Columnist Myra Blackmon of Athrns, Georgia, sees through the so-called “reform” movement: its goal is to disrupt and destroy public education.
Blackmon describes the latest shenanigans in Georgia. The Governor’s education aide, Erin Hames, crafted legislation to create an “opportunity school district” modeled on the one that failed in Tennessee. The state will close or take over the lowest scoring schools and hand them to entrepreneurs to run as charters.
Now the Atlanta Public Schools system has hired Hames for $96,000 a year to figure out how to keep its low performing schools from being taken over by the state. So Ms. Hames gets to write the bill, then is hired as a consultant to avoid its consequences.
Blackmon writes:
“If that isn’t sleazy, I don’t know what is. Hames engineered the entire Opportunity School District, complete with junkets to New Orleans and Nashville for key legislators, testimony before committees in both houses of the Georgia General Assembly and God only knows what other dealing. So now, she will go to work for the other side, helping Atlanta’s school system — and any other districts with the money to hire her — avoid what she worked so hard to bring upon them.
“Hames’ credentials as an education expert aren’t at all strong. She taught for three years, then went to law school. Upon completion of her law degree, she immediately went to work on education issues for former Gov. Sonny Perdue. She stayed on with Deal, rising to deputy chief of staff and taking the lead on education issues….
“This is how the self-selected “education reformers” operate. Their motive is profit and personal advancement. They love the idea of schools run by private organizations, staffed with uncertified teachers, cherry-picking the easy students and leaving the most vulnerable students behind. Unproven, invalid standardized tests drive every decision.
“It is disgusting. It is immoral. It is repugnant to every American ideal of community, mutual support and benefit and democratic rule. It defies the values of local control in favor of centralized, easily managed power — all the while claiming “it’s for the children.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
More than that, Disinformation And Miseducation (DAM) …
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Calling the New Orleans “a model for the rest of the country,” smiling Campbell Brown does an interview with African-American privatization ally Howard Fuller. Fuller backs the transformation of New Orleans, with only the mildest of reservations — there’s a little animosity from blacks, and some blacks feel disempowered. … Ya think?
Fuller recommends that the privatizers running New Orleans’ schools reach to the reasonable elements of the community, but avoid the hardcore opponents, as it’s pointless and a waste of time talking to them—“they’re not interested into building on the positives”:
Also, on Campbell Brown’s Twitter, she laments that few media outlets are portraying the New Orleans’ miracle in a positive light:
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Campbell Brown @campbell_brown Aug 13
“Media Ignores New Orleans Success Because It’s Good News on Charters”
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Here’s the link to Campbell Brown’s twitter:
She got these responses:
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Gary Rubinstein @garyrubinstein Aug 13
“media generally pro-charter I think. New Orleans results mixed.”
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Josh McCarty @Josh__McCarty Aug 13
“its a mix of improved: grad rates, act scores, math, ela, college enrollment, TOPS”
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Gary Rubinstein @garyrubinstein Aug 13
“and other things are unchanged like AP results.”
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Josh McCarty @Josh__McCarty Aug 13
“we’ve got a long way to go, but more stdnts passed and earned college credit this yr”
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Gary Rubinstein @garyrubinstein Aug 13
“the only state worse than Louisiana in terms of AP is Mississippi.”
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Josh McCarty @Josh__McCarty Aug 13
“thanks Gary. We’ll let our kids know you’re proud of their progress.”
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Gary Rubinstein @garyrubinstein Aug 14
“it’s not about whether or not Im proud of them. Its about Inflated claims of progress”
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E.A. Richards @earichards21 Aug 13
“GOOD NEWS would b giving trad public schools the same operating latitude charters get. PUSH 4 THAT!”
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http://getschooled.blog.ajc.com/2015/08/12/aps-superintendent-defends-hire-of-deal-adviser-outlines-plan-to-fend-of-state-takeover/
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Well this indeed interesting. I recall a young man informing me that drug dealers were also invested in rehab facilities. Makes sense. Addicts are created, arrested, sent to rehab by gov. This way you profit at both ends.
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I think privatizers are seeing state takeovers as an easier way of getting what they want.
It is hard and expensive to convince a community to hand over its school – democracy is messy.
Find a way to declare an emergency (20 years in the making?) and then presume the state has some magic powers to improve things , buy the necessary politicians and voila – instant community buy in vid a vie politician rather than grass roots.
