You first read about “City Fund” when Tom Ultican wrote about it on August 18. Then four days later, Chalkbeat got the “leaked memo” and told the story that Tom had already broken.
Two billionaires, unhappy with the slow and slowing pace of privatization, have created another organization to spread the gospel of school choice, following in the venerable tradition established by racist Southern governors and senators following the Brown Decision of 1954. In the late 1950s (as Mercedes Schneider wrote in detail in her fine book School Choice), white southerners were mad for choice. They saw choice as the best way to stop racial integration.
Now, under the unesteemed leadership of rightwing zealot Betsy DeVos, the mask of benevolence has been stripped away from the choice movement.
But that doesn’t stop billionaires Reed Hastings (Netflix) and John Arnold (Enron). Education is their game, their hobby, and they are not ready to abandon their dream of privatizing every school in America.
They have hired a “dream team” of failed Reformers, who bring together in one place a long history of stealing democracy and public schools from poor African Americans.
The Reformers tell us that up until now, nothing in reform has worked. But they seem convinced that charter schools work (think Detroit, think Milwaukee). If NOLA is the model, start by closing all the public schools, firing all the teachers, then replacing them with charters and TFA. Crucial to the plan is to add hundreds of millions of dollars in new spending (they forgot that part of the formula).
Peter Greene takes a crack at explaining the grand plan for transforming public schools into a business–and failing as Kevin Huffman and Chris Barbic did in Tennessee’s Achievement School District, where they blew $100 million trying to turn “failing schools” into high-performing schools by handing them over to private operators. Say this for Huffman and Barbic: It was failure on a grand scale!
It is not easy to put together, but I am hoping to blast the St. Louis Post Dispatch for their protection, (compared to the Kansas City Star of two wealthy guardians of charter schools…….the Turkish Pennsylvania recluse Gulen, and the former president of the Missouri State board of education while also being part of his family’s sole ownership of the dangerous Duck Boats—-a source of his wealth—Peter Herschend——who, at the age of 83 has wormed his way onto the state board again…….to make sure St. Louis does not get to vote for their school board—continuing the disenfranchisement begun while he was president of the state board (and a duck boat pilot?) in 2007 or 2008.
We have moved from the carrot of “choice” to the stick of “no voice.” Forced privatization has nothing to do with student needs. It has everything to do with billionaires that do not want to invest in our children. Instead, they have invented a scheme to make our children pay them with our own public money. The ultimate goal is to move the value of a great public asset into the pockets of wealthy investors. Our young people deserve a legitimate education supported by our common investment, not the whims of billionaires. They do not deserve to be a line item in some billionaire’s portfolio. The NAACP and other social justice groups need to go on defense to protect young people from the recklessness of profit seeking billionaires.
The rest of us need to defend by voting out the complicit politicians that work against the common good. Maybe we should cancel our Netflix subscription, which I did a couple of years ago. There are other streaming services available today other than Netflix and Amazon.
“They have hired a “dream team” of failed Reformers”
This is why there aren’t more public school supporters- the best job guarantee is to be an ed reformer.
They get jobs for life.
I don’t think you can get hired in the federal government unless you take an oath of fealty to market-based reform. I know you can’t get 20 million dollars from billionaires.
It contributes to the echo chamber and makes it self-selecting. They all hire one another.
The portfolio “approach” is such transparent BS I don’t think they’ll be able to market it as “new and improved” though. It is exactly the same approach they’ve used for the last 20 years with a slightly different name. Exactly the same people too. You wonder why they bother rebranding it.
No wondering why: Because they see a pot of gold in those “portfolio districts”. That is the only thing those avaricious bastards care about. They still see easy pickings.
Some of the leaked stuff is comical. They tell the public this is about “markets” and then planning documents leak and we find out they have specific percentage goals for charters.
How is that “choice”? They engineer this so cities end up 40,50,60 or 100% privatized. The percentage of charters is baked in before they launch the charter plan. They know exactly how many public schools they want to replace with their preferred schools and they know it before the first ed reformer parachutes in.
Has nothing to do with “markets” or “quality”. They strive to hit the percent of privatization.
That’s why we see public schools (and public school students) treated so shoddily in areas taken over by ed reformers. They gotta close X numbers of public schools. If your kid is IN one this should concern you. Of course they don’t support existing public schools. The goal is to close 50% of them.
Go look at the ed reform marketing of Indianapolis, which is the template for this plan. Look for mention of public schools in that city. You won’t find any. Imagine being a public school parent in that city. The people you’re paying to design your schools exclude children in public schools. They get nothing.
It’s the worse deal ever for public school kids. They are literally the collateral damage ed reformers are willing to sacrifice to reach their ideological goals.
If I may make a minor correction to your last thought: “They are literally the collateral damage ed reformers are willing to sacrifice to reach their MONETARY goals.”
In this instance, I believe “ideological” and “monetary” can be used interchangeably and both are correct. When you worship at the altar of money, your ideology is spouting whatever nonsense the people who will pay you the most want you do spout.
If Bill Gates started spending his billions to promote the gospel of public education and wanting to fund and promote research showing that charter schools are failures, the “ideology” of education reformers would be to close all charters.
If Laurene Powell Jobs realized that charters were a sham and decided the Emerson Collective should start bashing charters and the rich billionaires who fund the Aspen Institute decided that charters were a sham, I have no doubt that Arne Duncan would suddenly “get religion” and start bashing charters and promoting public schools.
