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)
Education reform protests pick up steam
By Valerie Strauss
04/20/2012
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/education-reform-protests-pick-up-steam/2012/04/19/gIQA8KiXUT_blog.html
Excerpt:
In Texas, New York, Illinois and other states, protests by parents and educators are getting louder against school reform that insists on using standardized test scores as the basis for evaluating students, educators and schools.
It is too early to call it a full-fledged revolt; Washington D.C. has yet to see tens of thousands of people marching through the streets against high-stakes standardized testing, which has been prominent in American education for a decade and is at the core of the Obama administration’s school accountability efforts.
But opposition is clearly growing, most prominently over “value-added” teacher evaluation models that purport to measure how much “value” a teacher adds to a student’s academic progress by using a complicated formula involving a student’s standardized test score.
Researchers have repeatedly warned that this evaluation method is not reliable — and doesn’t take into account all of the out-of-school reasons that could affect how a student does on a test — but the Obama administration has pushed it and states have been adopting new teacher accountability systems that are heavily weighted to test scores.
In New York, hundreds of professors at colleges and universities have banded together and signed a letter to political and education officials protesting the state’s new educator evaluation system, Annual Professional Performance Review, or APPR, which rests largely on test scores, and asking them to reconsider the reliance on high-stakes tests.
This effort follows one by school principals in New York to protest APPR with a petition that describes APPR is “an unproven, expensive and potentially harmful evaluation system” that “is not the path to lasting school improvement.” At this point, more than 1,432 New York State principals and more than 4,860 friends have signed the petition.
Meanwhile, in Texas, some 345 school districts — out of about 1,030 districts — have adopted a resolution that says that standardized tests are “strangling” public schools and asking the state Board of Education to rethink the testing regime. Those school districts represent more than 1.6 million students.
It was in Texas where the era of high-stakes testing was born. George W. Bush started a test-based accountability program when he was governor and then blew it out into a national education initiative known as No Child Left Behind during his presidency.
Thus it is somewhat ironic that this year Robert Scott, the Republican commissioner of education in Texas, caused a public stir when he told the Texas State Board of Education that the mentality that standardized testing is the “end-all, be-all” is a “perversion” of what a quality education should be. California Gov. Jerry Brown had said essentially the same thing last year. Scott also agreed to postpone by a year a requirement that the results of each end-of-course exam account for 15 percent of a student’s final grade in that course.
It’s impossible to know if Scott’s comments had an effect on any other officials, but The New York Times reported last month that the chief academic officer of New York City’s public schools, Shael Polakow-Suransky, said publicly that he, too, has concerns about APPR because of the value-added formulas that carry so much weight.
KEEPING PUBLIC SCHOOLS PUBLIC
by Barbara Miner
Testing Companies Mine for Gold
Rethinking Schools
Winter 2004/2005
http://www.rethinkingschools.org/special_reports/bushplan/test192.shtml
Excerpt;
There’s gold in them there tests.
Thanks to the testing mandated by the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation, private companies are mining the testing field with all the power their accountants, test-makers, and marketers can muster.
States are likely to spend $1.9 billion to $5.3 billion between 2002 and 2008 to implement NCLB-mandated tests, according to the non-partisan Government Accounting Office (GAO).
Those GAO figures cover just the direct costs of six years of developing, scoring, and reporting the tests—which is performed under contract with private companies. Add in indirect costs, such as the amount of classroom teacher time devoted to coordinating and giving the tests and, increasingly, preparing students with ongoing “practice” tests, and testing experts say the figure could be 8 to 15 times higher.
The amount of education money devoted to standardized tests is only part of the problem. Invariably, the private testing companies that control standardized testing operate behind closed doors with little to no public accountability. They function as subsections of multinational conglomerates that view the U.S. testing industry as just one tentacle of publishing and entertainment empires that span the globe.
“There’s very little oversight of the testing industry,” notes Walt Haney, an education professor at Boston College and a senior researcher at its National Board on Educational Testing and Public Policy (NBETPP). “In fact, there is more public oversight of the pet industry and the food we feed our dogs than there is for the quality of tests we make our kids take.”
