Perdido Street blogger asks why it is impossible to find out who contributed to the lobbying group Families for Excellent Schools, which spent $6 million this year to prevent Mayor Bill de Blasio from regulating the charter school sector and won a law that forces the city to pay the rent of charters not located on public school grounds.
The blogger quotes extensively from the business magazine Crain’s New York, which described how this lobbying group exploited loopholes to avoid complying with state laws that require disclosure of donors to political action committees. “Group is visible,” the article’s title says, “but not its donors.”
Why do they hide their names and faces? We know why Perdido Street blogger has no name: he or she would be fired for speaking candidly, although tenure might be an obstacle.
But why do Wall Street hedge fund managers hide their identity? Why are they ashamed to let the world know that they are the “Families for Excellent Schools,” that they—whose children attend elite schools—are pretending to be parents in New York City’s poorest communities? Why pretend that impoverished families raised $6 million to attack Bill de Blasio, even as he was fighting to raise the minimum wage, expand universal pre-kindergarten, and preserve public education? Why pretend that the poor families who have been hoodwinked into supporting the privatization of public education are paying for the destruction of public education and the enrichment of investors and charter entrepreneurs?
Perdido Street blogger writes:
Just as Campbell Brown refuses to reveal who the donors for her anti-tenure group are even as she spends the money she gets from them on her anti-tenure campaign, Families For Excellent Schools spends millions lobbying politicians and millions more on pro-charter ads without revealing where that money is coming from.
This is life in Andrew Cuomo’s New York, where he raised millions through his Committee To Save New York PAC, then had that PAC spend that money on ads touting his political agenda, all without having to reveal who was donating to the Committee To Save New York PAC.
When the law changed and he would have been forced to reveal that donor base, he shut down the Committee To Save New York instead.
The criminals are running the state, folks – they own it, they’re throwing their dirty money around and buying whatever they want and whomever they want whenever they want and there’s NOTHING you can do it about it.
Andrew Cuomo’s New York – a cesspool of corruption.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I would like to submit an essay. Here it is.
Emanuele Corso’s essays on politics, education, and the social contract have been published at NMPolitics, Light of New Mexico, Grassroots Press, Nation of Change, and his own – siteseven.net. He taught Schools and Society at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he took his PhD. His BS was in Mathematics. He is a veteran of the U.S. Air Force’s – Strategic Air Command where he served as a Combat Crew Officer during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He has been a member of both the Carpenters and Joiners and IATSE (theatrical) labor unions and is retired from IATSE. He is presently working on a book: Belief Systems and the Social Contract. He can be reached at ecorso@earthlink.net
The Is and Isn’tness of Public Education
It Isn’t About Children
It’s not about children, people and it’s not about education. It’s about profit. Don’t let anyone, including Arne Duncan, tell you otherwise. The Rupert Murdochs, the Koch boys, the Michael Moes and other billionaires wouldn’t be stuffing vast sums of money into political campaign coffers unless they expected a commensurate ROI. There’s a public money jugular out there and investors are salivating. As Moe himself recently explained, “We see the education industry [my emphasis] today as the healthcare industry of 30 years ago.” He is referring to the American healthcare industry which can’t climb beyond 26th place out of 30 countries, and where the cost of an MRI can range anywhere from $335 to $2844.
The Oxford dictionary definition of industry is “economic activity concerned with the processing of raw materials and manufacture of goods in factories.” Schools as factories, children as raw materials to be manufactured into goods as a form of economic or commercial activity? Does that fit your definition of education?
In the US, monied interests have always exerted influence on public education, but much more directly now that investors are salivating for access to an “industry” of government-enabled testing and corporatized alternative schools. Billionaires are financing political campaigns and candidates, placing operatives in key administrative positions in state education departments. Listen to Rupert Murdoch: “When it comes to K-through-12 education, we see a $500 billion sector in the US alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed.” Who is desperate?
