Archives for the month of: July, 2012
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Let’s Hear It for Stability

By dianeravitch
July 6, 2012 //
55

Corporate reformers love the idea of creative disruption. They think that closing schools and opening schools is a bold, innovative stroke.

It’s never their own children who lose their school.

It’s never their own community.

They never ask those involved, because when they do, the people say a loud “No.”

People have many reasons to care about a community school, not just its test scores.

But corporate reformers would like everyone to shop for their school the way they shop for shoes, with no loyalty, no ties, no community.

They think that’s progress. But not for their children. For other people’s children.

A reader writes:

I think one way to counter the fast march to privatization might be to talk about stability.One thing that is important to parents and students, I would think, is stability. People move to certain neighborhoods because they like the schools. If those schools are subject to impulsive decision making processes, instability and even interruption of education could follow. I think our traditional system has been successful in providing some stability for communities. Starting in the 1920s or even before, we built large attractive buildings that were like temples of education. People are loathe to tear down some of these buildings and closing a school is often a heart-wrenching event. Part of what bothers me about charter school businesses is that they can be here today and gone tomorrow. Then a community has build a school from the ground up. Either that or charters take kids from all over a city tearing apart communities, leaving building vulnerable to sale. Getting rid of our education infrastructure seems a grave mistake. Even in our highly mobile society, the presence of schools that are not located in malls and that are run by elected officials and regulated by states can provide a common experience for kids.
Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Reform

Fraud Alert! Beware of Change.Org

By dianeravitch
July 5, 2012 //
19

From a reader:

Change.org & Students First are STILL at it! Yet ANOTHER Students First petition is attached to a valid one. This petition is titled
“Good Teachers Deserve Decent Pay.” REALLY??  Can someone out there get them to stop loading these phony petitions? It
says that 1,300,000+ people signed!!! To whoever can do anything–THANK YOU VERY MUCH!

Note: I am still a “member” of StudentsFirst, having signed a petition without knowing that I was joining an organization that I did not wish to join.

I assume that a significant portion of the alleged 1.3 million “members” are like me. I’m guessing that over one  million of her supposed members are like me: Duped into joining.

Don’t count anyone as a member who has not knowingly signed up.

I have been listed by StudentsFirst as a “member” for over a year without knowing about it. It was only when I complained on this blog about Change.Org facilitating this deception that a staff member of Change.Org contacted me, and in an exchange of emails, told me that I had signed one of the petitions that made me a “member.”

Shame on StudentsFirst for continuing to deceive innocent people who want to show their support for teachers, not to join Michelle Rhee’s campaign to undermine the teaching profession and promote the privatization of public education. And shame on Change.Org for allowing this deception to continue on their website.

Diane

Categories Education Reform, Rhee, Michelle, StudentsFirst

Misinformation at NEA RA

By dianeravitch
July 5, 2012 //
28

I have had several emails from people at the NEA representative assembly asking me if I was no longer supportive of the Save Our Schools organization.

Apparently some delegate got up and said I had disassociated myself from the group.

I replied that this was untrue.

I was invited to speak this summer, and I declined but that was no indication of a lack of support, just a wish to minimize travel during the summer.

I participated as the lead respondent in an SOS webinar on June 19. I think that is a show of support.

I support SOS.

I support any organization that supports public education.

Diane

Categories Ravitch, Diane

More Puzzling about the Gates Foundation

By dianeravitch
July 5, 2012 //
15

I blogged about an article on the  Gates Foundation this morning. The article was written under a pseudonym. The author of the article posted the following comment this morning in response to my post:

I’m puzzled, too. When Gates first announced the foundation, my husband was at UCD working on international health and nutrition. The exact year was 1994, I think. Anyway, I confess I actually cried for joy, and I’m not easily moved by press announcements.

My disillusionment has been gradual, and in fact continues through this week. I wonder if you opened the links in my post?

You see a picture of Gates personally putting a dose of polio vaccine into a child’s mouth, in one link, as though he had bought it with his billions. It turns out later that what he bought was the leverage to spend the money my own students raise each year for Unicef, and that he used his GAVI Alliance control to engineer a secret price gouging scheme, to overcharge Unicef and the other real charities who purchase the vaccines.

That’s a cold fact, not a “conspiracy theory”, and it’s a crime when drug companies collude to raise prices. The puzzle piece missing is, as you say, a motive for the Gates Foundation. His rationale is apparently that higher profits will incentivize big Pharma to invest in research, he explained in his Forbes interview.

