I wrote an article for the online version of the Chronicle of Philanthropy about how the big foundations paved the way for Betsy DeVos’ nihilistic campaign to privatize public education. I wanted it to be in a journal that foundations across the nation read. It is available only to subscribers.
https://www.philanthropy.com/article/Opinion-Blame-Big-Foundations/238662
Opinion: Blame Big Foundations for Assault on Public Education
By Diane Ravitch
President-elect Donald Trump has promised to reallocate $20 billion in federal funds to promote charter schools and private-school vouchers. He has selected Michigan billionaire Betsy DeVos — who has long devoted her philanthropic efforts to advocating for charters and vouchers — as the next secretary of education. After the election, her American Federation for Children boasted of spending nearly $5 million on candidates that support school choice, not public schools.
Currently, 80 percent of charter schools in Michigan are run by for-profit corporations, due in no small part to Ms. DeVos and her husband, Amway heir Dick DeVos. These schools represent a $1 billion industry that produces results no better than do public schools, according to a yearlong Detroit Free Press investigation. The DeVoses recently made $1.45 million in campaign contributions to Michigan lawmakers who blocked measures to hold charters accountable for performance or financial stability.
With Ms. DeVos in charge of federal education policy, the very future of public education in the United States is at risk. How did we reach this sorry state? Why should a keystone democratic institution be in jeopardy?
I hold foundations responsible.
Extremist Attacks
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Edythe and Eli Broad Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation have promoted charter schools and school choice for the past decade. They laid the groundwork for extremist attacks on public schools. They legitimized taxpayer subsidies for privately managed charters and for “school choice,” which paved the way for vouchers. (Indeed, as foundations spawned thousands of charter schools in the past decade, nearly half of the states endorsed voucher programs.)
At least a dozen more foundations have joined the Big Three, including the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, and the Doris & Donald Fisher Fund.
For years these groups have argued that, one, public schools are “failing”; two, we must save poor children from these failing schools; three, they are failing because of bad teachers; four, anyone with a few weeks of training can teach as well, or better. It’s a simple, easily digestible narrative, and it’s wrong.
To begin with, our public schools are not failing. Where test scores are low, there is high poverty and concentrated racial segregation. Test scores in affluent and middle-income communities are high. The U.S. rank on international standardized tests has been consistent (and consistently average) since those tests began being offered in the 1960s, but the countries with higher scores never surpassed us economically.
The big foundations refused to recognize the limitations of standardized testing and its correlation with family income. Look at SAT scores: Students whose families have high incomes do best; those from impoverished families have the lowest scores. The foundations choose to ignore the root causes of low test scores and instead blame the teachers at schools in high-poverty areas.
Follow the Money
Major foundations put their philanthropic millions into three strategies:
They funded independently run charter schools, which are a form of privatization.
Some, notably the Gates Foundation, invested in evaluating teachers based on their students’ test scores.
They gave many millions to Teach for America, which undermines the profession by leading young college graduates to think they can be good teachers with only five weeks of training.
Many of the philanthropists behind the foundations have also used their own money to underwrite political candidates and state referenda aimed at advancing charters and school choice. Bill Gates and his allies spent millions to pass a referendum in Washington State authorizing charter schools; it failed three times before winning in 2012 by 1 percent of the vote. After the state Supreme Court denied taxpayer funding to charters, on the grounds that they are not public schools because they are not overseen by elected school boards, three justices who joined the majority ruling faced electoral challengers bankrolled by Mr. Gates and his friends. (The incumbents easily won re-election.)
The Walton Family Foundation claims to have launched one-quarter of the charter schools in the District of Columbia. It has pledged to spend $200 million annually for at least the next five years on opening new charters. Individual family members have spent millions on pro-school choice candidates and ballot questions. This year they joined other out-of-state billionaires like Michael Bloomberg in contributing $26 million to support a Massachusetts referendum that would authorize a dozen new charters a year, indefinitely. It lost, 62 percent to 38 percent. Only 16 of the state’s 351 school districts voted “yes”; the “no vote” was strongest in districts that already had charters, which parents knew were draining resources from their public schools.
Advocates for charter schools insist they are public schools — except when charters are brought into court or before the National Labor Relations Board, in which case they claim to be private corporations, not state actors. They do share in public funding for education, a pie that has not gotten bigger for a decade. So every new charter school takes money away from traditional public schools, requiring them to increase class sizes, lay off teachers, and cut programs.
Charters have a mixed performance record. Those with the highest test scores are known for cherry-picking their students, excluding those with severe disabilities and English-language learners, and pushing out students who are difficult to teach or who have low test scores.
Many other charters have abysmal academic records. The worst are the virtual charters, which have high attrition rates, low test scores, and low graduation rates. As The New York Times recently reported, citing federal data, the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow in Ohio has “more students drop out … or fail to finish high school within four years than at any other school in the country.”
Why do state leaders allow such “schools” to exist?
Follow the campaign contributions to key legislators.
