Mayor Michael Bloomberg left office in January 1, 2014. One of his legacies was the changes he made in the school system over 12 years of total control.
Today the Néw York Post says his “reforms” were disastrous, and the only hope for children in the city’s public schools is escape to a privately managed charter school.
The Post writes about the Bloomberg reforms:
“New York’s public-school system is an ongoing horror — one that traps hundreds of thousands of kids in schools that don’t work, “tracked” into dead-end “promotions” to equally bad schools that lead to worthless diplomas and limited economic opportunities for the rest of their lives.”
The Post has long–at least since Rupert Murdoch owned it–loathed public schools, their teachers and administrators, and unions.
So the editorial says that the “obvious solution”–based on a study commissioned by billionaire hedge fund managers who have the chutzpah to call themselves “Families for Excellent Schools”—is more charter schools.
Why not?
Let Eva do it! Let her open her schools to the children with severe cognitive impairments, the students who can’t speak or read English, the kids right out of the juvenile justice system! She should show what she can do.
She has a chance to demonstrate that her schools are replicable for all, not merely a triumph of skimming and attrition.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Murdoch signed on to Bloomberg’s stealth coup in 2009 when he and the other two billionaire owners of NYC media–Punch Sulzberger of the NYTimes and Morton Zuckerman of the Daily News–agreed to stand by Bloomberg’s seizure of an illegal 3rd term in office as Mayor. NYC citizens had TWICE voted to limit all officeholders to 2 terms max. King Mike forced himself on us for an illegal 3rd time while the 3 major newspapers sat on their hands. Now, Murdoch suddenly attacks Bloomberg, for his own selfish reasons–to distract attention from the dismal failure of his own Amplify ed tech venture driven to a grave by NJ’s Chris Cerf, now appointed head of Newark Schools, and to build a private base for marketing which Amplify couldn’t capture in the public sector. 75 of America’s 450 billionaires live in Manhattan, so scions like Murdoch throw a lot of weight around this town, resulting in a runaway rise in homeless thanks to a luxe condo bldg boom engineered by Bloomberg, and a downhill suffocation of the public schools. Waiting for the UFT under Mulgrew and the AFT under Randi to fight back against this unrelenting assault on public education.
Here is the Huffpost article that tells it all…see the last two paragraphs re Murdoch. Also the NY Times published an op ed about 3 years ago by Rupert Murdoch laying out his plans to privatize public schools as the greatest free market investment opportunity.
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Education profiteering
Wall Street’s next big thing?
By Jeff Faux | October 1, 2012
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This piece originally appeared on Huffington Post
The end of the Chicago teachers’ strike was but a temporary regional truce in the civil war that plagues the nation’s public schools. There is no end in sight, in part because—as often happens in wartime—the conflict is increasingly being driven by profiteers.
The familiar media narrative tells us that this is a fight over how to improve our schools. On the one side are the self-styled reformers, who argue that the central problem with American K-12 education is low-quality teachers protected by their unions. Their solution is privatization, with its most common form being the privately run but publicly financed charter school. Because charter schools are mostly unregulated, nonunion and compete for students, their promoters claim they will, ipso facto, perform better than public schools.
On the other side are teachers and their unions who are cast as villains. The conventional plot line is that they resist change, blame poverty for their schools’ failings and protect their jobs and turf.
It is well known, although rarely acknowledged in the press, that the reform movement has been financed and led by the corporate class. For more than 20 years large business oriented foundations, such as Gates (Microsoft), Walton (Walmart) and Broad (Sun Life) have poured billions into charter school start-ups, sympathetic academics and pundits, media campaigns (including Hollywood movies) and sophisticated nurturing of the careers of privatization promoters who now dominate the education policy debate from local school boards to the U.S. Department of Education.
In recent years, hedge fund operators, leverage-buy-out artists and investment bankers have joined the crusade. They finance schools, sit on the boards of their associations and the management companies that run them, and—most important—have made support of charter schools one of the criteria for campaign giving in the post-Citizens United era. Since most Republicans are already on board for privatization, the political pressure has been mostly directed at Democrats.
