As I was researching the story about the closing of Allan elementary school in Austin, which will be replaced in the fall by an IDEA charter school, I came across this story about the Gates compact.
What is the Gates compact? Austin was the 16th district to apply for $100,000 from the Gates Foundation to sign a compact with the charter schools, agreeing that charter schools and public schools would receive equal treatment. By signing the compact, a district then becomes eligible to win millions of funding from the Gates Foundation. But of course, it may never win anything more.
So what’s the deal? Charter schools win recognition and are treated henceforward as if they were public schools, entitled to equal funding. This legitimates their status. So, rather than being experimental, or even laboratories of innovation, their inroads are made permanent thanks to the generosity of Bill & Melinda Gates.
The Gates compact works sort of like Race to the Top. By competing for funding they may never win, the districts agree to commit millions of their own dollars to equalize funding for charter schools.
Meanwhile, the charter schools continue to pursue policies that skim the best students from the public schools and to take disproportionately small numbers of students who are English language learners and have special needs. The public schools are left with the most expensive students to educate, and the charters get equal funding. The charters have fewer regulations and get extra resources while the public schools get budget cuts and are daily rebuked that they are failing, failing, failing.
The Gates compact cements the gains of privatization.
Worse, it persuades the leaders of the public schools to endorse a plan that undermines the future of public education.
How embarrassing that so many public education leaders call press conferences to acknowledge what they have done when they should be embarrassed.
Diane
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane–many of the superintendents signing a compact have connections to Broad, TFA, or both. As for the compact, it will allow the charters to not serve special ed kids because the districts will provide services. So, too, for ELL kids. I don’t see what the charters can offer the districts. It is the charters that need the districts, not the other way around. So, for $100,000, large urban districts have essentially agreed to provide support to charters in areas the charters need help.
BTW–In Austin, the community impacted by the new charter (IDEA Charter) did not want the charter and, in fact, a majority of the parents chose to send their children to a school further away than Allan. The charter had to recruit students from outside the very community the district was targeting.
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We are all aware of ‘citizens united’ decision that opened the flood gates of private unaccountable money into politics. It is a form of legal bribery, in which the few billionaires can determined the course of elections. But ‘citizen united’ just reaffirm the world we have been living for some time. It is the financial elites who steer the wheel of this nation while ignoring the majority.
Back in 2005 Citibank distributed a secret memo that described the US as a ‘Plutonomy’ or a country that run by the rich and for the rich. It is where: “economies are powered by the wealthy..”and where “economic growth is the wealthy few…” and “there are rich consumers, few in number but disproportionate in the gigantic slice of income and consumption they take.” The only risk that bothers those few is the fact that populations might express their will because they “have equal voting power with the rich.” but there is no reason to worry since: “one reason that societies allow plutonomy, is because enough of the electorate believe they have a chance of becoming a Plutoparticipant.”
And that brings us to the Gates compact. It is indeed a nation the the wealthy actually decide for the population, Where democracy is so despised, feared, hated and has been demolished – Michigan’s “emergency laws” are few to mention – The rich like Gates need to find ways to bribe their way to a path of implementing policies against the will of the people, in order to ensure pacified conformist society. They invest plenty to maintain the Plutocracy and have been lucky to have of what Citibank memo called: “Capitalist friendly cooperative governments…”.
We also see reinforcement of those beliefs that the rich are our saviors by the corporate media, who portray any wealthy enough person as a brilliant entrepreneur. One can only recall the personality worshiping that surrounded Steve Jobs before and after his departure. Gates falls within this category as well. His disproportionate predatory involvement in our education, encouraged by the “Capitalist friendly cooperative governments…” and unchallenged by the people who would sufferer.
We also leaped into a time when the rich and crony politicians act against the will of the people but no longer do it behind closed door. They realized that there is no real challenge – at least not in the US, I am not talking about the brave people of Quebec – therefor they show no embarrassment, on the contrary, democracy has been diminished to the extant that they feel immune and can be proud of the actual destruction of public education.
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Right on!
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A parallel to the Gates compact:
Our union, in district that includes several blue ribbon schools, a high school in the top 3% in the nation, and, at some sites, an 80% participation in free/reduced lunch programs, yesterday rejected the Milken Foundation’s TAP, adopted a couple of years ago. The issue has deeply divided teachers, many of whom have seen real benefits in TAP, but here’s my problem with it:
As someone who watched an IRA lose more than half its value—from $53,000 to less than $23,000—in 2008-09, in a recession sparked by investment fraud, it dismays me to see Lucia Mar participating in a program founded by an unindicted co-conspirator in investment fraud.
It was the Milken Brothers’ firm, Drexel Burnham, that paved the way for their little brothers–firms like Lehman Brothers, who took the national economy with them when they went under in the subprime crisis of 2008-09.
Michael Milken, the model for “Wall Street’s” Gordon Gekko, served 22 months for racketeering in a junk-bond scandal in the early 1990s, and Lowell Milken, TAP’s founder, escaped prosecution as part of his brother’s plea bargain.
Lowell was among the featured characters in a book by former Wall Street Journal editor James B. Stewart, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for his coverage of insider trading, and the title isn’t pretty: “Den of Thieves.”
I don’t deny anything TAP’s defenders say in its defense, but I’m uneasy with continuing the relationship. I’d much prefer we’d say the following to TAP:
“Thank you. We’ll use and build on what we’ve learned. Goodbye.”
Admittedly, if we continued the program, we’d be in good company: the UCLA School of Law last month accepted $10 million for the spectacularly ironic Lowell Milken Institute for Business Law and Policy.
Nothing men like the Milkens do is uncalculated, and their generosity is aimed as much at rehabilitating their own damaged reputations as it is at the public good. And, while UCLA gets $10 million—perhaps, smart policy in desperate economic times for education–all we have to do is come up with $1 million, our share toward rewarding the bad behavior of predatory investment capitalists.
That’s $1 million more—please correct me if I’m wrong–that potentially works against what are already the lowest faculty salaries of any comparable district in the area, against union members who agreed to a salary freeze three years ago in response to a district in crisis in a recession caused by predatory investment capitalists.
I fail students on assignments when they cheat. It’s inappropriate for us to validate cheating on a scale so vast that it can buy its own law school on the path to redemption.
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If you want to learn more about the rise and fall of Michael Milken, read Connie Bruck’s book “The Predators’ Ball.”
I get tired of hearing people who make annual incomes in seven or eight figures complain about teachers, their salary, their pension, their public schools, and how easy it is to teach.
Diane
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Ravitch states “Charter schools win recognition and are treated henceforward as if they were public schools, entitled to equal funding”, and “The public schools are left with the most expensive students to educate, and the charters get equal funding” is not accurate and is misleading. Unlike traditional public schools, public charter schools in Texas do not recieve any locat tax revenues and do not have taxing authority. The difference is that charter schools deal with aproximately $2,000 less revenue per student to educate a student. Some champions of charter schools state that charter schools do more with less which is generally not true and misleading. While many charter schools have excellant academic results they generally cut back on extra-curricular programming, facilities and other services to make up the funding deficit.
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