Massachusetts has been engaged this past year in a heated public debate about “lifting the cap” on charter schools. Public school parents are concerned that lifting the cap will encourage a proliferation of charter schools that will harm public schools, draining away students and funding.
One blogger, known as Public School Mama, has become deeply invested in protecting her children’s public school. Recently she and other parents have been slammed on Twitter by an out of state venture capitalist who thinks he knows what is best for parents in Boston and everywhere else.
This venture capitalist doesn’t like public schools. He calls those who defend them ugly names, suggesting they are akin to Nazis or segregationists. He thinks he is a “freedom rider,” although he is not on a bus risking his life for anyone.
My own experience has taught me that it is useless to engage with people who won’t listen. It is passing strange to tell parents that they should open the flood gates to privatization and relinquish their attachment to their community public schools, especially when the person doing the lecture doesn’t even live in the state.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Public School Mama and her supporters should read George Lakoff’s work in the Huffington Post and then adapt her tactics accordingly — not to win over the Venture Capitalist, because he is a lost cause, but to keep that greedy SOB from winning over anyone that;s reading their debate by using “Autocratic Father Knows Best” Trumpism tactics and language.
Keep it simple and repeat, repeat, repeat to counter the same tactics the autocrats are using.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-lakoff/understanding-trump_b_11144938.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-lakoff/why-trump_1_b_9372450.html
You can find a lot of Lakoff speaking on YouTube. The two previous YouTube videos are an example.
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“(Corporate ed. reform’s anti-union policy & smears) come straight from Bizarro World, where the richest and most powerful people in the U.S. are cast as a plucky band of selfless rebels fighting for the civil rights of poor children of color, while dedicated and overworked teachers who can’t afford a house or pay for their children’s college tuition are imagined to be the greedy overlords of the old order.”
—————- RANDY CHILDS, United Teachers Los Angeles
————————————————–
Back in 2011, UTLA’s Randy Child’s wrote an article about L.A. Mayor Tony Villaraigosa — and by extension also about the Dimitry Melhorn’s of the corporate ed. reform world.
BACKGROUND: Tony Villaraigosa got his start in politics as an organizer with UTLA. In fact, UTLA backed him in his 2005 victory.
If memory serves, we gave him $1 million is his failed 2001 bid for mayor, and $500,000 in his 2005 successful bid for mayor.
At the time, little did UTLA know that the corporate ed reform industry had already bought him, and would soon cut loose this newly-union-hating attack dog to trash both CTA and UTLA whenever and wherever possible.
So, just after taking office, Tony went all-in with the corporate ed. reformers, reading the scripts that his corporate masters wrote for him, and signing onto newspaper op-ed’s pre-written for him, calling his one-time employer and benefactor UTLA “an unwavering roadblock to reform,” the “loudest opponent and the largest obstacle to creating quality schools” and the “most powerful defenders of the unacceptable status quo.”
In addition, Tony was able to gain control over several LAUSD schools — the Mayor’s Partnership — and while those school sites remained unionized, he had his underling in charge, ex-charter honcho Marshall Tuck, dismantle all the ethnic studies and dual language programs, per Tuck’s and Villaraigosa’s corporate masters’ marching order. This played a huge role in Latinos voting in droves against Tuck when he ran for State Superintendent of Instruction. This will also come back to bite Tony in a future political campaign.
Tony’s now trying to position himself as a born-again pro-union (Ha!) candidate for governor, and incredibly, attempting to win back teacher support … or enough of that support to win the governor’s mansion. (MORE ON THAT at the end)
Well, I’ll let Randy speak here about Villaraigosa… and his similarity with this recent ridiculous smear that Dimitry Melhorn, a well-paid corporate ed. reform shilll, made against an unpaid parent activist:
(As parent and activist Caroline Grannan once said,(from memory):
“I’ve never encountered anyone on-line, off-line, or anywhere else who supported corporate ed. reform who wasn’t being well-paid to do so.”)
https://socialistworker.org/2011/01/06/anti-teacher-bizarro-world
—————————————
RANDY CHILDS:
“(Villaraigosa’s) charges are all despicable lies. Unfortunately, this type of rhetoric is all-too-common in current debates around public education. A nationwide chorus of politicians, business executives and billionaires who like to be called ‘philanthropists’ are repeating the same talking points ad nauseam in their campaign to remake public schools in the image and interests of Corporate America.
“In what education historian Diane Ravitch calls the ‘dominant narrative’ of education reform today, buzzwords like ‘accountability’ and ‘choice’ are used as window dressing for a concerted effort to impose corporate management techniques and market-style competition on the education system. Teachers unions and anyone else who dares to disagree with this agenda are invariably accused of being ‘against reform’ and ‘for the status quo.’
