One of our readers brought this sad article to my attention.
Under Governor Rick Snyder, more school districts have collapsed into emergency status than during the time of any of his predecessors. Failing districts get taken over by the state and put into its Emergency Achievement District, an oxymoron. Once in the EAA, a graduate of the unaccredited Broad Academy arranges to dissolve democratic control and turn the schools over to for-profit charter chaplains.
Snyder encourages charters and loves for-profit charters.
80% of Michigan’s charters operate for-profit.
What a racket!
How much longer will Michigan voters tolerate the plundering and sacking of public education?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The for-profit logic will always look for areas in an industry where they can cut cost—that is what for-profit is all about. In education the largest expenditure in any school budget is labor–teachers. Following the for-profit logic demands that as a provider you initiate the following strategies to reduce cost: raise class sizes; employ non-certified faculty; eliminate tenure; marginalize or eliminate unions; substitute technology for certified personnel. The same logic is largely the cause of an era where corporate growth has steadily increased while jobs and pay have declined–now that logic is infecting the public sector. There are sectors where this logic makes sense, education is not one of them, nor is health care. In fact, there are public services, education is one of them, that are designed to go into the red. This is the definition of the common good–a service that the public values and has agreed that the quality of that service is wholly dependent on individual attention by highly trained professionals — that is not the recipe for making a profit—it is recipe for educating a child. Not to belabor the point, but when you open up the books of an exclusive pre-school (or University) you find that even with wealthy parents, the tuition never covers the entire cost of a student’s schooling—the difference is made up with endowments. The very wealthy do not put their children in private schools designed to make a profit—they will pay high tuitions and donate generously to a school they know will never make money, but will give their child the care and attention that all us in communities across the tracks also deserve. There was a time when the state and local taxing bodies would provide that extra fundings to make up for the “inefficiencies” of public schools. But that idea of the common good is quickly disappearing. The irony of course, is seeing CEO’s of these for profit companies systematically dismantle public schooling while at the same time using taxpayer money to fund charters that are tailored to meet the individual needs of their child.
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Alan C. Jones: the posting just previous to this one reinforces your points.
Thank you for your comments.
😎
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In this video, Duncan talks in a friendly collegial tone to re\presentatives of a our nation’s teachers, agroup THAT, IN FACT, DUNCAN WANTS TO DESTROY, and that his CORPORATE MASTERS ARE PAYING HIM TO DESTROY.
That’s not hyperbole. This is EXACTLY what is going on. When talking to teachers, Arne puts on the facade of “I’m your friend”… “you’re whom we want input from”, and and on and on… while the truth is…
ARNE DUNCAN WANTS TO DESTROY THE TEACHING PROFESSION.
I first heard words to that effect two-and-a-half years ago at UTLA’s LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE from Warren Fletcher, my current union president:
(go to 06:30)
———————————————-
WARREN FLETCHER, UTLA PRESIDENT:
“Well, I’ve been through a lot. In the past our reactions to each successive wave of bad educational ideas would have been what you might expect: ‘We’re professionals. We’ll do what’s best for the kids despite these bad policies. We’ll just get through this.’ That’s what professionals do!
“But the challenges we face today in Los Angeles are different. THE GOAL of the phony ‘reform’ movement IS NOT TO CHANGE YOUR JOB; IT’S TO ELIMINATE YOUR JOB.
“THEIR GOAL IS NOT TO CHANGE THE TEACHING PROFESSION; IT’S TO ABOLISH TEACHING AS A PROFESSION.
“Teachers are college educated professionals. You are not easily taken in. You see what the current school board majority is trying to do to your profession and to your students. I know that every one of you is ready to stand up and take this fight to the District, ready to take back our schools.
“You are not alone. Your union stands with you.
“We are public school teachers and we are proud of it!”