Thus, for example, when Andrew Cuomo wanted to get the support of hedge fund managers for his run for governor of New York, he was told to talk to Joe Williams, director of Democrats for Education Reform, a group set up to lobby liberals on privatization. Cuomo is now a champion of charter schools. As Joanne Barkan noted in a Dissent Magazine report, privatizers are even targeting school board elections, in one case spending over $630,000 to elect two members in a local school board race last year in Colorado.
Wall Street’s involvement in the charter school movement—when the media acknowledges it—is presented as an act of philanthropy. Perhaps, as critics claim, hedge funders are meddling in an area they know nothing about. But their motives are worthy. Indeed, since they send their own children to the best private schools, their concern for other people’s children seems remarkably altruistic. “Wall Street has always put its money where its interests of beliefs lie,” observed thisNew York Times article, “But it is far less common that so many financial heavyweights would adopt a social cause like charter schools and advance it with a laser-like focus in the political realm.”
Yet, with the wide variety of social causes and charitable needs—poverty, health, housing, global warming, the arts, etc.—why would so many Wall Streeters focus laser-like on this particular issue? The Times suggest two answers. One is that the money managers are hard-nosed, data-driven investors “drawn to the business-like way in which many charter schools are run; their focus on results primarily measured by test scores.”
Twenty years ago, one might have reasonably believed that the private charter schools, which are managed to produce the numbers, would produce better outcomes—as measured by the numbers. But the overwhelming evidence is that they do not. The single most comprehensive study, by researchers at Stanford University, found that 17 percent of charter school students performed better than their public school counterparts, 46 percent no better and 37 percent worse. Stanford’s conclusions have been reinforced by virtually all of the serious research, including those at the University of California, the Economic Policy Institute and the policy research firm Mathematica.
Nor do charter schools seem more efficient. Those promoted as the most successful examples have been heavily subsidized by foundations and Wall Street donors. The film, Waiting for Supermanthat portrays a heroic charter school organizer fighting a selfish teachers union was widely hyped in the media—including popular TV shows like Oprah Winfrey’s. Yet, as Diane Ravitch, an assistant secretary of education under George H.W. Bush and a former charter school supporter turned critic, noted, the film neglected to report that the hero educator kicked out the entire first class of the school because their test scores were too low, that the school was heavily subsidized by the pro-reform foundations and that the hero took an annual salary of $400,000.
Neither do the data on international comparisons support either privatization in general or charter schools in particular. The foreign education systems that out score America’s are government-run, unionized, monopolies. Ravitch asks: “I look around the world and I don’t see any country doing this but us. Why is that?”
Good question. Although the data do not support the supposedly data-driven privatizers’ claims, their enthusiasm is undiminished. In response to an op-ed by Bill Gates that crudely misrepresented the statistics on school performance, education policy analyst Richard Rothstein observed: “It is remarkable that someone associated with technology and progress should have such a careless disregard for accuracy when it comes to the education policy in which he is now so deeply involved.”
The Times‘ other guess about Wall Street’s motives was that hedge funders are attracted to the anti-union character of the charter schools. This is undoubtedly true; the attack on the pubic schools is clearly a part of the broad conservative campaign to discredit government.
Wall Street has always loathed the labor movement. And in the last decade it has had even more of a reason since corporate profits now depend more on cost cutting and less on the creation of new products. The Chief Finance Officer of JP Morgan reports that some 75 percent of the net increase in corporate profits between 2000 and 2007—before the financial crash—was a result of cuts in workers’ wages and benefits. Given that unions are the only serious vehicles for resistance to the corporate low-wage strategy, Wall Street’s antipathy has become even stronger.
But today unions represent less than seven percent of private sector workers. And the influence of public sector unions on the bargaining position of workers in profit-making corporations is, certainly in the short run, negligible. So while hostility to unions plays a role, is it is not quite credible to believe that Wall Street profit maximizers would be spending so much of their time and money simply to beat up on a proxy for the private sector unions that they have already so beaten back.