Where’s the Outcry?
There has been little public outcry over the fact that private, multinational companies operating beyond public oversight are determining which students, schools, and districts in the United States are deemed “failures” and which are deemed “successes.” Given the secrecy that shrouds testing company operations, information is negligible. What the public doesn’t know, the public doesn’t complain about.
Critics of standardized testing also point to a third problem beyond the amount of money and the secrecy. That’s the problem of missed opportunity. There’s little doubt that the Bush administration’s obsession with standardized tests as the sole determinant of school success has undermined reforms that focus on teaching children to think and to do more than fill in circles on test forms.
“The amount of money spent on standardized testing is not the real problem,” notes Monty Neill, executive director of the Boston-based group FairTest. “The real problem is how it distorts teaching and learning.”
The Testing Explosion
NCLB, introduced two days after George W. Bush took office and passed a year later, instituted an unprecedented level of federal mandates for testing public school students. The mandates built on bipartisan support for a corporate-influenced agenda of increased standardized testing. But NCLB carried that agenda to new levels, both with the number of tests and the harsh sanctions for those schools not meeting predetermined levels of test progress.
NCLB requires annual testing of students in third through eighth grades in mathematics and reading or language arts, and testing once in high school. Beginning in 2007-08, states will also be required to give tests in science at least once in elementary, middle, and high school. All told, there will be 17 NCLB tests each year for school districts. This translates into unfathomable amounts of school time devoted to standardized testing and teaching to those tests. It also creates untold business opportunities for the companies that produce the tests. (If you add in district- and state-mandated tests on top of NCLB requirements, and the growing number of “practice” tests given to students so they will do well on the “real” tests, the number of tests schools must administer skyrockets.)
The Failure of Corporate School Reform: Toward a New Common School Movement
Monday, 05 December 2011
By Kenneth J Saltman, Truthout | Op-Ed
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/5280:the-failure-of-corporate-school-reform-toward-a-new-common-school-movement
Excerpt:
In the United States, a corporate model of schooling has overtaken educational policy, practice, curriculum and nearly all aspects of educational reform.
While this movement began on the political right, the corporate school model has been heralded across the political spectrum and is aggressively embraced by both major parties. Corporate school reformers champion private-sector approaches to reform including, especially, privatization, deregulation and the importation of terms and assumptions from business, while they imagine public schools as private businesses, districts as markets, students as consumers and knowledge as product. Corporate school reform aims to transform public schooling into a private industry nationally by replacing public schools with privately managed charter schools, voucher schemes and tax credit scholarships for private schooling. The massive expansion of deunionized, nonprofit, privately managed charter schools with short-term contracts is an intermediary step toward the declaration of their failure and replacement by the for-profit industry in Educational Management Organizations (EMOs). EMOs extract profit by cutting teacher pay and educational resources while relying on high teacher turnover and labor precarity.(i) Corporate school reform seeks solutions to public problems in private-sector ways, from contracting out schools and services, to union-busting, a wholesale embrace of numerical benchmarking and database tracking and the modeling of schooling and administration on multiple aspects of corporate culture. Policy hawks make demands, for example, for teacher entrepreneurialism, or insist that students dress like retail chain workers and call school heads “CEO”; or install corporate models of numerical “accountability,” paying students for grades and teachers for test scores; or leaders play intricate Wall Street-style shell games with test performance to show rising “return on investment”; or teachers assign students the task of crafting a resume for Benjamin Franklin; BP was involved in creating California’s new science curriculum: the examples are endless.