– – – – – – – –
Indeed, one of the goals of the “reformers”—a goal that goes hand-in-hand with overall privatization—is change teaching from…
————————————-
CATEGORY A … a profession with requires exacting education, extensive expertise, a demanding training period before actual practice… much like that of doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc. … a career job that last decades…
and convert it to …
CATEGORY B… nothing more than a low-level service job that requires the most minimal education, almost no expertise, and little if any training period (just gimmicks from godawful books written by “experts” like Doug Lemov) … like fast food, retail sales at a store, janitorial, etc. … not a career job… and with no job protections, or due process for firing… a few years and out you go, to then be replaced by a next round of similarly poorly-compensated, short term workers…
—————————————–
CATEGORY B need only be paid a pittance and can be abused and over-worked with impunity, while CATEGORY A requires considerably more compensation. If the money-motivated privatizers are going to make a decent profit while taking over all or much of what is now public education, the the work force has to be the latter.
I remember talking to a TFA Corps Member at a school site, telling her that doctors, lawyers, and engineers need exacting education, extensive expertise, a demanding training period before actual practice… and so should teachers.
Her reply, “Yeah, but those are different from teaching; those are REAL professions.”
THUD! Sound of my jaw hitting the floor. (That’s part of what they’re taught during their five weeks of training… oy vey!!)
The other agenda is that corporations—including those not engaged in raping and pillaging of public educatin—and rich folk will have their taxes drastically cut as a result of all this. Those corporations will have higher profits, higher price for their stock, and happy stock-holders as a result. THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENED IN CHILE… thanks to decades of the dictatorship there, and no democratic process to stop privatization.
That’s why the so-called “corporate reform” privatizers are spending hundreds of millions of dollars vilifying the current teachers and their unions—documentaries, movies, op-eds, foundations, etc. Those unions are getting in their way of their rampage towards profits. The privatizers desperately need to destroy the public’s faith and confidence in teachers, and pass so-called “right-to-work” laws that will destroy unions. They want to do to education what they did to the housing industry, and to Wall Street… education is the next realm to conquer, rape, and pillage. These are the same folks.
However, you’ll notice that in the schools that these well-heeled folks send their own kids, you have teachers with multiple degrees, decades of experience… schools that include full-time dedicated libraries / librarians, arts teachers/ program, music teachers / programs..
Unlike the McSchools they want for the kids of the middle and working classes, these schools have small class sizes, and no (or very little) time spent in a cubicle with on-line or digital teachers. 100% (or close to it) of their kids’ instructional time is spend with live teachers of CATEGORY A above, and because of the small class sizes—12-to-1, 10-to-1, that attention is often 1-on-1… again, totally unlike the McSchools they want for everyone else’s kids.
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Michigan has been a leader in the destruction since Gov Engler, at least. Frogs in water that nears boil etc etc.
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Except that the frog thing is a myth. The frog really will hop out. Americans, on the other hand, not so much.
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As a Michigan resident, my opinion is that Snyder is a very clever politician. And I mean politician. He pretends he isn’t a politician (“oh, I’m just a humble business man who only makes decisions based on data and dashboards,” Snyder will say), but he engages in political agendas and ideologies easily.
He loves all the stuff that reformers love. His EAA is very cheap (lots of TFA and lots of blended learning). His encouragement of charter expansion (mostly by for-profit) is easy to recognize. The infamous skunkworks project where he managed to deflect the heat is another example.
He wants to unbundle education and turn it into a massive market exchange where students could be getting classes from three or four institutions and delivered in a variety of ways. Sounds good but it is really unstable financially for any education provider.
He’s currently trying to make Michigan an indentured servant to China. His State of the State address was heavy on rolling out the welcome mat to immigrants. (He states that these immigrants will start business but we know that they’ll just be cheaper H1-B employees). Note: Snyder sold Gateway Computers to the Chinese.
All while underfunding schools and claiming a surplus. He noted a surplus of a billion dollars. It’s not really a surplus. It happens to be the amount that he cut from education funding in 2011. Almost exactly that amount.
Snyder isn’t interested in providing better education. He’s interested in providing cheaper education. It’s all about cost-cutting.
The problem is that he’ll be very difficult to beat. The best Democrat candidates don’t want to run against him because the DeVos family and the Koch brothers will flood the airwaves with Snyder ads come next fall. His spending advantage will be gigantic.
In 2012, Michigan voters cast more votes for Democratic candidates in the state House by a margin well over 50%. Obama carried the state. But an off-year election only brings out the most dedicated voters and those Tea Partiers never miss a chance to back their candidates.
