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Public Schools for Sale?: Diane Ravitch Talks with Bill Moyers about the Privatization of Public Education
Diane Ravitch Education Historian
Diane Ravitch
Education Historian

Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Weekend Contributor

Diane Ravitch is Research Professor of Education at New York University, a historian of education, and author of more than ten books—including The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn (2003) and The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education (2010). Ravitch served as Assistant Secretary of Education from 1991 to 1993 during the administration of George H. W. Bush. When she was Assistant Secretary, she led the federal effort to promote the creation of voluntary state and national academic standards. “From 1997 to 2004, she was a member of the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the federal testing program. She was appointed by the Clinton administration’s Secretary of Education Richard Riley in 1997 and reappointed by him in 2001. From 1995 until 2005, she held the Brown Chair in Education Studies at the Brookings Institution and edited Brookings Papers on Education Policy. Before entering government service, she was Adjunct Professor of History and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University.”

Ravitch, once a champion of charter schools, supported the No Child Left Behind initiative. After careful investigation, Ravitch changed her mind and became one of our country’s most well-known critics of charter-based education. She believes that “the privatization of public education has to stop.” In late March, Ravitch sat down with Bill Moyers on Moyers & Company to discuss the subject of privatizing of public schools—which has become “big business as bankers, hedge fund managers and private equity investors are entering what they consider to be an ‘emerging market.’” You can view a video of that program, Public Schools for Sale?, below the fold.

 Public Schools for Sale?

 

SOURCES

Public Schools for Sale? (Moyers & Company)

Charter Schools Gone Wild: Study Finds Widespread Fraud, Mismanagement and Waste (Moyers and Company)

Diane Ravtich: Curriculum Vitae

 

FURTHER READING

A Look at Some of the Driving Forces behind the School Reform Movement and the Effort to Privatize Public Education (Res Ipsa Loquitor)

Charter Schools and The Profit Motive (Res Ipsa Loquitor)

From the ABC’s of Privatizing Public Education: A Is for ALEC, I is for iPad…and P Is for Profits (Res Ipsa Loquitor)

 

166 thoughts on “Public Schools for Sale?: Diane Ravitch Talks with Bill Moyers about the Privatization of Public Education”

  1. The charter-school lie: Market-based education gambles with our children
    New proof that vouchers and charter schools don’t reform education, just subject it to the whims of businessmen
    Jeff Bryant
    11/4/13
    http://www.salon.com/2013/11/04/the_charter_school_lie_market_based_education_gambles_with_our_children/

    Excerpt:
    Just 10 days into a new academic year, classes were abruptly over at one North Carolina charter school this year.

    In September, parents who had enrolled their children in Kinston Charter Academy received a letter from the principal directing them to take their children someplace else.

    According to a local news report, a mere two days prior to those letters being received, the local board met in an emergency session to close the school after “low performance and disciplinary challenges made the enrollment numbers dwindle.”

    Said one dismayed parent, “I feel like we should have got more notice. If they was going to close the school, they should’ve gone ahead and let us know that before we enrolled the kids.”

    Meanwhile, folks at the North Carolina Justice Center are wondering what the school did with the $666,818 in state education funding it received in July that was supposed to last through October. The school had actually been overfunded for 366 students, but only 230 students enrolled.

    Hundreds of miles away in Philadelphia, parents received a similar notice, this time not by a letter from the principal but from a notice on a website. Due to “safety concerns and financial instability,” Solomon Charter School was abruptly closed to its 330 students.

    The school, a cyber charter that was supposed to deliver instruction over the Internet, also demanded parents return computer equipment to the school.

    “I was just trying to get him a good education,” said one parent, “and now I don’t know where he will go.”

    “No type of warning,” said another. “We bring our kids to school Monday; they say the school is shut down… it’s closing for good, so what are we to do?”

    In the meantime, according to news reports, state officials are wondering why a school that was required by law to hold classes online was holding classes in an unsafe building instead – oh, and in a building that happened to also house a clinic for sexual and pornography offenders.

    “Another charter school has closed,” began a recent article in a Florida paper, leaving 60 students in the lurch – only this time without bothering to tell district officials beforehand.

