Jonas Persson of the Center for Media and Democracy’s PR Watch reports on a panel discussion in Néw Orleans about speeding up the dismantling of public education.
The event was a conference sponsored by the voucher-loving American Federation for Children, celebrating the privatization of Néw Orleans schools.
The panel Persson describes was called “Knocking out Yesterday’s Education Models” but a panelist “joked that the working title of the panel had been “What Happens After You Blow it All Up?”
Persson writes:
“But in the absence of a new hurricane that would sweep away public schools, a man-made calamity might do the trick. Such was the argument of Rebecca Sibilia, who is the CEO of a new non-profit education group: Edbuild.
“When you think of bankruptcy … this is a huge opportunity. Bankruptcy is not a problem for kids; bankruptcy is a problem for the people governing the system, right? So, when a school district goes bankrupt all of their legacy debt can be eliminated . . . How are we going to pay for the buildings? How are we going to bring in new operators when there is pension debt? Look, if we can eliminate that in an entire urban system, then we can throw all the cards up in the air, and redistribute everything with all new models. You’ve heard it first: bankruptcy might be the thing that leads to the next education revolution,” Sibilia explained.”
This has already happened in Chester Uplands, Pennsylvania, where the district’s exorbitant payments to charter schools has brought it to fiscal collapse, requiring a loan from the state to make payroll. It could happen in cities like Philadelphia and even Los Angeles, as the charter sector siphons away the best students and resources that cause the district to cut programs and lay off teachers.
At some point the tipping point comes, and the parasite sucks the life out of the host. That’s the reformers’ end game,
– See more at: http://www.prwatch.org/node/12932#.dpuf
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Disgusting.
LikeLike
Diane…I have, as have others of my colleagues who focus on LAUSD, been writing for the past two years about this possible potential goal of Eli Broad to bankrupt the district.
The teachers salaries, health care costs, and pensions, are only the tip of this iceberg. The vast real estate holdings of LAUSD throughout LA County are worth hundreds of billions of dollars. If the district can be forced into bankruptcy, as with the Deasy disruptions causing economic dismantling of the district’s budget and assets, then Broad and his cohorts stand to make a fortune when picking the bones of the district after bankruptcy forced sell offs, for pennies on the dollar.
Add to this that they can then embed charter schools everywhere with no opposition and charge them high rental fees paid for again by taxpayers, thus keeping the taxpayers on the hook for this huge killing by their vast free market win, with virtually NO investment of consequence. Business schools will be teaching about this creative economic onslaught and planned Broad Academy ‘coup’ for many years.
Many cite Naomi Klein and her book The Shock Doctrine to explain this vulture capitalism. Also Lester Thurow of MIT wrote how this works after the huge economic debacle in 1981. He called it the steamroller effect.
Broad, and Milken of K12, are both famous for this kind of insider plan to dismantle anything they see as profiteering for their own greed.
We in LA are now in the midst of searching for a new Supt. and the ‘Broadie bunch’ including United Way and California Endowment, are forcing themselves on the BoE to be their only partners in searching for, and vetting, and determining who will be hired. We once again have un-elected Eli Broad and his lawyers invading our public school system to their own end.
This is why we need you, Diane, and all the public school supporters in the nation, to be continually shouting out about LAUSD and watching every bit of minutia that these anti-democratic Body Snatcher Billionaires are doing here.
What happens in LA radiates across the country.
LikeLike
Your are right to focus on the real estate angle. That’s where the real money is both in terms of rents for new charter schools and in terms of development of the property owned by existing school districts. In the future, nearly all children will go to school in strip malls.
LikeLike
Well, they’ve certainly got Moral Bankruptcy down pat …
LikeLike
TAGO
LikeLike
Richard DeVos Advocates “Stealth” Strategy Against Public Education
LikeLike
Michigan ed reform will follow Ohio into the “disaster” category. It’s just a matter of time. They haven’t had it as long.
LikeLike
That video is from 2002 …
LikeLike
Chiara, I live in Michigan and all I can say is: you’re correct.
LikeLike
There’s good local reporting on the Obama Administration grants to Ohio charter schools. This piece makes the connection between the Kasich appointee who had to resign and the grants. There’s also questions regarding if there’s a connection between the Youngstown privatization plan and the new federal funding to open more charter schools in this state.
I am baffled why the Obama Administration claims that Ohio charter school governance is good. I don’t think there’s a person in Ohio who believes that. Where are are they getting their information? Is there any oversight at all of this federal charter school program? Congress? Anyone?
http://www.ohio.com/news/break-news/ohio-official-who-manipulated-charter-school-data-helped-win-federal-grant-to-take-over-public-schools-1.628194
LikeLike
Obama has more than once referred to his admiration for Ronald Reagan, who often spoke of the “magic of the marketplace.”
