Tom Ultican lays out in gruesome detail the billionaires’ plan to destroy public education.
The documentation is solid. The billionaires are jointly funding every anti-public school organization they can find, and they create them when they don’t exist.
Gruesome, yes. But it is a fact that their spending has not accomplished much, other than to ruin the lives of children, teachers, families, and communities. Nowhere has it produced better education. They sow chaos and disruption, then move on to the next big idea.
He begins like this:
“Three researchers from Indiana coined the terminology Destroy Public Education (DPE). They refuse to call it reform which is a positive sounding term that obfuscates the damage being done. America’s public education system is an unmitigated success story, yet, DPE forces say we need to change its governance and monetize it.
“We are discussing the education system that put a man on the moon, developed the greatest economy the world has ever seen and wiped out small pox. It is the system that embraces all comers and resists all forms of discrimination. In the 1980’s, it was laying the foundation for the digital revolution when it came under spurious attack.
“Not only are great resources being squandered on DPE efforts but the teaching profession is being diminished. Organizations like Relay Graduate School and the New Teachers Project are put forward as having more expertise in teacher education than our great public universities. That would be amusing if wealthy elites were not paying to have these posers taken seriously.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
They’re goal is to dismantle the public schools! Administrators, teachers, classified, parents and students get into the streets!
It’s a good point that “Education Reformers” is too benign a name for these people. How about “Public Education Destroyers” — or PEDs for short?
PEDophiles: lovers of public ed destruction
Kind of edgy.
SDP,
Maybe PEDophobia.
“Pizzagates”
“Reformers” love Destruction
Of Public Education
So “PEDophile,” you see
Would fit them to a tee
Zuckerberg was promoting Summit charters yesterday, XQ Schools promotes them relentlessly and now the US Department of Education joins in the chorus:
“Diane Tavenner of Summit charter schools, which emphasized personalized learning, now speaking at #rethinkschool. One of two winners of the Emerson XQ prize participating in the conference.”
Not science and not a real debate, either. A private/public sector cheerleading squad for a very specific (and privatized) vision of “public” schools.
Parents in some public school districts are objecting to the Summit/Facebook program in their schools. One public school district in Connecticut was forced to drop it because public school parents objected and there’s another in Ohio where parents are asking where this came from and how did it end up in their schools. Will that be mentioned?
Zuckerberg wrote yesterday his goal is to “scale” the Summit model- not to examine or determine if this is a good value for public schools, but to “scale”- which means grow as fast as he can.
I wonder if the public- the people who actually use public schools and also own them- will get in his way – I suspect they will 🙂
You are laying out exactly what I am seeing. Zuckerberg, Jobs and Gates are selling technology. Hastings, Walton and Gates are selling charter schools. Arnold, Bradley and Gates are selling portfolio models. And these represent a small minority of the Billionaires financing the demise of public education. I still cannot fathom why the amazingly wealthy want to end public education? Maybe a Dickensesque society is appealing to them.
The US spends approximately $600 billion dollars a year on K-12 education, and these greedheads want ALL of it.
That’s one reason.
Then there’s their will to power. It wasn’t just greed that put these people in the position they’re in (though in the case of the Walton’s, it was financially-fortunate birth), but their obsessive-compulsive desire for power and control.
Take those two, combine them with an ideology (“Greed is good!”) that justifies their interests and motives, and you have so-called education reform.
Others born in the right place to the right family:
DeVos
Koch brothers
I think these billionaires genuinely believe that “markets” and business approaches are the solution to every issue.
They simply can’t understand anything outside that narrow mindset.
It’s like the difference between the attitude of the people who develop and support free open source software (including operating systems like Linux) or Tim Berners-Lee (who invented the world wide web and did not patent it but gave it away) and people like Bill Gates who demand payment for everything (including ideas stolen from other people).
Gates believes that the profit motive is best and he simply can’t see why it would not work with education. He excuses/denies all his failures by blaming other people: eg, teachers and Diane Ravitch got in the way of “progress”.
The privileged few want people to stop voting for social security (lower case) and public services so they can be free to do business however they please, to own everything. They PEDdle privatization so they won’t have to be told by government to pay taxes. They are not just out to Destroy Public Education (DPE), but to Destroy Everything Vital to Others’ Security (DEVOS). They are Destroyers of Everything Vital and Inalienable, for Libertarianism’s Sake (DEVILS).
