Marla Kilfoyle is a teacher on Long Island and executive director of the BATS.
In this post, she describes the well-funded effort to privatize public education in New York State.
We have lived with it for so many years that it seems to be just one more issue, although it is an issue that the mainstream media completely ignores. It is the “Sound of Silence,” as she says.
She writes:
“Election season is always a difficult time for many educators and education activist. We begin to look at all the campaign donations that fly to politicians from people, and organizations, that seek to destroy public education. It is the same old players emerging here in N.Y.
“The Waltons, The Koch Brothers, StudentsFirstNY funded by Wall Street Hedge Funders like Paul Singer, Dan Loeb, and John Paul Tudor.
“The NYS Senate Republican Committee are HUGE cheerleaders for the charter movement and have received millions for this election cycle from the folks listed above. For the sake of transparency, our Governor, and a smattering of Democrats, are also cheerleaders for charter expansion and the privatization movement.
“I will have to say that NO ONE, and I mean NO ONE, is a bigger cheerleader for privatization than John Flanagan, the Republican majority leader in our Senate. He is also a member of ALEC
“The ALEC education agenda is model legislation that travels around the nation when they need to defund schools, close them, and open up unaccountable charters. They support ending public education for a competitive model of education. The problem with a competitive model is that there are always winners and losers. We should have NO losers when it comes to education in this country….
“Republican Carl Marcellino, who is running against Democrat Jim Gaughran, got not one but two, yes two, $142,590 independent expenditure from StudentsFirstNY (A20133) for media. Republican Elaine Phillips, who is running against Democrat Adam Haber, got a $271,950 independent expenditure from StudentsFirstNY (A20133). Anyone who follows the fight to save public education KNOWS that StudentsFirst has been on the frontlines of the attack on public education and public school teachers. They have been the cheerleaders for Common Core, High-Stakes Testing, School Closures, vouchers, choice, and charter expansion. The sad thing is that Marcellino is on the NYS Education Committee. Call me crazy but shouldn’t that mean he should fight for public education NOT privatization? The larger question is – who will Marcellino and Phillips be accountable to when it comes to education policy? We all know the answer to that question. The Money!
“The PAC that is distributing all this money to StudentsFirstNY – New Yorkers for a Balanced Albany is funded by anti-public education billionaires. The other PAC, New Yorkers for Independent Action, is also supported by billionaires who are anti-public education. This money is being distributed to politicians who will support their destructive agenda for public education in NY.
Bottom line is – we must get to the polls and vote anyone out who takes this money – Republican or Democrat.
“As a public educator, education activist, and mother I will NOT be voting for anyone who takes money from StudentsFirstNY, New Yorkers for a Balanced Albany or New Yorkers for Independent Action. Public education is for the public good and we should be funding that equitably, not defunding and destroying it. Public education should not be competitive where you have winners and losers. Public education is the cornerstone of our democracy and is the great equalizer.
“So, why did I title this piece the sound of silence?
“While the NYS Senate Republican Committee is raking in all this cash from anti-public education billionaires, NOT many of them have said a word about Donald Trump’s behavior. To me, silence means acceptance.
“It’s OK to malign immigrants and it’s OK to malign women….
“Oh, and by the way, the NYS Senate Republican Committee thinks it is OK to pay for and distribute anti-semitic flyers. This is a flyer that the Senate Republican Committee distributed about Adam Haber, who is Jewish and running against Republican Elaine Phillips.
“To add insult to injury this was distributed during the week of Yom Kippur.”
Open the link to see the anti-Semitic image that the New York State Republican Committee distributed about Adam Haber. This is the same committee that received millions in contributions from former Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
OMG! What has this country become? Land of the free and the brave? NOPE. It’s become the land of the greedy and liars who feed off their own young. Sometimes I think human evolution is definitely going backwards. Look around and notice. Sad.
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This is a message to NoBrick:
Please stop sending anti-Semitic messages. I won’t post them.
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There seems to be no link to open to read about this. Please add the link.
