The writer of this article, Colin Woodard, recently won the George Polk award, one of the highest honors in journalism.
The article is bout a sordid effort to promote technology as a for-profit enterprise in Maine schools. To introduce a Maine virtual charter school, to require online courses for graduation, and to follow a script written not by educators but by lobbyists.
This is a classic. Don’t miss it.
The New Yorker magazine has a contest each week. On the last page of each issue is a cartoon without a caption. Readers are invited to dream up a caption, and the best one wins.
Now here is our contest. Jeb Bush, Bill Gates, Mike Bloomberg, and Oprah are meeting at a swank island resort off the coast of South Carolina. The news story suggests it is a secret conference convened by Bill.
Question: Why are they meeting?
Ready, set, go.
Obscene amounts of money translate into power.
Obscene amounts of money–billions–often translate into the ability to buy elections. But not always, as we saw in the recent school board election in Los Angeles, when the candidate of the Billionaire Boys Club was beaten by Steve Zimmer.
Billionaires don’t just try to buy elections.
They try to buy anyone who might help them or hinder them in their quest for power.
The Gates Foundation, for example, underwrites almost every organization in its quest to control American education. It supports rightwing groups like Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Educational Excellence and Ben Austin’s Parent Revolution. In the recent past, it gave money to the reactionary ALEC. It pays young teachers to oppose unions and to testify against the rights of tenured teachers. It also pays unions to support its ideas about evaluations, despite their flaws. It spends hundreds of millions of dollars to support “independent” think tanks, which are somewhat less independent when they become dependent on Gates money.
The other day, I reported that the ACLU had persuaded the U.S. Department of Justice to take action against voucher schools in Milwaukee that discriminate against students with disabilities. My source at the ACLU, who sent me the DOJ statement and the ACLU press release, mentioned in passing that the National Urban League had turned its back on the ACLU’s efforts to make private choice schools non-discriminatory.
Wonder why? Here is a possible answer.
Switch to teacher evaluation.
Some teachers in New York have wondered why their state union organization is not fighting the misuse of test scores as the basis of evaluation.
Wonder why? Here is a possible answer.
Power corrupts. So does money.
There is a new parlor game among the cognoscenti called “Albert Shanker Said This 20 or 30 Years Ago So It Must Be Right.”
Last fall, I had a tiff with New Jersey Commissioner Chris Cerf, who invoked Shanker’s name to support the Christie administration’s push for charters. I patiently explained that Al Shanker was indeed a founding father of the charter movement in 1988, but became a vehement critic of charters in 1993. He decided that charters and vouchers were the same thing, and both would be used to “smash” public education. This is not a matter of speculation. It is on the record.
Now the Shanker blog has an article by Lisa Hansel, former editor of the AFT’s “American Educator” magazine and now an employee of the Core Knowledge Foundation, asserting that Shanker would endorse Common Core if he were alive today. (The Core Knowledge English Language Arts program is now licensed to Amplify, which is run by Joel Klein and owned by Rupert Murdoch.)
Hansel also quotes Shanker as a great admirer of “A Nation at Risk.”
But here is the problem. Hansel speculates about what Shanker would say if he were alive today. She doesn’t know.
Would he join with Jeb Bush to endorse the Common Core? We don’t know.
Would he be as enthusiastic about “A Nation at Risk” in 2013 as he was in 1983, now that it has become the Bible of the privatization movement? We don’t know.
However, I can speculate too. Al Shanker cared passionately about a content-rich curriculum. So do I. Would his love for a content-rich curriculum have caused him to join with those who want to destroy public education? I don’t think so.
Would he have come to realize that “A Nation at Risk” would become not a document for reform but an indictment against public education? If he had, he would have turned against it.
Would he have felt good about Common Core if he knew that it had never been field tested? Would he have been thrilled with the prospect that scores will plummet across the nation, giving fodder to the privatizers? I think not.
Would he have been concerned that the primary writers of the Common Core were the original members of the board of Michelle Rhee’s union-busting StudentsFirst? Absolutely.
Would he have allied himself and his union with those who want to destroy the union and privatize public education? No.
Where would Albert Shanker stand on the Common Core if he were alive today?
I don’t know, and neither does anyone else.
Leo Casey, a long-time union activist, here reviews a recent report by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute decrying the immense power of teachers’ unions. Michael Petrilli of TBF described the unions as “Goliaths” battling the weak, underfunded “Davids” of the corporate reform movement.
