This article reviews the Obama administration’s bottomless love for charter schools. Hedge fund managers love charters. The Koch brothers love charters. Reed Hastings loves charters. Governor Scott Walker loves charters. So does Rick Scott, Mike Pence, Rick Snyder, John Kasich, Andrew Cuomo, and Dannell Malloy.
Why are so many politicians in love with charters? Because the billionaires love them. The free market worked for them. They give large sums to politicians. And politicians love what their big donors love.
What’s sad about this is that no other nation is outsourcing its public schools to chains of privately managed schools.
Public education is a civic responsility and a cornerstone of our democracy. Yet the U.S. Department of Education has given $3.3 billion to privately managed charter schools, even though they harm public education. It is sad to realize that billionaires like Gates, Walton, Broad, and Hastings can erode public support for a democratic institution that belongs to the public, not the plutocrats.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I would love to see charter schools become a campaign issue in the Democratic primary. Where do Clinton and Sanders stand on them? Clinton takes a lot of money from big money donors so it is hard to imagine she will take a hard stand against them. I don’t know if Sanders has said anything about charter schools, but I do like his proposal for subsidized college at public universities.
https://dianeravitch.net/2016/01/06/bernie-sanders-i-oppose-charter-schools/
At a meeting in New Hampshire, Bernie Sanders said the following:
“I’m not in favor of privately run charter schools. If we are going to have a strong democracy and be competitive globally, we need the best educated people in the world. I believe in public education; I went to public schools my whole life, so I think rather than give tax breaks to billionaires, I think we invest in teachers and we invest in public education. I really do.” – Bernie Sanders (Quote begins at 1:48:32)
Sanders finally came out in support of public schools. He does not agree schools should be created to give tax breaks to billionaires. Hillary is quite the chameleon. She wants to be all things to all people. Of course, she is married to the neo-liberal Bill, the guy that signed the New Market Tax Credits; her daughter married a hedge fund manager, and she worked with corporatist, Obama. The only thing she will say is she is in favor of “quality schools.” That’s neutral enough for her.
The thing to watch for with Hillary (and, to be honest, probably Sanders too) is the slippery use of the word “public”. Hillary, for instance, considers charter schools to be public schools, so of course she supports “public education”. Sanders is more clear about rejecting privatization, but I think he’s also being a little elusive because I think he means specifically for-profit privatization. I could be wrong, but I think he supports “public” or non-profit charters. Maybe I’m reading him wrong (and I do support him in general, at least a lot more than I support Hillary), but I think we could stand to nail him down a bit more specifically on that.
Overview: Office of Innovation
Located within the Department of Education, the Office of Innovation and Improvement (OII) manages various grant programs, ranging from charter schools to dropout prevention, and coordinates the public school choice and supplemental education services that are provided under the No Child Left Behind Act. In managing these grant programs and implementing new educational reforms, OII attempts to improve student achievement, increase parental awareness, and prepare the educational system, both technologically and instructionally, for more advanced learning.
History:
The Office of Innovation and Improvement (OII) was established in December 2002 by then-U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige, who placed it under the leadership of Nina S. Rees, former deputy assistant to Vice President Dick Cheney and chief education analyst for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. Rees was also one of the architects of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), which laid the groundwork for the OII, charging it with managing the Act’s funding.
OII received an initial budget appropriation of roughly $2 billion, which supported its management of two-dozen competitive grant programs. Among those programs were dropout prevention and charter schools. The OII was also charged with coordinating such NCLB provisions as public school choice and supplemental education services.
In 2011, the OII began developing a national database of all charter school authorizers and their schools to provide better insight into the reasons for charter school closures and renewals. Various federal initiatives, including Race to the Top, have triggered an increase in charter schools. But closings have also been on the increase, and both supporters and critics have made note of charter schools’ uneven quality and lack of oversight.
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so it’s been there a while. Most likely they got a bump in funding with the AARA Recovery funds in the Great Recession (as our local homeless shelter did)….
Dienne, the charter lobby has encouraged that ambiguity. They are public when getting the money but private when anyone calls for transparency or accountability
“What’s sad about this is that no other nation is outsourcing its public schools to chains of privately managed schools.”
