Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio is a Democrat, and he is known as a progressive. He has also been known in the past as a supporter of charter schools.
However, even Senator Brown had a wake-up call as charter scandals multiplied in his home state. He could not help but notice the multiple editorials appearing in newspapers across the state, as well as news stories in national media about the charter owners who were becoming multimillionaires by donating to Republican politicians and getting more funding and less scrutiny of their charter schools.
He wrote a letter to Secretary of Education John King expressing his concern with the U.S. Department of Education’s award of $71 million to Ohio to open more charter schools (a grant put on hold because of outrage from Ohioans), as well as the embarrassing performance of the state’s charter sector. If Senator Brown has had his eyes opened, at last, that is a big step forward.
The letter can be read here.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Better very late than never. Brown voted for the ESSA legislation that rewards the charter industry in addition to making teacher education GREAT by dumbing it down and funding charter teacher prep organizations such as the infamous Relay Graduate School of Education, allowing the comply-or-else strategies of Doug Lemov to thrive.
I asked Brown to oppose ESSA. I got a boilerplate response well after the law was passed. I realize that Brown and other members of Congress are accustomed to responding to in-basket suggestions from staff, but the Ohio and USDE scandals with charter funding are hardly new or without consequences in and beyond Ohio. Will he hold Congressional hearings? Not likely. Will he be Hillary’s choice for VP? More likely.
LikeLike
I think the problem is that the staffs of senators and representatives, listen to Aspen’s, Gates-funded, “Senior Congressional Education Staff Network” because it is convenient to be on the side of oligarchs in education.
LikeLike
I was about to sendup a cheer, “Finally…” Then, I read in the Brown letter, “…high quality operators with a history of student success (should) have access to the (tax) resources.” And, who are those operators? Why, it is the Walton-funded Fordham. So, instead of me, sending up a cheer, I’ll let the conservative Fordham do the cheering. I hope that the Ohio Democratic Party, runs a progressive against Brown, in the next election.
LikeLike
Brown also earns bonus points as a piedpiper for the “progressive” finance speaker…
LikeLike
Too bad that the Gates-funded New Schools Venture Fund goal, “to develop charter management organizations that produce a diverse supply of different brands on a large scale”, didn’t get past Brown’s self-serving neoliberal blinders.
In light of Brown, who is steering the Dept. of Ed. to fund the expansion of Walton-funded Fordham-run schools, Ohioans have more reason to thank Republican auditor, Yost, than Democrat, Brown.
LikeLike
When the Columbus Dispatch needs a quote for an education column, the spokesman from the Fordham Institute is their #1 guy every time.
LikeLike
I contacted the Dayton Daily News reporter for the same reason. He replied that Fordham’s Chad Aldis is a “quotable individual”. It’s a shame that the newspapers can’t find a representative for the fleeced taxpayer,
LikeLike
It is so apparent that the Department of Education is complicit in charter school fraud. We must ask ourselves why the federal government continues to push a failed and unjust policy. The goal of privatization seems clear when confronted with the real facts on dollars given to charters and the corruption with no oversight that ensues. As a public school teacher for 17 years, I often wonder: who will side with teachers? When will this end? Will the protests and arrests of teachers multiply? Will the US government resort to repressive tactics like Mexico to shut teachers up?
LikeLike
Perhaps we need to march in the streets like the teachers in Mexico.
