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)
Yeah, those stifling unions that brought you a minimum wage, an end to child labor, a forty hour work week, benefits and collective bargaining are sure a pain in the ass.
Collective bargaining is so important a right in light of the abuses of the industrial revolution that it was protected by Congress when they enacted the National Labor Relations Act in 1935 in partial response to the abuses of management in the period leading up to the market crash of ’29 like the Battle of Matewan in 1920.
It sure sucks that the one bulwark still standing against corporate and management abuses is standing in the way of men teaching.
Cryin’ freakn’ shame. *sniff**snort**HONK*
The public education has always been geared toward our capitalist system. At about the same time that our economy changed from industrial to service/technical, unions came to power. Unions are not well @ adapting except in rare instances [Ford Motor and the auto union being a positive example, that’s why they didn’t need or want a bailout]. Because of the stifling nature of unions, men have for the most part abandoned teaching. As you should know, the teaching force is currently ~80% female. That % is even higher in grammar school, where you worked FOR 30 YEARS!!! I’ve been told that @ least 20 times. These SUCCESSFUL, TALENTED, BRILLIANT billionaires are trying to have their SUCCESS become a part of a failed public system that has catered to the adults running it instead of the kids. I heard the Chicago union leader mock Duncan’s lisp. I guess calling him a “dunderhead” is slightly less classless. Is Ms. Gordilla is your hero? Mexico had the most powerful teachers union in the world.
Arne “Dunderhead” Duncan is your hero? Go figure.
*****
“I am heartened also that those evil billionaires like Gates, Zuckerburg, Brin and the late Steve Jobs are stepping up and showing how public education can be successful like it was when I was a kid.’
*****
Can you please provide an explanation of what you mean by that statement? I don’t know how old you are–but that corporate-style education that you seem to admire was not in vogue when I attended grammar and high school in the 1950s and early 1960s.
“Bee in my bonnet!” Is Ike still prez?
I believe this country was heading toward a situation where an Elba Esther Gordillo would have been running our schools. One of the good things Obama has done is hire Arnie Duncan and start putting kids first. I am heartened also that those evil billionaires like Gates, Zuckerburg, Brin and the late Steve Jobs are stepping up and showing how public education can be successful like it was when I was a kid. We go through this dance everytime you write a polemic on this topic. We simply disagree, however I do admire your persistance. Sadly, your fighting is akin to those stranded Japanese soldiers on deserted islands still fighting WW2 in the 1950’s. The unions had their shot..they failed our kids. Time for plan B.
Gene,
Holiday Inn Express?
nick,
You certainly have a bee in your bonnet. In your close-minded world all teachers are bad…their unions are all evil. Then again, my teaching experience of more than three decades pales in comparison to your lengthy career as an educator.
Tony, I just respectfully disagree. I have seen teachers use kids as pawns. It is too common for teachers to stop doing functions like writing letters for students, doing extracurricular work, etc. when there is a contract being negotiated. Happens all the time. And the even sicker thing is the union teachers get their kids to march for them. The kids love their teachers and so they do it. It’s like a Jerry Lewis telethon only the kids can walk. How in the hell does that comport w/ what you just wrote? Again, the FIRST duty of a union is to protect it’s members. In the aforementioned circumstances unions do indeed protect their members on the backs of kids and parents. Probably the strongest teachers union is in Wi. where I live. They simply walked out and got phoney doc excuses when they didn’t like some legislation that was passed. They hung students and parents out to dry w/ that hissy fit. And, they lost a lot of support from people who were w/ them for that illegal work action.
Is having an attorney present also one of my rights? Can I make a phone call?
Mike,
I think it was Billy Joel who once said, “Honesty is such a lonely word.”
A Battle Between Education and Business Goals
By Pauline Lipman (Lipman is a professor of educational policy studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago and author of “The New Political Economy of Urban Education: Neoliberalism, Race and the Right to the City.”
9/12/12
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/09/11/must-teachers-and-school-officials-be-foes/a-battle-between-education-and-business-goals
Chicago was the birthplace of neoliberal education reform — high-stakes testing, closing neighborhood public schools and turning them over to private operators, expanding charter schools, running schools like businesses, test-based teacher evaluation, prescribed standards, and mayoral control of schools.