Education reform is now the big target after healthcare. In both cases, equating education and healthcare with industry, humanity is displaced by venality. Education is being drowned in an alphabet soup of meaningless, cleverly contrived names depicting cleverly contrived meaningless programs. No Child Left Behind and Common Core are about business models, not about children. The case of Washington State recently losing its federal carrot for not conforming to Duncan’s Dictates gives lie to any pretense that this is about children learning. Kids in Washington are learning alright, but without the onerous evaluation regimens and pointless methodologies, such as the “counting up” method of subtraction taught in Common Core schools. To their credit, many more states than Washington are pushing back and putting children first.
This IS About Children
Because there are no easy procedural, political, or curricular solutions, public education has been an easy sell for simplistic solutions since colonial times. There are, however, at least three non-simplistic, fundamental reforms which could be implemented to good effect given the courage and determination to carry them out. The first involves innate learning ability, the matter of recognizing basic intelligence. Politicians won’t talk about differences in innate ability because parents vote, and all their children are wonderful and above average. Also because of social and political taboos, educators will not risk alienating parents.
It is just common sense to acknowledge that some children learn faster than others. Some will learn math, reading, or science faster than their classmates. This is no different from a child being a better first baseman than his or her classmates. Schools do talk candidly about athletic skills and, more importantly, they discriminate on that basis without reprisal. It’s a different story altogether, however, when it comes to intellectual ability. No matter what cleverly marketed standard academic achievement tests are applied to children across the board, holding teachers to the charade is fundamentally dishonest. It is unfair to teachers and, even more so, to students who are thus denied appropriate individualized approaches to learning.
The artifices of grade levels from first to twelfth could be done away with and replaced by individualized growth levels and programs allowing for the cognitive and motivational differences between children. This would be true “no child left behind”- every child could ascend at his or her own rate and motivation – there would be no contrived “behind”. Children should not have to suffer the indignity of being held back simply because the system could not do better at serving them. It’s adults who are failing not children.
Second, we seldom hear discussions about how public schools are organized even though school organization is a key factor in their lack of success. Simply put, the wrong people are running schools, and it’s an inverted hierarchy that has crippled education for years. Schools need to be organized around teachers and students, not overpaid and over-empowered bureaucrats. Teachers should determine, according to set standards, curriculum, the evaluation of learners and faculty, and school policy. Administrators should exist to serve the teaching staff – serve being the operative word.
The third reform involves parents. Parents must be held to account for their children’s interest and motivation in the process of schooling. Teachers with classrooms full of students cannot be held responsible for matters essentially parental. It does indeed take a community to fully and truly educate children, and the process starts at home.
The process of schooling cannot be replaced by testing, nor by demonizing teachers or allowing parents to transfer their responsibilities to schools. Thanks, but no thanks, Arne, you are wrong, tragically wrong about all of this. Kids in too many schools are spending their time learning to take tests with real education taking the hind seat, if any seat at all. When education is drained of its humanizing values and reduced to meaningless rote Pavlovian response, we are creating a nation of sheep.
No matter how you slice it, this present “reform” movement is not about children. It’s about money and most importantly, that is what has to change.
You mention for profit healthcare and education as targets of big business. At least in healthcare workers and their bargaining units were not attacked, and senior staff members weren’t fired while uncertified and unqualified people took their jobs. The assault on public teachers in this country has been a constant for the past several years. Nobody suggested nurses get paid less if their patients get sicker. No one has told doctors that there is only one way to treat a patient. Nobody has tried to deprofessionalize the medical profession. The attack on teachers has be up close and personal. Teachers have been a scapegoat for all of America’s ills, both real and imagined, by the Wall St. crowd in cahoots with the government.
“…and senior staff members weren’t fired while uncertified and unqualified people took their jobs.”
Well, not exactly, but there still has been a great attempt to deprofessionalize the field. Physicians assistants and nurses are doing a lot of what doctors used to do, for instance, and doctors are being told what tests and procedures they can and can’t do.
As far as the healthcare unions, the nurses union in particular need to watch their backs. They are getting quite powerful, especially their public statements during the ebola “crisis”. Plenty of people will be gunning for them too, if they haven’t already.