That turns out not to be the case. Is he deluded?

Categories Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates

What About Sweden?

By dianeravitch
July 5, 2012 //
13

A reader of the blog posts a comment saying that the U.S. should be open to charters and privatization because, well, what about Sweden.

What about Sweden? Their educational system is one of the best in the world. It’s a public/private hybrid that essentially uses a voucher system. This is something the NEA has foot tooth-and-nail for years.To post that “fighting public education” is by itself a bad thing is simply not enough detail. I think it’s safe to say that monopolistic “public education” is a failure in the U.S. It’s verboten to try something new?

The suggestion is that Sweden should be a model because it has welcomed for-profit schools and various forms of privatization.

Well, what about Sweden? I checked the PISA results and found that Sweden has scores no better than those of the U.S., in reading, mathematics, or science; in fact, Sweden’s scores are nearly identical to ours, right about average, even though Sweden does not face the demographic challenges of the U.S.

Why should Sweden be a model? It is not a high-performing nation. It does not have the challenges of demographic diversity and extreme inequality of income that we have.

I’d rather look to Finland, which actually does excel on PISA. It has consistently been at the top of the international league tables for the past decade (Sweden has not). Finland has built a strong and vibrant public school system.

Like Sweden, Finland does not have much demographic diversity, and it has very consciously sought to reduce child poverty (which is far less than our own).

What Finland has that makes it special is the ideal of equal educational opportunity. It has done a far better job of reaching that ideal than we have. That makes it a worthy model. Finland has achieved both equity and excellence. That is a good combination for us.

If we copy the Swedish model, we will make no progress. If we copy the Finnish model, we too might achieve equity and excellence.

Categories Education Reform, Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), International

Muddy the Narrative? We Know That Trick. (Update)

By dianeravitch
July 5, 2012 //
30

I have received a copy of this story from about 15 different people, all of whom live in Louisiana. The story tells about emails showing that John White, the commissioner of education in Louisiana, hatched a strategy to mislead the media and divert attention from the botched voucher program. After a local newspaper revealed that some of the schools accepting vouchers were little denominational schools that have neither facilities nor teachers, the commissioner had to find a way to change the story from his incompetence to something else.

I guess people send me the story thinking that I will be shocked by the idea of manipulating the media. But living in New York City, I can’t be shocked because we have a Department of Education that has done this sort of thing for the past ten years. They know how to play the press. They put out a blizzard of press releases boasting of their progress, their new programs, their slogans, their latest gimmick. If something goes wrong, they put out another blizzard of self-congratulatory releases. They “muddy the narrative,” as John White put it in one of his emails that were released. They change the conversation. The press falls for it.

This is old news to those of us who live in New York City. John White learned his tricks from the best.

UPDATE:

The Louisiana press is onto the game, thanks to the released emails. The Shreveport Times writes:

Now, we’re looking at legislators who were duped, an education superintendent who’s making it up as he goes along, and a governor who’s traveling the country nonstop running for vice president.

In all of this, we’re wondering — who is really concerned about our children?

Categories Education Reform, Louisiana

More about Stand for Children in Memphis

By dianeravitch
July 5, 2012 //
10

It turns out that Stand for Children is not only the guiding organization behind the plan to transfer large numbers of public school students to charter schools, along with $212 million of taxpayers dollars, in Memphis/Shelby County, but it was previously active in promoting the pro-privatization propaganda film “Waiting for ‘Superman'” to parents and the public in Memphis.

As you will see in the link below, John Legend, the singer who is on the board of the Wall Street hedge fund manager group Democrats for Education Reform, funded the showing of this mockumentary to low-income communities. The purpose of the film was to show the failure of public education and the superiority of private management.

A reader sent this link. It shows how Stand on Children set the stage for privatization on a large scale in Memphis.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Privatization, Stand for Children, Tennessee

I Am Puzzled by the Gates Foundation

By dianeravitch
July 5, 2012 //
121

When one foundation has amassed over $30 billion, it has the financial power to shape the policies of government to its liking.

The Gates Foundation has more than $30 billion, and when Warren Buffet’s gift of another $30 billion is added to the Gates fund, the Gates Foundation will have the power to direct global policy on almost any issue of its choosing.