LikeLike
I agree. In Texas, I’m one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit suing the Texas Education Agency for giving illegal assessments to my child. The TEA responded through the corrupt Attorney General that parents had no right to sue the TEA, that basically the TEA was above the law! We are planning a pro-public education rally at the state capital soon. I think teachers need to join with opt out parents in every state and start protesting in each state regularly.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I live in Ohio and all I can tell you is the charter schools are rampant in phasing out many of the public schools especially Cleveland PS, where many had to be restructured Elem (k-4) M.S. (5-7) HS (8-12). Every time I turn around another charter school or cyber charter school is being pushed as the up and coming miracle to public education. I just got a flyer announcing the opening of a high school called Invictus HS on W. 130th, Parma Heights. Here’s the line that gets under my skin. The school’s philosophy is to allow “students to choose when they go to school and which courses they work on each day. The schedule is designed to fit your life.” What HS student will actually follow and stick to such a lax schedule if given the opportunity? Students will be doing more online learning, their so-called “unique credit recovery program”, that actually learning from an educator, which is an obvious push to decimate the teaching profession. Education of these predator charter schools is not geared to preparing the future of our nation; it’s the bottom line of profit and no teachers union.
So I agree with Laura where the Senator Brown will do what’s best for education as long as the reformers have power and money. He’s progressive but in the wrong direction because you can’t be progressive and support Hillary. That’s an oxymoron.
LikeLike
Everything that the new U.S. Secretary of Ed. John King did in New York State and is doing now in D.C. — and everything that Arne Duncan did in Chicago and in D.C. — was always geared towards certain primary goals:
1) increase the privatization of our public schools — close them and put the control of unaccountable management of money-motivated private sector entities (i.e. charter schools);
2) destroy any and all democratic governance of schools;
3) destroy teachers’ unions… or weaken them as much as possible;
4) enable the profiteering of companies that provides testing, on-line curriculum, digital curriculum, etc.
(with 2, 3, and 4 as part of the means to bring about 1)
Once you can see this clearly — much like taking the “red pill” in the movie “THE MATRIX — everything that King and Duncan have done, and are now doing makes total and perfect sense. Everything they do and have done was geared towards accomplishing one or all of those four objectives.
If it doesn’t lead to 1-4 or in any hampers achieving 1-4, then don’t do it, or end it.
If it DOES lead to 1-4, then do it full out, no matter how damaging that is to students and teachers in both the short and long term.
(Meanwhile, King, Duncan, Obama, Michelle Rhee, Campbell Brown, etc. sent and are sending their kids to rich kids’ private schools that ARE THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF WHAT THEY THESE SAME 1% FOLKS AND THEIR ALLIES ARE TRYING TO IMPOSE ON THE MIDDLE AND WORKING CLASSES … i.e. “other people’s kids.” They know their corporate ed. reform schools suck, so they spend tens of thousands of dollars so that their own children, figuratively speaking, are kept as far away from these “reforms” as possible.” … again, while pushing them on the vast majority of children.)
Think about it:
Mayoral control usurping and replacing control via a democratically elected board?
Test-based evaluation and paying of teachers?
Common Core testing?
Charter expansion?
The mass firing of those teachers in Rhode Island?
Insist that all special ed. kids achieve on the same level as their fully-abled peers, then blame and punish the veteran, unionized teachers when they can’t pull of such miracles?
The list is endless.
And now we have this federal incursion into local school control, which the recent ESSA legislation explicitly forbids. John King is practically taunting the legislative branch, saying:
“Oh, so you senators and congresspersons say I can’t do any of this? That the new law that you passed forbids it? Well, guess what, guys and gals? I’m doin’ it anyway, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me! Na na-na na-na naaaa!”
King’s actions are designed to hamper the ability of traditional public schools to succeed in educating kids. It’s about having the those in D.C. running the DOE being able to starve certain districts, or parts of districts, or individual schools, so that starvation will lead to “failure”, which can, in turn, be used to justify closing the schools and turning them over to money-motivated privatizers. …
… or to have financial leverage to institute union-busting merit pay schemes or other union-busting schemes… or to leverage and close school boards and replace them with mayoral (read: corporate) control …
… or to encourage, with the funding as the leverage, the opening of more and more privately managed charter schools run by money-motivated charter operators, schools which are not accountable to the public, not transparent to the public, staffed by non-union inexperienced scab teachers, and which don’t educate all the public — eschewing those students most expensive and troublesome to educate … special ed., immigrants, second language learners, homeless kids, foster care kids, kids with extreme behavior arising out of distressed home life conditions.
