Governor Andrew Cuomo promised, in a meeting with the New York Daily News editorial board, to “bust” the public school monopoly.
Vowing to break “one of the only remaining public monopolies,” Gov. Cuomo on Monday said he’ll push for a new round of teacher evaluation standards if re-elected.
Cuomo, during a meeting with the Daily News Editorial Board, said better teachers and competition from charter schools are the best ways to revamp an underachieving and entrenched public education system.
“I believe these kinds of changes are probably the single best thing that I can do as governor that’s going to matter long-term,” he said, “to break what is in essence one of the only remaining public monopolies — and that’s what this is, it’s a public monopoly.”
He said the key is to put “real performance measures with some competition, which is why I like charter schools.”
Cuomo said he will push a plan that includes more incentives — and sanctions — that “make it a more rigorous evaluation system.”
Cuomo expects fierce opposition from the state’s teachers, who are already upset with him and have refused to endorse his re-election bid.
“The teachers don’t want to do the evaluations and they don’t want to do rigorous evaluations — I get it,” Cuomo said. “I feel exactly opposite.”
Cuomo sounds more and more like Scott Walker of Wisconsin every day. Bust the unions. Humble the teachers. Crush public schools and introduce free market competition.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The last public monopoly is state government. Wonder if Cuomo will bust that one? Bill Gates for CEO of New York?
+1
yes.
And housing public records; providing public safety; public health. . .public roads, what other monopolies can be busted?
In Ohio, about the only thing legislators worked harder on than “accountability” for teachers was gerrymandering their districts. And maybe filling campaign coffers.
Some thorough information about “Quid pro Cuomo” appears at the site: http://www.danielskatz.net At this site, we read of the hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to Cuomo from supporters of charter schools: “Proudly ignoring 92% of New York State’s public school children.” Hefty amounts appear as well from real estate interests, and on and on. In his bullying way, Cuomo has promised to continue to harass the public school teachers of New York, while pampering the charter school money interests. Shame on him, a person educated in private schools, who knows little or nothing about the public school system.
With every passing day, Andrew Cuomo makes enormous strides towards demonstrating that he is in no way his father’s son. More’s the pity for the people, and particularly the children, of New York. When it comes to public education, there are no Republicans and no Democrats: just plutocrats, neoliberal-cons, and their lackeys on one side, and the 99% on the other. With democratic core values and our children hanging precariously in the balance. We cannot, must not, and will not let these soulless, conniving, greedy bastards win.
Magee & Mulgrew – the ball is in your court.
“underachieving and entrenched public education system”
This is underachieving!
Last year, 80% of high school graduates graduated on time on an academic track, and in the U.S. 90% have a HS degree or its equivalent by age 25. No other country graduates that many students on an academic track. Not one country. In Japan, for instance, 70% graduate from HS on time from an academic track. The rest graduate from a vocational track and then find a job with no plans to go to college.
The U.S. is ranked 4th in the world for the number of adults who have a four year+ college degrees—so many that there are almost 3 college graduates in the U.S. for every job that requires a college degree. All of the countries, but one (Israel), with the highest number of college graduates also have high numbers of unemployed or underemployed college graduates. This holds true for the U.S., Japan, Russia and South Korea.
Even with the PISA test—when we ditch the overall average and compare the six socioeconomic groups separate from the total—the U.S. has the highest average score for the lowest three groups outperforming every OECD nation and for the highest three socioeconomic groups, the U.S. is equal to or very close to the rest of the OECD nations so the statistical difference is not significant.
Get that, the U.S. does the best job teaching children who grow up in poverty. Children who live in poverty are the lowest scoring children on the PISA test in every OECD nation.
That NEEDS to be said again”
The public schools in the United States do the best job in the world with the most difficult and at risk children that they teach. No other country that is tested by PISA beats the United States when it comes to teaching children who live in poverty, and the children who do not live in poverty hold their own with their socioeconomic peers.
The only reason the overall average of the PISA looks bad is because the U.S. has the most children living in poverty and it also over tested the number of children living in poverty and this acted the same as a ton of cement around the feet of someone tossed in the ocean. In fact, I suspect that Arne Duncan and his troops made sure that the U.S. would test a larger ratio of children who live in poverty compared to all other OECD nations so the overall PISA average would be much lower than what the average would have been if the ratio tested had been what it should have been.
I think testing more children who live in poverty was a deliberate act to drastically alter the actual average to make the public schools look bad.
The corporate funded, fake-education reform movement is not about reform. It is about profits for the private sector, and the education of children does not count. It is also about educating the national’s children through a Prussian education model that the CCSS agenda will create and support, so future generations don’t question their masters and leaders.
In the “Bridge Over the River Kwa”, the Japanese prison camp commander tells the British soldiers who are building the bridge that they must be happy in their work as they tortured, beaten and slowly starve and are worked to death.