What’s sadder still is that our own national and state governments are outsourcing our public schools to chains of charter schools owned and operated by foreign nationals like Gulen.
In a very real sense, our own governments are helping this man (basically a cult leader) get even richer than he is (billions) at the expense of our own children, teachers and communities.
It is sad that the only way to get information about it is through blogs like this.
This is one of the reasons I regret supporting President Obama, who has done more damage to public education than any Republican could have. If a Democrat embraces the Republican agenda — as he has done not just in public education but unfortunately in other areas where he has caved in to facilitate “compromise” – it encourages the public to buy into the Republican philosophy that privatizing everything is good. Unfortunately, President Obama’s close advisors valued Wall Street opinion far more than they valued traditional Democratic beliefs. The President had a bully pulpit to speak up to support public education and instead he chose to support privatizers.
What President Obama did that was most damaging was to allow his Dept. of Education to direct huge amounts of money to private schools without caring one whit about who they were serving and how corrupt they were. Their billionaire donors from Wall Street “endorsed” those charters, so Obama and Arne Duncan did whatever those big donors wanted. I can’t think of one single instance where Duncan ever stood up for anything that those Wall Street money men were against, and that speaks volumes. Not once (if someone can think of a time, please let me know — I’d love to think that he wasn’t as corrupt as it seems).
If Duncan had believed in charter schools AND demanded strict oversight, that would have been a good thing. But instead he just kept giving them money — the amount of federal dollars that Success Academy received would probably shock most of the public. That amount of federal dollars wasted in Ohio and so many other states that made people very rich and public schools very poor is truly a shame that I hope will always be part of the legacy that Obama left this country. It will be one of his great failures along side the things he did right.
^^^(by private schools, I was referring to private CHARTER schools)
“Reformerland”
When falling into Reformerland
We hit our head much harder
Than Alice did in Wonderland
And woke up in a Charter
We have all been duped by the Obama administration. He is really not the man he portrayed himself as. I feel the same way you do he has done more damage than any other president to education.
I agree. The Obama Administration has not been good for public schools.
I think it was such a mistake for Democrats to adopt the Republican agenda on public schools, because that left the schools with no allies in DC.
Public schools needed a powerful ally when the GOP turned on them and instead they got bloodless, technocratic “fixers” who aren’t committed to anything and don’t value anything.
Agnostics make lousy advocates, and I think you see that reflected in existing public schools. I think he’s done real damage.
I would argue that Obama has never “caved”. He has done what he wanted to do. It just doesn’t happen to be what we think he wanted to do. It’s not about the Republicans forcing him to do anything. They didn’t, for instance, force him to hire Arne Duncan (or John King for that matter).
Dienne, I agree that in his very pro-charter school stance, President Obama did exactly what he wanted to do. His administration seems to be full of pro-privatizers and I can’t think of a single top advisor who is a strong supporter of public education at all. So his positions in education were not a cave in to the Republicans but he simply agreed with Republicans that public schools and teachers unions were not worth supporting, while the charter schools his favorite Wall Street buddies liked were going to solve everything. What offends me the most is not that he supported charters in the beginning, but that after years of seeing the corruption and high suspension rates and all the other problems, Obama’s DOE just kept on supporting them in a way that encouraged that corruption to continue instead of actually doing something to put a stop to it.
I expect that kind of “look the other way at corruption and bad practices” cronyism from the Republicans but it is sad that when it came to public education, the Obama White House embraced cronyism to a degree I have never witnessed when it comes to public education. What a shame, because they had to the power to do so much good and instead used it to reward their friends and try to break the teachers’ unions at the expense of the thousands (millions?) of children they were content to leave behind in underfunded public schools while their charter operator buddies made out like bandits at the public trough.
Obama has the same relationship to “caves” that bats do.
That is why in a nutshell I REFUSED to vote for him in 2012. I voted third party. He has damaged the Democratic Party brand almost beyond repair. His ACA isn’t much better thanks to the high premiums and high deductibles making it next to impossible to get medical care. Neoliberals need to be purged out of the party.