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Yes, Yvonne…hatred seems to tRump collaboration, acceptance, kindness, and the Golden Rule.
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It is most frightening that supporters of privatization in education have not learned from the disastrous experience with the privatization of prisons. It is equally frightening that those supporting privatization are not moved by the absence of compelling data that privatization is improving education to reconsider their support. We need to make our voices heard at election time!
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The supporters of privatization fail to acknowledge that every privatization scheme has contributed to harming the middle class by destroying stable middle class jobs. The privatized jobs are usually at will jobs that pay less with fewer benefits. Privatization contributes to income inequality which is a huge issue for our country. Nobody is talking about this.
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retired teacher,
Please don’t knock private industry.
Opposite of privatization is “Nationalization” as practiced by the old “Soviet Union”, aka USSR. Look where USSR is now. Nationalization is the greatest failure known to mankind.
India followed the Soviet model of central planning and nationalization, the concept that the government and politicians knows what is good for everyone, and it resulted in a loss of 50 or so years of development. No one deserves such things. This concept equalizes every one, i.e., makes everyone equally poor.
I recently sent a family photo album to my relatives in India, it took 3 days to reach Delhi and is now sitting in a government facility for the past 10 days. This is an example of “Government knows best” concept.
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Raj,
I favor a mixed economy in which private industry and public services co-exist.
Private sector cannot provide equal services by its nature.
Some government functions must not be privatized, e.g., public schools,public libraries, public parks, public highways. Privatization means someone must extract a profit. In education, we tax ourselves for benefit of schools,not investors
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Diane,
I agree. Some functions are definitely better performed by the government, but many others are better done by the private industry. There has to be a balance. Most of the time government performs its function poorly. For the money government collects from us and spends they get very little done.
That is where I have a problem when people who seem to blame the private sector for all the ills of society. I think government has to be blamed because they have failed to manage/guide the private sector. Instead our politicians are at the beck and call of the private sector. They’ve sold out. There is enough blame to spread around.
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Raj
For each example we can come up with for the failure of Government we can come up with examples of failure in the private sector. The centrally planed Soviet Union has failed. The centrally planed Peoples Republic of China is booming. Cuba may not be the ideal place to live when we compare it to the USA . I suspect you might take Cuba over Honduras, Hatti, Guatemala,… … Greece is in shambles, must be the cradle to grave socialism ,but the Northern European nations are doing relatively well and they have stronger social states. So there is a far more complex story we have to look into when comparing nations and their economic system.
Working for a private contractor on massive Government contracts . I have seen the failures of the bureaucracy first hand for a myriad of reasons. However few if any of these projects would get done if not for the risk that the Government assumes. Private contractors would walk away before assuming a loss. Just as charter operators walk away from those students who are difficult to teach. The is room for both.
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retired teacher
You are confusing two issues. There was a time that Private industry and it still does in many cases , paid higher wages than civil service jobs . Civil service provided some job security that was traded off for lower wages. Have no fear after decimating the living standard of most private sector workers, the oligarchy has turned its sights on the largest Public sector unions from postal workers to teachers. Their argument to the rest of America, why should they have what you don’t.
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Agreed. Or Obamacare, which is a subsidized private sector voucher program that is not affordable for working class people. It’s a bad deal for them. It ends up as pricey catastrophic care insurance. They simply don’t have the money to pay thousands of dollars in addition to an insurance policy. I can’t imagine why anyone thought they WOULD have the money. They don’t have 400 dollars put aside let alone 4000. It may as well be 40,000. If you make 25,000 a year you don’t have thousands of dollars sitting around. How could the people who spent thousands of hours designing that law not know that?
I wouldn’t object to privatizing public schools if I weren’t absolutely convinced we will deeply, deeply regret it and it will be impossible to reverse once it’s done.
It’s a profoundly bad idea and one that can’t be undone. I feel as if I can see the op eds now- “no one could have predicted this would be a disaster”.
It’s reckless. There’s no consideration at all among ed reformers of any possible downside. That’s insane.