Despite the fact that corporate school reforms have expanded at an exponential speed, the dominant corporate school reforms have failed on their own terms. Such reformers have insisted on “accountability” through test scores and lowering costs, but it is precisely in reference to these accountability measures that corporate school reforms have failed. The failing policies that are being aggressively implemented nonetheless include: contracting out management to privately managed charters or for-profit educational management organizations;(ii) putting in place voucher schemes or neo-voucher scholarship tax credits;(iii) expanding commercialism;(iv) imposing corporate “turnaround” models on schools and faculty(v) that often involve firing entire faculties and administrations, reducing curriculum and pedagogy to narrow numerically quantifiable and anti-intellectual, anti-critical test-based forms; the creation of “portfolio districts” that imagine districts as a stock portfolio and schools as stock investments;(vi) reorganizing teacher education and educational leadership on the model of the MBA degree;(vii) and the elimination of advanced degrees and certification in favor of pay-for-test-performance schemes such as value added assessment.(viii)
These corporate school reforms are deeply interwoven with commercial interests in the multibillion dollar test and textbook publishing industries, the information technology and database tracking industries and the contracting industries.(ix) The corporate sector has in the last decade positioned education in the United States as a roughly $600 billion per year “industry,” ripe for takeover.(x) As directions for future economic growth are uncertain, public tax money in public services appears to corporations and the super-rich, who are flush from decades of upward redistributions, as tantalizing to pillage.(xi) These upward redistributions of public wealth and governance are particularly obvious in Wisconsin and New Jersey as tax cuts on the super-rich and corporations and slush funds for business development are funded by defunding public and higher education; attacking teacher pay, benefits and unions; expanding privatization schemes including vouchers, charters, tuition fee hikes; and shifting educational costs onto individual working-class and professional-class individuals. The same agenda is being enacted in Michigan, Indiana, Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania – to name a few. Chicago could be considered the blueprint with its Renaissance 2010 plan designed by the Commercial Club and implemented by Arne Duncan. That plan – which resulted in failure to raise test scores or lower costs – succeeded in privatizing and deunionizing about 100 of the 600 schools in the district
Mike,
I’ve missed being around. Things are finally looking up.
Thanks for the link to the HuffPo article.
Outstanding posting and an enlghtening discussion, thanks Elaine.
More on Jeb Bush from today.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/03/jeb-bush-education-foundation_n_2802536.html
Mike Spindell: The Bush family appear to breed oxymorons…and one of their latest is “public” monopolies. See here how the family works their treacheries from generation to generation and from Texas to Florida:
Jeb, George P. Bush push charter schools in Texas
By WILL WEISSERT
Associated Press
AUSTIN, Texas — Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and his rising-political-star son, George P. Bush, urged Texas on Tuesday to dismantle the “monopoly of public education” by dramatically expanding access to charter schools, embracing online learning and overhauling how teachers are evaluated.
But neither man offered any hints about his political future.
The elder Bush, who is often mentioned as a possible contender for president in 2016, told an education forum organized by the Texas Business Leadership Council, “I urge you to be big and bold, and if people get offended, so what?”
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/02/26/3254240/jeb-and-george-p-bush-to-speak.html#storylink=cpy
Regards to you Mike!
Bruce
Bruce,
I did read about that Jeb Bush foray into Texas, which is pretty telling. I think he will definitely run for the nomination next time and get it. check out this link below for further tales of the Bush Crime Family.
http://jonathanturley.org/2012/03/17/a-real-history-of-the-last-sixty-two-years/#more-46802
Mike: That is quite an article you provided. I strongly urge everyone to take a moment and copy that link; send it to all the people you care about…
http://jonathanturley.org/2012/03/17/a-real-history-of-the-last-sixty-two-years/#more-46802
it would be off topic for me to respond to your voice in history with mine in this blog stream: but I have added some tidbits of an outline in return for your presenting yours. I too…sign my name in full when I post. Please take a look back over to your article and see what you think. I must add, however, Truth hurts.
I think a lot of the reactions are based on what people think an educational system should “produce.”
In a society with a government that can’t really handle the reality it has produced, there are competing elements, such as “tell it like it is” vs “tell it like it feels heavenly.”
Thus, the struggle to make education subservient to a particular world view, and the contrary struggle to form world views according to the real world around us.
It is as tough a problem as anything else that matters very much.
Jeb Bush urges Texas to ‘go big or go home’ on school fixes
By TERRENCE STUTZ
Staff Writer
tstutz@dallasnews.com
Published: 27 February 2013 11:54 PM
AUSTIN — Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush gave a burst of attention Wednesday to Republican efforts to overhaul Texas’ public schools.
