Jack Hassard, retired science professor, refers to Governor Nathan Deal’s proposed “opportunity school district” as the the “misfortunate school district.”
He knows a hustle and a fraud when he sees one.
Governor Deal is angry that the state’s elected school boards don’t want him to have power to seize control of schools and turn them over to private entrepreneurs. So he calls them a “power hungry monopoly.”
Professor Hassard writes:
Deal, The Bully, Calls Local School Boards Power Hungry Monopolies Because They Oppose His Misfortunate School District
monopoly: exclusive control of a commodity or service in a particular market
bully: a blustering, quarrelsome, overbearing person who habitually badgers and intimidates smaller or weaker people.
Governor Nathan Deal is calling local school boards a power-hungry monopoly because they oppose his Opportunity School District which would steal 20 schools per year from the same local school boards. Deal’s definition of a monopoly (according to an AJC report) are entities “that have no competition and see no reason to change.”
Deal, I suppose, is angry that local districts are really not monopolies, but in fact run by democratically elected school boards, which indeed, change. However, since the Federal No Child Left Behind Law, and Race to the Top, the biggest obstacle facing local schools is the State which carries out the laws of the Federal Government.
Schools districts are not monopolies (thank goodness) but independent entities that have the right and responsibility to educate the youth in its communities. The only monopoly in the State seems to be the Governor’s office which wants to control educating children in direct opposition to the Georgia Constitution.
The Georgia Department of Education rank-orders all schools in the state on a scale with 100 being the top score. This score is primarily based on achievement test scores. Any school that has a scale-score less than 60 for three consecutive years is put on the list of chronically failing schools.
It’s from this list that the Governor will be able pick his schools that are “chronically failing” and put them under his control.
Many school districts are opposed to the Governors plan. So now the governor is lashing out saying he will punish districts if his plan is defeated. He says he will mess with the districts use and access to money and will require districts to give parents a choice in sending students in “failing schools” to a better school in the district. This is nothing new. Districts have in place the ability to do this, but it often is simply not realistic for parents who would find it difficult to provide the transportation for their children.
The Governor is acting like a spoiled child. Maybe he needs detention.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
We have surely entered the land of doublespeak when democratically-elected bodies are called monopolies because they resist the transfer of tax dollars from publically-controlled institutions that serve all to privately-controlled institutions that serve the few.
From a European POV:
It seems that if you want to distribute money equitably and prevent it from flowing almost all or certainly too much to the privately controlled institutions that serve the few, then all of a sudden you are labeled “dirty socialist” or “dirty communist”. Well, we Europeans must be very, very, very dirty people, which is why our quality of life is so high, for the most part, and our stress levels, post WW2, are so low.
But when it comes to your Wall Street needing a bailout from the government, they remain the country’s sacred, precious capitalists, the defenders of “freedom”.
I don’t know how there is no rioting in the streets over this. Norway would never be able to cope with this sort of dynamic. We would just vote out our federal government and start from scratch.
Norwegian Filmmaker
I would like to point out, we Americans, bailed out European banks during the recent recession. We bailed Europeans during and after the World War II. We fought for the Europeans during world war II. We rebuilt Europe after the war.
We also bailed out our own financial institutions during the last recession. We did not wait for the generosity of Europeans to bail us out.
Bad mouthing Americans is unfair, unless Europeans are in charge of re-writing history. It has nothing to do with socialism or communism.
German banks may need serious bailout soon. Who do you think is going to help? Just tell me when did Europeans last bail out USA?
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970204464404577118682763082876
Political theorist, Franz Fanon, argued culture is the expression
of consciousness…
No, Raj; Europe rebuilt Europe after WW2, and it took nearly 50 years to do so.
NF,
Did you forget the Marshall Plan?
We even offered to help Russia rebuild, but they rejected the offer.
Diane,
Thanks
Calling locally elected school boards a “power hungry monopoly” makes utterly no sense whatsoever. Are mayors and governors power hungry monopolies? This is insane, deceptive, disingenuous, obfuscatory and false. Cuomo is no better, because he referred to public schools as a monopoly. From the washingtonpost, 10-29-14: New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is running for re-election, has angered teachers, parents and education activists by telling the New York Daily News editorial board that he views the K-12 public education system as a “monopoly” and that teachers are opposed to be evaluated.
According to this story in the Daily News, Cuomo said that if he is re-elected, he would work hard to bust up “one of the only remaining public monopolies,” he said, referring to public education, and said that he likes charter schools because they introduce competition into the K-12 education world. He also said he wants to change teacher evaluation systems to increase more incentives and more sanctions in order to “make it a more rigorous evaluation system.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2014/10/29/cuomo-calls-public-school-system-a-monopoly-he-wants-to-bust/
Wow, just wow. I know this is old news but it still leaves me speechless and disgusted. Cuomo and Deal are power hungry monopolies and things which I cannot mention here out of respect to this excellent blog.
Deal links to Louisiana and Tennessee when pushing his plan. It’s on the website.
Notably absent is Michigan.
They simply ignore failures in ed reform. The failures disappear, never to be heard from or mentioned again.
Here’s Arne Duncan pushing the Michigan EAA in 2012:
“U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan says public schools in Detroit have improved in the last four years. Duncan was in Detroit today with Governor Rick Snyder. They toured a traditional public school and a school in the state’s Education Achievement Authority.
The EAA is a controversial state-run authority meant to turn around failing schools. Based on his tour today, Duncan says the EAA shows promise.”
When Duncan visited, Broad and Snyder were pushing to have the EAA expanded to the whole state so Duncan was part of their political campaign. They failed to expand to the whole state which is good, because the EAA in Detroit was a disaster.
http://michiganradio.org/post/us-education-secretary-snyder-tour-eaa-and-dps-schools#stream/0
I’m sort of curious to see how ed reformers plan on making privatization work in rural districts. Can they portray it as “choice” if they’re simply privatizing the only public school that is available to people?
That’s what happened in Michigan when they tried it- they just outsourced a whole system to contractors.
It was attend a for-profit school or move- that was the “choice”. Michigan has the sad distinction of “first in the nation to sell a whole district to a for-profit entity”.