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One of the main problems with the ACA is the outrageous compensation packages the CEOs from the insurance companies and Big Pharma get. Of course, they all have lobbyists to make sure Americans pay the highest rates for coverage and drugs. Few people have been talking about this, although with the ACA rates skyrocketing, it is a more common topic of conversation. https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://medcitynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Screen-Shot-2015-06-24-at-9.58.14-AM.png&imgrefurl=http://medcitynews.com/2015/06/what-were-the-top-healthcare-ceo-salaries-last-year/&h=976&w=1006&tbnid=ikpfL5kmp1TqFM:&tbnh=160&tbnw=165&docid=Sjbv5ECY0Bk0UM&usg=__EKF2mBt2xFOJkRq0wSP68BOTO-Y=&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiQz4bts-zPAhWDeSYKHcs6DQwQ9QEIKjAA
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Chiara,
If you make $25,000 a year your contribution to ACA (silver policy) is limited to 2.04% of your income, i.e., about $510 a year. It is not thousands of Dollars sitting around as you state above. People that created the law were very smart.
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Or worse yet, the federal DoEd under Arne Duncan, John King & the Democratic party are in agreement with Republicans, The Friedman Foundation & the Koch brothers on privatizing public colleges of education. King’s new regs on teacher prep are a Rube Goldberg of VAMS connected to VAMs connected to federal funds connected to student loans. DoEd will require VAM scores of the students of the teacher-ed graduates of colleges of education. There is a broad base of organizations opposed to these idiotic regs. You can read the letter here & spread to the general public.
Click to access Teacher%20Prep%20Regs%20Stakeholders’%20Group%20Response%20-%20FINAL%20with%20Signatories%20October%202016.pdf
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The charter school”movement” does not represent the vast majority of Americans. That’s why the charter bunch is so secretive. In fact, lack of transparency is part of their framework. I don’t like to say that they are flat-out liars, but that’s what I’ve seen from charter CEO’s.
Raising awareness every day is what makes this blog a real treasure. It’s what Teachers do, routinely. We know that the privatization of our public schools is the wrong choice.
All that has to be done now is tell the truth, repeatedly, about the privatizers.
The imaginary Waiting lists need to be exposed.
Charter CEO salaries that are many times the average salaries of the jurisdictions that “host” the charter schools.
“Operation costs” cash paid as rent to owners of the charter school. Etc.
The list goes on, enough to scare away most parents who figure it out, and who don’t want to worsen conditions for other public school students at the same time. It’s not hard to see that they are a lose-lose for us, the citizenry.
The charter school scam is what’s corrupt, not the American people.
Next, the obscene 2010 “Citizens united” ruling needs to fall.
Only one presidential candidate has promised to do that, and we must help her.
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IT’S UP TO YOU AND ME NOW TO SPREAD THE WORD because our state and local lawmakers and social media friends everywhere need to know right now that the Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education has issued a warning that charter schools posed a risk to the Department of Education’s own goals. The report says: “Charter schools and their management organizations pose a potential risk to federal funds even as they threaten to fall short of meeting the goals.”
The report documents multiple cases of financial risk, waste, fraud, abuse, lack of accountability of federal funds, and lack of proof that the schools were implementing federal programs in accordance with federal requirements.
Throughout our nation, private charter schools backed by billionaire hedge funds are being allowed to divert hundreds of millions of public school tax dollars away from educating America’s children and into private corporate pockets. Any thoughtful person should pause a moment and ask: “Why are hedge funds the biggest promoters of charter schools?” Hedge funds aren’t altruistic — there’s got to be big profit in “non-profit” charter schools in order for hedge fund managers to be involved in backing them.
And even the staunchly pro-charter school Los Angeles Times (which acknowledges that its “reporting” on charter schools is paid for by a billionaire charter school advocate) complained in an editorial that “the only serious scrutiny that charter operators typically get is when they are issued their right to operate, and then five years later when they apply for renewal.” Without needed oversight of what charter schools are actually doing with the public’s tax dollars, hundreds of millions of tax money that is supposed to be spent on educating the public’s children is being siphoned away into private pockets.