Over the past 15 years, these policies were promoted nationally by corporate philanthropies, conservative think tanks, and recently by billionaire-initiated education reform organizations like Stand for Children and Education Reform Now. The Chicago agenda became the official national agenda when President Obama appointed Chicago’s chief executive schools, Arne Duncan, to be his Secretary of Education.
The first thing Duncan did was fly to Detroit and tell that financially devastated school system that they would have an infusion of federal funds, but only if they did things very differently – that is, implement the Chicago model. That model became the criteria for awarding $4.3 billion in federal funds to states, known as Race to the Top.
Yet, closing schools has destabilized students and communities and had little positive effect on achievement. Test-based merit pay has been shown to have little validity as a measure of teacher effectiveness. And charter schools are doing no better, and sometimes worse, than regular public schools and are more racially segregated.
But more deeply, at the school level, there is plenty of research showing that these policies have reduced the curriculum to what is tested, demoralized teachers and degraded the teaching force, and left parents and students with no public school options in their communities.
These are not education policies, but rather business policies applied to schools with business goals: promoting top-down management, weakening unions, shifting the purpose of education to labor force preparation, and opening up the $2 trillion dollar global education sector to the market.
Despite efforts by educators, researchers, and parents nationally to contest this agenda, it has become the new status quo. This is why Chicago teachers are on strike.
After absorbing 15 punishing years of these policies, they have had enough. Compensation is not their biggest concern. They are fighting for respect and for a vision of public education that is grounded in equity, respect for teachers, a rich well-rounded education for all students, and the financing priorities to realize it.
Mike,
When I taught at a university, I came across very few students who wrote more than was required of them.
Nick: There is no fundamental lie in a teacher’s union, the point of the union is indeed to protect teachers, so they can spend more time on children and less time fighting a rear-guard action against those that would corrupt the curriculum with politics, religion and favoritism, and make it impossible for them to teach.
If I run a hospital and say my focus is on patient care, I am not lying just because I also have to pay doctors, nurses, janitors, repair techs, orderlies, and administrative staff, and for electricity and water. My paying those people and those expenses, and drawing a salary for myself, does not suddenly make it about us. We can’t serve patients if we don’t pay those bills.
The same thing goes for teacher’s unions: They cannot withstand the forces that would corrupt the school on their own, they need the protection of the union in order to create an environment in which they have enough security to be able to teach kids without interference. Without being threatened by principles or school board members for refusing to do favors for their friends and “important” people, without being subjected to favoritism, without being forced to quit and find a higher paying job with their degree. Teachers already accept a much lower income than they COULD earn in order to teach, my sister doubled her income in a year when she gave up after 15 years of teaching.
Having an organization with influence protect you is a necessity if you want to concentrate on teaching and kids. The union provides that service.
nick,
This isn’t high school–and this post wasn’t an assignment. Jonathan gives us free range as to the topics we choose to write about. There are no restrictions on the length of our posts or the number of comments we may leave on our own articles.
The school reform movement is a subject that I’m very interested in. I saw what it was doing to the educational system in the district where I taught for more than three decades. It’s the reason I left the classroom. I knew I wouldn’t be able to teach the way I had for many years. I knew I’d be much more restricted in the classroom…and that I’d be expected to spend valuable class time prepping my students for mandated high stakes tests. Tests are not what should drive education programs. What should drive education programs is getting children excited about learning, opening up their minds to the world, science, literature, new things, and tapping into their creativity and problem solving abilities.
When I taught high school history there were always the students when the assignment was 5 pages they would submit 18 pages. I took points off and realized I was most probably alone in doing that by the student’s reaction. Often times, less is more. However, thanks for your generous sharing of info.
As an investigator I learned when a person I interviewed evaded a question, that it meant they had something to hide.
“When I taught high school history there were always the students when the assignment was 5 pages they would submit 18 pages. I took points off and realized I was most probably alone in doing that by the student’s reaction. Often times, less is more. However, thanks for your generous sharing of info.
As an investigator I learned when a person I interviewed evaded a question, that it meant they had something to hide.”
Nick,
Chickensh*t, Bullsh*t and dishonest to boot. Your comments were obviously done in criticism of Elaine and yet you lack the courage to express it openly.
You have the right to disagree and you have the right to criticize, but one would hope you would at least do it with honesty.
Most of us appreciate Elaine’s thoroughness. We know that if she posts something that it is well researched and well thought out.
