John Thompson: Maybe The Goal of Reformers IS Privatization

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1. Jon Awbrey says:

   December 20, 2012 at 12:10 pm

   Well, Duh …

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2. Sharon says:

   December 20, 2012 at 12:14 pm

   The privatization movement has been keeping a lot of secrets from a lot of people for a long time, but they’re starting to leak out.

   In Chicago: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/education/ct-met-school-closings-1217-20121219,0,1445270,full.story

   In NJ: http://www.wnyc.org/articles/new-jersey-news/2012/aug/02/documents-detail-nj-school-reform-plan/

   And of course, then there’s ALEC: http://www.alternet.org/education/inside-alecs-education-task-force-private-players-manipulating-public-education

   The proverbial tip of the iceberg.

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3. Ron Poirier says:

   December 20, 2012 at 1:14 pm

   This is excellent. Thank you, Diane. I will be forwarding this to members of my family who, while lifelong educators, have been reluctant to use the “p” word when it comes to the education reform movement.

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4. Jon Awbrey says:

   December 20, 2012 at 1:58 pm

   Some force alien to American life is trying to colonize our country all over again.

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5. Tim says:

   December 20, 2012 at 2:10 pm

   The real problem is that it is not just John! The Educators and our protectorates the “Unions” have been completely “outflanked” by the corporate privateers. They have a foothold in all our States and our Nation. It is going to be a long and difficult fight to salvage Public Education and in the mean time children’s education will suffer!

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6. Michael Fiorillo says:

   December 20, 2012 at 2:18 pm

   How many smoking guns are needed before it becomes generally accepted that privatization is what so-called education reform is all about? Or is none of this news fit to print?

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7. Mary Pishney says:

   December 20, 2012 at 2:27 pm

   DAH???? He is either a dim-wit, or a covert endorser of privatization! I really question his motives since anyone who checks the least bit into this and other destructive, educational movements sees very quickly the agendas behind charter schools, NCLB, race to the top, etc. It is ALL part of the same goal and mindset…which is anything but positive to our public schools! As a fellow teacher said to me, “We aren’t allowed to be educators, we’ve been reduced to “educating” ditch diggers!”.

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8. George Buzzetti says:

   December 20, 2012 at 3:05 pm

   John Thompson has obviously been delusional for awhile. In LAUSD with over 900 schools about 260 are charter schools. In L.A. County with 88 school districts there are only 348 according to the L.A. County Office of Education (LACOE). 8 have been approved by the State Board of Education and 10 by LACOE. That leaves only 60 for 87 other school districts. Something wrong here? In the Sept. 2012 DOE OIG report on the total lack of accountability of charter schools at all levels in Florida, Arizona and California you can read how bad it really is. This report is DOE-OIG/A02L0002. When there was a presentation by California State Staff on charter schools and how wonderful they are and how accountable they are I got up and read from the report and asked them “Do you have this report and if you do not I can give you one” they said they had the report. This means that the State Board of Education knew that they were lied to and did not care. This is what is really going on. Also, concerning performance of charter schools the Stanford Report showed that only 17% of charter schools nationwide did even marginally better than regular public schools. To properly compare the two you have to use the “Correction Factor” which allows for charter schools not having to follow much ed code and local regulations along with cherry picking parents and students, not dealing with behavioral problems, ESL and special education. Now charter schools do not look so good. Wake up people to the scam being run on you hold your local “Real Public Schools” accountable for your childrens education and if they do not throw the “Bums” out and if they are breaking the law have them prosecuted. We are about ready to do that here in LAUSD concerning administrators breaking the child abuse reporting laws which hold misdemeanor criminal violations with jail time and fines. Check out the laws in your state and if administrators have broken them and go to the D.A.

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9. DeeDee says:

   December 20, 2012 at 8:37 pm

   Yes Oklahoma, be very afraid. Do an in depth look at Michigan to see what “for profit” charters look like. This is the most underhanded and exploitive system implemented on children’s education.

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   • teachingeconomist says:

     December 20, 2012 at 11:32 pm

     Would you object to charter schools if the government restricted them to not for profit educational organizations?

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     • Jon Awbrey says:

       December 20, 2012 at 11:44 pm

       Public funds come with public strings attached.

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     • teachingeconomist says:

       December 20, 2012 at 11:53 pm

       Indeed that is true. I have often argued here that government regulation could address many of the objections to charter schools.

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     • Jon Awbrey says:

       December 21, 2012 at 12:14 am

       When they work as designed, governments on the American plan are simply instruments of the people governed. There are definite principles involved in that design, and I know that folks my age all learned those principles by heart at school.