    In Ohio, at least 15 charter schools have abruptly closed this year – most don’t even bother to list a reason.

    In Detroit, a city wracked by debt and bankruptcy, officials scrambled to close a failed charter school by Oct. 31 this year, due to the school’s debts, which exceeded $400,000.

    According to The Washington Post, Washington, D.C., spent over $1 million on closing failed charter schools from 2008-2012.

    More cities are following the lead of districts like Chicago, where the largest shutdown of public schools in the nation’s history occurred at the very same time that new private charter schools were being expanded by the district.

    Abruptly opening and closing schools – leaving school children, parents and communities in the lurch and taxpayers holding the bag – is not a matter of happenstance. It’s by design.

    The design in mind, of course, is being called a “market.” Parents and taxpayers who used to rely on having public schools as anchor institutions in their communities – much like they rely on fire and police stations, parks and rec centers, and the town hall – are being told that the education of children is now subject to the whims of “the market.”

    The supposed benefit to all this is that parents get a “choice” about where they send their children to school. But while parents are pushed to pick their schools on the increasingly turbulent bazaar of “choice,” the game resembles much less a level playing field and much more a game of chance in which the house rules determine the odds. And too many of the nation’s families – and their communities – are getting caught up in a crapshoot with our children’s education at stake.

    Whether from charters or voucher-funded private schools, the explosive growth of crapshoot schools is fast becoming the norm. And too few are asking, “At what risks?”

    1. Elaine – I am not sure about other states, but the state of Arizona is starting to close traditional public schools. Those students are forced to go elsewhere. I notice your articles did not go into the tragically low scores of traditional public schools. Is it better to roll the dice to put my kid in a charter school where they have a chance to a good education or should I continue to keep them in a school with abysmal test scores? Even if the new school closes, it usually does not take more than a day or two to get the students in a new school.

  3. John

    Public school/college is not about education, it is about redistribution of wealth.

    Why are union teachers (when they’re not on strike) so afraid of free markets? Why are they horrified of professional scrutiny? How do they rationalize robbing the infinitely “deep pocketed” taxpayers?

    *****

    Who’s being robbed? I live in Massachusetts. The tax rate on our former governor Mitt Romeny’s unearned income was less than half that of working folks’ earned income.

    Why would a society want to educate its children? We should abolish public education. Too bad if your parents are poor and can’t afford to send you to school. It would be better if the United States emulated third world countries.
    Why can’t young kids get jobs and pay for their schooling?

  4. It’s truly sad to actually see the “Constitutional Crisis” encouraged and applauded on Professor Turley’s website.

    “Without liberty, law loses its nature and its name, and becomes oppression. Without law, liberty also loses its nature and its name, and becomes licentiousness.” James Wilson, Of the Study of the Law in the United States, 1790

    “Our Consolation must be this, my dear, that Cities may be rebuilt, and a People reduced to Poverty, may acquire fresh Property: But a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty once lost is lost forever. When the People once surrender their share in the Legislature, and their Right of defending the Limitations upon the Government, and of resisting every Encroachment upon them, they can never regain it.” John Adams, Letter to Abigail Adams, 7 July 1775

  5. Excuse me. The Constitution has no faults.

    The fault lies in the reader.

    Again:

    “Well, that’s it. You see what you want to see and you hear what you want to hear.”

    —Nilsson, The Point (1971)

    Most “academics” and “intellectuals” refuse to hear the words of the Founders in their writings and in the Preamble, in which government is limited to security and infrastructure and “the blessings of liberty” are the endeavors and businesses of citizens conducted in private, free markets without governmental interference, including the education, healthcare and charity industries. The Founders promoted the general welfare and deliberately excluded individual welfare. The right to private property includes money which excludes redistribution of wealth. You can’t take money from one man to give it to another. That would nullify the Constitution and make private property public. The government has the power to tax to fund governmental operations.

    Once you grasp the CONTEXT of America as stated in the writings of the Founders and in the Preamble, you grasp the perfection of the document; you understand that the Communist Manifesto IS DIFFERENT and NOT THE SAME – “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” – even as America has implemented most the Manifesto’s principles and programs.