—————————–
The above was a post I wrote elsewhere on this blog.
Chris in Florida replied with this post, in support of what I wrote:
—————————-
Chris in Florida
June 24, 2016 at 10:49 am
Good summation. It is following the Milton Friedman plan for privatizing US public schools paragraph, by paragraph.
This plan has been publicly available for quite a few years now. The embrace of neoliberalism by the IMF, the US Chamber of Commerce (ALEC), and other nefarious players in the international economics scene was documented by Susan Ohanian back in the early to mid 1990’s.
Over and over and over again we were told that we were little more than tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists when we tried to raise these issues with our professional organizations (see Ohanians very shabby treatment by the NCTE), the teachers’ unions (see the shabby treatment of dissenters by Randi Weingarten’s Unity party), and the ivory towers of higher education (see the dismissive refusal to engage in discussion or research by pretty much every professor in the country due to Gates funding being jeopardized.)
http://www.edchoice.org/who-we-are/our-founders/the-friedmans-on-school-choice/article/public-schools-make-them-private/
Read the plan, look at what is happening, and realize this has been an ongoing, long-range plan that has succeeded in capturing both political parties, the wealthy elite, the ivory tower, and the business community.
Those are formidable opponents with deep pockets and endless resources, but they are not invulnerable nor unassailable, as any student of world history can prove.
LikeLike
Maybe the Ohio Senator could find time to write a letter on behalf of Ohio public schools.
I don’t know if DC or Columbus has noticed, but the schools 93% of Ohio kids attend aren’t doing so hot under ed reform leadership.
We could really use an advocate for the unfashionable “public sector” schools.
LikeLike
Also, can I ask why Google is writing ed tech policy for Ohio public schools?
“Jamie Casap, senior education evangelist at Google encourages this line of thinking for preparing students for new technologies that will be used in their future careers, “Instead of asking what students want to be when they grow up, Casap asks, ‘What problem do you want to solve?’”
Are these people really naive enough to believe that the same people who are selling ed tech product to public schools should be writing policy that pushes ed tech product INTO public schools?
Perhaps we could make some effort to keep salespeople out of children’s classrooms? Can they have one space where some adult isn’t pushing product, or is that too much to ask?
http://education.ohio.gov/Media/Extra-Credit-Blog/June-2016/Beyond-the-Blend-The-Age-of-Customization
LikeLike
To answer your question, no, children can’t have space, w/o tech salesmen. The Canadian Microsoft employee interviewed in Entrepreneur magazine appointed herself, “education partner” and said, “Teachers have to shift or get off the pot.” Americans only have the rights that corporate oligarchs, like the Koch’s, Gates and the Walton’s give them.
Ohioans can thank Senators Portman and Brown for the theft of our democracy.
LikeLike
Sherrod can better serve the Waltons and Gates from his current Senate position. His false image as a progressive might be exposed if he was a vice-presidential candidate.
He is on the board of the neoliberal, right wing OSU John Glenn School of Public Affairs. Last year at the college’s leadership conference, 3 proponents of charter schools, including Fordham, were invited. Not one person holding an opposing view was on the panel.
LikeLike
I work in a charter school and have for a while. I assure you that while the Teachers and other staff are well intentioned the “Company” they are employed by is not. The money being sucked out of these schools by the “Company” is outrageous and the performance of our students is reflective of this greed.Which has led to unbelievable turnover, lack of educational resources, poor professional development,and operational deficiencies. Lack of accountability is the issue.
LikeLike
My Ohio Democratic county chair said there’s a rift in the party over the issue of corporatized and privatized public schools. I conclude Brown sees no inherent problem in either, convincing me that Brown is a right wing/neoliberal.
Apparently, part of the Ohio Democratic party favors community fleecing by one set of leeches and, the Republican Party favors a different set of leeches.
LikeLike