Lyndsey Layton has a terrific article in today’s Washington Post about the move by GOP governors to end local control when it suits them. They like to say that they are “saving” people or children. Think Flint. Think Detroit. Think Newark. As the late Derrick Bell said in the title of a book, “And They Are Not Saved.”
The GOP once made local control a basic principle. Now it’s not. As Layton points out, Governor Kasich took over Youngstown schools in quiet coup. Governor Deal of Georgia wants to create a takeover district like the so-called “Achievement School District” in Tennessee. Governor Snyder in Michigan has taken over several cities and school districts. The GOP in Virginia wants to supersede local control.
The one thing that all these takeovers have in common is that none has succeeded. Not one. What they do best is to extinguish democracy and give the governor control of a large pot of money to use as he wishes.
What’s the common thread behind the GOP’s new enthusiasm for state control? Look no farther than ALEC. It has drafted model legislation for state takeovers. Why? Once the governor takes over, he can give the public schools to charter operators. That accomplishes three goals:
- Privatize public schools
- Get rid of unions and contracts with employees
- Campaign contributions from grateful entrepreneurs
A win for everyone but the children, the community, and democracy.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The Party of Smaug Government
CA Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown just allocated more state funds to charter schools. He is silent as Eli Broad keeps trying to privatize LAUSD Schools. He is silent as SBAC testing costs aprox. $100 Mil a year and children are sleeping on L.A. streets.
This is not a partisan issue, but a greed issue.
Tru Dat
In Florida state legislature, we have some Jeb Bush moderate Republicans who want to privatize public education, but who also support Common Core. The local-control groups want to privatize public education by channeling funds to charter schools, but they oppose Common Core. Florida Citizens’ Alliance, the local control political activists, oddly want the state to enact legislation to give any citizen control of curriculum decisions that teachers and individual parents make now for children. Apparently, state control is acceptable as long as it advances the priorities of the local control groups.
The three goals you list represent “success” for these people, which is why they can never be convinced, only defeated.
No, they can never be convinced but they can be embarrassed and humiliated by reminders that they are not only failing but hurting kids
It’s an interesting experiment being conducted by our betters, I must say.
In Ohio they’re creating two sets of schools- a state school set (charters) and a local schools set (public). They have no earthly idea how that will play out in these places.
I think the piece gives them way too much credit for a “plan”. I think they’re radically changing this state’s whole governance and funding structure for public schools with an endless, cascading and completely incoherent series of “reforms” that are put in piece by piece and are mostly driven by which player in the ed reform “movement” is currently dominant or popular or clout-heavy.
Aside from privatization or ideology, it’s just bad government. It’s chaos. Even if I supported the ideology that demands public schools be privatized, I wouldn’t support people who take this much risk with a public entities and public money. I think they’re reckless.
Attacking on two fronts, corporatization and privatization, without declaring war on America, shows us, oligarch cowards, hell bent on destroying our representative democracy. Unlike the middle class, the current, richest 0.2% never have and, never will, sacrifice anything for the United States of America. They are takers without conscience. who refer to schools as “human capital pipelines”, giving cause for public retribution.
Before I knew there was ALEC, I felt the creepy existence of “something” creating similar bills, similar issues, similar public “outcries” popping up in various states. I knew it couldn’t have been coincidental that this was happening. I tied it to Republucan Governors, then to the Koch Brothers, then to RttT. But finally the existence of ALEC became apparent. This is damaging so many lives that it is frightening. When you couple it with the buying of elections thanks to “Citizens” United, we have quite a battle to fight to win back any democratic justice whatsoever. The aim is to overturn any sense of equality among our citizens and to segregate our society by race and economic “class”.
Something has got to change. Vote for change.
I think that ALEC is easy to underestimate as a force that is organized to undermine democratic governance. In 2014 for example, ALEC set up what may be called “baby ALEC.”
The baby is The American City Council Exchange (ACCE), created in order to shape business friendly city and county legislation, limiting citizen oversight.
One of the first successful ACCE projects was putting a stop to prohibitions on fracking in Denton TX. Local control was lost. Fracking in Texas can be done anywhere, no restrictions allowed by city or county officials.
The process of coopting elected local officials, including members of school boards, is achieved by putting ACCE members (businesses that pay ALEC a healthy fee) into buddy relationships with elected officials who pay only $100 a year for “information” packages carefully tailored to a local issue. This is a timesaver for the elected official who can also seem to be smart about an issue with ACCE/ALEC talking points. The willing elected officials are offered lots of other perks for circulating the information, often portrayed as impartial research, and for acting in accordance with the recommendations. The perks can include all expense paid trips to ACCE or ALEC meetings, networking opportunities, and so on.