But it’s unclear whether his high-profile appearance before the Senate Education Committee will boost prospects for the legislative package.
Bush, brother of George W., the former president and Texas governor, urged lawmakers to create a “continuous cycle of reform,” such as expanding school choice. He said that helps spur competition and prods low-performing public schools to get better.
“When you empower the consumer of any service to be on equal footing with the supplier, that yields a better outcome,” he said.
Sen. Dan Patrick, R-Houston, the committee chairman, wants to expand the state’s charter school program and increase options for lower-income families, such as taxpayer-paid vouchers for private schools.
Democrats vow to fight that idea, saying it would hurt public schools.
Bush said Texans needs to think big.
“When you have a chance to reform, it ought to be big. … Go big or go home,” he declared, referring to his Florida initiatives that he said helped students and increased accountability.
What Bush didn’t say: Critics contend Florida is not the model for massive school fixes and has seen lackluster results, such as in its high school graduation rate among minorities.
Bush, a potential presidential candidate in 2016, said the Legislature must be prepared to pay for major changes.
“If you are going to create tough love policies, then you need to fund them.”
The Privatized Mind
by Liza Featherstone
Report Card
Feb. 2012
http://brooklynrail.org/2012/02/local/report-card-the-privatized-mind
Excerpt:
Beyond the odd bake sale or PTA party, capitalism doesn’t belong in our schools.
“Report Card” is not reproaching anyone for participating in schemes like “Power a Bright Future.” Schools are hammered by budget cuts, and of course parents do whatever we can to raise money for good programs. But it’s worth thinking about the values such activities encourage. We are constantly telegraphing the idea that good education is a scarce resource rather than a public good. Or perhaps it’s more like a flat screen TV pilfered from the wreckage in last summer’s riots in London—something we are lucky to get for free, but don’t deserve. Often, in its official literature, a high quality public school will remind parents that it provides a fabulous education with no tuition bill attached, a fact we are expected to receive as a kind of miracle.
This is what privatization looks like. Our public institutions, starved of funds, are desperately kissing up to corporate America. Worse, our expectations are privatized. We’re thinking of education as a prize—won by fierce competition or dumb luck—rather than a right.
The private money is everywhere. Our neighborhoods continue to be bombarded with charter schools that could not exist without the financial and corporate elites. Success Academy, the hedge fund-powered entity discussed in the last “Report Card” column, continues to expand like the pre-recession Starbucks, though parents and Occupy forces are still resisting Success Williamsburg. Achievement First, a charter chain known for excessive discipline, which operates in Brooklyn’s poorest neighborhoods, gets money from the Bank of America and Moody’s foundations, as well as Merck, Wyeth, and plenty of hedge funds. But the private sector even underwrites some of our neighborhood schools: Park Slope’s P.S. 321’s website thanks real estate giant Corcoran, calling it “our marquee sponsor.”
In return for such genuflection, capital is looting our schools. New York city and state are spending hundreds of millions enriching hucksters who peddle wrong-headed teacher evaluation schemes and unproven technology while our schools lack money for the basics (music, gym, substitute teachers). Somehow our school system can’t afford things that have been proven to reduce the achievement gap between rich and poor, like reducing class size, yet has plenty of money to waste on anything that enriches the technology sector—or former Department of Education officials.
While New York State still does not allow for-profit charter schools, the city is coming dangerously close, expanding its School of One program—now operating in one school in Chinatown—to four more schools. School of One is a name and concept eerily appropriate to our education zeitgeist, because privatization is not only a funding strategy; it is a pedagogy and an experience. The program has been touted as breathtakingly innovative—for allowing children to spend much of their day alone in front of a computer. The founder of the school, Joel Rose, is also the CEO of a firm formed last August solely to provide services to School of One in return for the rights to the technology and intellectual property. In the current edutech bubble, Rose will presumably make a fortune.
