The forces advocating privatization of public schools are well-funded and relentless. They cloak their goals in high-flown rhetoric about “saving kids from failing schools.” Or they cynically claim the mantle of the civil rights movement as they seek to disrupt communities and replace public control with private ownership. As the public gets wise, resistance grows.
This comment came from a reader:
I have been researching this whole privitatization of public services since Parent Revolution has targeted my school. Ben and his like are interested in taking publuc services like schools and even libraries to privateers. Always promoted as being able to provide better services. With dwindling tax dollars public entities can unburden themselves of unions, costly health care, and underfunded pensions. Under eleaborate PR campaigns boards and councils are sold on the ideas.
Next, is to convince the public needing the services. The gray area of being ethical is where the privateers work in. Their campaign is well groomed. A student looked at the Parent Revolution web site. He said ( a 5th grader) that it was well written to appeal to parents. Just what parents would want to hear. He researched those opposed to PR and found explicit examples of not doing what they promised. He said “bait and switch”.
Privitization is just another way for the 1% of America to mine new monies for profit to line their pockets. Their desire to help students is only if there is profit to be made. Besides if things don’t work out well and these kids hit the street being undesirables there are privitized psychiatric hospitals and private prisons these people can be warehoused with tax dollars and at a profit.
Yes, the purpose of privatization is to get private hands on public school tax money. Almost all the school “reformers” are hustlers with fake degrees and scant experience. Almost none are teachers because these people wouldn’t even consider public service work for $40,000 a year.
Fortunately, as the fog of the Recession fades, the public is catching on. In the end, the American people will always side with the people in the classrooms.
as it happens, my Saturday morning ‘meditation’ at Daily Kos is somewhat related, as you can read here
Point well made. The privatizers have a well thought out, long term plan to privatize public education, hospitals, and prisons. Here in Louisiana our governor is selling off every public asset he can get his hands on. Our state is for sale to the highest bidder. Hmmm, I wonder whom this will most impact? Could it possibly be our most at-risk, high poverty population? His campaign donating Corporate Baggers are on the dole as we speak. People with monetary means will send their children to private schools, and have great insurance to go to the hospital of their choice, and probably won’t have to make the kinds of bad choices that land them in jail. Their targeted population is clear and very few people are aware or even care. Most won’t even see the writing on the wall until it hits them in the face. What will become of this generation of children when they become adults? Who knows what the results of this EdDeform experiment will be??? I only know that the people who will be impacted most are the ones without a lobby voice. And the Corporate Baggers and EdDeformers will be no where to be found. They will have moved on to the next big money maker project. Yes this is the civil rights movement of today, but it’s poverty as much as race.
Thank God many of us are waking up with the realization that this new education reform really is about destroying public education in the communities, and giving control to a few to make huge dollars for their selfish gains!
It is time to stop being naive about the goals of the Corporate Hedgucators. No one who wants to improve public education would do the things they are doing to our schools. They do not want to make this a better country — they want to make this a country they own.
I too have come to realize that it is also as much about power as it is about more money. How many billions of dollars is enough for Koch and Gates and Walton and Broad??? It IS about money for their puppets (Rhee, et al…) but IS more about control and power for those whom another million or billion $ will not change their lives. GREED rules!
I just watched the Dalai Lama’s Tulane University 2013 commencement speech on YouTube. My daughter was in the graduating class. I wonder if this generation will heed his words and see that we must behave in a manner that sees the interconnectedness of humanity? I hope my own two children will continue that legacy and help make this a better place for all, not just for themselves.
Slick campaigns don’t work so well when there are blogs like this one.
For example, Parent Revolution—recently rebranded pRev—should be able to cite chapter and verse of their successful efforts in Adelanto California to charterize Desert Trails Elementary School as an example of the wonders they work.
Instead, what they must confront is that the reality of their ‘creative destruction’ gets broadcast far and wide. For one [notably mild] example of many exposés of their actual conduct and results, click on the link below for a posting on this blog from yesterday:
https://dianeravitch.net/2013/06/28/parent-a-sad-graduation-day-at-desert-trails-elementary-school-in-adelanto-ca/
At a minimum pRev should follow that part of the Hippocratic oath that binds practitioners to “never do harm to anyone” and if possible, to actually do some good.
Their ethos bears an eery similarity to the remark made during the Vietnam War that “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”
😦
The Nobel prize winning economist, Shumpeter, devised the theory of “creative destruction” as in when the automobile was invented, the horse and buggy was finished as an industry. He believed that there were periods when a new industry took over an outmoded industry.
However, Parent Revolution, I don’t use their new acronym, is set up to further the interests of the corporations who wish to profit from the huge’ industry’ that is currently American public education, which has been a successful system for universally educating America’s students since the time of Thomas Jefferson.