Acceptance of the ideas behind charter schools, performance-based teacher salary
differentiation and diminishment of teachers’ collective bargaining rights is having a
morally corrosive effect on our society. These are destructive policies choices, not just
because they are ineffective and contraindicated by available evidence, but more important because they undermine the fundamental moral principle of community responsibility.
The famous quote attributed to the ancient Rabbi Hillel provides a worthy moral compass: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, who am I? If not now, when?” [Ethics of the Fathers, 1:14]
Read more here: http://www.arthurcamins.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Education-reform-and-the-corrosion-of-community-responsibility-_-The-Answer-Sheet.pdf
Unfortunately, our leaders neither look at evidence or ethics when making decisions. They consider what is politically expedient. That is why we have “run away” charter schools with little to no oversight. We just keep tossing more public money into the black hole, destroying neighborhood schools, and failing to do what is in the best interests of students.
Maybe this is not about ignoring evidence and ethics, but rather about different goals and values. Even the best among the supporters of market driven levers for education improvement are not after systemic equity. They are after “escape from poverty” for the “best and brightest” among the poor. Just as I would count reduction of reliance on local property taxes and expansion of teacher professional collaboration time a victory in anticipation of more equitable achievement, they view the expansion of charter schools and undermining union power, steps on the road to their goals.
As a science and engineering educator and researcher, I certainly value evidence, but I know that data only become evidence in relation to the questions that get asked. Our struggle is as much about values as it is about evidence.
doug ducey in AZ loves charters here, too…..they have been in AZ longer than many states, and no one seems interested in fighting them….it is a sad situation…..
It is hardly unique to education, but as long as people are not taught the difference between a society and a business, between a democratic social institution that really is too big to fail and a capitalist business operation that can and will declare bankruptcy, pack up its carpet-bags, skip town with its money-bags, and leave the locals with the mess to clean up, any time their profits dip below the level of the absolutely fabulous — then there is really no hope for this country.
“Charter Things”
When Cat-in-the-Hat
Let Things run wild
He cleaned with DIRT-majigger
When Chartering rat
Has school defiled
It leaves a mess much bigger
I just can not believe that the Obama administration is so supportive of Charter Schools. I feel as if I have been taken—I have been duped. He is a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
“Jabbertalky” (from “Jabberwocky”, by Lewis Carroll)
The billionaires with the usual names
Did lie and dissemble in the press:
All flimsy were Reformer claims,
And the charter rats did nest.
‘Beware the Jabbertalk, my son!
The laws that bite, the Cores that catch!
Beware the Coleman bird, and shun
The felonious charters, natch!’
He took the parents’ word in hand:
Long time the testing foe he sought —
So rested he by the Knowledge Tree,
And stood awhile in thought.
And, as in dovish thought he stood,
The Jabbertalk, with test and VAM,
Came rifling through the teaching wood,
And burbled as it came!
One two! One two! And through and through
The Opt-out blade went snicker-snack!
He left test dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.
‘And hast thou slain the Jabbertalk?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
Oh frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!’
He chortled in his joy.
The billionaires with the usual names
Did lie and dissemble in the press:
All flimsy were Reformer claims,
And the charter rats did nest.
SomeDAM Poet, you really have a gift for getting right to the heart of the matter with your poems and ditties.
You should gather them all in one place and publish them online.
Kudos to you!
Thanks.
I actually have compiled many of my poems in “A DAMthology of Deform”, which can be read/downloaded here
Great, thanks for the link, I saved it. Keep up the good work!
power point shows how complete the take-over is http://www.prwatch.org/files/oii_csp_datasetppt20151223.pdf
One of those slides is just a lie. Ohio is on the list of the states that have received the most funding for opening charter schools. They can repeat “high performing” as many times as they like, but that doesn’t make it true.
They probably should have invested in Ohio public schools if they were just looking at “data” and weren’t on a mission to open more charters.
I think it’s much bigger than funding. “Personnel is policy”
It matters, a lot, who they hire and who they listen to and I just feel like they’re captured. No one who is not a member in good standing of The Movement is hired.