Though I assume, based on consistent patterns of behavior, crasser motives on their parts, perhaps they really are engaged in magical thinking, and believe these voracious greed heads can control themselves.
On second thought, nah… it’s just Smash and Grab.
LikeLike
The goal has been the same for 20 or 30 years, only the means get meaner with time.
☞ The East India Company That Ate Public Education
LikeLike
Strategic bankruptcy: so now the so-called reformers are going directly to the playbook of private equity parasites.
LikeLike
You got it right. When hedge funds attack a smaller company, they buy it, load it up with debt, toss out the workers, and sell it off in pieces. That the government is underwriting these tactics to be used against public education is negligent and short-sighted. It’s time to comb through state laws looking for laws to protect public education from vulture capitalism.
LikeLike
Rebecca “Black” Sibilia must be very happy to trade her bankrupted Ed BS talk for impersonation by singing “Friday” in America’s Funny Canard show.
LikeLike
“Bankruptcy is not a problem for kids; bankruptcy is a problem for the people governing the system, right?”
You have to love how “kids” apparently have no connection at all to the places kids live.
I don’t know where this comes from, in what world it works like that. They won’t notice that someone has “thrown all the cards up in the air” regarding the schools they currently attend? The cards will automatically be better when they land?
LikeLike
Don’t you know anything about the second law of thermodynamics and entropy?
And about “52 pickup.”
When you throw cards up in the air, they always land in a highly ordered state — usually just like they were before you opened up the package.
LikeLike
Chiara:
When it comes to the rheephormsters that “count” for something, it’s not THEIR OWN CHILDREN that suffer the toxic effects of their business plan that masquerades as an educational model but OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN.
So much easier when the pain is NIMBY.
Kinda like being all in for CCSS—then not—when the ‘better class of student and parent’ is concerned.
This blog, 3-23-2014, “Common Core for Commoners, Not My School!”
[start posting]
This is an unintentionally hilarious story about Common Core in Tennessee. Dr. Candace McQueen has been dean of Lipscomb College’s school of education and also the state’s’s chief cheerleader for Common Core. However, she was named headmistress of private Lipscomb Academy, and guess what? She will not have the school adopt the Common Core! Go figure.
[end posting]
Link: https://dianeravitch.net/2014/03/23/common-core-for-commoners-not-my-school/
Double talk. Double think. Double standards.
The whole self-styled “education reform” movement is built on those three pillars of intellectual and moral vacuousness.
Go figure…
😎
LikeLike
America’s children then just become collateral damage in an economic war.
LikeLike
“So, when a school district goes bankrupt all of their legacy debt can be eliminated”
That’s a very responsible statement, I must say. She knows that debt is borrowed money, right? When they discharge “legacy” debt in bankruptcy it doesn’t literally disappear. What that means is they don’t pay the people they promised to pay and someone is paying for her “throwing the cards up in the air”.
LikeLike
Bankruptcy for corporations = okay. Bankruptcy for people drowning in student loan debt = not on your life. They’ll Inspector Javert you to your grave and beyond.
LikeLike
Yes, it strikes me as totally double standard when you can’t discard student loan or irs debt but the Feds intervene and allow states to discharge pension debt which negatively affects the masses who worked years to acquire retirement income. The Anerican people better wake up and send these greed sucking plutocracy where they belong, out of the public coffers.
LikeLike
When corporate leaders are fired, they get a golden parachute. Carly Fiorina was fired as CEO at Hewlett-Packard –and—sob!–left with a goodbye gift of $42 million.
LikeLike
$42 million reward for destroying HP (and Compaq). And she got to keep her homes, her yacht, her fancy cars, etc. Much like Jamie Dimon getting multi millions from his Board after all his illegal mismanaging HSBC. If the banksters and corporate CEOs can walk away with the nation’s wealth for their failures, how come teachers cannot even get a few dollars an hour in raises to expand their yearly incomes to meet Dimon’s and Fiorina’s and Trump’s pocket change?
LikeLike
Though bankruptcy is more difficult in the case of student loan debt, it is by no means impossible
That it is impossible is little more than a myth — and one can only guess where that myth started.
People who are drowning in student loan debt need to be made aware that they might actually be able to get some relief even under the current laws (which are certainly heavily weighted against those with student debt).
The current law needs to be changed, but until then we need to stop perpetuating the myth that people with student debt can not get relief under the bankruptcy laws.
As it stands now, because of ignorance about the facts (perhaps partly resulting from the myth) only a small percentage of people who file for bankruptcy and who might qualify for forgiveness of some or all student loan debt even include it in their bankruptcy filing.
And there may be a lot who never even file thinking that there is no way they would ever qualify for relief.