“These allegations come straight from Bizarro World, where the richest and most powerful people in the U.S. are cast as a plucky band of selfless rebels fighting for the civil rights of poor children of color, while dedicated and overworked teachers who can’t afford a house or pay for their children’s college tuition are imagined to be the greedy overlords of the old order.
“However, in the real world, UTLA fiercely supports — and has spent years fighting for — a whole array of school reforms that support student learning and would tremendously shake up the actual status quo in education.
“We have advocated for smaller class sizes, more art and music education, democratic and collaborative school governance models, progressive taxation to increase school funding, reducing the onerous burden of standardized testing, an end to scripted curricula imposed by LAUSD, and even overhauling teacher evaluations with mentoring and peer review, just to list a few.
“Such reforms would dramatically improve student learning, be easy to implement with adequate school funding, and even make the process of teaching and learning more enjoyable for all. The mayor and his corporate ilk know all this — but they don’t want you to know it. That’s because these genuine reforms would also empower teachers, parents and students at the expense of the LAUSD administration, fellow politicians, and big business.
“Meanwhile, the ‘reforms’ that Villaraigosa advocated in his speech are at the opposite end of the spectrum. They include increasing the number of privately-managed charter schools, closing or reconstituting ‘failing’ schools, lengthening the probationary period for new teachers from two years to four years, eliminating seniority protections for teachers in job placements and layoffs, using students’ standardized test scores to evaluate teachers and as the basis for a ‘merit’ pay system, and making it easier to fire teachers.
“Each one of these measures weakens teachers’ rights at the workplace, forces students further into the restrictive box of standardized ‘bubble’ tests, and increases the leverage of the rich and powerful to force public education to serve their own narrow interests.
“Numerous education studies have failed to find any consistent positive effect on student learning caused by any of these ‘reforms.’ So it is only natural and completely justified for this business-driven campaign to meet resistance from teachers and our unions. In fact, we need that resistance to become stronger and better organized.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
“VILLARAIGOSA’S ATTACKS on UTLA are even more noteworthy when you consider how hard he works to pose as a progressive, pro-union Democrat and man of the people. It’s no secret that he was, ironically, a staff organizer for UTLA in the 1980s, and he repeatedly emphasizes his distant past as a union organizer in order to gain credibility with working-class audiences.
” ‘I don’t have an anti-union bone in my body,’ he claimed in his Huffington Post piece. Which only begs the question:
” ‘If he’s so pro-union, why is he spreading lies to make teacher unions the scapegoat for the problems in public education?’
” ‘And if he’s such a friend of the unions, why are almost all of his “reform” proposals designed to strengthen the hand of management over labor?’
“In his speech, Villaraigosa started with some liberal-sounding critiques of the state of education in California, without offering any specific explanations about why these problems exist. He said that California spends $2,400 less per pupil on education than the national average, our schools are becoming increasingly segregated, and Black and Latino students are vastly underrepresented in California’s state universities.
“We know what caused these outrages. Thirty years of tax cuts for the rich have starved our schools of the resources they need. School integration has been all but abandoned by the powers that be. Racial discrimination in jobs and housing continues to be a daily fact of life in the U.S. California’s universities have essentially ended affirmative action, and tuition has skyrocketed in the last 20 years, steadily pushing more and more students of color out of the system.
“But Villaraigosa didn’t say a word about any of this. Instead, he posed the rhetorical question,
” ‘What is stopping us from changing direction?’
“Then he launched into his tirade against UTLA.”
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
“THIS MAKES Villaraigosa’s rhetoric even more dangerous. If a ‘pro-union’ liberal like him thinks unions are to blame, then it must be true, right? By shedding crocodile tears about the plight of students of color, and then calling UTLA the biggest obstacle to improving their education, he makes his strategy clear — divide students & parents against teachers, and manipulate the public into acquiescing to Corporate America’s war on teacher unions.
” ‘I knew it would cause a firestorm,’ Villaraigosa bragged to the Los Angeles Times about his speech. ‘I knew that if I said it at one of my partnership schools, it would go unnoticed.’
“By ‘my partnership schools,’ Villaraigosa is referring to the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools (PLAS), an independent nonprofit agency affiliated with the mayor’s office that oversees 21 schools in collaboration with the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). These schools are often erroneously reported as being ‘under mayoral control,’ where in actuality PLAS has simply replaced LAUSD’s reviled ‘mini-district’ offices as the middle layer of LAUSD bureaucracy. Naturally, the only thing Villaraigosa himself does at any PLAS school is pose for photographs at staged media events.