Anthony Cody published a guest column in Education Week (funded in part by the Gates Foundation) that describes how the Gates Foundation intervenes in agricultural and environmental issues around the world, often in ways that support corporate profits rather than the public interest.

I have never believed that the Gates Foundation or the Gates family puts profits above the public interest. I work on the assumption that anyone who has more riches than they can ever spend in their lifetime or in 100 lifetimes is not motivated by greed. It makes no sense.

I believe that Bill and Melinda Gates want to establish a legacy as people who left the world a better place.

But I think their their efforts to “reform” education are woefully mistaken.

I have tried but had no luck in my efforts to meet Bill Gates. On the two occasions when I was in Seattle in the past year, I tried to arrange a meeting with him well in advance. He was never available.

I am puzzled by what I read in the column cited here. I am also puzzled by the Gates Foundation’s persistent funding of groups that want to privatize public education. I am puzzled by their funding of “astroturf” groups of young teachers who insist that they don’t want any job protections, don’t want to be rewarded for their experience (of which they have little) or for any additional degrees, and certainly don’t want to be represented by a collective bargaining unit.

I am puzzled by their funding of groups that are promoting an anti-teacher, anti-public education agenda in state after state. And I am puzzled by the hundreds of millions they have poured into the quixotic search to guarantee that every single classroom has a teacher that knows how to raise test scores.

Sometimes I wonder if anyone at the Gates Foundation has any vision of what good education is, or whether they think that getting higher test scores is the same as getting a good education. I wonder if they ever think about their role in demoralizing and destabilizing the education profession.

When Bill or Melinda Gates is asked whether it is democratic for one foundation, their foundation, to shape a nation’s education policy, they don a mask of false modesty. Who, little old us? They disingenuously reply that the nation spends more than $600 billion on education, which makes their own contribution small by comparison. Puny, by comparison. Anyone with any sense knows that their discretionary spending has had a powerful effect on the policies of the U.S. Department of Education, on the media, on states and on districts. When Bill Gates speaks, the National Governors Association snaps to attention, awed by his wealth. They are pulling the strings, and they prefer to pretend they aren’t.

But their disclaimers do not change the fact that they have power without accountability. They want accountability for teachers, but who holds them accountable?

When I see Bill or Melinda make a pronouncement on education, I am reminded of the song in “Fiddler on the Roof”: “When you’re rich, they think you really know.”

They don’t. And no one will tell them that they are out of their depth. They may be well-meaning but they are misinformed, and they are inflicting incalculable damage on our public schools and on the education profession.

Who elected them? Why should they have the power to shape American education?.

It’s puzzling.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates

Who Is Funding Charters?

By dianeravitch
July 5, 2012 //
4

I recently learned about an amazing new website that shows the commitment of private foundations to charter schools: http://www.erinproject.org/foundation. The website was created by the John and Laura Arnold Foundation. John Arnold is a Texas billionaire who has given a lot of money to Michelle Rhee for her campaign to diminish the teaching profession and privatize public education. The foundation has created a truly astonishing website from which you can learn about funding for charter schools and other initiatives that promote corporate reformers policies. There are a few references to research, but none of the research listings is comprehensive or balanced.

If you are concerned about the creeping privatization of U.S. education, the Arnold Foundation’s list will make you even more concerned. Indeed, it may persuade you that the issue is not “creeping” but “galloping.” In years past, the foundation world devoted its resources to goals that the U.S. Department of Education and other federal agencies neglected. No more, now the federal government and the foundations are on the same page.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform

Whose Side Are You On?

By dianeravitch
July 4, 2012 //
9
Once again we see the short-term and long-term effects of the continual cutting at our public schools in order to feed the monster of corporate education. As we celebrate our country’s independence, I also find I am mourning the loss of teaching civics to our young people and how that has reduced us to ranting instead of discussion, and polarization instead of compromise. When so few understand the role of government and how it works (current legislators definitely included) how can we and the next generation possibly hope to continue and build the brilliant work that created our nation? We have not only stopped trying to be an enlightened society, but the constant dumbing-down of public education is ensuring that we will be left with no choice but to hand over the education of our next generation to the corporate world. I am hopeful that more and more are seeing that government and business are two very different things and serve two very different purposes. And the goal of education should not be to return on shareholder value, but to give each and every child a chance to become a contributing member of society. I’m will not stand by and see our nation become the United States of America, Inc.

Keep up the good fight Diane! I joined our school board to be part of the solution, not the problem!
Categories Education Reform
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