As usual, when looking for what motivates capitalists in a market system, the answer is likely to have something to do with making money.
Having been rescued from the consequences of its own folly by the Bush/Obama bailouts with its de-regulated privileges intact, Wall Street is once more on the prowl for the new “big thing”—a new source of potential profits upon which to build the next lucrative asset bubble.
The landscape of the coming decade is not promising. Most forecasters see a near term future of slow growth, sluggish consumer spending and government retrenchment. Despite the Federal Reserve’s commitment to low interest rates there is little demand for equities, indicating widespread investor pessimism about the future. As Bill Gross, the founder of global investment giant Pimco, wrote in August, “Boomers can’t take risk. Gen X and Y believe in Facebook but not its stock. Gen Z has no money.”
The financial bubble of the 1990s was driven by new business start-ups exploiting technologies whose development had been subsidized by the taxpayers. The bubble of the 2000’s was built on the boom in subprime mortgages organized and subsidized by Federal housing programs. But with a virtual Washington consensus on cutting back public spending, investors have little expectation of new government money being poured into some dormant economic sector on a scale sufficient to generate widespread speculative excitement.
Education privatization would not, per se, create a net new stimulus for the economy. But by diverting large existing flows of money from the public to the private sector it would create new profit-making ventures that could be capitalized and transformed into stocks, derivatives and leveraged securities. The pot has been sweetened by a 39 percent federal tax credit for financing charter school construction that can double an investor’s return in seven years. The prospect of new speculative opportunities could well recharge the animal spirits upon which Wall Street depends.
Some “liberal” privatization promoters claim that charter schools should not be considered private. But that’s an argument the management companies that run the schools only use when they are asking for more government funding. At the same time they argue in courts and to legislatures that as private enterprises they should not be subject to government audits, labor laws and other restrictions.
These companies rent, buy, and sell buildings; make contracts for consulting, accounting and legal services, food concessions, and transportation; and pay their managers far more than public school principals earn. In cases where city governments have given land to charter schools, for profit real estate companies have ended up owning the subsidized land and buildings. In states where charter schools are required to be nonprofit, profit-making companies can still set them up and then organize a board of neighborhood residents who will give them the right to manage the school with little or no interference.
In 2008 Dennis Bakke, CEO of Imagine Schools, a private company that managed 71 schools in 11 states, sent an email to the firm’s senior staff. It reminded his managers not to give school boards the “misconception” that they were “responsible for making decisions about budget matters, school policies, hiring of the principal, and dozens of other matters.” The memo suggested that the community board members be required to sign undated letters of resignation. “It is our school, our money, and our risk,” he wrote, “not theirs.”
The potential for private profits from publicly funded education is not limited to K-12. Profit-making universities and vocational schools—increasingly substituting remote internet learning for classroom teachers—are among the fastest growing businesses in the country. The sector is rife with high-pressure sales tactics and shoddy training, which leaves students—many of them low-income—deeply in debt and no further up the job ladder. Most of their growth is financed by Federal aid and Federally guaranteed student loans.
“You start to see entire ecosystems of investment opportunity lining up,” Rob Lytle, an business consultant earlier this year told a meeting of private equity investors interested in for-profit education companies. According to Stephanie Simon of Reuters, who reported on the event, investment in for profit education has already jumped from $13 million in 2005 to $389 million in 2011. Among others, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase have created multimillion-dollar funds for education investments.
These “data-driven” investors are not so much interested in students’ scores, as in the opportunities to cut costs by using online technology. Ironically, while reformers insist their goal is to develop more skilled teachers, a goal of their financier allies is to get rid of them. The central question, says education entrepreneur John Katzman is “How do we use technology so that we require fewer qualified teachers?”
