the past was being shut down under Race to the Top and what had been controversial was being expanded.”
Robin,
you are no doubt an intelligent person who has been made ignorant by pre-judgment and what seems to be a mis-guided libertarian political view. I took the time to follow yours and “Lark’s” link back to your website, so I was able to read the two dense essays that links track back to. You obviously think that Marxism is at base the main problem and frankly that’s your problem and your Achille’s heel. Education is being attacked by the Plutocrats and the Corporate Elite in order to dumb down society and thus make them more pliable for economic slavery. In tandem with that there is money to be made ad that is always an interest for those who rule us.
This country is not under attack from “Marxists”, but from Plutocrats who want to impose a “new feudalism” upon us. In your paranoia you conflate government with Marxism and that is a faulty premise. Government per se is not the enemy of freedom, those with the wealth and the power to pervert government are the problem. Unfortunately, despite your seeming erudition, your conception of the problems this society faces are filtered through the lens of your political suppositions. Free yourself from ideology and you might be able to see your errors.
Bravo, Elaine. Thank you. I taught high school before I taught college. There were teachers who were so dedicated but often had to fight the bureaucracy to keep up their level of creativity, interaction with and personal assistance to students. WhewnI hear “privatization” and “voucher,” I hear “control.” I hear no longer being required to give an education to everyone. I am tired of so many knee-jerk, no-nothing “education reformers” (aka too often politicians who want to cut back funding of education) who don’t really give a rat’s butt about all students having access to and receiving a good education.
Thanks, Elaine, for the article and others for other articles. I have been aware of ALEC for quite a while and have heard enough about Michelle Rhee to realize she is full of wind and very interested in enriching herself. As a public school teacher for about 25 years, I am in a school district where students perform very well on tests and many go to college. I have also taught in school districts with equally wonderful students but the scores were low, well, they were low for the children of low-income parents or those on food stamps. If I could’ve sent all my badly behaving children to Ms. Rhee or Ms. DeVos; if I could’ve added all the recent children of recent immigrants who didn’t speak English or very little English but still had to take the State Tests; if I could’ve added the students who had one form of autism or other of which some would scream out from time to time; another one would crawl on all fours and lick the floors; if I could have sent to these nice upstanding Evangelical donors the hungry children for which I bought honey graham crackers to keep them energized till lunch… guess what would’ve happened to my former school district? Well, we’d have us a nice group of students with supporting parents with an education and enough money to pay for extra curricular activities etc. You get the gist: Ms. Rhee and Ms. DeVos and Melinda and all those mighty smart and wealthy people would be knocking on OUR doors and propose to privatize it.
While I’ve enjoyed teaching children from whatever background or ability, whether they were ‘good’ or ‘bad’ little boys and girls. I don’t recommend to anyone a career as a teacher, public or private because the truth is that teachers, the majority of them being women, will remain underpaid and overextended and they will still get blamed for all society’s ills. One day when we as teachers finally stop being abused and noone enters the profession anymore, perhaps we can start all over again… but I doubt it; suckers enough there: like me!
Walmart, ALEC unite on another school ‘reform’ bill
Posted by Max Brantley on Tue, Aug 14, 2012
http://www.arktimes.com/ArkansasBlog/archives/2012/08/14/walmart-alec-unite-on-another-school-reform-bill
There’s an Arkansas angle in this story about Walmart’s promotion of a new ideological film, “Won’t Back Down,” aimed at supporting “trigger laws” that give school parents a vote to convert a conventional public school (preferably one with a union workforce) into a non-union charter school. The movie is misleading. It suggests a majority vote of teachers is also needed for school conversion. That’s not what the existing laws provide.
The legislation is being doled out at cookie-cutting sessions by the American Legislative Exchange Council, the go-to Koch lobby for Arkansas Republican legislators in need of corporate movement bills. Conservative billionaire Philip Anschutz is also promoting the movie.
Walmart, in Arkansas alone, finances wholly or in part an anti-union lobby group, a similarly inclined nonprofit, a nonprofit that provides advice to charter schools, a new “reform” lobby headed by a former Chamber of Commerce executive who doesn’t like the Little Rock School District, charter schools and most of the key members of legislative education committees. 2013, many think, will be the year it moves to take over the direction of education in Arkansas. (Oh, and I forgot to mention the Walton-financed (with an assist from the equally conservative Windgate Foundation) Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas which churns out a steady diet of corporate movement education tracts, and whose financial arrangements the UA refuses to fully reveal despite the state Freedom of Information Act.)