Public schooling should draw families into the public sphere and make us more engaged citizens. But the privatization of the system has quite the opposite effect. Parents act more like consumers than members of a community, simply switching schools when we are unhappy with our kids’ education, though an extensive body of research shows that this practice hurts our kids and their schools. We are like drivers sitting in traffic, constantly switching lanes to get ahead, and thus snarling the traffic even more.
Mike,
We may be able to run–but we can’t hide from the Bushes.
“Maine’s education commissioner had just returned to his Augusta office last October after a three-day trip to San Francisco where he attended a summit of conservative education reformers convened by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education, which had paid for the trip.”
Elaine,
I find it very interesting that we see the name of Bush rear its ugly head again. Jeb, who I think will run and get the 2016 Republican nomination, is using the same tactic used by his daddy and his brother. If you remember
G.H.W. Bush called himself “the Education President” and G.W. Bush gave us the terrible “No Child Left Behind”. That the seldom heard of Marvin Bush is involved financially with the supply of educations materials, this seems a field of family interests. Another murky interest of the “Bush Crime Family” and we all know how well their ascendancy to power has worked out for this country.
Mike,
I’ve met Irene Fountas and know of her work. She’s no Marxist.
Here’s some information about her:
Guided Reading expert Irene Fountas is a professor at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and has extensive experience as a classroom teacher, language arts specialist, and consultant in school districts across the nation and abroad. Currently, she directs field-based literacy research projects and continues to publish resources for comprehensive literacy programs including guided reading resource guides that quickly become staples for guided reading education across the country.
With her coauthor Gay Su Pinnell, she has written Guided Reading: Good First Teaching for All Children; Guided Readers and Writers grades 3-6: Teaching Comprehension, Genre and Content Literacy; Word Matters: Teaching Phonics and Spelling in the Reading/Writing Classroom; and Phonics Lessons: Letters, Words and How They Work (for kindergarten, grade one, and grade two).
She is the recipient of the Greater Boston Council and the International Reading Association’s Celebrate Literacy Award.
http://www.eduplace.com/marketing/leveledreaders/forum/bio.html
“Mike,
I’ve met Irene Fountas and know of her work. She’s no Marxist.”
Elaine,
The truth is that almost all the people who tend to call other people Marxists, are quite ignorant of what that term stands for. BTW, it’s good to see you back and in top form. We’ve missed you of late and hope things are now in good order.
Robin,
What also specifically bothers me about your comments and “Lark’s”, might be your doppelganger, is that Elaine’s evidence is both copious and persuasive, is the supplementary evidence added in the links from Bruce E. Woych. However, in the three comments from you, not one bit of attention is paid to Elaine’s points, rather they are cavalierly dismissed with your own self-reference. It’s fine for you to push your viewpoints, but in doing so you add nothing to the discussion of this thread. Because I try to read each comment fairly to then further examine my own positions, I had to take time to see what you were writing about. Frankly, my time at your blog wasn’t worth it.
Maybe the present “School Model,” whether public or private, is outdated and a new model needed? –
http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_build_a_school_in_the_cloud.html
September 13, 2012
Special Report: The profit motive behind virtual schools in Maine
Documents expose the flow of money and influence from corporations that stand to profit from state leaders’ efforts to expand and deregulate digital education.
By Colin Woodard
Portland Press Herald
http://www.pressherald.com/news/virtual-schools-in-maine_2012-09-02.html
Excerpt;
Stephen Bowen was excited and relieved.
Maine’s education commissioner had just returned to his Augusta office last October after a three-day trip to San Francisco where he attended a summit of conservative education reformers convened by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education, which had paid for the trip.
He’d heard presentations on the merits of full-time virtual public schools – ones without classrooms, playgrounds or in-person teachers – and watched as Bush unveiled the “first ever” report card praising the states that had given online schools the widest leeway.
But what had Bowen especially enthusiastic was his meeting with Bush’s top education aide, Patricia Levesque, who runs the foundation but is paid through her private firm, which lobbies Florida officials on behalf of online education companies.
Bowen was preparing an aggressive reform drive on initiatives intended to dramatically expand and deregulate online education in Maine, but he felt overwhelmed.