If the CCSS becomes the controlling element of the nation’s schools, that will be what the oligarchs and their media will keep telling the starving, suffering masses: Be Happy in Your Work!
Regardless of what Cuomo thinks, he is a puppet of the oligarchs and a total fraud. If the oligarchs didn’t control the traditional media, Cuomo would lose the election and probably have to go into hiding to stay alive, because voters—instead of being fooled to vote for him—would know the truth. Maybe, he’d even have to change his last name like Rhee did when she fled to Sacramento to reinvent herself.
Well said! Too bad this message can’t get out to more New Yorkers.
If everyone who reads Diane’s Blog were to Tweet, for instance, just this post, then the odds of it going viral on Twitter would be high. Then we would get more coverage and reach more people because of the snowball effect.
20,000 to 70,000 original tweets in one 24 hour period on one post would have an impact, a big impact on Twitter.
For instance, if everyone who visited Diane’s Blog today were to copy and paste the following Tweet and then repeated it once an hour:
Built on a foundation of lies & fraud
Cuomo Promises More Charter Schools
Tougher Teacher Evaluations
After Election
http://wp.me/p2odLa-8Wn
To be effective and make this work, I think that Diane would have to pick just one post a day that comes with a powerful copy and paste Tweet and urge her followers to use it on Twitter. I think doing this with more than one post a day would be overkill and eventually lose its effectiveness.
Keep it super simple.
Public education is not some monopoly that needs to busted, it’s a democratically supported public institution that ensures the foundations of democracy. The real robber barons of our day are the new generation of Gatesian oligarchs who want education as their own private, profit centers.
Cuomo must be speaking from their latest pr plan here. Their rhetoric is one of projection: accuse public ed of doing the very action you are engaged in.
I don’t know how supporters of public ed could support Cuomo.
It’s a poorly educated person who never learned the distinction between monopoly and sovereignty.
or a selectively educated person . . .hear what you want to hear; create your own definitions and realities.
Who needs right-wing governors like this one â so much for worker rights, so much for public schools –
John A. Matthews
Executive Director
Madison Teachers Inc.
821 Williamson Street
Madison, WI 53703
608-257-0491
matthewsj@madisonteachers.org
http://www.madisonteachers.org
Yet, Randi Weingarten and the AFT is chasing after TIME but supporting Cuomo.
_Last_ public monopoly? C’mon Andrew, you’re not even trying! Don’t we need “choice” in justice, emergency response, policing and defense? How about we get to choose which entity receives and apportions our state taxes?
Governor Cuomo could not be more wrong. I want evaluations that help me improve instruction and learning, not how to help my students improve their test score.
Yes.
Stack ranking didn’t work at Microsoft and it won’t work on teaching. Cuomo doesn’t get it.
“Plutopoly”
Cuomo’s a plutopoly
And teachers just a boot
To kick around the board
And pass by “Go” for loot
make that “schools are just a boot”
Milton Friedman would be proud. (Disaster Capitalism)
Naomi Klein would not be surprised. (Shock Doctrine)
At least we now know that Governor Cuomo is a Friedmanomics Devotee and can vote accordingly in New York!
http://publicschoolscentral.com/2014/10/28/governor-cuomo-a-friedmanomics-devotee/
Just make sure that people unfamiliar with him understand that Milton Friedman was a hard core Republican, economic advisor to Ronald Reagan, and in the opposite camp of Andrew’s liberal father, Mario, when he was governor.
This acorn fell on a vastly different planet from the one inhabited by his dad. Andrew is much like the children of former civil rights leader and child activist Marian Wright Edelman, who are making their fortunes from trashing teachers and privatizing public education. Where are their parents now?
Scariest thing about this is that he doesn’t choose a policy without having one eye on a future presidential bid. Can he persuade the public on this? Or can I get some reassurance on here that he’s totally misreading the situation?
Maybe Cuomo missed the study showing 50 – 60% of the differences in standardized test scores are genetic: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0080341
How will his “rigorous evaluation system” change this?
It’s very ironic that the Governor is saying that he wants more rigorous evaluations just a day after we filed a lawsuit to declare the Growth Model irrational. See below blog posting.
cross posted at
http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Cuomo-will-push-new-teache-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Clueless_Education_Monopoly_School-Reform-141028-364.html#comment517505 with this comment from an earlier post here:
This in the face of overwhelming rejection by parents, students and teachers of testing as a means to evaluate teachers. Once again a non-educator who has the power to talk about TEACHING and not LEARNING.
“Denny Taylor, a professor emerita of literacy studies at Hofstra University,here comments
http://www.livingindialogue.com/response-marc-tucker-can-win-struggle-democracy-big-money-writes-public-education-policy/
on the recent exchanges among Marc Tucker, Anthony Cody, and Yong Zhao about high-stakes testing and education reform. The key issue, she believes, is not so much about policy as it is about money, power, and control. When big money takes control of public policy, what is at risk is not only children’s lives and their education, but democracy itself.