According to none other that Rupert Murdoch, the U.S. education industry represents a $500 billion dollar opportunity for investors. In 2010, he hired prominent reformer Joel Klein from his post as chancellor of the New York City Department of Education to run Murdoch’s education technology company. A few months later the firm received a $2.7 million contract from the city.
Charter schools, for profit on-line universities and other forms of privatization may not in the end fulfill all the dreams of its Wall Street promoters. But there is clearly money to be made here. And where there is money to be made, we can be sure that there will be money to finance political campaigns, to support career ladders that move between government and business and to bribe the media into ignoring the data. So the war on public education will continue. All of course “for the sake of the children.”
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See related work on Education
See more work by Jeff Faux
And what is most fascinating is that Murdoch’s intentions 3 years ago was not some new idea or course of action by business types who heralded the free market as the panacea that would save America’s public school system that was “supposedly” failing. While helping research “The Origins of the Common Core: How the Free Market Became Public Education Policy” this endeavor only reinforced what I new in a more superficial manner pre-NCLB. Pre-NCLB conservatives such as Chester Finn or Bush I to mention only two and certainly the third way governing liberal named Bill Clinton, saw great potential in unleashing the business community and the free market on America’s system of public education in an effort to systemically reform and invigorate school privatization that is now destroying America’s system of public education. The free market education reform hounds of hell are now ravaging our system of public education. What is most fascinating is that, as many of us know, there were those who were warning about this current assault on education by billionaires like Murdoch and even before NCLB. These warnings, however, were not just coming just from educator types. In 1995, for example, David Korten wrote a well respected book titled, “When Corporations Rule the World” just one year before the 1996 Palisades education summit. Now we all should know what happened as a result of that summit!
All I can say is that it might be too late to stem the tide, although OPT-OUT warriors are fighting a heroic battle! However, I have no faith in any Republican candidate for president – nor do I have faith in Wall Street darling Hillary Clinton to alter the course of corporate free market education DEFORM in any significant manner. Perhaps Bernie Sanders would help slow down the onslaught. Perhaps.
The only real issue is this–I wouldn’t want my child, or anyone’s, subject to that system for all the tea in China.
I know I am beating a dead horse, but Eva Moskowitz dropped priority for at-risk students zoned for those failing public schools and then she dropped priority for ELL students. As is typical of their admirable “oversight”, the SUNY Charter Institute was more than happy to allow her to change the charter they gave her to drop that priority! After all, she asked and the job of SUNY is to grant and not ask any questions! No wonder certain pro-charter posters on here keep insisting that SUNY’s oversight is so terrific! It is — terrific for charter operators who have no scruples! Not so terrific for the at-risk children, but who cares about them anyway? Certainly not the pro-charter posters on here who keep talking about how terrific SUNY’s oversight is!
And, as it typical of the dishonesty of Success Academy, years after dropping that priority, they claimed that they were “forced” by the US Dept. of Education to drop priority for every at-risk kid, despite the fact that they had long ago dropped that priority anyway.
They also claimed they were “forced” by the US Dept. of Education to ALSO give up their preference for ELL learners (although whether they actually had a preference is questionable since most of their schools never had very many, even in Kindergarten.)
However, it turns out they were never forced to give up ELL priority at all! They just were not allowed to LIMIT them to a certain predetermined percentage of the class. It would have been perfectly okay to just give ELL students lottery priority. But for some incomprehensible reason Success Academy felt that if they could not limit ELL students to a certain number of set-aside seats, they would just refuse to give those students ANY priority in the lottery. I’m trying to figure out how just refusing to give students whom you purport to care about ANY priority is going to help them, but who am I to question the actions of a charter school where 50% of at-risk students may disappear? After all, SUNY Charter Institute is doing all the oversight we need.
The sad thing is that a charter school with as much money as Success Academy has might actually do some good if they weren’t so desperate to use that money to advance the political goals of their founder rather than to educate the most at-risk kids and KEEP them, even if they struggle. But like the kids in New Orleans who disappear, I have yet to hear any pro-charter group express the least amount of concern for those kids. To them, those kids do not exist.
