The Néw Yorker has a long article about Jeb Bush’s passionate interest in reforming public education by high-stakes testing, report cards, and privatization. Since his own children attend private schools, they are not affected by his grand redesign of public education.
To boil down his approach, regular public schools get loaded down with mandates and regulations. Charter schools are free of mandates and regulations, and many are run for profit. As public schools are squeezed by the competition with charters, they get larger classes and fewer programs. Meanwhile, Bush’s friends and allies get very rich.
It is a thorough story about Jeb Bush’s mission to turn public education into an industry.. One conclusion: If he were elected President, it would be the end of public education as we have known it for more than 150 years.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education and commented:
WOW!
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Jeb Bush has downright dangerous ideas about education. He is a self-proclaimed expert that really doesn’t know what he is talking about. A first year teacher has a better grasp on what works and what doesn’t. Like most of the “reformers,” Mr. Bush sends his own children to private school, where they are shielded from most, if not all, of his illogical beliefs.
I’m a Republican and I intend to vote for a Republican for president in 2016, but I would never consider voting for Mr. Bush on the basis of his support for the Common Core alone.
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I don’t need a story about Jeb’s Education policies, I lived through them. If you really want a chuckle look up his nickname while he was in office in Florida. I will save you the grief. Jeb was anointed the title of “The Education Governor”.
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” If he were elected President, it would be the end of public education as we have known it for more than 150 years.”
….yeah. Like it will be here in New York State probably within a handful of months. Andrew Cuomo’s plans are just as bad and way more likely to become real policy.
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Both of them are “legacy” politicians that trade their names for their own self aggrandizement, but they lack their fathers’ wisdom and insight.
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Completely agree!
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I thought it was fine, but I think it suffers from the same omission a lot of ed reform reporting suffers from: it doesn’t go into the system-wide impacts of setting up a second school system.
I don’t get it, I really don’t. If you’re talking about a universal public system and you look at one piece and say “this charter chain takes 20% fewer high needs kids” don’t you almost have to look at the other side of that and look at how the public schools in that area who are receiving the higher needs kids are changed by the introduction of charters?
Rather than just discussing the effect of the testing mandates on public schools and them dropping public schools completely, I’d like to see the charter piece discussed and then the effects of privatization on existing public schools. There are two sides to this. When ed reformers pull on the charter string, the underlying “safety net” public fabric changes.It’s as if the existing public schools have no value so we don’t even have to consider what happens to them as a result of this.
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yes. Well-stated.
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I genuinely find it baffling. It’s as if they can take charters out of the context of the broader system, but that isn’t how universal public systems work. They’re universal.
This is an example of a Toledo Blade piece that doesn’t go far enough, but at least considers the question. The premise is charters are over-counting students according to the state auditors report. The reporter than asks the next question, which is “what about Toledo Public Schools?” and sure enough TPS has MORE students than were estimated in July of 2014. That matters, because the effects of charters over-estimating students spill over to public schools. ALL students are impacted. Charters can’t be cordoned off and considered in isolation. That’s not reality.
http://www.toledoblade.com/
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Nobody looks at the impact on public schools because there is no money to be made doing so. Only an academic would do this.
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It’s weirdly narrow, though, isn’t it? They do the same thing with testing. “Tests take 11 hours and 1.5% of educational time”
I guess, if you start the timer when students enter the room and click it off at “pencils down”. Common Core testing actually takes tens or hundreds of adult work hours and those adults could be doing something else. It isn’t “11 hours” as a total cost. It’s much.much higher than that.
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This article chronicles the unholy alliance of politics and business in order to profit from “the education market.” It highlights the misadventures of Jeb Bush as he trades his name for access to business moguls with deep pockets. It is a tale of manipulation and alliances with little understanding consequences. Failure to understand the bigger picture seems to be the hallmark of the Bush boys. It should be noted that two of his “great ideas,” Reading First and cyber education are enormous flops, but failure never seems to deter a Bush. Now he want to infect America with his arrogance and cronyism. He needs to be quarantined so his disease won’t spread to the remaining parts of the country with meaningful public education. He and his brother, both silver spoon babies with daddy issues, have done enough to America.