Mike,
Thanks. I think it’s of great import to show how corporations, “astro-turf” groups, and billionaires with agendas are the real driving forces behind the school reform movement. Their tentacles are everywhere. Now, we are beginning to uncover and understand what these individuals and groups have been doing “under the radar” for years.
nick,
I often continue to do research on subjects that I write posts about. I believe in sharing the information that I find. Do you think that is noteworthy?
60 of 140 comments have been made by the guest blogger on this thread. I’m not sure what that means, but it is noteworthy.
“60 of 140 comments have been made by the guest blogger on this thread. I’m not sure what that means,”
Nick,
What it means is this:
Elaine took what was an excellent guest blog, full of valuable information and made it even more valuable, by adding numerous links with further information. This blog and thread have become a thorough, go to resource for those who are concerned about the corporatization of our education system.
It’s not just Bill Gates who is trying to upset the applecart. The late Steve Jobs, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerburg, et al are also looking to destroy our highly successful education system. What evil people the wealthy are..EVIL!
How Online Learning Companies Bought America’s Schools
Lee Fang
November 16, 2011
http://www.thenation.com/article/164651/how-online-learning-companies-bought-americas-schools
Excerpt:
If the national movement to “reform” public education through vouchers, charters and privatization has a laboratory, it is Florida. It was one of the first states to undertake a program of “virtual schools”—charters operated online, with teachers instructing students over the Internet—as well as one of the first to use vouchers to channel taxpayer money to charter schools run by for-profits.
But as recently as last year, the radical change envisioned by school reformers still seemed far off, even there. With some of the movement’s cherished ideas on the table, Florida Republicans, once known for championing extreme education laws, seemed to recoil from the fight. SB 2262, a bill to allow the creation of private virtual charters, vastly expanding the Florida Virtual School program, languished and died in committee. Charlie Crist, then the Republican governor, vetoed a bill to eliminate teacher tenure. The move, seen as a political offering to the teachers unions, disheartened privatization reform advocates. At one point, the GOP’s budget proposal even suggested a cut for state aid going to virtual school programs.
Lamenting this series of defeats, Patricia Levesque, a top adviser to former Governor Jeb Bush, spoke to fellow reformers at a retreat in October 2010. Levesque noted that reform efforts had failed because the opposition had time to organize. Next year, Levesque advised, reformers should “spread” the unions thin “by playing offense” with decoy legislation. Levesque said she planned to sponsor a series of statewide reforms, like allowing taxpayer dollars to go to religious schools by overturning the so-called Blaine Amendment, “even if it doesn’t pass…to keep them busy on that front.” She also advised paycheck protection, a unionbusting scheme, as well as a state-provided insurance program to encourage teachers to leave the union and a transparency law to force teachers unions to show additional information to the public. Needling the labor unions with all these bills, Levesque said, allows certain charter bills to fly “under the radar.”
If Levesque’s blunt advice sounds like that of a veteran lobbyist, that’s because she is one. Levesque runs a Tallahassee-based firm called Meridian Strategies LLC, which lobbies on behalf of a number of education-technology companies. She is a leader of a coalition of government officials, academics and virtual school sector companies pushing new education laws that could benefit them.
But Levesque wasn’t delivering her hardball advice to her lobbying clients. She was giving it to a group of education philanthropists at a conference sponsored by notable charities like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation. Indeed, Levesque serves at the helm of two education charities, the Foundation for Excellence in Education, a national organization, and the Foundation for Florida’s Future, a state-specific nonprofit, both of which are chaired by Jeb Bush. A press release from her national group says that it fights to “advance policies that will create a high quality digital learning environment.”
Despite the clear conflict of interest between her lobbying clients and her philanthropic goals, Levesque and her team have led a quiet but astonishing national transformation. Lobbyists like Levesque have made 2011 the year of virtual education reform, at last achieving sweeping legislative success by combining the financial firepower of their corporate clients with the seeming legitimacy of privatization-minded school-reform think tanks and foundations. Thanks to this synergistic pairing, policies designed to boost the bottom lines of education-technology companies are cast as mere attempts to improve education through technological enhancements, prompting little public debate or opposition. In addition to Florida, twelve states have expanded virtual school programs or online course requirements this year. This legislative juggernaut has coincided with a gold rush of investors clamoring to get a piece of the K-12 education market. It’s big business, and getting bigger: One study estimated that revenues from the K-12 online learning industry will grow by 43 percent between 2010 and 2015, with revenues reaching $24.4 billion.