I thought the response to Hillary Clinton’s really mild comment was instructive. No criticism of any kind is permitted. They essentially forced her to retract it. Meanwhile, every GOP candidate attacks public schools almost daily and no one objects to that.
I just resent the manipulation and the too-clever political marketing. They’re privatizing public schools. At the very least people deserve a real debate on whether that’s a good idea, instead of these ridiculous denials and legalistic parsing of what “public” means.
Chiara. I notice that Diane is working on the language. She is routinely describing charters as privately managed. That is a good way to express the idea thesre are NOT public schools without that tongue twisting privatization word. The myth that these are public schools must be dismantled.
Let’s not forget that the leadership of NEA and AFT have gotten money from the same sources. How do you think that has influenced them? Many state affiliates also receive money from the same oligarchs committed to the destruction of public education.
Reblogged this on 21st Century Theater.
Reblogged this on Politicians Are Poody Heads and commented:
Imagine what, not only the $3.3 billion from the Dept. of Education, but also the mega-bucks spent by the Gates Foundation, the Waltons, Broad, et al, could have done to improve the under-resourced public schools.
As well as, maybe the Gates Foundation, at least, could spend some of its billions to begin to address the fundamental problems of poverty in this country.
This is actually funny. There’s yet another ed reform group in Ohio. They were criticized for being a front group for charter expansion.
In response to that criticism, they gave their first grant not to charter schools, but to private schools. I suppose we’ll have to reframe the criticism. They’re not a charter school front group. They’re a charter and publicly-funded private school front group.
http://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/education/2016/01/27/catholic-schools-nab-13m-grant/78854890/
“They’re not a charter school front group. They’re a charter and publicly-funded private school front group.”
You nailed it.
Diane and others, There is a recent TED talk by Yanis Varoufakis entitled:
Capitalism will eat democracy — unless we speak up, that was posted Jan 2016. It provides compelling insight about the conflict between free market systems and the demise of democratic institutions. It frames the issue in the greater context of economic principles in play globally. I found that it helped me to better understand what is at risk both economically and politically in education. Enjoy!
thanks for this Kathleen, I will try to watch this a.m. A book that helped me was “Waking the Frog” by a canadian scientist
Kathleen interesting TED talk…he even managed to work in Oedipus.. I appreciated the way he describes MATRIX THE MOVIE as a documentary. .Twin peaks : deficit and a “Mountain of idle cash” thanks again
OMG! George was so right then, and he’s still right, even more so, it’s just gotten worse.
And for those who think that privatization and competition are the ways to go for our schools (and other public services, for that matter), I offer this quote from John Maynard Keynes:
“Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all.”
If the American people ever allow private banks to control their economy, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and the corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the very continent their fathers conquered.
Thomas Jefferson
Tina Packer (British dramatist) said “When Rome fell we were left with the Roman catholic church; when U.S. falls we will be left with the American church and it’s called the corporation”….
“The American Church”
American Church is business
American God is Gates
And godly wealth means fitness
To enter Heaven’s gates
thanks for the poem
Didn’t Sweden actually outsource some schools to private companies or do similar via vouchers? I seem to remember reading about that and about the abject failure of it.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_dismal_science/2014/07/sweden_school_choice_the_country_s_disastrous_experiment_with_milton_friedman.html
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/04/sweden-school-choice-education-decline-oecd
http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2010/10/05/198729/swedens-vouchers-are-charter-schools/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/7846599/Swedish-free-schools-fail-to-improve-results.html
Also, Diane, didn’t you recently cover growing school privatization efforts in Africa?
yes and yes.
Privatization is not American; it’s global.
cc,
Two recent articles said Clinton has Cory Booker on short list for VP. As Newark mayor, he sought to make Newark, NJ a “charter capital” and his former campaign advisor Cami Anderson, who’d never worked as school principal or curriculum coordinator, was named State Appointed Supervisor for Newark PS. (She did have experience Closing public high schools w on-site daycare for teen mothers run by NYC Board Ed.) Something to be aware of.
Ugh. Booker, a true neoliberal. One more reason not to support Clinton.