I think all workers, and professionals in particular, are getting assaulted in nearly every field, but it just looks a bit different from one field to another.
Dienne
De-professionaize?
Yeah. They sure did that, but where teachers are concerned the Constitution went out the window, so tens of thousands of the veteran professionals were thrown to the dogs, not merely from their career.
GO here an learn how the war on teachers works in LA.
http://www.perdaily.com/2013/03/now-is-the-winternow-is.html
Then see how it worked in NYC
http://www.speakingasateacher.com/SPEAKING_AS_A_TEACHER/No_Constitutional_Rights-_A_hidden_scandal_of_National_Proportion.html
and take a look at what happened when the veteran teachers were pushed out.
https://vimeo.com/4199476
Well said.
Cross Posted at http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Perdido-Street-Blog-Here-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Action_Andrew-Cuomo_Diane-Ravitch_Donors-141018-710.html#comment516457
with this comment which has embedded links to posts here, that do not reproduce below, so if you want the links go to the comment.
15,880 school districts in 50 states make it impossible for you to know the huge fraud that is perpetrated now that the public schools have been ravaged to remove the authentic professional teachers so they will tail.
Look at New Orleans where Mike Deshotels, veteran educator and blogger in Louisiana, reviews the accumulating evidence and concludes: the claims of success in the Recovery School District are a complete fraud.
Look at the Bait and switch tactics of Charter schools described by Peter Greene.
Take a look at the shenanigans in Pennsylvania, where Larry Feinberg, who runs the Keystone State Education Coalition of public school advocates, offered a summary of K12 Inc.’s Agora charter school in Pennsylvania which shows its failure.
Look at In Florida: Karen Yi and Amy Shipley of the Sun-Sentinel in Florida report on the multiple problems of Mavericks Charter Schools. The chain currently runs six charter schools for dropouts, five of them in South Florida.
But more than a thousand pages of public records obtained by the Sun Sentinel raise questions about the private company’s management of its six charter high schools, including five in South Florida, which are publicly funded but independently operated.
Many of the company’s schools have been investigated and asked to return public dollars. Three have closed. Local, state or federal officials have flagged academic or other problems at Mavericks schools.
Look at Nevada, where Angie Sullivan is a teacher who regularly emails a long list of legislators, education advocates, journalists….and me. Here is her outraged commentary about Democrats who collect money from teachers and betray them and refuse to fund public schools. And her outrage at her own state union for supporting Democrats who don’t support public education. In many other states, the Democrats act no different from Republicans in their fealty to privatization and high-stakes testing.
Look at Denver, Colorado Jeannie Kaplan reports here on Jonathan Kozol’s recent visit to Denver. Denver is a city that has become totally devoted to corporate style “reform” for a decade. Now the corporate reformers own the entire school board plus they have a U.S. Senator Michael Bennett.Kaplan shows how Kozol’s message explains corporate reform, now deeply embedded in Denver.
How about Wisconsin: A review by the Wisconsin State Journal found that taxpayers wasted $139 million in the past decade on failing voucher schools. “Over the past 10 years, Wisconsin taxpayers have paid about $139 million to private schools that were subsequently barred from the state’s voucher system for failing to meet requirements related to finances, accreditation, student safety and auditing, a State Journal review has found.
And in North Carolina Lindsay Wagner writes in NC Policy Watch that 90% of the students using the state’s new vouchers are attending religious schools. The institution receiving the largest number of vouchers is the Greensboro Islamic Academy.
and there is so much more, and no where is the corruption of public schools more in evidence then IN LA. Perdaily.com chronicles the debacle that will make you dizzy.
Only criminals, frauds, terrorists and unpopular crazy, dysfunctional extremists have to hide their identities. Honest, hard working people have nothing to hide.
Mr. Cuomo is spot on: NY is fraught with corruption, a veritable cesspool of evil, with the governor as one of the biggest pieces of floating doody in the smelly cesspool . . . .
It’s like doody calling excrement “waste product”.