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Also, the OH auditors report on charter schools was released. I don’t think anyone anticipated this:
“In a disturbing new report from State Auditor David Yost, officials found that at one Ohio charter school, the state was paying the school to educate about 160 students, yet none, that’s right, zero, were actually at the school.
And that’s just the worst of a really chilling report, which, if the results are extrapolated across the life of the Ohio charter school program, means taxpayers have paid more than $2 billion for kids to be educated in charter schools who weren’t even there.”
I like the coverage because it doesn’t stop at charter problems in Ohio. It asks the next question, which is “what is the effect on every single Ohio public school?” These are SYSTEMS. The fact that charters aren’t regulated doesn’t just harm charter students. It harms every public school student in the state:
“This is a big deal because charter schools are paid out of state revenue originally intended for school districts. If that money isn’t actually educating those students, then the children in the local districts are being hurt twice — once because they have significantly less state revenue anyway due to the charter school deduction, then again because the money is going to a school that isn’t even educating those students.”
http://10thperiod.blogspot.com/2015/01/ohio-auditor-charters-have-far-fewer.html
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Chiara: combined with your comments above, you have outdone yourself on the question of looking at education as a system with many moving parts and considering how changes/mandates in one part affect another.
Bravo!
But I don’t for a moment think that the self-styled “education reformers” don’t understand this at all. Many of them are clueless about a lot of things but the key here, IMHO, is that public schools and their students and staffs and families and communities don’t count. Literally. The metrics of rheephorm measure a perverse education triage: whatever it takes to get a small part of the student population, a few more or a few less depending on circumstances, a bare bones education while the vast majority are ignored/pushed away/pushed out/abandoned.
In this endeavor the adult salvage operators make beaucoup bucks for their efforts to fulfill their “it’s all about the kids!” promises while studiously neglecting to mention that it’s only about a few of the kids. And in order to salvage, albeit just barely, those few, they steal from and harm the many.
One of the most galling aspects of all this is that they think they should get kudos—not brickbats—for making the allegedly hard choices needed to create an openly and shamelessly inequitable two-tiered education system that advantages the advantaged and disadvantages the disadvantaged. *They consider themselves part of the former, not the latter, so in reality it’s an easy choice—they’re helping themselves and their own children.*
Thank you for your comments.
😎
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As we oppose this, and we may well have a Dem candidate saying similar things, we really are going to have to sell an alternative narrative, not just an anti whatever narrative,
We’ve got to give candidates a narrative that looks forward.
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‘If he were elected President, it would be the end of public education as we have known it for more than 150 years.”
To say nothing of the end of the country we have known for more than 200 years.
And speakin’ of country (with apologies to Tompall Glazer)
Put another nail in the coffin
Cook me up some bacon & Bush beans
And coddle up to Wall Street very often
Watch my stocks and sell my charter schemes
Come on baby you can fill my pipe & then go fetch my slippers
And boil me up another Tea Par-tee
Then put another nail in the coffin babe
Cuz President is what I want to be
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J. Bush, H. Clinton and B. Obama seem to all be for privatizing and federalizing public education. Privatizing public schools is neither a progressive impulse nor a democratic one. Forget your political inclinations and look at who is trying to kill the great American public educations system and speak out against this evil.
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Evil indeed is what it is. The goal is to limit education access for the
masses. The end result is elite private schools for the few, and sweatshops for the children of the masses.
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Condaleeza Rice will take over:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/22/condoleezza-rice-jeb-bush-education_n_6527402.html?utm_hp_ref=education&ir=Education
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Professor Rice is all for the so-called “Florida Formula” of the Education Governor which has failed miserably and destroyed public education and teacher morale in the Sunshine State. She is all for teacher accountability, but when, if ever, is she going to be held accountable as a war criminal for the needless deaths of Americans and Iraquis, and the endless suffering of our war veterans and their families she caused as a co-conspirator with George W and Cheney in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq. She has no shame.
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I choke every time they mention the benefits of competition as if the deck hasn’t been stacked against public schools before the “competition” even begins. How can they even pretend that the playing field is level? It makes me wonder what warped kind of education these people had where beating out their classmates for grades and awards by any means was their ultimate goal.
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