Creates a marketable commodity for politicians to sell off to the one who can benefit them most – and given the fungible nature of designing a school bidding processes can be subverted.
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Arne Duncan & Co. will most likely follow in Erin Hames footsteps.
First you destroy Public Education, then you become a highly paid consultant to swoop in and ‘help’ clients avoid the impending calamity. Not a new idea.
Are the Gates/Obama/Duncan bottom feeders heading in that direction? Any signs? This revolving door of bombing, bleeding, firing, closing, and rescuing public schools can bring in even more $M for the CorpProfiteers.
Afterall, only children and teachers are involved, and only their lives depend on it and will be impacted by these evil-doers’ evil tactics. That’s all!
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Apparently the whole concept of a “conflict of interest” has fallen out of fashion. The Best and Brightest have decided they simply won’t recognize that idea- doesn’t apply to them.
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So the “opportunity school district” is now boilerplate ed reform policy everywhere? Done deal, no more discussion or debate, all over but rolling over the locals and signing contracts?
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During the first Bush (the Younger) term, privatizers tried to convince Americans that Social Security funds were safer in the hands of Wall Street than in the Social Security Fund. Privatizers also try periodically to make the same argument about Medicare–that replacing Medicare with individual vouchers that would be used to buy health insurance on the open market is a better way to provide health care for everyone.
Privatizers have never tried to hide their view: public goods are expensive relative to the same quality good provided by private companies. Milton Friedman and associated libertarians have been making this argument for nearly seventy years. He said this struggle is about liberty.
In all these cases, financiers and select corporations stood, and stand, to make a killing off tax dollars (irony of ironies: libertarians doing well off government taxation–the ultimate crony capitalism).
It should surprise no one that the same argument is being made about public education. (Public market of some $600 billion dollars a year.) But, unlike Social Security and Medicare, there is no federal tradition of creating and managing a system of public education in the US. National privatizers have captured the feds (Dept of Education) for purposes of turning locally controlled public education into a national system of private education based on tax dollars. (I’m told 23 states now use public tax dollars to support some form of private education.) We’ll see whether our tradition of local control of public education is strong enough to ward off the Duncan Devil–if you look at the fine work of ALEC in state after state, the future is not looking too good. Parochial schools want their share of public money; independent schools want their share; for-profit schools look for their share. Public schools, increasingly, look like other programs for the poor, and have little clout in the electoral sphere. We must not be afraid to ask ourselves whether Americans truly support quality, free public education for all children.
What is more surprising to me is that so many of us continue to have a hard time accepting that these folks mean what they say. It’s as if we simply can’t wrap our minds about the idea that the people who run the country really, really, really believe that many of us are “useless eaters,” and that if they could eliminate us without too much disruption, they’d do so. That these “leaders” really, really, believe the world ordinary people live in is a social Darwinian world (take Amazon for example), while the world they live in, the so-called “magic circle,” exempts them (and their kids) from such harshness because they are somehow anointed by some divine power to govern. (OMG: here’s that damn “bell curve” again.)
We have a hard time believing that the people who continue to run in and win elections use their popular mandates to degrade our democracy. It’s a tough reality to accept, I suppose. But reality it is. Remember that Reagan, a very popular president, wanted to dismantle the government he was elected to lead. He ran on that idea, twice, and he told us that he would try to dismantle as much of the public sphere as possible. He did a pretty good job.
Or, consider that Bernie Sanders is a moderate returned to earth from the New Deal era. As long as his ideas are dismissed by leaders of both political parties as “radical,” you can rest assured that the plutocratic assault on democratic public life will continue, full steam ahead. Local control of public education, including the use of public funds solely for the support of free public education for all children, will continue to weaken. Under the ideology of “choice,” ordinary people will have but one: your kids will attend underfunded and educationally deficient public schools.
It’s too easy, and lazy, for us to describe what’s going on as “greedy” behavior (which, of course, it is). “This is how the self-selected “education reformers” operate. Their motive is profit and personal advancement.” No, it’s much deeper than that: to wit, that, like Andrew Carnegie and other self-appointed rich trustees of American society over the last 150 years, a group of so-called natural leaders believes only it can keep America healthy and prosperous, and safe from various evil forms of government, such as too much popular democracy. These folks support the Rheeformers.