In California we do now have a private prison industry whose goal is to keep all cells full to capacity at all times, in the name of the free market. We have seen the impact on the Juvenile Justice system whereby some judges collude with this privatization to detriment of a teen ager whose crime may only have been to steal a sandwich to sate his hunger. His punishment can be a long sentence in the private prison and a ruined life.
This same mentality based on profit and greed permeates privatization of public schools. Parent Revolution and CEO Ben Austin, using ‘spin’ wording to sell their program, is no different than any other charlatan, think Bernie Madoff, who uses false words for self enrichment.
It is not surprising that Ben Austin and his crew are soft-soaping a naïve public in order to steal the schools from us for their profit. Heartland Institute which supports this nefarious plan, is a Grover Norquist approved operation to overcome government and the voice of We, the People, in favor of secretive takeover to impose things such as teaching of ‘creationism’ while stealing our taxes to finance their private charters for profit.
Only We, the People, can stop this.
Please contact us at Joining Forces for Education to learn the issues and train to bring the real information about this push to privatize to the community.
jf4ed@aol.com
Joseph Shumpeter died in 1950. The first Nobel in economics was awarded in 1969 to Ragnar Frisch and Jan Tinbergen.
“. . . which has been a successful system for universally educating America’s students since the time of Thomas Jefferson.”
Tell that to the slaves, tell that to the 90% who didn’t graduate from high school in the late 1800’s, tell that to African Americans up through the 60s and even 70s, tell that to students with special needs even up till today depending on the district, tell that to the poor impoverished children of today whose schooling has been yanked out from under them under the guise of “reform” and standardized testing.
NO, universal public education is the ideal and we keep having to fight those who would destroy it from now till doomsday.
Reblogged this on inspirEDucation and commented:
Also wanted to add in this comment on this post that I thought summed up the point even better:
“Yes, the purpose of privatization is to get private hands on public school tax money. Almost all the school “reformers” are hustlers with fake degrees and scant experience. Almost none are teachers because these people wouldn’t even consider public service work for $40,000 a year.
Fortunately, as the fog of the Recession fades, the public is catching on. In the end, the American people will always side with the people in the classrooms.” –Linda Johnson
Teacher Ken. I just read your Daily KOS piece. Wow, is it great and the truth. That should be widely published.
Ben Austin is a joke and all the Parent Triggers are illegal due to illegal signatures according to the law, rules and regulations. They are specific as to how the signatures may be and may not be obtained. Too many have testified in public and to reporters and in print to be denied. At least a real investigation and all of these triggers by Parent Revolution put on hold until the investigation into the legitimacy of the signatures is determined. Does anyone think it is an accident that Zimmer put up that resolution at the last LAUSD Board Meeting? No way. Or the L.A. Times Op-ed. You have to lay the groundwork and can then strike. Now Tuesday Monica Ratliff will be inaugurated and a new board president will be chosen. Now for the political fun. Zimmer and Galatzan were set to be next board president when Sanchez got elected. That didn’t happen. Ratliff won. Now the only obvious choice for the new 4 was Vladavick. Suddenly there are charges against Vladavick. Who is pulling what string here and what do they want out of it. Is any of this real? Why one week before the vote? Smells to me and yet I do not know for real.
With this much money and power on the line and LAUSD having more charter schools than anyone else, 240 according to the L.A. County Office of Education handbook in 2011 so that is 2010 numbers, there is a lot on the line now. They lost and do not know what to do in the key district to spread their poison. There must be 280 charter schools by now. What if the board and board president do not stay charter friendly and shut down the ones who are failures like former Mayor Villaraigosa’s PLAS. Read today’s L.A. Times on this concerning Roosevelt and Santee High Schools. What they are not telling you is how much of the MOU and Matrix which are legal requirements to maintain the schools PLAS has broken. 5 years later we have in writing from PLAS that they still do not have a Procedures Manual which is critical to the operation of the MOU. And much, much more including every F grade for every student.
Very well put! I hope more parents do their research as you did. If P Rev continues their path they will keep preying on low income communities where many people don’t have access to research. Spread the word! We as parents, can stop them!
“Keep your friends close and your enemies even closer.”
This journal — Journal of School Choice: International Research and Reform — provides insight into understanding the advisories against public education:
Here are some articles:
The Twelve Policy Approaches to Increased School Choice
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15582150802007267
Charter Schools, Academic Achievement and NCLB
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1300/J467v01n03_07
The End of Exceptionalism in American Education: The Changing Politics of School Reform by Jeffrey Henig
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15582159.2013.789307
* This one made me sick to my stomach. *
The Diverse Schools Dilemma: A Parent’s Guide to Socioeconomically Mixed Public Schools by Michael J. Petrilli
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15582159.2013.789317
Thanks for the links, however the full articles have to be paid for if one doesn’t have a subscription. Any other links to the articles that don’t charge a fee?
Here’s how the story is playing out in Santa Clara, CA. Scroll down for Innovate Public Schools Fails to Explain Its Answers: /www.santaclaraweekly.com/2013/Issue-25/education_desk.html