“I teach at Roosevelt High School, the mayor’s alma mater and part of PLAS. If he had given that disgusting speech at Roosevelt, it would not have gone ‘unnoticed.’ He would have been booed and heckled.
“Unfortunately, we didn’t have the opportunity to challenge Villaraigosa’s attacks in person. But teachers at PLAS schools have organized a response to his lies. Seventeen UTLA representatives at PLAS schools have signed an open letter to the mayor, soon to be published by the Los Angeles Times, that challenges his anti-union rhetoric and points out, among other things, numerous examples of reforms that are being implemented right now by UTLA members at ‘his’ schools.
“In order to win true, beneficial reforms for our schools, teachers and our unions need to be ready to challenge the dishonest attacks from politicians like Villaraigosa. Moreover, we will need to proudly stand as an ‘unwavering roadblock’ to the insidious corporate-style restructuring looming over our schools. ”
——————–
Bravo, Randy.
Now, back to Villaraigosa. In his quest for the governorship, he’s lately been trying to have a rapprochement with the teachers unions, hoping for amnesia on our part, I suppose.
Pursuant to that end, he recently broke with this corporate ed. reform masters, and claims to take the teacher’s union side on both the Friedrichs’ and Vergara lawsuits. In the latter, this was a recent reversal, as he now claims that he opposed the failed 2016 appeal by the corporate reformers. Interestingly, however, he did not oppose the initial victory by those same corporate reformers two years ago where he made a statement in 2014 celebrating the initial Vergara verdict as a victory for children over evil teachers unions.
As the election for who will succeed Jerry Brown approaches, he’s starting to tap dance. No more indescribably vicious teacher bashing or teacher union bashing.
In addition, he made some comment (I can’t find the quote yet) where he said something like, “My biggest regret as mayor was the unfortunate falling out I had with teachers. I want to repair that relationship” or something to that effect.
Yeah, right.
There’s a version of that here in an interview. He’s given a question that is a total opening to ream the teachers unions like he repeatedly has in the last ten years, but contrary to his statements from 2005 on, he won’t take the bait … again, in the vain hope that he can mend fences with CTA and UTLA:
http://www.latimes.com/local/politics/la-me-pol-boxer-villaraigosa-20150112-story.html
——————————–
“On whether the union was his biggest obstacle to bringing about more change in Los Angeles schools”:
VILLARAIGOSA: “I always tell people, it was a city and a state that refused to invest in these kids. … Money does matter. We have failed as a society to make investments in these people, to create a safety net for them, and we wonder why there are so many disaffected people, angry with their circumstances. They have lost hope. I think it’s incumbent on all of us. It wasn’t just the unions. We all say we want better schools, but we haven’t wanted to invest in them in the way that we should.”
QUESTION: “Who do you listen to on education issues?”
VILLARAIGOSA: “Well, historically it was Ramon Cortines, John Deasy, Marshall Tuck (and) Joan Sullivan … but also parents (and) teachers. I don’t think we can listen to one stakeholder group to the detriment of the rest. Teachers and the unions are important, so are parents. I think the community overall is important.”
QUESTION: “When will you decide on running for governor?”
VILLARAIGOSA: “I would just say that sooner rather than later…I don’t want to talk too much about (the race for) governor.”
———————-
Here’s another recent interview where, when given the opening to attack CTA and UTLA, he once again won’t oblige:
https://calmatters.org/articles/antonio-villaraigosa-wants-schools-to-close-achievement-gap/
——————–
QUESTION: “Does (corporate ed. reform) in any way conflict with teachers’ rights?”
VILLARAIGOSA: “I support teachers unions. I supported the (teachers’ unions’) Friedrichs appeal. I support collective bargaining. I worked for the teachers union for eight years. I am respectful of bargaining. I think they have a very important role, along with parents, the most important role to play. But I don’t think there’s any contradiction in supporting collective bargaining and believing that we all need to be accountable for higher standards.
“This is connected to income inequality. It’s connected to poverty. It’s connected to all of it.
“I’ve broken a few glass ceilings. Whenever asked, I say,
” ‘I can read and I can write. I went to college and law school and I went at a time when I’m the first generation of people like me go.’
“Accountability should be critical for all of us. It shouldn’t just be vertical, however, just teachers. It should be horizontal. It should be all of us. That’s why we did the parent college. In private and charter schools, they can require parent participation. Public schools can’t. But you can change the culture and that’s what the parent college has done, is change the culture that parents don’t have a role.
“I also believe that we need to spend more on our schools, pay our teachers more. What accountability helps us do is make the case. The way to get the public to spend more is to show them that we’re doing more with the money we’ve got.”