       Progressive educators are Big Fans of alternative, experimental, innovative, laboratory schools. I don’t know anyone who had a problem with charter schools as originally conceived.

       But that was then, and this now — and the original conception has blatantly obviously been Fouled Up Beyond All Recognition by the usual suspects.

       That is the reality that we have to deal with today, not some fantasy of what might have been.

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     • Eric says:

       December 21, 2012 at 9:23 am

       folks my age all learned those principles by heart at school.

       When did publicly funded common schools stop promoting those principles? Wouldn’t that have been self-defeating?

       George Washington believed in the invisible hand of providence; Milton Friedman believed in the invisible hand of the market. Whose perspective is dominant today?

       What would Horace Mann think? What would he do?

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     • teachingeconomist says:

       December 21, 2012 at 12:50 am

       That is true that the government was designed to be an instrument of the people. The designers just had a different definition of who counted as a person. Some only counted as 3/5 of a person.

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10. John Thompson says:

    December 21, 2012 at 7:39 am

    Maybe I am delusional. I’ve spent a lot of effort trying to work with nearly all of the people quoted in the article. But, what is the alternative? Maybe compromise won’t work. Maybe evidence will be ignored. Maybe attempts using humor, like below, will fall flat. Maybe we’ll lose. But, what is the alternative to trying to work through the (public) system?

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-thompson/do-school-reformers-need-_b_2337520.html

    And you know what? In the hardcore inner city schools where I taught, we did our best within the system, and we lost a lot of kids, but we still came back, doing what we could do.

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    • Eric says:

      December 21, 2012 at 10:16 am

      John, you make a good deal of sense. “Stupid has its own gravitational pull,” and educators lack the training necessary to navigate a minefield of private equity and market failure so schoolchildren are best served. Once upon a time, state departments of education had opportunity to plan a course through knotty problems posed by Richard Elmore, Susan Fuhrman, Sherman Dorn (Accountability Frankenstein), etc. Jeanne Chall and Diane Ravitch helped ensure policy makers avoided past mistakes.

      Now we have the “battle of the titans,” with Finn (happy to have gullible followers) and Ravitch (historian-turned-polemicist). As a result, America’s support for public education (the common school ideal of Horace Mann) suffers. The polarization is so pervasive that Finn’s repudiation of for-profit charter schools is unheeded.

      So what’s a (non-delusional) person to do? The Walton Foundation and state departments of education ought to explain how they are addressing Koh’s memo on CERD, etc; see:
      http://www.state.gov/j/drl/hr/treaties/index.htm

      If (as claimed) plans were in place in the 90s to address educational inequities, what happened? How did late-comers (NCLB, RttT) improve on the NEA’s new unionism? Was new unionism abandoned in NEA’s orchestrated backlash against NCLB?

      The public education doomsday clock approached midnight in America. The information needed to save public education exists in court proceedings from California to Massachusetts–but policy makers are too enmeshed (submerged?) in politics to consolidate that information and plan a way forward.

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11. Jon Awbrey says:

    December 21, 2012 at 10:45 am

    Re: Teaching Economist

    Systems engineers, chefs, and sous-chefs all understand the difference between ideals and implementations — we critique our implementation du jour in the light of our espoused ideals, life is short, the art long, and the art of the possible does not make all things possible all at once.

    I think the ideals are pretty self-evident, the rest is history …

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12. Teaching Economist says:

    December 22, 2012 at 12:10 am

    It was, of course, the recepie they were writing, not an issue of execution.

    I am reacting to the apparent nostalgia that many people here seem to have about the past. For almost everything, in the words of Carol King, “These are the good old days”.

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    • Jon Awbrey says:

      January 3, 2013 at 11:28 am

      I think we have to forgive people for being a trifle nostalgic about the days when American Politics and Abnormal Psychology were not the same subject.

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13. rob traber says:

    January 2, 2013 at 11:07 pm

    As a teacher in Bridgeport, CT, there is no doubt in my mind about the move to privatize. After similar efforts in public housing and public healthcare over the last few decades, they see public schools as the last and largest remaining untouched source of public money that they can plunder.

    Also, as an officer of the BEA, I would add that they are intent on destroying the trade unions of the United States. They recognize that if they can destroy the NEA and the AFT, they will be able to destroy the rest of the public sector unions as well. No doubt, bust the Unions, plunder the resources, destroy public education.

    Of course they dress it all up as a deep concern for the education of poor children, but the quality of the education they are pushing is designed to make our children competent minimum wage workers. They do not see our children as future leaders of our country .They would never send their own children to such schools. Their children are future leaders and require an education with small classes and creative curriculum.

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