Taylor has written a scorching analysis of Marc Tucker’s finances and his role in education reform. ”
“It is the PR discourse of big money that shapes the lives of teachers and children in public schools, and confounds the lives of families with young children struggling with the grimness of developmentally inappropriate instruction in public schools — instruction that rejects all that we have learned as a society about child development, how children learn language, become literate, and engage in math and science projects to both discover and solve problems. Knowledge gained from the sciences and the lived knowledge of human experience, the very essence of our human story, no longer counts.”
“Tucker’s view of education is economic. Children in, workers out, could be the mantra of National Center on Education and the Economy. The NCEE website toots the familiar horn of the rich non-profit educational organization stating that: “Since 1988, NCEE has been researching the world’s best performing education systems to unlock their secrets.” Nonsense, of course. What NCEE has actually been doing is making money.”
IF WE ELECT CUOMO, he flies in the face of the truth, a politician to the end, who does not represent US!
How could a public service ever become a monopoly? Does the fire department have a monopoly on putting out fires and saving lives? Does the police department have a monopoly on handing out speeding tickets and protecting people? How can educating the general public be a monopoly…it doesn’t qualify as something that can be construed as a monopoly be definition: exclusive control of a commodity or service in a particular market, or a control that makes possible the manipulation of prices. It is neither a commodity nor a service that can make possible the manipulation of prices….it is NOT FOR PROFIT!!!
People sometimes use the word “monopoly” outside the context of commerce. Most famously, Max Weber wrote that the state (or, as you put it in your comment, the police) has a monopoly on violence.
I do love Google’s “Ngram Viewer.”
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=monopoly+on+education&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cmonopoly%20on%20education%3B%2Cc0
Cuomo likes charters because of “real performance measures and competition.” How can you get real performance measures from a test that is developmentally inappropriate in the lower grades and rigged to make secondary schools look deficient in secondary schools? For teachers’ evaluations we have the junk science of VAM. Cuomo should consider that he is not launching a new product in the marketplace; he is playing with children’s lives and futures, and those children have the right to a free public education. How arrogant it is to treat urban children like human lab rats! Public education is a democratic public service, not a product. All he care about is helping his Wall St. supporters make a profit from poor children.
First Cuomo teachers already have rigorous evaluations. Just cause they aren’t your evaluations doesn’t mean they aren’t long arduous and take a lot of teachers time and trouble. In LAUSD it’s a year long process starting in the Fall. Fill out this form, explain everything you do, how are you improving, what classes have you taken, what are you doing new etc followed by conferences, and more examples of classroom activities via a portfolio and lesson plan folder followed by several classroom observations planned and unplanned. Is this not enough for you? Then there is the parental overlooking of what teachers are doing, the students who don’t do the work and complain and criticize and the media and the reformers. Given all of this if a teacher survives it she deserves a medal for putting up with continuous political BS that doesn’t help, solve, or create better teaching and or better learning.
So much for the lie that ed reform was about improving public schools.
It’s about replacing public schools with a privatized system.
The one and only remaining question is to what extent ed reform politicians misrepresented this to voters the last 15 years.
When Cuomo was asked about charter schools in the one and only debate, he did not answer the question
Wow! I thought Mike Pence was bad for public education. At least he didn’t pretend to be a Democrat like Cuomo.
So will hack politicians continue to misrepresent their position on public schools or have they decided to reveal to voters that the intent is to privatize public schools?
Maybe we could have a real debate if our out-of-touch entitled political class start telling the truth to the people they supposedly represent?
Do Americans support privatizing the one and only truly universal public system in the US? Let’s debate that.
It would be a shame if politicians just gradually destroyed it without a debate or informed consent of the public. We’ll need to know who to blame when it ends up a corrupt, lobbyist-controlled disaster for the working and middle class, like every other privatized system.
According to his commercials and his debate rhetoric, Cuomo continues to claim that he will institute a five year moratorium on “the use of test scores”. How does this jive with the claim that teacher evaluation based on said scores will be tougher tan ever? And exactly hoe does he plan to do this? And if he absolves students only regarding test scores, doesn’t he realize that those scores automatically become compromised and thus invalidated. The minute you tell kids that a tests doesn’t count, you have corrupted the results. Cuomo isn’t even a credible liar.
Ed reformers don’t give existing public schools a whole lot of thought.
They don’t value our schools.. That’s where the cavalier recklessness comes from.
He doesn’t care what happens to existing public schools, on test scores or anything else. He’s winding them down anyway.
I also love how ed reform politicians completely ignore the vast majority of public schools when they issue these statements.
