Mike Klonsky shows the face of Bruce Rauner, a billionaire financier who doesn’t like the public sector, especially public schools and unions. He loves charter schools and even has one in Chicago named for him.
Rauner and State Superintendent Tony Smith want to abolish all unfunded mandates. Smith was once part of Ted Sizer’s Coalition of Essential Schools. But he has gone along with Rauner’s program.
Klonsky writes:
“For Rauner/Smith that’s exactly what the call to abolish mandates means. Rauner wants nothing less than to privatize all public space and eliminate civil rights protections and public employee unions altogether.
“Yes, let’s get rid of unfunded mandates like, Rahm Emanuel’s longer school day, like Common Core and PARCC testing madness. But we need to keep mandates that ensure student safety, special education, ELL, class size ceilings, caps on charters, and school desegregation as well as all other fundamental civil and human rights — including teachers’ right to bargain collectively with elected school boards.
“The response to necessary, but unfunded, mandates, should be to adequately fund them, not abolish them.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Ah, the key words–yes—“eliminate civil rights protections”
Why, because corporations hate to end up in court when a product they manufactured and sold made someone sick, injured or dead.
Many corporations already have clauses added to almost every contract that says you can’t go to court and sue them—even if they lie to you and cheat you out of your money—-but you are allowed to go to arbitration as long as the corporation picks the arbitrator who seldom rules in the favor of the injured/cheated customer or employee.
Tort reform supported by a huge propaganda campaign—-that made victims look like crooks and deadbeats—-in the media in the United States led to the loss of those civil rights protections, and the oligarchs won’t stop until all of those rights are gone.
They will strip the Bill of Rights of everything that the Founding Fathers put there to protect us from frauds like them. The only right that will be left is the right to buy firearms because that leads to profits for the corporations that make the weapons.
The irony will be when the people use those same weapons to take back the rights the corporations took away from the people.
I just find the coverage of the Eli Broad plan to buy a public school district amazing.
“The Los Angeles Times published a confidential document yesterday, which seems to confirm earlier reports that the Broad Foundation wants at least 50 percent of L.A. public school students educated in charter schools over the next eight years. Currently, 16 percent of students in L.A. Unified attend charters, and according to the report, getting to 50 percent would require creating 260 new schools, for 130,000 students, at a cost of $490 million.”
It’s now just business as usual to write “the Broad Foundation wants…” like they’re some kind of alternate, private government equal to any public entity.
It’s kind of horrifying to watch to normalization of this- the only question is will it be more or less like Newark.
The Broad Foundation “wants” X,Y and Z and it’s just a matter of ironing out the details. There’s not even a question of whether they’ll get what they want- that’s a given.
http://prospect.org/article/new-philanthropy-education-reform-and-eli-broads-big-plan-la-schools?utm_content=buffer4b5f7&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
Yes, it is business as usual. When I talked to a neighbor who owns a small business and explained what was happening to the schools, he shrugged and said exactly those same words.
This is how the private sector operates and the private sector has decayed war on the public sector to destroy it so eventually there will be no public sector.
Then it will always be “bushiness as usual” as the psychopaths who are CEOs wage war with each other and the rest of us are caught in their crossfire.
Another “unfunded mandate” in Illinois is electronics recycling. Our town in Illinois has stopped accepting these items for recycling until the state starts funding it. Who knows when that may happen.
I wondered why they stopped here in Cary…hmmm so now I have a shed full of computers with no where to go with them, nice.
Strictly speaking, to decimate means to kill off one tenth. That has already been done several times over.
The American system is the worst in the world for a country that claims to be “developed” let alone “the best”. What a joke. Leave here, go to Europe. It’s a mess over there but at least there their way of life isn’t based solely on greed.
Long Distance commentary. But living next door, the story changes. At least 5 of the districts agree with scrapping some of the unfunded mandates, among which driver’s ed. It is a financial burden for school districts, with sky high insurance rates.
Meanwhile in IL every teacher is dealing with SLOs and student assessment:
I”m sharing what a friend of mine wrote about an in-service we had yesterday (BTW an in-service is where teachers are supposed to be learning new things to help teach our students)
“I was just saying that today as we went into another basically useless in-service about testing. We have to spend more time creating tests we aren’t trained to create and test the kids, analyze them and create more tests to see if the kids are learning. Like we can’t tell that from actually teaching them and spending time with them. Great idea, bureaucrats!”
And let me add: Not only are we not qualified to create these tests and rubrics but since our job depends on ‘your’ child doing well on them you can bet they are going to do WELL. You will never see these tests, your child will never be graded on these tests but some students (in our little school) will take up to 7 of them a year, 2 times a year (do the CCSS math here…14x a year!)This is ridiculous! Great waste of tax payer dollars, I can only imagine what our in-service leader is getting paid per wasted session with us as she keeps changing her mind as to how we should be proceeding (this was meeting 5 with her). I’m so glad Seattle stood up for this ridiculousness and won! When is IL going to do the same…heck when it the whole nation going to do the same!
After 1999, when California instituted its own early form of Common Core high stakes tests (but without the Bill Gates HARSH and autocratic rank, fire and close public schools punishment), the district where I worked for 30 years hired an anal-cyst and gave him a fancy title paying him a six-figure income. His job was to crunch all the test data and then hold workshops with every teacher in the district school-by-school showing us how we could use that information to identify children ready to move to the next level and what students were too far away to reach the next benchmark so we could basically ignore those children and focus all of our energy on the few who would move up and raise a school’s ranking in the annual AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress) state rankings that the legislature mandated had to be made public so the people could compare schools.
Every public school in California still has one of those AYP’s posted online, and its easy to match the rankings with why they are low-or-high based on the number of children who eat a free or reduced lunch. If a parents wants their child to go to a high ranking school district or school, they have to be able to afford to live in a community with much higher property values. If they don’t have the money, then they are stuck in schools where the property values are low and most of the community lives in poverty. The distances between these communities is usually to far for parents to transport their children and the cost of offering busing would be dramatic.