David Sirota explains how a small number of very rich men bought control of American education.
“But, then, as shocking as this let-them-eat-cake attitude may seem when it is evinced so brazenly by a national politician, it is the same oligarchic attitude that now dominates local education politics all over the country. Perhaps most illustrative of the trend is my home state of Colorado. This state has unfortunately become the national petri dish of the Education Oligarchs – people like the Walton family, of Wal-Mart fame; Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft; Michael Bloomberg, the anti-union media mogul; and Philip Anschutz, the billionaire sponsor of right-wing Christian causes. These oligarchs and others aim to put everything – including our kids future – up for sale to the highest bidder in the Colorado education system.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Another first rate piece of reporting by David Sirota. The oligarchs have, in too many locales, transformed public school into their own ‘toy store’, where they are free to roam the aisles, picking a choosing amongst the ‘inventory’.
Sirota asks the central question: what will it take people to wake up and exit the losing ‘shell game’ into which they have entered, often without choice.
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Sirota writes:
“Denver taxpayers have been forced to cough up more than $3.6 million to Johnson’s private law firm for bond work in the last decade. One fifth of that sum was generated since just 2008”
It is a good thing Sirota writes better than he figures.
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How do you figure how he figures?
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He writes that in 10 years the law firm received $3.6 million. In the first five years they receive 80% of that money, while in the last 5 years they received 20%. It is written as if 20% is more than 80%.
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Ah, Thanks! I see what you’re saying now. I think it’s more a problem of not the best writing. It is confusing and I’m not sure what he’s trying to point out/highlight with those statements.
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Perhaps, but I think it is more likely that he is simply not a numbers guy. All he had to do was say 3.6 million in 10 years. $600K in 5 years is about 2.5 hours a week per year, assuming a daily rate of $8000 per day. But Bond lawyers frequently work on base points for whatever the amount of the bonds being issued.
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Actually, the statement is “Denver taxpayers have been forced to cough up more than $3.6 million million…” When what followed made little sense, too, instead of writing off Sirota as a numbers twit, I assumed that editors probably messed up.
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Good point. However, many journalists are not very good when it comes to numbers. Take a look at this article in the NYT.
Ask yourself how much money is this business likely to have made?
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I think you missed the point of the article, Bernie. It’s about sustainability, which is different from profiting financially. Making a profit was not listed among the aims of the project. I believe the point of the article was to provide a portrait of a rather unique couple, a retired hedge fund manager and his wife, who care more about the earth than they do about pocketing additional money. In this day and age, that’s highly unusual.
You come across as hypercritical of people, and you are painting journalists with a very broad brush.
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Teacher Ed:
I understand perfectly the point of the article and I also understand that a 1600 acre farm that cost upwards of $5 million produces 60 heifers per annum that generate a top line revenue of less than $100K before operating costs and carrying costs and is not sustainable. It is an oligarch’s hobby farm and a massive tax shelter. As I said, the journalist had no number or business sense.
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You understand profits but sustainability is an ecological concept, not economic. The guy may be able to write off his expenditures, but he seems more concerned about the other people involved in his agricultural venture making a living than making profits himself. Nothing is stopping him from purchasing more cattle and selling “10 times the amount we raise, in 10 minutes.” The scope and aims of his project are not to pursue monetary gains.
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Teacher Ed:
Of course I understand that the thrust of the article is about ecologically sound farming practices. The point is that no real farmer could possibly operate the way that these folks do. Their activities have limited relevance.
Take a look at the Form 990 for the Foundation that controls the One PacificCoast Bank. It appears to be a vehicle for acquiring other banks. Look for actual charitable activities undertaken by the Foundation – it has $50 million in assets, no discernible income from these assets and provided funds for the two principals to acquire a bank in Oregon.