Walmart’s hostility to unions and collective bargaining is well-known so its support for a message in favor of stripping teachers of that is not surprising. From Hollywood to a school district near you.
Why Are Walmart Billionaires Bankrolling Phony School ‘Reform’ In LA?
March 2, 2013
by Peter Dreier
http://billmoyers.com/2013/03/02/why-are-walmart-billionaires-bankrolling-phony-school-reform-in-la/
Excerpt:
For years, Los Angeles has been ground zero in an intense debate about how to improve our nation’s education system. What’s less known is who is shaping that debate. Many of the biggest contributors to the so-called “school choice” movement — code words for privatizing our public education system — are billionaires who don’t live in Southern California, but have gained significant influence in local school politics. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s recent contribution of $1 million to a political action committee created to influence next week’s LAUSD school board elections is only the most recent example of the billionaire blitzkrieg.
For more than a decade, however, one of the biggest of the billionaire interlopers has been the Walton family, heirs to the Walmart fortune, who have poured millions into a privatization-oriented, ideological campaign to make LA a laboratory for their ideas about treating schools like for-profit businesses, and treating parents, students and teachers like cogs in what they must think are education big-box retail stores.
As a business chain, Walmart has spent a fortune — in philanthropy and campaign contributions — trying to break into the Los Angeles retail market with its low-wage retail stores.
Now the Walton family — which derives its fortune from the Arkansas-based Walmart — is trying to use that fortune to bring Walmart-style education to Los Angeles.
The Waltons have long supported efforts to privatize education through the Walton Family Foundation as well as individual political donations to local candidates. Since 2005, the Waltons have given more than $1 billion to organizations and candidates who support privatization. They’ve channeled the funds to the pro-charter and pro-voucher Milton Friedman Foundation for Education Choice, Michelle Rhee’s pro-privatization and high-stakes testing organization Students First, and the pro-voucher Alliance for School Choice, where Walton family member Carrie Walton Penner sits on the board. In addition to funding these corporate-style education reform organizations, since 2000 the Waltons have also spent more than $24 million bankrolling politicians, political action committees, and ballot issues in California and elsewhere at the state and local level which undermine public education and literally shortchange students.
rafflaw,
Wasn’t Groucho a Marxist?
Lark,
No phonics so the schools are marxist???
The toll of school reform on public education
By Diane Ravitch
3/28/12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/ravitch-the-toll-of-school-reform-on-public-education/2012/03/27/gIQADjVEfS_blog.html
Excerpt:
There comes a time when you look at the rug on the floor, the one you’ve seen many times, and you see a pattern that you had never noticed before. You may have seen this squiggle or that flower, but you did not see the pattern into which the squiggles and flowers and trails of ivy combined.
In American education, we can now discern the pattern on the rug.
Consider the budget cuts to schools in the past four years. From the budget cuts come layoffs, rising class sizes, less time for the arts and physical education, less time for history, civics, foreign languages, and other non-tested subjects. Add on the mandates of No Child Left Behind, which demands 100 percent proficiency in math and reading and stigmatizes more than half the public schools in the nation as “failing” for not reaching an unattainable goal.
Along comes the Obama administration with the Race to the Top, and the pattern on the rug gets clearer. It tells cash-strapped states that they can compete for federal funding, but only if they open more privately managed schools (where few teachers have any job protections), only if they adopt national standards that have never been field-tested, only if they agree to evaluate teachers by student test scores, and only if they are ready to close down low-performing schools, fire the principal and staff, and call it a turnaround.
Race to the Top seems to have catalyzed a national narrative, at least among the mainstream media. The good guys open charter schools and fire bad teachers. The bad guys are lazy teachers who get lifetime tenure just for breathing and showing up. Most evil of all are the unions, who protect the bad teachers and fend off any effort to evaluate them. Anyone who questions the headlong rush to privatization and the blind faith in standardized testing will be smeared as “a defender of the status quo” who has “no solutions.” Even if all the “reformers'” solutions are destructive and stale, even though they consistently have failed to produce better education, the reformers never think twice about their palette of “solutions.”
Just by happenstance, a major documentary appears in September 2010 (“Waiting for ‘Superman'”) to recapitulate this narrative to millions. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation puts up the money to ensure that this morality tale of good reformers and bad teachers is shown to state legislatures, to civic groups, to people living in housing projects. The movie itself is financed in part by an evangelical billionaire (Philip Anschutz) who contributes heavily to libertarian and ultra-conservative causes.