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I’m not an educator, but we spend several months every year in the state of Tennessee.
The state “won” First Place in the first round of “Race To The Top”–a Democratic Party (and Arne Duncan) initiative.
The Grand Prize was about $501 million dollars–mostly misspent on Charter Schools, privatization, etc.
Not sure that it would help a great deal if more Democrats are elected–unless Dems are willing to change the national education agenda. Or, somehow, ‘real’ progressive Democrats can be elected to office.
[But that’s just a view from an observer and non-educator.]
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Good piece on how ed reformers in Michigan pushed Right to Work:
http://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2014/01/report_details_how_devos_famil.html
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Glad I don’t live in Michigan anymore. In Colorado, it’s awful, too. The good news is that number of parents who are opting out their child(ren) from repressive testing is growing. In Colorado, we have two huge billboards up on freeways informing parents of their right to opt out and where to go for more information.
Pasi Sahlberg is coming to Colorado for Colorado United Opt Out, March 28th – March 30th. Google this event.
And THANK YOU, Diane, for speaking in Colorado. You were great.
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This article is even worse. It’s about the Educational Achievement Authority (Michigan’s takeover district) which of course Snyder and the Republican legislature are trying to expand. Disgusting. We can not stand for this.
http://www.eclectablog.com/?s=Eaa&submit.x=8&submit.y=11
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Curious why you would highlight an article that is more than a year old when this blogger has consistently written many articles about education in Michigan. The most recent on this particular subject was just yesterday and is an excellent, well-researched piece about the Education Achievement Authority and how wrong it is for our students.
http://www.eclectablog.com/2014/01/education-achievement-authority-teachers-speak-out-on-abuse-of-students-and-the-failure-of-the-eaa.html
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Marty, great minds think alike!
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And apparently perfectly time-synced as well. That is funny!
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And, of course, there’s the flip side of ed reform leadership, because of course Michigan still has some public schools. It’s not yet 100% privatized.
They’ve been completely abandoned.
I read about the closed meetings ed reformers held in the state on how to cut funding from education with the methods used in Louisiana and what jumps right out at you is there is no mention, at all, of the public schools in the state. Those kids don’t exist. They put a public school teacher on the reform board but he resigned. I don’t blame him! He was probably tired of waiting for some discussion of public schools.
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It’s Pure Michiguna❢
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I was looking at some School Choice Week events from years past.
Apparently, a showing of the movie The Cartel is a popular activity.
http://www.texaspolicy.com/events/national-school-choice-week-movie-screening-cartel
Google School Choice Week and The Cartel. It’s amazing how many events focus on this film.
I guess I’m supposed to tell my 5th grader his teachers and local public school are part of a “cartel”.
They should call it “National Bash Public Schools Week”
Truth in advertising.
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Charter schools seem to me to be like our “health care” industry. When blue cross and blue shield were non profit health care was affordable. Now? Need I ask?
I believe charters will follow the same pattern. In the future only the children of the rich will get decent education. Others: too expensive.
Colleges are getting that way now. When in Portugal several years ago I was told that a child could go to college for $100.00 a year. That from one of the poorest countries in Europe. Since funding for colleges has been cut over and over again. Students come out with humongous debt. Middle and lower class families even now can hardly afford collegiate education.
Politicians decry our poor education. [They are abysmally ignorant.] Yet they cut funding, put road blocks in place to hinder teachers from doing their job ad nauseum. Without a great educational system how can democracy survive? Especially since the media is in the hands of 5 corporations, at least 80% of it is.
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Gordon,
You are correct: education is now following the deregulation – think TFA and its 5 week wonder temps – and privatization pattern that was established for healthcare in the ’70’s and ’80’s, and it will have the same predictably catastrophic results.
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Agree that:
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John Austin, President of Michigan State Board of Education here. We do have an unfortunate proliferation in Michigan of new charter and cyber schools, both good, mediocre and truly bad at educating children. The legislature’s, and to date the Governor’s unwillingness to insist on quality control in new school creation, to ensure they educate kids, and the fueling of a wild-west free market of largely for-profit new school creation is doing damage both financially, and educationally to all our schools and children.