Casey challenges the report and the characterization, pointing out that corporate reformers have deployed vast amounts of money–far greater than the teachers’ unions could ever muster–to destroy the last vestige of teacher unionism. This assures that teachers have no voice at the table when governors and legislatures decide to slash spending on education or to privatize it to the benefit of entrepreneurs and campaign contributors.
Last year, Florida State Senators failed to pass a parent trigger bill because not a single parent group in the state supported the bill. Parents came from across the state to testify against the legislation. They accurately saw the bill as a transparent effort to trick parents into handing their public school over to a charter corporation.
The bill comes up for a vote in the next few days. Jeb Bush and his surrogates are working hard to get the bill through this time. Senators have offered a flurry of amendments to try to remove some offensive features.
But Florida parents remain united in opposition to this blatant effort to enrich charter corporations.
Every Florida legislator should read the exposé of the parent trigger that was reported here by Yasha Levine..
The Republican Party is divided about the Common Core standards.
The Republican National Committee has come out in opposition to the Common Core, calling it “an inappropriate overreach to standardize and control” education. Senator Charles Grassley wants to defund the Common Core.
But Jeb Bush is one the loudest cheerleaders for the Common Core. When his sidekick Tony Bennett lost the state superintendent job in Indiana, In part because of Tea Party opposition to Common Core, Jeb Bush made sure he landed on his feet as state commissioner in Florida.
Now Jeb has declared in TIME that David Coleman, the architect of the Common Core, is one of the world’s 100 most influential people. Jeb adores the Common Core. So do the high-tech corporations that back Jeb’s Foundation for Educational Excellence.
The Republicans will have to duke this out over the next few years. Do they support federal control or local control? State standards or federal standards?
And we will all wait to see how the Common Core drama plays out? Will all children be college and career ready because of the Common Core? Will it close gaps or make them wider?
Readers may recall that outgoing Indiana State Superintendent Tony Bennett left behind a videoconferencing system that cost $1.7 million and was utterly useless because it was incompatible with the department’s existing technology. The expensive technology was purchased from Cisco Systems, which by happy coincidence employs Bennett’s former chief of staff Todd Huston.
Karen Francisco of the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette notes that the useless videoconferencing system is symptomatic of Bennett’s most important legacy: a full-bore assault on Indiana’s public school system.
She asks:
“Is the spin that is used to justify the questionable $1.7 million deal any different from the claims he used to expand charter schools, to shift tax dollars to private schools through voucher payments, to strip collective bargaining rights for teachers or require third-graders to pass a standardized reading test before moving on to fourth grade?
“Aside from his former chief of staff’s job with Cisco, Bennett’s ties to corporate interests have become increasingly clear. A nonprofit group in January released thousands of emails revealing the Foundation for Excellence in Education’s efforts in working with state officials, including Bennett, in writing education laws to benefit the foundation’s corporate supporters. The foundation, started by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, has received financial support from for-profit companies like McGraw Hill, Pearson and K12 and the nonprofit College Board, Huston’s current employer.
“The complex web of ties between corporate influences, Bennett’s administration and the raft of legislation should give lawmakers every reason to halt the continuing tide of education bills, including several sponsored by Huston. Demanding research-based evidence of the effectiveness of laws already passed and simply giving schools time to implement and evaluate them could save legislators some embarrassment later.”
Yesterday, I published a post about how critics were raising questions about Jeb Bush’s financial ties to certain corporations.
I linked to an article in the Tampa Tribune. However, the link was dead. The article had disappeared.
A reader found it. Not on the Tampa Tribune website but here, where it has been preserved for readers. A testament to a free society.
Recently, the Foundation for Educational Excellence (FEE), created by Jeb Bush, has come under fire for mixing its programming with the financial interests of its backers while serving as a vehicle for Bush’s 2016 presidential ambitions.
The Tampa Tribune ran a scathing article that pointed out problematic practices:
“Lobbyists are not allowed to finance perks like trips for state officials, but those at the Foundation for Excellence in Education get around that ban by being registered to another foundation run by Jeb Bush.
The foundation sponsors conferences where the top stars of the corporate reform movement appear to praise the virtues of vouchers, charters, and online learning. For example, last years’ summit in Washington, D.C.”
“….included “strategy sessions” on such topics as “Reaching more students with vouchers and tax-credit scholarships” and banquets with speeches by Bush, Condoleeza Rice and U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