———————
Clearly, Tony is trying to make nice with teachers …. or with enough of them to put him over the top to succeed Jerry Brown as governor.
Personally, if the powers-that-be in UTLA even consider reversing field and supporting/endorsing this P.O.S. Villaraigosa’s bid for governor — an extremely unilkely scenario, thankfully, I’m told — I would resign from UTLA and suggest every other teacher I can influence to do likewise.
Over my dead body … as the cliche goes.
At a UTLA House of Reps meeting, just the mention of Villaraigosa’s name always provokes the same reflex response: instant and almost unanimous loud booing … as well it should.
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“Education Reform and Disruption”
Last night, asking a question on Google led me to https://www.quora.com/ one of those question/answer sites like Ask. It turned out you had to sign up/in for it (it’s free) and then they ask about your personal interests. I was looking for Education and discovered they had this category of “Education Reform and Disruption.” Never heard that before, but I think it so accurately describes what corporate reformers like DFER are up to that now I believe, henceforth, we should probably always be calling it “Corporate Education Reform and Disruption.”
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You are right about “disruption” as a talking point. In Aspen 2015 promotional materials, posted on the web, there’s espousing of disruption. Until a few weeks ago, David Koch’s photo was in the Aspen Board array. Gates funds Aspen education programs like the Senior Congressional Education Staff Network and Pahara Aspen Institute. The Aspen Institute brags about its success in influencing national policy.
How Aspen fits into the American democracy, is a subject that demands attention.
LAUSD’s, John Deasy, is a Pahara Aspen Education Fellow.
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The Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation http://www.christenseninstitute.org/our-mission/ works on education issues, with not a great deal of insight, but plenty of publicity.
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Disruption is a failed business theory once espoused by Bill Gates that is being slowly abandoned by businesses, including Microsoft, but is eagerly embraced by educational reformsters. No failed theory is too crazy for public schools and public school teachers!
The Innovator’s Dilemma, 1997, by Clayton Christenson, a Harvard Business professor, is the bible. This article is a critique of the theory which has never produced the sought-after outcomes:
https://knowledgeproblem.com/2014/06/17/critiquing-the-theory-of-disruptive-innovation/
“The eighteenth century embraced the idea of progress; the nineteenth century had evolution; the twentieth century had growth and then innovation. Our era has disruption, which, despite its futurism, is atavistic. It’s a theory of history founded on a profound anxiety about financial collapse, an apocalyptic fear of global devastation, and shaky evidence. …
The idea of innovation is the idea of progress stripped of the aspirations of the Enlightenment, scrubbed clean of the horrors of the twentieth century, and relieved of its critics. Disruptive innovation goes further, holding out the hope of salvation against the very damnation it describes: disrupt, and you will be saved.”
Another critique:
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/235072
“And in this latest battle of words, I agree with Lepore. She criticized Christensen more for the examples he used to prove his case. She found his examples provided flimsy support and also cited his becoming involved with a failed investment fund whose strategy was to use his model to bet on stocks.
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Maybe just leave out the word “reform.” It has felt like nothing more than Corporate Education Disruption” for years.
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“…it’s useless to engage with people who won’t listen.” I sure do agree with that sentiment. PS Mama exhibits not just passionate concern for the wellbeing of her community, but also a great deal of patience and perseverance. Praises. From my own perspective, it’s indeed useless to debate ideas with an ideologue, but the real problems arise when said ideologue is in a position of power. This venture capitalist is just shouting (with capital) from the sidelines. He has all the power of a billboard on the side of the road. When principals, superintendents, school board members, mayors, legislators, governors, and presidents turn their backs on people who disagree with them, it is dangerous, sometimes useless, but necessary to engage.
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Charters and vouchers, charters and vouchers. I’m old enough to remember when ed reformers claimed they were interested in “improving public schools”
Everywhere they land the entire thing becomes about charters and vouchers.
Does anyone in ed reform work for public schools? The governor feels he can just completely ignore existing schools while campaigning for a competing system?
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How much hypocrisy can Ohioans stomach, while watching Gov. Kasich demand no duplication of services in the public sector, while
promoting the duplication provided by a failed charter school system?
And, if Ohioans are paying for bureaucratic administration of the failed voucher system, why the h_ll?
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This is why Donald Trump’s speech frightened me so much. He reminded me of the way the educational reformers’ talk — no doubt he has similar PR advisors. Their method of debate is disgusting because Donald Trump is not interested in real debate. He just wants to paint the people who oppose doing what he wants to do as evil.