The EAA was an effort, well-intentioned, to create a functional and effective state turnaround district to improve performance in our worst schools. Unfortunately, it too was tied up in knots, when legislation to codify it was loaded up with ornaments of the unlimited new school creation policy being pushed last year. It also has had real growing pains, problems and transparency issues.
However, different from the account my friend Ellen Cogen Lipton seemed to suggest in the Electabog article, the State Board of Education twice asked Dr. Covington to come and discuss progress or lack thereof with us, and he certainly did so, and we had as recently as last September a useful and robust public discussion of all the issues– hopefully towards helping the EAA work better, and do better with the legitimate concerns raised by Rep Lipton and many others.
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I think they should stick with paying $14,000 per student per year for the worst academic results in the country.
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To “stick with” that, it’d have to be the case in the first place. It isn’t. If you’re talking about the state per-pupil funding, Snyder has not cut it to less than half what you’re claiming. If you’re complaining about Detroit specifically, the funding is a bit higher because of all of the issues the kids bring with them, but it’s still possible for students who show up, behave, and do the work to get an excellent education in Detroit Public Schools. That’s not true in the charters or the EAA schools that Snyder and Michigan Republicans are pushing to replace the public schools. It’d be great if more students did those things, but it’s not the fault of the schools that they don’t.
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They are not just attacking the teaching profession.
The are out to DESTROY TEACHING AS A PROFESSION.
One of the goals of the “reformers”—a goal that goes hand-in-hand with overall privatization—is change teaching from…
————————————-
CATEGORY A … a profession with requires exacting education, extensive expertise, a demanding training period before actual practice… much like that of doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc. … a career job that last decades…
and convert it to …
CATEGORY B… nothing more than a low-level service job that requires the most minimal education, almost no expertise, and little if any training period (just gimmicks from godawful books written by “experts” like Doug Lemov) … like fast food, retail sales at a store, janitorial, etc. … not a career job… and with no job protections, or due process for firing… a few years and out you go, to then be replaced by a next round of similarly poorly-compensated, short term workers…
—————————————–
CATEGORY B need only be paid a pittance and can be abused and over-worked with impunity, while CATEGORY A requires considerably more compensation. If the money-motivated privatizers are going to make a decent profit while taking over all or much of what is now public education, the the work force has to be the latter.
I remember talking to a TFA Corps Member at a school site, telling her that doctors, lawyers, and engineers need exacting education, extensive expertise, a demanding training period before actual practice… and so should teachers.
Her reply, “Yeah, but those are different from teaching; those are REAL professions.”
THUD! Sound of my jaw hitting the floor. (That’s part of what they’re taught during their five weeks of training… oy vey!!)
The other agenda is that corporations—including those not engaged in raping and pillaging of public educatin—and rich folk will have their taxes drastically cut as a result of all this. Those corporations will have higher profits, higher price for their stock, and happy stock-holders as a result. THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENED IN CHILE… thanks to decades of the dictatorship there, and no democratic process to stop privatization.
That’s why the so-called “corporate reform” privatizers are spending hundreds of millions of dollars vilifying the current teachers and their unions—documentaries, movies, op-eds, foundations, etc. Those unions are getting in their way of their rampage towards profits. The privatizers desperately need to destroy the public’s faith and confidence in teachers, and pass so-called “right-to-work” laws that will destroy unions. They want to do to education what they did to the housing industry, and to Wall Street… education is the next realm to conquer, rape, and pillage. These are the same folks.
However, you’ll notice that in the schools that these well-heeled folks send their own kids, you have teachers with multiple degrees, decades of experience… schools that include full-time dedicated libraries / librarians, arts teachers/ program, music teachers / programs..
Unlike the McSchools they want for the kids of the middle and working classes, these schools have small class sizes, and no (or very little) time spent in a cubicle with on-line or digital teachers. 100% (or close to it) of their kids’ instructional time is spend with live teachers of CATEGORY A above, and because of the small class sizes—12-to-1, 10-to-1, that attention is often 1-on-1… again, totally unlike the McSchools they want for everyone else’s kids.
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Children are not profits. Deal with it. These are kids, not data points.
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