It’s partly because it’s a revolving door. The big shots in the Obama ed dept went immediately from THERE to the big orgs in ed reform.
It’s not that they “agree” with one another- they’re the same people.
They sound the same because they are literally the same people, same funders, same approach. There’s no real line between public and private. It’s one big org.
In a way it doesn’t matter if they’re actually coordinating this “message”. They get the same result anyway.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/17/ta-nehisi-coates-neoliberal-black-struggle-cornel-west
DeBlasio’s plan to improve public schools is being portrayed as an abject failure by ed reformers. About 1/3 of the schools “improved”.
Guess how many districts were shown to “improve” under the “portfolio strategy” so far?
If you guessed 1/3 you’re right.
Yet one is a huge success that should be adopted nationwide and the other is an abject failure that should be scrapped immediately? Sorry. That ain’t “science”. It’s ideology.
It’s a preference for s specific system of schools that is NOT a public system. That’s okay! But ed reformers need to admit it.
To quote Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters, the one thing deBlasio did not try that has a solid base in Research is reducing class size in the low-performing schools.
Excellent, Tom! You’ve done us a great service putting this all together in such a compelling, informative way.
Power causes brain damage: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/power-causes-brain-damage/528711/
The brain damage precedes the power in most cases.
One of the primary characteristics that facilitates the rise to power is lack of empathy, a critical element of sociopathy and psychopathy.
Ever since “A Nation at Risk” and NCLB, the rich and powerful have controlled the public education narrative by describing public education in terms of a deficit model. In their view public schools need to be fixed or “reformed.” No one is against continuous improvement, but the 1% targeted public education for the dustbin, and they have continued their forced march over public education using persistent high stakes testing to make their agenda appear legitimate and buying complicit representatives to do their dirty work. The wealthy are monetizing our schools crushing democratic participation in their path. They want to give us the schools they believe we deserve: cheap and autocratic. Under Trump and DeVos these nefarious goals are crystal clear for everyone to see. Those that support public schools need to make our own “got to go” list of complicit representatives, campaign against them and target them for removal.
Not all of the billionaires and millionaires in the United States are out to profit while destroying the republic’s (and destroy the republic by subverting the US Constitution through the GOP they own) community based, DEMOCRATIC, transparent, non-profit, unionized, traditional public schools and replace them with AUTOCRATIC, secretive, child abusing, teacher (paid less with no benefits and no union) abusing/bashing, for-profit (no matter what they call themselves), corporate charter schools.
“George Soros and Hundreds of Other Millionaires (more than 400) Are Asking Congress to Raise Their Taxes”
“they note that the Republican tax plan would disproportionately benefit the wealthy, while adding at least $1.5 trillion in tax cuts to the current national debt. This deficit “would leave us unable to meet our country’s current needs and restrict us in advancing any future investments,” the letter continues.”
http://fortune.com/2017/11/13/geore-soros-ben-jerrys-millionaire-billionaire-raise-taxes-congress/
Our Political Book Club just read and discussed your book REIGN OF ERROR. Thank you for a well researched book with solutions and for your ongoing vigilance to protect and improve PUBLIC education. Our democracy depends on it.
Thank you, Barbara
“it is a fact that their spending has not accomplished much, other than to ruin the lives of children, teachers, families, and communities. ”
This is the effect of the “investments” everywhere, not just in education, and especially in economy. They are not the embodiment of success but an anomaly that needs to go away.
“Reform School”
Their product is disruption
Their pitch is “failing schools”
With lots of rank corruption
And loads of testing tools
Their goal is liquidation
And everything must go
The essence of the Nation
The public schools we know
Chelsea Clinton had this line in an article published in Teen Vogue yesterday: “I certainly think her choices — all her choices — were worthy of scrutiny though I remain flabbergasted that your grandmother’s emails were covered more than all other stories of the election combined. More than children being poisoned by tap water, shot by those who should have protected them, failed by schools meant to educate them, or finally receiving health care thanks to President Obama’s signature legislation.”
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/chelsea-clinton-to-her-children-my-hopes-for-your-futures-havent-changed