It’s fitting that Dmitri Melhorn has no ethical compass that would prevent him from characterizing the reform movement just as Donald Trump had none when he characterized President Obama in his acceptance speech. I see that from so-called educational reformers all the time.
President Obama doesn’t care about the woman killed by illegal immigrant, Donald Trump told the country. Because she had to be SACRIFICED in the name of allowing illegal immigrants to run rampant.
And like Trump, educational reformers characterize any criticism the same way. Like President Obama, those public school parents want to keep children down and exposed to the most violent unworthy kids — and teachers — in public schools.
After years of watching educational reformers spending untold tens of millions to pursue their agenda this way, is it any wonder that Donald Trump and his son fittingly support their goals? And paint the critics as “enemies of children”, just like President Obama is an enemy of American citizens.
It is disgusting, but of course, it pays very, very well. If you have no moral compass, you do it.
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^^^and by the way, if charter school advocates REALLY believed half of the nonsense they post, they would NEVER condone charter schools who delightedly usher out the students who they find too hard to fit. Find me a charter school who KEEPS every student and immediately fills the spot of any student who leaves at any point in the year with the next child on the wait list — without forcing them to take a test so they can discourage the unworthy ones by telling them they can’t come unless they repeat as many years as necessary — and I will believe these reformers really care about the kids.
Those people have the same ethics as Donald Trump — they just try to disguise their “take no prisoners, we know what is correct and anyone who opposes us is evil” with platitudes and pretense that they care about kids. They do — the kids who will make their charters look good and the rest can rot. Just like Trump cares about the Americans who make him look good and get rich and anyone who believes he isn’t happy for the rest to rot is not paying attention.
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NYC public school parent: as I see it, no surprise that Donald Trump follows the rheephorm playbook when it comes to reflexively falling back on the sneer, jeer and smear—
Because despite all the protestations about the differences between rheephormistas of different political colorations, they are all [the saying itself is gendered] “brothers from another mother.”
As they see it, when faced with conflicts between morals [words] and $tudent $ucce$$ [deeds]—which one makes more ₵ent¢?
Thank you for your comments.
😎
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Instead of slamming Boston Public Schools parents, perhaps ed reformers could tell parents of kids in existing public schools how this political agenda benefits public schools?
Crazy I know but they DO sell ed reform as “improving public schools”. If they meant “opening charter schools to replace public schools” maybe they should have been straight with people and told them that was the plan.
The bait and switch really gets old, especially because they pull this same political maneuver in state after state.
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Opening charter schools to skim the students who make them look and don’t cost too much money. They don’t really want to replace all public schools because they need a dumping ground for the kids they don’t want.
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The basic tenant of capitalist and libertarian theory, espoused in neoliberalism and neoconservatism, is that the so-called ‘free market’ will right all wrongs and correct all problems through competition.
Why then does this billionaire keep trying to get his hands on tax money stolen from public schools?
Why does he not use his billions to fund free-market, profit-taking private schools that can compete with the free public schools he so hates?
Where in Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman is there advocacy to taint the holy capitalist competition with government tax money and actively seek to be a taker, a moocher, a parasite, and all the other epithets they use against the non-rich?
I’m all for billionaire hedge fund managers spending large amounts of their ill-gotten gains on providing free-market schools that are free to all comers, just like the public school system that made this country what it is.
Apparently they do not believe what they claim to believe because they are trying very hard to tilt the playing field in their favor and to make sure that the public schools are starved of capital, resources, pupils, and all the other things that would make them true competitors in the free-market of educational reforms.
Hypocrites, liars, grifters, snake oil salesmen, mendacious liars and cheats, the lot of them. Repeat, repeat, repeat, as urged above by the Lakoff supporter.
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Unrelated to the post or comments but, about Massachusetts. Web entries describe, the Great New England Public School Alliance, as, an “electoral advocacy” group. If AEI publications (an institute described as a right wing think tank) had contributors, who were also described, at “The 74”, as Democratic activists, donors and investors, and who were, also, panelists at Aspen Institute events, I suspect, a lot of state politicians would listen to them, regardless of constituent and local taxpayer agreement.
I was surprised to learn from a 2015 Forbes article, linked from an investment firm, about a new business, in trial use, at Ohio prisons, with 450 prisoners in the pilot. The article author described the product as tablet-based education that includes “… a suite of Khan Academy videos”.
Out of the blue, my mind wandered to ed reforms’, “human capital pipelines” and the “school to prison pipeline.”
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No one should waste a minute arguing with Dmitri Melhorn. It’s a minute you will never get back. Just sayin’
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Public School Mama has a kid going to the same school as my kids and I’m grateful every day that she’s fighting for our kids and teachers.
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