At the same time, a small group of high-profile figures, led by Michelle Rhee and Joel Klein, proclaim that low test scores are caused by bad teachers, and if they had their way, they would abolish tenure, seniority, and any other job protections for those greedy, lazy teachers. Freed of those encumbrances, teachers would hold on to their jobs only if their students’ test scores went up. Economist Eric Hanushek adds another twist to the emerging scenario: fire 5 to 10 percent of the teachers whose students get the lowest scores, and amazing things are sure to happen: Bad teachers will be replaced by average teachers, test scores will rise to the top of the world, and the nation’s gross domestic product will rise by trillions of dollars.
Governors and state legislatures heed these messages. How could they not? In state after state, men with vast personal fortunes invest in campaigns to end teachers’ tenure, end seniority (now called Last In, First Out, or LIFO), and clear the way for private takeovers of public schools, where teachers work with no job rights at all. Understandably, the message is embraced by right-wing governors like Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, John Kasich of Ohio, Mitch Daniels of Indiana, Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania, and Rick Scott of Florida, but also by Democratic governors like Andrew Cuomo of New York and Daniel Malloy of Connecticut, as well as independent Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island.
Meanwhile, the richest foundation in the United States, the Gates Foundation, pours hundreds of millions of dollars into a project to find the perfect teacher evaluation system, thus reinforcing the “reform” narrative that the best way to fix what ails public education is to create a foolproof way to find and fire those malingering bad teachers. Where the Gates Foundation leads, many other foundations follow, sure that this philanthropic behemoth is wisest because it has the most money and presumably the best thinking.
Lark,
What school systems don’t teach phonics these days?
What would you recommend as the best method of teaching children to read?
What? No mention of Common Core? That’s been implemented in some 47 states?
No mention of the The Communitarian Network, the Frankfurt School or John Dewey’s and the Marxian technocrats’ influence/vision on today’s refashioning [language manipulation]… of P20 OBE (Pre-school through Graduate School Outcomes Based Education)?
I’m shocked! Just shocked!
Perhaps this discussion deserves wider perspective. Would parents go along with a communitarian, cultural Marxist education agenda if they knew how carefully [and deceptively] it was being kept hidden from them?
That public education was being employed as a covert weapon of modern warfare? Against ‘We, the People’? That they’re little darlin’s are no longer even taught phonics anymore?
What central planning genius dreamt this one up? No wonder Johnny and Emily can’t read or write. Or ~heaven forbid~ even ‘think’ with the shoddy tools they’ve been handed by the ‘philosopher-kings’ intending to do them grave harm? So that, hey, a proper grounding in the English language… is now thought… passe? Puhhh-leeeeeeze!
(‘Look-Say method’, ‘whole language’, ‘psycholinguistics’, ‘sight reading’ ‘balanced literacy’ – could it be our ‘free trade’ and immigration policies, multiculturalism, and yes, ‘diversity’ are destroying the very soul of this country [with its debauched ‘currency’] from the inside out?)
How many Americans are aware of Horace Mann – the avowed socialist – the man our history books call the ‘father of American public education’?
I say we close down ALL these decrepit social [-ist] engineering and brainwashing factories. Then present young people and their families with real freedom-of-choice again.
With that accomplished, we should next all go to work and then entirely eliminate the [unconscionably] un-American property taxes which keep feeding this [mind control] cancer!
After that… those bloodsucking central bankers – our SLAVEMASTERS!
[monopoly State] capitalism + [federalism] corporatism + [British ‘Anglo-American’ bankster/big corporate-controlled ‘free trade’] mercantilism + [cultural, ‘socioeconomic’, political] communism
II
II
[world-socialism; syndicalism; neoliberalism; parasitism; totalitarianism]
~communitarianism~
II
II
socialism = gangsterism = slavery
The Invisible Man (1897), by HG Wells
The New World Order (1939), by HG Wells
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDCUXzY9Uzo
A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oormlLCVQKA
The Science of Mass Manipulation Through Crisis Creation
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnUUMs9WIC0
John Maynard Keynes and Economic Fascism
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjer4fTUA-I
UNESCO and the Deliberate Dumbing Down of the Western World
http://CommonCore.org
Common Core
http://InvisibleSerfsCollar.com
Invisible Serfs Collar