Click to access 20-5253663_990_201112.pdf
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There are similar sustainability efforts around the world, including the establishment of the Sound Downs National Park in England. These are very important initiatives. I think the way this story was reported was telling. Not revealing that little tidbit of information about the small numbers of cattle until the end left the door open.to speculation. Personally, I’d like to see more reporters checking and double checking before drawing conclusions about important matters like this. You’d rather tag people as incompetent.
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Sorry, that’s South Downs, not Sound Downs.
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Teacher Ed:
Take a look at this piece by Allan Savoury
Not all environmental and ecological groups are on board but it certainly gets one to question what we think we know.
What triggered this discussion is Sirota’s strange phrasing. I don’t think I am in a rush to label people as incompetent but I am wary of when something looks too good to be true and when the facts somehow are spun. $3.6 million in legal fees over 10 years sounds very different from 1 day per month. When I read a newspaper story I seem to notice these discrepancies, frequently by doing a little mental arithmetic and asking myself some basic questions – such as what is the normal carrying capacity of an acre of pastureland. There is a local cattle farm near me in Massachusetts and they have about 50 head on 20 acres. That was sufficient to start me thinking. Classic examples are when somebody mentions what looks like a large number, e.g., millions of tons of ice melting in Greenland, but fails to include a baseline. Take NAEP test scores. It is very difficult to know what a rise or fall of 5 or 10 points means unless you know the nature of the baseline, which involves (a) the scoring procedures (b) what items people have no difficulty with and (c) what items people have difficulty with. Large sample sizes guarantee a form of statistical significance for small changes but they may have little practical significance.
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It looks like you enjoy playing “Gotcha.” I don’t want to play your game.
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Teacher Ed:
In what way am I playing gotcha?
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‘This state has unfortunately become the national petri dish of the Education Oligarchs – people like the Walton family, of Wal-Mart fame; Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft; Michael Bloomberg, the anti-union media mogul; and Philip Anschutz, the billionaire sponsor of right-wing Christian causes.’
One of the weirdest things about following this is how everyone claims this mantle, “the petri dish of ed reform.”
I read it coming out of Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Arizona,Texas. It might be time to recognize that there are a LOT of states that are moving really rapidly to privatization. Colorado isn’t an outlier. The “choice” district in Colorado gets a huge amount of attention, but there are now at least 2 districts in Michigan where one cannot “choose” a public school. The public schools are gone.
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Columbus public schools will be really damaged by this reform initiative that failed at the polls:
“This week Columbus school district voters rejected a 9-mill levy that would have increased local property taxes by 24 percent. The levy would also have sent some local tax dollars directly to charter schools.”
http://stateimpact.npr.org/ohio/jp/why-the-columbus-school-levy-failed/
Cleveland now sends local tax dollars directly to the unregulated, for-profit charter sector, and it’s been a disaster, so Columbus voters rejected the idea.
The problem is, charters have billionaire backers, and public schools don’t, so this leaves Columbus Public Schools vulnerable and ripe for takeover…. AAAAND, here come the finance folks ready to build charters to replace the public schools ed reformers stripped of funding:
http://markets.financialcontent.com/stocks/news/read/25621606/Charter_School_Capital_Invests_in_Ohio
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My only issue with this article is the subheading, which may have been written by Salon, not Sirota: “New data proves conservatives and moguls are spending huge sums to turn schools into Wall Street profit centers”. Nothing in Sirota’s article indicates that he thinks this is a “conservative” problem, but nevertheless it’s important to emphasize that it is a bipartisan problem. Emanuel and Quinn (with his new sidekick Vallas) here in Illinois aren’t “conservative”, but they’re certainly on-board with the privatization plan. Plenty of other people with Ds after their names (and even plenty who consider themselves liberal) are behind it too.