LikeLike
Caveat dear Poet…if the student loans are put on credit cards, under the Bush tort reform, they, like those who have medical credit card debt, cannot find relief through bankruptcy. This debt follows them even after their death…and the credit card companies can reach into their estates to get a payoff.
LikeLike
Here’s what I found related to payment of student loans with credit cards
“Any refinancing of a qualified education loan is still considered a qualified education loan,” says Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of Edvisors.com, a network of sites offering educational resources. “Thus if someone were to pay off student loans with credit cards, the credit card debt would be non-dischargeable in bankruptcy.
And, he says, paying off a student loan with credit cards with the intention of filing for bankruptcy afterward would be considered fraud. ”
from Card debt is dischargeable, student debt isn’t, but don’t do it
LikeLike
The problem with this country is simple: Capitalism….plain and simple. The deeply entrenched credo that “the business of America is business” has destroyed, and is continuing to destroy, the lives of everyday people, teachers certainly no exception. These so-called “reformers” simply want the money spent on labor: salaries, pensions, benefits, and other deserved perks of the job that come with a masters degree (with tens of thousands of dollars in debt) and experience.
LikeLike
I know what to do with these parasites. Use DDT or Agent Orange and spray them, drench them, in fact, with both.
LikeLike
I prefer a military solution, Napalm. It is easier to formulate and burns a bit cleaner, but I am sure you know that, right Lloyd.
LikeLike
Napalm is jellied gasoline that sticks to the skin when it hits. The tank battalion I was a field radio operator in had a company of tanks that fired Napalm 700 feet or 700 yards (don’t remember which one now) and they roasted the Vietcong on a number of occasions.
LikeLike
I don’t see how planning for bankruptcy can be good for anyone except the lawyers consultants and charter profiteers who can be handed the reins as soon as it’s completed.
I do believe though there is some element of bankruptcy (though I’m no lawyer) that requires the assumption that the debtor actually intends to repay the loan and is not acting in bad faith. I don’t think the court is compelled in that case to accept a bankruptcy filing.
If the evidence shows that a municipality intentionally went towards bankruptcy so it could gain leverage to slash pensions and other debts (sort of like going on a binge, buying $100,000 worth of stuff on your credit card and then expecting to keep it – you could have avoided the bankruptcy – you chose to drive over the cliff) – then I’d have to at least hope the court system would not reward that behavior though they have rewarded shadier dealings (2008 bank bailout though that was legislative).
It’s funny I’m finding though, that they are now targeting the courts to be their savior (or accelerator) and overturn the rights of thousands of workers while at the same time those same courts have ordered many of them to comply with funding mandates which they simply ignored.
LikeLike
I didn’t have to look far – this is a rather disturbing paper released from Harvard a few months ago – a how-to guide to manipulate bankruptcy for the savvy (dis)investor.
Whether it applies to municipal Bankruptcy I don’t know – but this is a very eye opening look at how the corporate class loots their acquisitions without risking their own money, saddling companies with debt and pocketing the money, and then discharging the debt in bankruptcy.
Chilling.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2620320&download=yes
LikeLike
Right-wing billionaire IL governor Bruce Rauner recommended that Chicago declare bankruptcy as well. See: “Is Detroit’s bankruptcy the model for Bruce Rauner in Illinois?” http://chicagoreporter.com/is-detroits-bankruptcy-the-model-for-bruce-rauner-in-illinois/
Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel ostensibly rejected the notion of filing for bankruptcy, but Emanuel is very close friends with Rauner, so my guess is that Rauner’s proposal did not come unforeseen. I would not be surprised if Emanuel intends to use that threat to leverage control over teachers and their union.
LikeLike
“But in the absence of a new hurricane that would sweep away public schools, a man-made calamity might do the trick. Such was the argument of Rebecca Sibilia, who is the CEO of a new non-profit education group: Edbuild.
”
Right out of Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. If the disaster isn’t natural, create one!
LikeLike
The lavish facilities charters purchase are a microcosm of this.
Invest as much taxpayer money as you can in the areas you can own and resell and spend minimally on kids while paying lavish administrative salaries.
You too can become a rich real estate magnate – all at the cost of the kids and teachers.
LikeLike
What disengenuous crap. You hurt districts financially, you hurt kids who lose classes and services. Who cares if the reformers can buy the bankrupt district on the cheap? The district wasn’t built for them or their profits. It was built out of public funds for public schools and the kids who were supposed to use them. Schools are a public service. Not a money making opportunity. What a cynical, mercenary, short sided view. Rebecca Sibilia should be ashamed. Wonder how she’d feel if her kid’s school blew up and went bankrupt.
LikeLike
She probably has her kids in a private school. Bankruptcy of this type is just robbery and stealing from those that labored and deferred payment in the form of a pension that these vultures want to steal. This surely fits RICO statute definitions for closer scrutiny should they follow through.
LikeLike