Murdoch is correct when saying “. . . lead to . . . limited economic opportunities for the rest of their lives” as those prior economic opportunities have been shipped overseas many years back with only measly low wage service sector jobs left for someone with only a high school diploma.
It was reported last week or so, that Murdoch was urging Bloomberg to enter the Presidential Race of 2015…. wouldn’t this be counterproductive? Makes no sense.
tripplenews.com/news/murdoch-urges-superrich-democrat-to-run
I mean 2016….
Murdoch and the dominant billionaires in America want to erase the maverick billionaire Trump from the race, can’t control him, he doesn’t owe them anything, won’t take their marching orders, too erratic and impulsive, speaks from hip, not the kind of compliant hegemony they need to keep the billionaire party secure.
Peter Greene nails Trump and the Republicans on the head in this post: http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2015/08/why-trump-is-not-sanders.html
Gosh, Murdoch v. Bloomberg – who to cheer for? Against? Ah heck with it, pass me the popcorn and I’ll just watch the show. With any luck, they’ll destroy each other.
I don’t think the Post was actually attacking Bloomberg or his reforms.
FLERP,
The word is irony.
What a story. Let’s fix disgraceful inequality that we helped create with a really aggressive strain of inequality that treats entire communities and swaths of people as urban blight, to be removed or sorted into useful service to privatization and gentrification.
Whereas The NY Times can appear at times like a tabloid, The Post is a political cartoon that is not meant to be a political cartoon.
to be a tabloid
I follow your blog from Australia, and am consistently horrified and angry about what I read. However, in today’s Melbourne Age newspaper, this article appeared:
http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/charter-schools-would-boost-grades-in-australia-new-report-20150830-gjb5f2.html
It seems as though the charter school proponents are spreading their wings…
Scary. Start gathering your forces. The wolves are circling.
I think it’s good they’re not hiding the ball anymore and pretending this is about “improving public schools”.
If the objective is to replace all the public schools it’s better if voters know that when they elect ed reform politicians. No kid in a public school gains anything from the “agnostic” crowd who deny this agenda to win elections. I much prefer the straight-up privatizers to the people who are supposedly working on “improving” public schools but are actually working on shuttering them.
Yes, yes, yes, children. RUN from those dread public schools–flock to the wonderful charters. Charters are the last and only resort.
This is just crying out loud for wild and yet pointed satire.
It so concrete and stark.
It’s
I don’t know though- what kind of a country allows billionaires to direct their public education system? This seems like a bigger problem than individual billionaires and their directives regarding US public school children. They’re more a symptom than a disease. We’ve always had wealthy people buying media and throwing their weight around. It’s like the defenses collapsed, and now they’re running the place unimpeded.
I agree, but I don’t think it’s the country (people, government) itself. It must be some form of insidious, long term, continually calculated infiltration by the wealthy into the media, government, politics and finance through all sorts of realms: finance, law, media, industry, etc. They want to keep their wealth and power over the generations to family and like minds and they know well, or at least better and better, how to make it appear otherwise, even while destroying things around them, public services like education, democracy, truth in media, etc. Control, control, control. They’ve gotten hold of too many levers and are now essentially deregulated so to speak. Look at how Cuomo set up his 2018 campaign as soon as he slithered in for 2014. He got it from them. Or he’s the spittin’ image.
This is dangerous. This has to change. But you can also see it in our arguably one-party system, though that’s hugely disguised by clowns right now, or maybe that’s why we’re entertaining them.
But what we will be is the kind of people who allow billionaires to run our public education system. At some point that becomes “The United States” – it can’t continue without having some profound effect on how people view themselves, as citizens. They’re running billion dollar Presidential elections but we’re participating. We don’t have some other, alternate democratic process. We have this one.
Yes. If we elect Trump, the American people elect Trump. It will be on us.
And of course we elected Obama who was also among an old boys club of elites.
Our alternative parties are so outrageously marginalized. What do we do? There must be some way to have an internal revolution without destructive conflict. But how?