Their ideology is money, period.
“Their ideology is money, period.”
Exactly. To them, if they make money off this fraud, then that means they are a success. Nothing else counts but making money.
The designer of this grand privatization scheme is not an educator. He is a “political science” person.
Which if you understand ed reform makes perfect sense. It’s way more politics than science 🙂
They don’t have a shred of evidence that this scheme “worked” in Indianapolis, yet they are gunning to privatize FORTY cities on that model. Nothing whatever to do with “data” or “evidence”- pure, distilled ideology. A belief system.
How do we convince people to stay and fight for their public schools instead of jumping ship for the charters? Especially when public schools are being asked to “compete” with both arms tied behind their back. I wish everyone were required to read this blog including comments. The national landscape would look very differently if that were the case.
When a district is snatched from the public through a hostile takeover, there is a limited amount of so called choice involved. Ultimately, it is the schools that do the choosing resulting in segregated schools generally along color lines. Students are placed where the schools feel the students “deserve” to be placed, not necessarily the most advantageous place. I believe the NAACP has witnessed this type of discriminatory practice in privatization which may be the main reason they have called for a moratorium on charter expansion. We are using public money to segregate students. Shameful!
Watch out Oakland! The Gates Foundation gave the City Fund $10 M to privatize what’s left of your public schools https://www.gatesfoundation.org/How-We-Work/Quick-Links/Grants-Database/Grants/2018/07/OPP1191868
See my comment below. Thanks to all this privatization and financial mismanagement, the district and the Oakland Athletic League announced that they are cutting our high school sports teams.
Le5 the Education Writers Association know. (Emily Richmond, David Loewenberg). As I posted the other day, they think it’s debatable whether charters have a fiscal impact on school districts and public schools.
It’s almost funny. They keep funding these huge national privatization projects and THIS is the kind of coverage ed reform gets locally:
” Ohio voters have more than a billion reasons to care about the ECOT scandal.
Over a 17-year period, state officials reached into your pockets, removed $1 billion, and allowed much of it to be poured down a rat hole formerly known as the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow.
Consider it another way: While state officials were underfunding local school districts, they were sending upwards of $100 million a year to a charter school that will be forever remembered as an epic failure.
As a result, mothers and fathers across Ohio had to raise their own property taxes to provide children they love with an adequate education.”
Why don’t they fix the damage they’ve done in Ohio before dumping another 20 million into more privatization?
The reality of ed reform no longer has anything to do with how it looks locally. Another national marketing campaign probably isn’t going to change that.
https://www.cleveland.com/opinion/index.ssf/2018/08/both_democratic_and_gop_office.html
“They have hired a “dream team” of failed Reformers”
This failures and frauds must be in a rare minority to keep getting rehired to fight the same losing battles.
Democracy hating crooks and autocratic billionaires like Reed Hastings (Netflix) and John Arnold (Enron) don’t have enough (fake) “Reformers” to hire so they have no choice but to keep hiring the same failures. The pool of fake ed reformers must be really small.
The funds that billionaires contribute is “fraud seed money” and the vast majority of the tab for their “mistakes” (which are not really mistakes at all) is picked up by the public.
The “fraud multiplier” is normally 10 to 100 times what the billionaires contribute.
One can never consider an education reform initiative a “failure” if lots of education reform promoters get rich from it.
One reason that no one is interested in any education reform that tries to make public schools better is that no one will get rich from that! Where is the profit is just making public schools better, especially the public schools serving the most vulnerable students? Who is going to pay the shills at education reform think tanks 5x what teachers earn just to promote making public schools better?
So it doesn’t matter whether the new privatized education system that the reformers love works or not. What matters is that lots of people who care nothing about the kids they hurt are being generously compensated for promoting it and CEOs who run those schools can get very rich from it. And “education reform” can fail ten thousand times and as long as those billionaires keep paying them generously, people who don’t care at all about kids will continue to promote their “reforms.”
Before there was money to be made, I rarely heard anything from business types for decades. I did my job on my own to the best of my ability. Now that we are infected with “free market madness,” all the profiteers are crawling out of the sewers with their fake think tanks trying to monetize students for their own self enrichment.
It would be really great if Bill Gates and his privatizing buddies would throw us a bone and help all the Oakland kids in the district fund their sports programs again. The Oakland Athletic League, funded by OUSD, recently announced that they were cutting 50% of the sports programs in the district’s high schools. All for the kids, no doubt. Thanks, Bill, much appreciated, way to go…smh
http://oaklandtech.com/staff/blog/2018/08/oakland-athletic-league-cuts/
You don’t want a bone from Bill Gates because there is always a hook and line attached.
Diane Your post this evening
Election 2018: Time for Democrats to Support Public Schools if They Want to Win
Would not open for comments and could not be found by Safari.
I do not know where the glitch is. The message says Page Not Found.
Laura, sorry, I’m writing posts for future posting.
As I change the dates on some previously written, some decide to post themselves without my permission.
I am constantly shuffling the lineup since the original publication date is often irrelevant.
That one will appear in a few days.
An eloquently written post, Diane.
That Huffman and Barbican failed in Tennessee does not fill my heart with delight. Thanks guys. Thanks governor Haslam, for trying out your failed business model and then claiming success.
With apologies to SomeDAM Poet and Pete Seegar:
Where have all the school yards gone?
Gone to investors every one
Where will the children learn?
Where will the children learn?