“I have no ‘political’ staff who I can work with to move this stuff through the process,” he emailed her from his office.
Levesque replied not to worry; her staff in Florida would be happy to suggest policies, write laws and gubernatorial decrees, and develop strategies to ensure they were implemented.
“When you suggested there might be a way for us to get some policy help, it was all I could do not to jump for joy,” Bowen wrote Levesque from his office.
“Let us help,” she responded.
So was a partnership formed between Maine’s top education official and a foundation entangled with the very companies that stand to make millions of dollars from the policies it advocates.
In the months that followed, according to more than 1,000 pages of emails obtained by a public records request, the commissioner would rely on the foundation to provide him with key portions of his education agenda. These included draft laws, the content of the administration’s digital education strategy and the text of Gov. Paul LePage’s Feb. 1 executive order on digital education.
A Maine Sunday Telegram investigation found large portions of Maine’s digital education agenda are being guided behind the scenes by out-of-state companies that stand to capitalize on the changes, especially the nation’s two largest online education providers.
Education reform as a business
Posted by Valerie Strauss on January 9, 2013
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/01/09/education-reform-as-a-business/
Did you know that the education sector now represents nearly 9 percent of the country’s gross domestic product? That for-profit education is valued at $1.3 trillion, and is one of the largest U.S. investment markets?
These facts were part of an advertisement for a conference for investors in for-profit education ventures, just one example of how much the profit motive has entered into the public education arena. The conference is one of two examples of how school reform has become little more than a business in some arenas (and just how removed some reformers have gotten from classrooms and the actual dynamic of teaching and learning).
If you had wanted to attend this conference for private equity investing in for-profit education companies, you missed it, (but you did save the walk-in fee of $1,495). Featured at the conference were “20 education experts,” none of whom are actually teachers.
*****
The Conference:
Private Equity Investing in For-Profit Education Companies
How Breakdowns in Traditional Models & Applications of New Technologies
Are Driving Change
http://capitalroundtable.com/masterclass/For-Profit-Education-Conference.html
Excellent article Elaine.
Thank You,
Responding to the Gates Foundation: How do we Consider Evidence of Learning in Teacher Evaluations?
By Anthony Cody on August 8, 2012
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2012/08/responding_to_the_gates_founda.html
Excerpt:
The Gates Foundation continues to fund Teach For America, Stand For Children, The Media Bullpen, the National Council for Teacher Quality, Teach Plus, The New Teacher Project, and literally scores of other groups which carry on campaigns to undermine due process for teachers, and actively lobby for coercive legislation that forces public schools to use faulty test scores for the purposes of teacher evaluation, against the best judgment of administrators and academic experts.
The Gates Foundation gave $2 million to promote Waiting For Superman, a movie rife with falsehoods about public education, which greatly promoted the hostile climate in which we find ourselves.
Ms. Phillips’ post focuses almost exclusively on the work of the Measures of Effective Teaching Project, an initiative of the Gates Foundation. While the Gates Foundation has invested upwards of $300 million in this project, they have spent several billion over the past few years funding other groups who are active partisans in the war on the teaching profession. We have not yet seen enough of the systems under development by the MET project to really understand them, so I will focus my attention on the other fruits borne by Gates Foundation investments.
The first question that arises when discussing teacher effectiveness is how we measure student learning. While Ms. Phillips distances herself from the use of test scores, this has been central to the reforms advanced by the Gates Foundation thus far. It is possible that the MET project will chart new ground, but before it does so, it will need to reverse all the policies and laws mandating evaluation systems that rely on test scores that have been passed at the insistence of the Gates Foundation and programs it has funded.
Researcher Walter Stroup has given the testing paradigm a much-needed shaking up, in his report, on the way standardized tests have been constructed, as reported in the New York Times.
