In this terrific article, you can see the beginnings of a popular uprising against the testing obsession and the rush to put public dollars into private hands.
In Texas, Republicans are paying attention, even threatening to pull the plug on testing. Rural Republicans seem set to ally with Democrats to stop the voucher movement and protect their community public schools.
Will the national Democratic Party pay attention to its base? It’s base is working people, not Wall Street. Educators, not the 1%.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thanks Diane!
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I think both parties are both brain dead and bought and sold by the same players. I work education, transportation and the criminal justice system and believe me there is a direct link between K-12 failures and who ends up being arrested and in jail and/or prison. All whose work I have read and talked with say the same basic thing. Education is the answer. Sheriff Baca in L.A. County has 1/3 of about 18,000 inmates in education and going to 50%. Where they institute education, which also teaches life skills they never had, the violence in the jails goes way down and those coming back to visit goes down a substantial amount. I not long ago had a discussion at a function with Sheriff Baca on this subject and we are lucky to have law enforcement who understands this. Believe me all is not wonderful here in our system. The thing is that you can talk with him and it is improving. If schools improve our criminal just costs on every side financial and human will go down. I personally have been robbed 27 times since 1990 and mostly not in bad neighborhoods. Another interesting statistic is that the 150+ I.Q. students are becoming the leaders of the gangs as we give them no other avenue. This is a total waste. Ever wonder why they are so good at what they do?
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How do you correct woeful parenting. Don’t you think it all starts within the home? Are you implying that schools create gangs and criminal activity. I totally disagree. I believe this is a problem that begins at home. No other avenue? You are giving excuses to criminals that terrorize their neighborhoods.
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There are no “public dollars.” Every dollar spent by the schools originates in the private sector and is collected through taxes from the private sector. The public sector creates no wealth, only provides the framework of law within which individuals create and work in business to add value to raw materials. Teachers often talk as if they had an entitlement to the money of the people who produce. The money belongs to the individuals who make it, not to the society as a whole. To the individuals who make it!!! They vote taxes on themselves to fund the services, but that is voluntary, not owed. When the government spends more than it takes in, and must borrow, that is a sure sign of excessive spending by government. If citizens won’t vote more taxes, government branches must cut back. Education is no exception. Some people seem to think they have a right to the money of others. They don’t. All funding of public services is on sufferance, and all public services should be mindful of that. The people are sovereign. The government only works for them. The people, through their representatives, can defund services which are wasteful or ineffective. That is what is happening in the privatization movement, and effort to control education spending by a kind of clandestine voucher system, where the foundation grant follows the child to charters and online schools. That’s not public education as we have known it, but it IS publicly funded education, and satisfies the constitutions of the fifty states. To speak as if the traditional public school systems had a right to sufficient funds to provide a first class education to every child is incorrect. It might be good policy, but it is not a constitutional or even a metaphysical RIGHT. For teachers to persuade the general public that the schools should have more money, they must first acknowledge that the money belongs to the individuals who made it, and not to the society of which the individuals are members. Unfortunately, it has all gotten mixed up with the rhetoric of the rich paying their “fair” share, with the pitting of the poor against the rich, with the politics of envy. To argue that rich people owe more because the make more is to argue that one person doesn’t own all the fruits of his own labor. That used to be called slavery, or serfdom. As long as proposals for increased taxes are justified by claiming that progressively more is owed from those who able to produce more, there will be a natural backlash because in fact progressive taxation is unfair. America seems to have forgotten what true fairness would be, and so accepts in public discourse the concept that the 1% are fairly taxed if the tax table is a product of voting. Theft by the many from the few is still theft. Thus public funding as currently set up is inherently unfair and unjust, and to the extent we support it we injure our own credibility. My tiny charter is as much a public school as the public schools of Detroit. When teachers insist on having education conducted uncompromisingly only in the traditional public school semi monopoly, they make themselves easy targets for the privatizers, because the arguement is inherently nonsensical, fails to promote freedom, and is unpragmatically utopian.
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So, since you claim to be just as much a public school as public schools, do you post your salaries that are paid with tax dollars the way public schools and public employers do? Do you accept all students – regardless of disability?
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Excellent question. I’ll find out about the salary scale, but I’ll bet we don’t publish it publicly the way my city’s non-charter public schools do. To your second question, we do not accept “everyone” but only those who test well enough to potentially complete the challenging Michigan curriculum for high school graduation. Some will be going for the IB diploma as well. So, you are correct that if public schools are like public transportation, open to all, then we would not qualify, but that analogy only goes so far. In the sense that we are “publicly funded” and open to all who can QUALIFY for the higher level of work, we are a public school. You seem to imply that you don’t consider us “public” unless we are “comprehensive.” That’s what’s wrong with contemporary public education: it discriminates against the gifted and motivated, throwing them in with the unready and undisciplined, which damages education by malign peer influence and holds people back. You’re not against compelling the gifted and talented and motivated to move as slowly as their less fortunately endowed peers must, are you? Why you anti-elitist, you.
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So what you’re saying is, because I am a teacher, I am also a serf?
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What a load of, well, something Diane wouldn’t appreciate me posting on her blog. Every dollar actually originates with the government, of course. It’s the government that decides how much to print and release and the conditions for doing so (interest rates, etc.). Paying taxes is just giving back to Uncle Sam what was his to begin with. Or, to put it another way, paying unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s. But then, based on your posts, I’m sure you don’t know very much about the speaker of those words.
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He says he is just repeating what “conservatives think”…just ignore…if you don’t watch Fox news, don’t read him. Same old, same old….ignore, delete, trash.
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Good job Dienne and Linda.
Both correct
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And may I ask how the government SHOULD decide how much money to print? Money represents goods and services. It is nothing in itself but a medium of storing the value of your work. I argue that your WORK belongs to you, not to the government, which only facilitates the exchanging of your work with others by establishing a medium of exchange good for all debts public and private. The work does not belong to the government just because a government establishes the dollar, or drachma or pound or deutsche mark, or yen as legal tender. If you raise sheep they are YOUR sheep, not Uncle Sam’s. You could, perhaps, spin the wool into thread, and weave the cloth yourself, and slaughter the animal and eat the mutton, but clearly that would be the result of your work, not the government’s. You could also sell the wool, and sell the meat in order to buy eggs and bread. The actual physical “money” is just a means for not having to raise on your own farm what you want to eat. I think you may be confusing what might be called the “currency” with the actual products and services underlying it. I also think the point Jesus was making was that the state (Rome) should be considered as different from what one gives one’s true loyalty to. If, in fact, you think that any and all work and production you undertake is owed to the state, then indeed you are thinking like a slave who has accepted his or her slavery as the right order of things. I have a different point of view.
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Wow, that is a lot of words to prove absolutely nothing. Next time 20 words or less dude.
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He’s just taking a page from Ayn Rand. Both literally and figuratively.
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Right on, tuppercocks. Gnarly, dude. Get down with it. Hey, yeah, man. Twenty words or less. Much less.
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Spare me. There isn’t a charter in Detroit that’s worth working in. You sound so right wing crazy when you make the statements you do. Just because someone is rich doesn’t mean they produce more. I mean, look at the eduvultures and CEOs of charters. They definately aren’t working harder than the teachers and staff they are ripping off. Charter are creating a system of limited freedom. They create little banana republics where a charter CEO has no true checks on his power and he employs many incompetent family members while funneling tax dollars upward into his aristocracy. A total farce. This is nothing but a scam.
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I ain’t no scam, DeeDee. I’m the best there is at what I do that will work for what I accept. Or should it “who” will work? I forgets my right English.
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Good article, Diane. It almost makes me hopeful.
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