    Freedom MANDATES self-reliance and that is what the Constitution did.

    America has been hijacked by communists who call themselves progressives so that you will be fooled.

    Did it work?

  6. Annie,

    What law needs to be broken for students to not pay their debts that they signed up for not me? You still haven’t explained why I should be responsible for others personal choices?

    What law did President Bush break in going to war? I’m pretty sure he got congress’ approval.

  7. History teachers who teach revisionist history are pretty useless.

    1. Annie – you are going to have to define ‘revisionist history’

  8. To read comments here showing an absolute ignorance of history, and how intransigent Congress has been over the centuries, makes me often think we should have a test before people are allowed to vote! Obama cultists w/ a middle school knowledge of history.

  9. Annie – you are aware that the Emancipation Declaration did not free one slave?

  10. No, Lincoln did GOOD for humankind. Are we such mindless robots that we think that EVERY law is just? How do you think slavery, the women’s vote, laws that allowed child labor, etc.etc. were changed if not for people who had the guts to break some of those bad laws? Where were the Consitutional purists when Bush was enacting his imperial Presidency? What happened to all those independent libertarians? I think it was LIP SERVICE.

  11. Little Orphan,

    The Law of Nations, Vattel, was considered the legal reference and university text by most in that era.

    Blackstone and English common law was literally rejected by many Framers who had fought a war to reject things British. They were revolutionaries with revolutionary frames of mind. The wrote a new constitution and it included the new phrase, “natural born citizen” which they understood was engendered by “parents” which existed in the Law of Nations.

    Vattel’s “parents” was understood by the framers. Read Vattel and Ben Franklin’s letter about how he was happy to receive copies of The Law of Nations and that the Framers “pounced” on them.

    Ask yourself if anything passed from mothers in that era. Everything flowed from fathers…estates, titles, etc. The Law of Nations made “fathers” as citizens mandatory.

    The Founders expounded on the imperative of precluding “foreign allegiances” which can’t possibly be imagined if a candidate’s father is a citizen of a foreign country. The Founders adhered to Vattel and he said “parents” and “fathers.”

    All Presidents, save one who hid the fact by fraud, had two parents as citizens, adhering to the definition of natural born citizen that everyone understood.

    You refuse to do due diligence in your research and decide on the basis of ideology, not facts.

    “Well, that’s it. You see what you want to see and you hear what you want to hear.”

    —Nilsson, The Point (1971)

    P.S. Some have indicated that The Law of Nations was unreadable by the Founders as it wasn’t translated from French until 1800. The language of England was previously French. The upper class in the 18th century spoke French. George Washington and many, if not most, Founders spoke French. English law was conducted in French until the mid 18th century.

  12. John,

    I agree with most of what you wrote. The only thing I would say is that colleges like Harvard aren’t as private as you think. When the govt. steals our property to give it to college students to pay for their loans, I don’t consider that private anymore. Annie in her group will have no answer for the question of why should I have to help pay for their personal choices be it education, contraception, children etc….

  13. “Looks like our awful terrible President is bypassing Congress again with an Executive order by helping graduates with student loan debt. What a despicable dictator! Shame on this imperial President, what a Nixon wannabe. Maybe he will continue his lawlessness with some Executive action on illegal immigration. He will go down in history as our worst President ever”

    Celebrating and encouraging this behavior.

    Were we not warned?

    “An elective despotism was not the government we fought for; but one in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among the several bodies of magistracy as that no one could transcend their legal limits without being effectually checked and restrained by the others.” James Madison, Federalist 84, 1788

    The people have become so corrupted.

    “In these sentiments, Sir, I agree to this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such; because I think a general Government necessary for us, and there is no form of Government but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered, and believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other.” Benjamin Franklin to the Federal Convention 17 Sept. 1787

  14. Annie,

    Yes, Lincoln did bad behavior so pointing to bad behavior to justify more bad behavior you agree with is a weak argument. Point taken.

  15. I stand corrected. My spellcheck preferred TAKE over TAKEN. Technology. Go figure. My apologies.

  16. So John, tell us again why Obama isn’t a legal President? Speaking about the inmates running the asylum.

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