This is to say that what may look like chaos now is on a trajectory where corporate interests continue to seek power over citizen voice.
In addition to ALEC, there is an increasing use of coordinated action in the philanthropic sector and much of that action is designed to outflank and diminish democratic governance of public institutions. The revolving doors between staff at USDE and corporatizers of public assets, and foundations are well documented.
The Gates Foundation, for another example, has recently dumped a bundle of money into teacher preparation reforms designed around “transformation centers” each with a large network of participants and intended influence. This project is designed to limit the academic freedom of faculty in higher education and to incentivize students (and other participants) to become uncritical proponents of the programs.
TFA is one of the early examples of this kind of influence. Here is another.
Seventy one teacher preparation programs in the state of Massachusetts, and all of their prospective graduates will soon have even more prescriptive requirements, checklists, audits, on-site inspectors and so on from the direct influence of the Gates grant. All of these industrial strength managerial efforts in Massachusetts are surrounded with lots of soft talk about collaboration, partnerships, and so on … That is pure propaganda. One of the new hiring ads for this project solicited applicants who could sell new policies that many would try to resist.
While ALEC may be behind coopting local control in some states, Democrats are using the same strategy to bypass local control in order to privatize schools. Both sides of the aisle are guilty of taking money to forge partnerships that undermine local control and forward privatization of public schools. Many Democratic mayors such as Emanuel are part of this anti-democratic trend.
It is important to note that generally privatization is not in and of itself the goal except where the politician is a real hardcore ideologue.
Mostly privatization serves as a bridge to 2 and 3 and moreso 3 for them while 2 serves the interests of those they are getting contributions for.
In summary:
1) The vehicle
2) Goal of private interests/their own profits
3) Goal of politician seeking money from private interests.
Why is this not considered bribery?
In OH I’ve always felt that really doing the hard legislative work of improving public education is on the same plane as moving mountains. It’s very simple, they don’t want to do it, it interferes with their ideology and it is not sexy. And they make so much more money selling out to the highest bidder!
The Republican Party here has found they can prosper very well by denigrating teachers and public school, ignoring the plight of the poor and taking the money. Why would they change? Until we get rid of the Republican super-majority, we’re toast.
“In OH I’ve always felt that really doing the hard legislative work of improving public education is on the same plane as moving mountains. It’s very simple, they don’t want to do it, it interferes with their ideology and it is not sexy. ”
I really couldn’t agree more. I’m an “outsider” to the whole thing and that’s the conclusion I’ve reached.
I don’t know why they can’t focus on one or two things and do those really well. Instead it’s this barrage that doesn’t seem to have any long terms goals and where everyone is pretending no trade-offs or choices have to be made.
It’s the opposite of “hard”, because anyone could do this- anyone could fire off 100 experiments and cross their fingers and hope for some net, broad gain without too much damage to things that are worth keeping.
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
A very big threat to our republic, the US Constitution and the people’s voice through the democratic process, and it is being pushed hard by the Republican Party.
You bet. Lloyd! I have been saying this for years!
This is how one of the online charters advertises in Ohio:
“I’m able to be at ECOT and on my old school’s soccer team!”
Great. His “old school” sends his entire share of school funding to a charter operator and then his “old school” picks up the cost of soccer.
No one cares how they pay for it- they’ll just have to figure that out. Obviously they can’t negotiate with a multi-state charter operator and it’s even more clear that no one at the state level cares what happens to the existing public school. They’re on their own.
This happens like crazy in Utah. Scores of students go to charter schools but come to public schools for all of those electives that they can’t get in a charter: music, debate, theater, sports, etc. Homeschoolers do the same thing here–the policy is protected by state law.
Cross posted the Washington Post article at
http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/GOP-led-states-increasingl-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Alec_Charter-Schools_Coup_Democracy-160202-980.html#comment581688
Marco Rubio was an early adopter of this strategy. He used the state legislature to limit the ability of local governments to raise revenue. Then his Republican colleagues followed up with a steady stream of legislation to centralize decision making in Tallahassee. There is nothing conservative about the crony crapitalist Republicans. They are no more conservative than the Democrats are “progressive.” Both parties are set on sending the middle class back to its 19th century misery.
A comment I saw on this topic noted that the strategy targets governors because it’s quicker and cheaper to buy/bribe/cajole one elected official of a whole state than to deal with many smaller, local, nuisance officials. Makes sense.