Don’t mean to compare Obama to Trump. The ‘also’ was supposed to refer to other potential candidates, virtually all other front runners the last decade or more.
Maybe it can’t be internal anymore. Maybe it has to be global.
Certain realities ARE coming into the open. In this case it’s Reaganism applied to one central institution of democracy, public education. Government from this ideological standpoint is always part of the problem and never part of the solution. And that’s a lie, a dangerous one, too.
It seems to me there are two directions to pursue: one is to insist on, to demand, quality education as a “Constitutional Right,” no less important than the ballot. And this is a demand for which students and parents are critical actors, together with teachers and others willing to engage, like those who have organized Opt Out, in what will be a hard struggle.
The other direction is to call out corporate “reform” for what it is: subjecting democratic institutions to forms of privatization designed to enable profiteering. There’s a lot of ideological b.s., as in the Post editorial, thrown up to cover the fundamental motive here, which is always profit. Why would someone like Murdoch ever get involved in running schools, except for profit? The bottom line is the bottom line.
I wish we had a single word or simple phrase to characterize this kind of politics, which seeks to elevate corporate profit over the right of kids to quality education.
Paul Lauter: simple words: greed, control
…and stupidity.
Murder-rock criticizing Bloomie?
That’s like Frog calling the Toad ugly.
I guess Murdoch got so pissed since he lost $$$ in his investment of Klein’s amplifier.
I couldn’t help thinking that, but how could he blame Bloomie for stealing away his crown jewel? At least that’s how the story went, according to Bloomie. Maybe Rup is pissed at all of NYC, and isn’t Klein a product of NYC public schools? I’ll say no more. A nudge is as good as a wink to a blind bat.
Yes, this is where he went:
http://nypost.com/2015/02/15/195k-unaccounted-for-at-nyc-high-school/
His HS made The Post this past February. A scandal. Is there a newspaper operating within the newspaper? Is someone reading everything? And are they on the run?
the editorial was not really a slap at Bloomberg. It is a blast at de Blasio for not opening more charters.
The NY Post regularly applauded Bloomberg’s reforms until he left office.
When de Blasio took over, the schools overnight turned into a horror.
Yeah. I’m kidding.
And let’s not forget that one of Bloomberg’s (and Gates’, and Broad’s et.al) chief enablers, former UFT and current AFT leader Randi Weingarten, supported mayoral control of the schools long after Bloomberg had made his intentions clear, boasted along with him over transparently fraudulent test scores, stood by as he ran for and won an illegal third term, and bragged about her “collaboration” with these monstrous hypocrites.
Her hand-picked successor and fellow fraud, Michael Mulgrew, is now doing much the same, defending Common Core, it’s attendant exams and the bogus teacher evaluations based on them, showing yet again that these two are assets (Eli Broad’s verbatim word for Weingarten) of the so-called school reformers.
Disaster by design.
Except that he didn’t succeed. The Post paints a slanted picture of a system that, despite Bloomberg’s pathetic legacy, still managed to do well for the kids and their parents.
These writers aren’t in the classrooms. They haven’t visited all of the schools. This is nothing more than the usual propaganda, meant to incite the masses so the billionaires can make more money and achieve greater control.
Will type it again:
The Post is a political cartoon that is not meant to be a political cartoon.
So is our Congress and Senate.
The plot is clear. Bring in leaders who are ill-trained in improving schools — Joel Klein, Cami Anderson, Chris Cerf, John White, Arne Duncan . . . . Paint them as successful as they succeed in de-funding schools, closing schools, ignoring students with special needs and English language learners, ignoring facility repairs, rubber-rooming teachers . . .Then, declare the schools failing and leave parents with no choice but charters. . . . And because charters can’t/won’t serve students with disabilities these students get vouchers (FL, MS, LA). And what’s next? As more charters fail, vouchers for more and more students in more and more states. Voila! Our children, especially children of color, have been monetized in our free market economy!