In their world, there are only failing public schools and super-duper charter schools.
I think public schools parents should demand that they do their jobs, and occasionally extend some effort on public schools, no matter their personal bias against public schools.
We are paying these people. . Unless “open charter schools and close public schools” is the extent of their job description, they’re not performing even their minimum duties. Can we replace them with people who actually support public schools and want to do the jobs they’re paid to do, no matter their personal opinion on the value of our public schools?
We have long had a public school system AND private schools, so there was never a “monopoly.” Few were interested in public or private education before because, as the old adage goes, “You’ll never get rich in education.” That was true because individuals could not get their hands on the tax dollars funding public education. The difference now is that unscrupulous politicians like Cuomo have made that possible for profiteers.
If this was truly about kids and education and not about money, people would have been opening private schools that don’t cash in on tax dollars. That is why this business plan, cloaked in a masquerade of “It’s for the children” and “the civil rights issue of our time,” never held water. Now, the smoke and mirrors have subsided and the truth is readily apparent for all to see. This was never for kids or civil rights. It was planned as a capitalist grab for tax dollars to the benefit of adults in the business world. This is why, for the past three decades, it has been so important for “reformers” to demand the business model in education and appoint business people to high positions, instead of educators, to call all the shots. This game has been rigged for quite some time.
People really need to vote this poor excuse for a “man” and his ilk out of office!
I applaud your comment.
Thank you. I wish the substance wasn’t so damning of the leadership of this nation, who have sold our children for the almighty dollar, but that is the prevailing truth across the country.
As educators, we may believe or want to believe that the current situation has to do with actual education reform, or whatever you may want to call it.
We may need to accept that it has much less to do with education, perhaps very little or even nothing to do with education, and everything to do with money.
“Next year, the market size of K-12 education is projected to be $788.7 billion. And currently, much of that money is spent in the public sector. “It’s really the last honeypot for Wall Street,” says Donald Cohen, the executive director of In the Public Interest, a think tank that tracks the privatization of roads, prisons, schools and other parts of the economy.”
Lee Fang, Venture Capitalists Are Poised to ‘Disrupt’ Everything About he Education Market, The Nation, 10/25/14
http://www.thenation.com/article/181762/venture-capitalists-are-poised-disrupt-everything-about-education-market
Cuomo, in his own words, ” I Get It”. Unfortunately, his “It” and ours are very different.
Public schools are a monopoly? Does the judiciary have a monopoly on interpreting and applying the law? Does the legislature have a monopoly on passing laws. It’s scary to see that education is regarded as a consumable, marketable product rather than a function of a civil society.
Reblogged this on HTA News & Views and commented:
As the HTA stated at our General Assembly meeting: Governor Cuomo is no friend of Public Education or teachers.
Maybe we’ll see a Christie / Cuomo ticket in 2016? These two bad boys are singing from the same opera.
Given the numerous legal and ethical allegations against both “The Evil Spawn of Good Father Mario” and “Terrible Tubby from Trenton”, it appears that they could BOTH be sharing space in Lewisberg or the equivalent, once the investigations in both states commence.
And what sweet justice that would be!
Disgusting and truly horrific. I’m not sure if most people or even Cuomo himself understands how deeply offensive his words were. His remarks were vile and sickening.
“Public School Monopoly!?!?!”
I really want to vomit. This specific term is the stuff of the ultra right wing, the extremists who hate what they call “Government Schools”, the people that despise anything “public” or anything “union”. Cuomo is doing more than just nurturing his own perceived self interest by currying favor with the “Wolves Of Wall Street” and those who enable them.
“Monopoly” to describe what happens when a community joins together around their school? Cuomo demonstrates how craven his ambition and just how low he’ll go for another 30 pieces of silver.
He is sounding like a Fox “News” commentator—in fact, I’m almost certain that’s where I first heard it, either there, or from “Students First” or “Stand For Children” or some other ersatz group that only exists due to Billionaire Money that emerged in and now dominates the culture of our neo-Gilden Age.
This is Ultra Right Wing language, the type that your average Republican in the past would have considered quite insane.
Okay, “Govenor Smear Your Family Name”. If you think you’re going to get lots of support for your mendacious and mean spirited attacks on the people who educate our children…you have another thing coming.
We’ll look back on this as the night when Cuomo waved goodbye to any chance of higher office—or maybe even to holding on to his current one. I can’t wait for him to reap just what he sewed.
this country is going to the toilet bowl with money evil wicked driven insanity people and a system caught up to itself now in that you have the monies going in one direction and separating human beings from each other due to the ill informed who allow monies to influence their opinions and thoughts and the book 1984 had it down thirty years ago. people like ravitch are fighting against the george washington dollar…somehow on this earth we have become slave driven to the monies and the monies are the driving force of life rather than principal logical thought pattern motivation.