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It is true when it comes to education, a lot of Democrats just proudly (even smugly) tell me they are Democrats, as if that automatically means they support public education. I think they have assumed Democrats would be looking after the institution, when in fact those of us who pay attention know that they have not. I kindly tell people. I tell them that the Secretary of Education is not a friend to the public’s schools. And when people show a disconnect because that is the Federal level, I point out that our state is beholden to Federal mandates because a Democrat governor signed us up to be eligible for such. I don’t point this out for the purpose of finger-pointing, but more to get folks to pay attention and stop assuming (especially in NC) along party lines. I have put away my anger; I understand the power of the rhetoric from A Nation at Risk. Now I’m just ready to see some changes and see some folks truly standing up for a quality of public education that would be embraced by even a private school (to the extent possible–and I do believe it is possible in ways we are not seeing currently).
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Many people never realized that with Clinton, the Democratic party changed dramatically. It was done on purpose, in order to reclaim the southern conservative votes that the Democrats had lost after Johnson, due to civil rights legislation and integration, which had swung to the GOP with Reagan and Bush I. Arkansas governor Clinton declared himself a “New Democrat” and a “centrist” when he ran for president. He also brought neo-liberal economic policies to the Democratic party, which had come from Milton Friedman, Reagan and the GOP.
Obama is in the same vein, as are Emanuel, Quinn and many others in the Democratic party. The party is no longer comprised primarily of liberals and, to those of us who are progressive, they are very much right of center and, yes, “conservative”.
What kind of liberal president would let banksters who crash the economy off the hook –even after bailing them out and they used that money to give themselves bonuses for their nefarious business practices? What kind of liberal politician would take Social Security cuts off the table and then suddenly turn around and agree to include them as part of a “Grand Bargain?”
When both parties protect the wealthy and use the most vulnerable populations, children, seniors and the disabled, as bargaining chips, then liberals should know that they have no one representing their interests and they don’t have a party anymore. Liberals and progressives really need to let Democrats know how they feel about that, too (and get behind a third party en masse ASAP).
As I wrote the other day, Democrats should tell Quinn of their disgust over his choice of Vallas as a running mate, as I did here: http://www2.illinois.gov/gov/Pages/ContacttheGovernor.aspx
What do you suppose will be next from the neo-liberal, pro-corporation, anti-union “New Democrats” of Illinois? After his DC gig is up, I would not be surprised if Arne Duncan runs for mayor of Chicago, since many people plan to make Rahm a one time mayor, but the Peter Principle in politics has devolved into the recycling of incompetents from various outposts.
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It is frightening that children are receiving less education through all the programs fostered on the public.
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Yet once again:
I would URGE you to get a copy and read”
Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson.
Once of the most scholarly, authoritative, respected book on the subject known to me. It starts from the beginning of human history, is world wide in its scope of study
AND
most importantly: View why his theses seem to fit so closely to what HAS happened and what is happening in the U. S. today.
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The WSJ has a highly regarded review.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304724404577293714016708378
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“Teach the Best and Stomp the Rest: The American Schools . .Guilty as Charged?”: chapter on “Failed Initiatives” details the phenomenal development of venture philanthropies making target investments in education. But even these large investments are selectively placed to draw even larger amounts of federal and state tax money into the mix of charters, vouchers, et. al. The book also details the acquired skills of many if not most charters in selective admissions, drops and expulsions. This is drawing charter applications from academically talented students of relatively well-to-do families of all races who are now supporting the charters to the demise of local public education. But the bulk of the poor students and those not academically talented are remaining in the pits, which is why the “gap” has not improved for 20 years, academic test scores remain level and school racial segregation is increasing.
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When I found out that Bill Gates had donated over 11 million dollars to the Colorado State Dept. of Education to push Common Core — (and they ACCEPTED it!) — I became very angry. In appealing to the State Board of Education in Denver, this group turned a deaf ear, with the exception of one member. I can’t see any way out of this mess in our state until the governor and the legislature change.
Sandra L. Wickham Woodland Park, CO
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It is insane how many groups and agencies accepted Gates’ money to push Common Core! The fact that he’s having to pay to peddle the product should disturb everyone.
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