One typical practice of charter schools is to pay exorbitant rates to rent buildings that are owned by the charter school board members or by their proxy companies which then pocket the public’s tax money as profit. Another profitable practice is that although charter schools use public tax money to purchase millions of dollars of such things as computers, the things they buy with public tax money become their private property and can be sold by them for profit…and then use public tax money to buy more, and sell again, and again, and again, pocketing profit after profit.
The Washington State and New York State supreme courts and the National Labor Relations Board have ruled that charter schools are not public schools because they aren’t accountable to the public since they aren’t governed by publicly-elected boards and aren’t subdivisions of public government entities, in spite of the fact that some state laws enabling charter schools say they are government subdivisions.
Charter schools are clearly private schools, owned and operated by private entities. Nevertheless, they get public tax money. Moreover, as the NAACP and ACLU have reported, charter schools are often engaged in racial and economic-class discrimination.
Charter schools should (1) be required by law to be governed by school boards elected by the voters so that they are accountable to the public; (2) a charter school entity must legally be a subdivision of a publicly-elected governmental body; (3) charter schools should be required to file the same detailed public-domain audited annual financial reports under penalty of perjury that genuine public schools file; and, (4) anything a charter school buys with the public’s money should be the public’s property.
NO FEDERAL MONEY SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO GO TO CHARTER SCHOOLS THAT FAIL TO MEET THESE MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS OF ACCOUNTABILITY TO THE PUBLIC. Hillary Clinton could, if elected President, on day one in office issue an Executive Order to the Department of Education to do just that. Tell her today to do that! Send her the above information to make certain she knows about the Inspector General’s findings and about the abuses being committed by charter schools.
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Finally something I can really do something about. Gaughran is in my senate district and I will be voting for him. I just wish the volunteer who knocked on my door didn’t make his first pitch a slam on the MTA tax which helps fund NY public transit. But I alleviated his fears and assured him that the last time I voted for a Republican was Jacob Javits.Who has been dead for 40 years. My School district like Roslyn should overwhelmingly support public education because of the quality of the schools. Somehow I doubt they will.
I agree with the author. It is a shame that we have Republicans and way too many Repulicrats attacking Public Schools and teachers, here in NY.
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Thank you for putting this into circulation. Not in NY but more confirmation that the Senate Republican Committee in NY should not ever, ever make decisions about public education. Trump and the Republican Party has legitmized that anti-Semitic image.
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This is an instant classic in the ed reform journalism genre:
It’s titled “Dumb and Dumber” and it’s about how incredibly stupid the US workforce is:
“The natural A-students will be fine. This reality allows many smart people to stop thinking about the country’s most socially destructive problem. But for many others, elementary and secondary school is a drag on lifetime achievement. What the cry from the Trumpian heartland has revealed is that many rural schools also offer the same futureless education as inner-city schools.
These people aren’t irredeemably stupid. Their schools are stupid. Fix the schools and half of America’s myriad problems are solvable.”
I’m looking at this guy’s picture and he looks to be about 50 years old.
I guess people were much, much smarter when he was in school.
All we have to do is send the incredibly dumb and lazy lower classes to Success Academy and our troubles are over!
They’re really insufferable snobs. It’s amazing to read this stuff.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/dumb-and-dumber-1476917265
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The Plan to Piratize Public Education and the Sound of . . .
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No Brick,
When you send me an article about how rich and powerful Jews are, it rings some very bad bells for me. I don’t care if the author is a Jew. The underlying message is anti-Semitic. Keep it to yourself. I won’t post it here.
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I respect such a position.
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Would someone explain to me why the poster/flyer with “Fiddler on the Roof” reference is anti-semitic. I always thought that the play/film/novel was a positive reference to the Russian Jews. Have I missed something along the way? Granted I haven’t seen/read Fiddler on the Roof for decades so maybe I missed/am forgetting something.