He focused on classes of students that had made significant strides in their understanding of math concepts. When he reviewed their standardized test scores, he discovered very little improvement, in spite of their learning gains. How could this be? He discovered that the test designer’s goal was not to create a test that was sensitive to learning, but rather was to rank students, to reproduce the spread of outcomes that we expect. These tests are “insensitive” to a great deal of learning, and of little use in evaluating the quality of instruction. Therefore, when the Gates Foundation (and its myriad sponsored projects) insist that test data be our guiding star, we are often misled.
This is no surprise to teachers. The Gates/Scholastic survey of teachers found that only 28% of teachers see standardized tests as an essential or important gauge of student assessment, and only 26% say they are accurate as a reflection of student knowledge. Another question reveals part of the reason this may be so – only 45% of teachers think their students take these tests seriously, or perform to the best of their ability.
Melinda Gates recently said on Nightline, “An effective teacher in front of a student, that student will make three times the gains in a school year that another student will make.” Math teacher Gary Rubinstein did some digging to figure out that the source of this statistic is a very weak twenty-year-old study by Eric Hanushek, an economist who has also “proven” that money does not matter in educational quality.
The sad truth about Monopolist Shark turned “Philanthropist” Bill Gates, is that his philanthropy has consistently been self serving. Microsoft, was and is a malicious company, which was built in his image. Why would we expect that this pirate would suddenly turn into a benefactor?
Leading Economist: Gates Value-Added Research Deeply Flawed, Ignores Its Own Data
By Kevin Hart
January 13, 2011
http://neatoday.org/2011/01/13/leading-economist-gates-value-added-research-deeply-flawed-ignores-its-own-data/
Excerpt:
One of the country’s leading economists is warning that a Gates Foundation study on value-added teacher evaluation not only fails to meet key academic standards, but that it dangerously misinterprets its own data.
Last month, the Gates Foundation released the first report of the Measures of Effective Teaching project, and the report claimed to find strong evidence for a value-added teacher evaluation model, where teachers are evaluated based on student progress on standardized tests.
But a report by University of California at Berkeley economist Jesse Rothstein, former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor and a former senior economist for the Council of Economic Advisers, found that the report was based on flawed research and conclusions that were contradicted by the study’s own data.
“In fact, the preliminary MET results contain important warning signs about the use of value-added scores for high-stakes teacher evaluations,” Rothstein wrote in his analysis of the research. “These warnings, however, are not heeded in the preliminary report, which interprets all of the results as support for the use of value-added models in teacher evaluation… This limits the report’s value and undermines the MET Project’s credibility.”
Rothstein’s critique of the study, scathing by academic standards, found that some of the correlations presented and conclusions reached in the MET research were “shockingly weak.”
In particular, Rothstein wondered how the report can reach its main conclusion that “a teacher’s past track record of value-added is among the strongest predictors of their students’ achievement gains in other classes and academic years,” when the report did not attempt to study the strength of several other possible predictors.
Rothstein’s analysis seems to validate a concern that many educators had about the report when it was released – that it was designed to reach predetermined conclusions. The conclusions that should have been reached, Rothstein wrote, would cast serious doubt about whether a value-added model is useful at all in teacher evaluation.
For example, 40 percent of the teachers who scored in the bottom quartile based on their students’ state standardized test scores actually placed in the top half of teachers when an alternative assessment was used.
That means, Rothstein wrote, that a value-added model based on standardized state test scores is only slightly more reliable than flipping a coin when used to determine whether a teacher is effective.
“In particular, the correlations between value-added scores on state and alternative assessments are so small that they cast serious doubt on the entire value-added enterprise,” Rothstein wrote.
lyris65,
I’m fortunate that I have the time to provide daycare for my granddaughter three days a week. I have thousands of children’s books that I collected over the years–some of which I have shared with her. Board books are great for babies. My Julia has been gentle with my hardcover picture books. She turns the pages without tearing them. Two of the words she says quite often are “book” and “read.” She’ll select a book, hand it to me, and climb into my lap. She also enjoys many of the Baby Genius programs on TV–which are about the alphabet, counting, nursery rhymes, etc. I recently found a good Youtube channel for her called Kids TV 123.
Here’s one of her favorite Kids TV Videos. She’s “into” trains at the present time.