To our political class, God has ordained that most Americans will labor in relative poverty, and that this reality, while perhaps regrettable, is the real world as God (or Nature) planned it–so they believe. (Globalization is a tough taskmaster.) Unions interfere with this divinely ordained plan; communism and New Deal thinking interfere with this divinely ordained plan; local control interferes with this divinely ordained plan–so they believe. Democracy interferes with this divinely inspired plan. Indeed, any alternative view of what might make American a better society that conflicts with the authority of these plutocrats interferes with this divinely ordained plan–so they believe. These beliefs are much deeper than mere “personal advancement.” These folks believe they’re special: really, really, special. (And that their kids, not yours, are really, really, special…born to govern.)
It’s hard to believe that Bloomberg and Koch, Gates and Jobs, Goldman Sachs and Johnson and Johnson execs, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton Trustees, all hold the same profound belief. One resists the thought. Yet who can deny that these days they have bought two political parties, and three branches of government, that translate such a belief into our laws and public policy? Schumer, Obama, Cruz, Guiliani, Christie, Clinton, Walker, Cuomo, Biden, Kerry, Bush (I, II, III), Roberts, Scalia, Alito, Ginsburg, Sotomajor, Kagan, Thomas, Kennedy, and Breyer, and hundreds of other politicians, constitute a mechanism by which this deeply held belief works its way into our everyday lives. (If Bernie takes off, let’s see how he does with this bunch.) They may disagree about how to keep the lid on an increasingly unstable society, but not about whose job it is to do so.
Changing this reality requires first that we recognize that our political culture, and the myriad people who maintain it (including Rheeformers), suppresses genuine democracy and rational public policy, in the pursuit of preserving a plutocratic status quo. This ground is not fertile for the growth of high quality, free public education for all children. It is not about personal greed (although it includes it); it’s about control and political suppression.
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Having grown-up as a Goldwater Republican, it is very easy to believe that the so-called reformers and political leaders believe in such a philosophy. It is exactly what I was taught to think. And because so many have abandoned any democratic responsibility, it is easy to implement anti-democratic functions in education. How many people care whether the schools are democratic institutions? After all the only business of America is business.
But that leads me to this…Why do Asians who have a long history of exam qualification send students to our more “creative” institutions?
What will America lose in this hand-off?
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Here’s one take:
The venerable Chinese exam qualification system was one of the pillars of the powerful religio-bureaucratic system of government that dominated Chinese political history for so many generations. China has always had a lot of folks, who live in myriad regions with very diverse cultures and economies, with a history of civil conflict. Keeping order was no mean feat and required many knowledgeable, smart, dedicated bureaucrats. The wealth generated by this immense population was legendary, and the political system that thrived off it was likewise immense.
This tradition is tough to just throw off. Not to mention the modern replay of an immense and diverse population governed by a small and self-sustaining political class (that needs a talented bureaucracy to support daily operations).
What’s different this time around is that so many of these talented “bureaucrats” now have a choice: they can make money that they control and even go abroad with it. They realize that, outside China, flexibility, smart risk-taking, entrepreneurialism, matter a great deal. They realize not only that they can get their money out of China and into a more secure environment (USA, Europe), but that in these environments their children can learn how to thrive in a very wide and, relatively open, world.
For these two purposes, sending their children to elite private schools in the US, or even the finest public school districts, secures some of their family wealth, while also exposing the young to the more free-wheeling business culture of the West. We call that culture “creative.”
We used to call this process “assimilation” into the American way of doing things. Only now the American way of doing things seems to be to adopt the inflexible examination system these Chinese are fleeing.
Go figure.
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The greed in charter schools is also seen in public schools. The concept that all educational woes will be fixed by removing the charter industry is a fallacy. We need to address what is happening in the public sector equally. There are good charter schools and bad; good public schools and bad. We will not fix education at all by requiring all students, especially poor students, to fit into one mold or one agenda.
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You are absolutely right Myra. And they do nothing innovative or different. It is important, however, to remember where education was in the not so distant past. Public school teachers are the only ones who can improve the system. We are the best at innovation meaning finding the best way for kids to learn.
For those who believe that we can simply get rid of the test and go back to the past, this will shock you into reality. http://savingstudents-caplee.blogspot.com/2015/08/public-education-change-or-perish.html
Public school teachers must lead whole child reform in a way that real changes are made that benefit all kids. If public schools don’t take the lead in innovation, public schools will and should perish. It’s in our hands to step up to the plate and scream, yell, march and do what’s necessary to allow innovation back into the public schools. The innovation that common core has stolen from us must be restored.
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