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Duane…this ad is a bit more subtle, but in the same direction of the Trump ad with Hillary’s face superimposed over a Star of David on a bid of dollar signs.
These bigoted ads are produced to indicate to viewers/voters that the candidate is either Jewish, or is supported by Jews.
This ad exaggerates the nose of the fiddler while shrinking the body so that you see ” huge Jewish nose” and associate it as a negative for the candidate.
Think about it and watch for more since Trump/Bannon is using this bigoted device nationwide.
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Thanks, Ellen! Your explanation explains the problem quite clearly!
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Going once … Going twice … Gone! … to the highest bidder!
Fess up! Who’s really surprised that schools are the next gold-mine for drooling hedge-funders and tech magnates? Big Banks, Big Pharma, and Big Oil … move on over. It’s Big Education’s turn.
The lure of charter schools … with the ever-repeating money stream via taxes … was just too, too lucrative to ignore. And now the sharks are just fattening their odds and slimming their risks by ruining the long-standing public school system.
These charters are ostensible saviors of the last resort for children stuck in failing, inner-city educational mills. But the inner cities are the starting blocks. They see education in an entirely new structure and with an outcome never before considered … profit.
To cull some schools from the system … a few at a time for now … sets the pattern. Profiteers hard-sell the “success” story and entice others to sign on … and the money siphoned from public schools further cripples already crippled schools. It’s a classic business “build and destroy” mission.
Combined screecher resources and skewered assessment results … think Common Core! … and more and more schools become ripe for take-over. Charter operators bully their way into new situations … which, in turn, allow others to come forward to reap profits from arming these new schools swimming in redirected taxpayer monies. Everyone is in on the action. … from software providers to textbook pushers. Even the tutoring industry gets a booster shot.
So the spigots are open and the tax monies now drain into the pockets of entrepreneurs who are more about flash than about substance. Classroom performance is now superseded by the bottom line.
Charter schools will come to dominate the scene. And in true entrepreneurial form, schools will become more and more like race cars … covered with product logos and insignias of all sorts.
Expect sport scoreboards with product info flashing all game long. Campuses will be decorated by signage that speaks to the generosity of business X and Y. We might not get a Whopper High School, but that doesn’t mean we won’t get something called the MicroSoft Magnet School for Technology. You know … something extra sexy that would awe the ordinary taxpayer into a state of silly gratefulness.
Sports’ uniforms will look like those patchy outfits race car drivers wear … with logos all over the place. Cafeteria foods will be franchised out … even transportation will be “Uberized” in some fashion because … well … if there’s money to be made, they’ll make it.
Teachers will be properly orientated company men and women … and students will be the product. The goal is to spit and polish the product just well enough to get by quality control and then … then it’s off to the bank.
Older teachers will run to retirement hills, and those too young to retire will simply quit because they will not have the intestines for what is unfolding.
So, there you have it. Schools will have new ownership, but the same funding … your tax dollars. The faculties will have been rinsed free of old blood and new, conforming teacher-bots will read from the curriculum scripts exactly as they are written … and nod their heads like bobblehead dolls.
Phony civic-minded entities that wish to maximize their exposure in order to maximize their advertising clout will pay for the privilege to be associated with the scam-school. And politicians will share in the looting of the public schools by getting loot from the looters. I’m sure you can follow that.
Taxpaying parents will have zero control over their tax dollars, and their children will be short-changed not for a few years … but for as long as they might live.
That’s the future. More and more control by fewer and fewer powerful people who control powerful mechanisms to become more powerful every day. Sounds like a tongue-twister, but it ain’t. It’s real.
Going … Going …
Denis Ian
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The vast majority of Americans have never heard of “neoliberals.” Even fewer realize that it has become the cornerstone of the Republican Party. The neoliberal agenda consists of privatization, deregulation, and the dismantling of social programs. Public education is definitely in the crosshairs of the neoliberals, and Massachusetts is the battlefield.
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I struggle to understand the difference between neoliberalism and conservatism. Both of them diminish the public sector and believe in privatization and deregulation.
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