Failing the Test
The Gates Foundation’s crusade to evaluate teachers by the test scores of their students has been a colossal failure, one from which the organization has yet to back off. (Unlike its $2 billion campaign to encourage smaller high schools, which the foundation admitted in 2008 had not succeeded.)
This has had devastating consequences. President Obama’s Education Department, which had close ties to the Gates Foundation, required states to adopt this untested way of evaluating teachers to be eligible for $4.35 billion in Race to the Top funding.
Since the standardized tests covered only mathematics and reading, some states, like Florida, began rating teachers based on the scores of students they didn’t teach in subjects they didn’t teach.
In New York State, a highly regarded fourth-grade teacher in an affluent suburb sued over her low rating and won a judgment that the state’s method, based on the Gates precept, was “arbitrary and capricious.” When newspapers in Los Angeles and New York City published invalid ratings of thousands of teachers, classroom morale plummeted and veteran educators resigned in protest. One in Los Angeles committed suicide.
The American Statistical Association issued a strong critique of the use of student scores to rate teachers, since scores vary depending on which students are assigned to teachers. The American Educational Research Association also spoke out against the Gates Foundation’s method, saying that those who teach English-language learners and students with disabilities would be unfairly penalized.
Still, big donors were so sure teachers were responsible for low test scores that they fell in love with Teach for America and showered hundreds of millions of dollars on it.
The nonprofit began as a good idea: Invite young college graduates to teach for two years where no teachers were readily available, sort of like the Peace Corps. But then the organization began making absurd claims that its young recruits could “transform” the lives of poor students and even close the achievement gap between children who are rich and poor, white and black. School districts, looking to save money, began replacing experienced teachers with Teach for America recruits, who became the hard-working, high-turnover staff at thousands of new charter schools.
Due in part to that supply of cheap labor, 93 percent of charters are nonunion, which the retail billionaires of the DeVos and Walton families no doubt see as a boon. Unfortunately, Teach for America undermines the teaching profession by asserting that five weeks of training is equivalent to a year or two of professional education. Would doctors or lawyers ever permit untrained recruits to become Heal for America or Litigate for America? It is only the low prestige of the teaching profession that enables it to be so easily infiltrated by amateurs, who mean well but are usually gone in two or three years.
Now that the Trump administration means to use the power and purse of the federal government to replace public schools with private alternatives, it is important to remember that universal public education under democratic control has long been one of the hallmarks of our democracy. No high-performing nation in the world has turned its public schools over to the free market.
Let us remember that public schools were established to prepare young people to become responsible citizens. In addition to teaching knowledge and skills, they are expected to teach character and ethical behavior. Gates, Broad, and other big foundations have forgotten that public education is a public responsibility, not a consumer good. Their grant-making strategies have endangered public education.
This is a time to hope that they will recognize their errors, take a stand against privatization of our public services, and commit themselves to rebuilding public education and civil society.
Diane Ravitch is a historian of education and a research professor at New York University. She writes about education policy at Diane Ravitch’s Blog.
Diane,
You have the clearest eyes and the sharpest pen.
In this writing, Ravitch delivers the most compelling and cogent defense for democracy possible, addressing it to the right audience.
The richest 0.1% are on notice that their involvement in, or acquiescence to, privatized public education, makes them enemies of America. They are enemies against a government of the people, by the people and for the people. They are enemies of the nation’s prosperity. America’s workforce, educated in public schools, have been forced to drag unproductive Wall Street (an estimated 2% GDP loss), and still make productivity improvements, while receiving no share of the reward for their gains. That enrichment of the richest 400 families won’t continue. The sheer short-sighted greed of those like Gates and the Walton’s, threatens the United States on two fronts- the decimation of its founding principles and, its future prosperity.
The sum total of Gates’ innovation in education is cost cutting, which any two-bit hack can do. He is a glory hound and a hypocrite. If public schools are made in his image, they will reflect the depravity of the richest 0.1%.
Thank you, Linda, I hope you send that as a comment to the Chronicle of Philanthropy
As a non-subscriber, I’ll give my most diligent effort, at getting the comment through to the Chronicle. Thanks for being the light.
Linda, I will gift you a subscription to the Chronicle of Philanthropy if you contact me.
Thanks Laura,
I sent the comment to the editor via e-mail. The site had an address.
I’m curious why no one talks about Eli Broad’s intervention in Detroit. It wasn’t that long ago- 2012.
I have not heard his name mentioned in connection to Detroit charters since all of ed reform descended on Detroit to cheer on his initiative:
“He then approached Gov. Rick Snyder — “I’m a lifelong Democrat, but we need to be party-blind on education,” he said — and had discussions that led to the Education Achievement Authority of Michigan.
The EAA took on the worst-performing 15 schools in Detroit — nine elementary/middle schools, three of which are charters, and six high schools — with the goal of improving them. EAA management began in August 2012, and students attend 210 days a year, 40 more than most other Michigan students. Individual learning plans are developed with an emphasis of mastery of current lessons before moving on to the next.
The Michigan Educational Excellence Foundation was created as the fundraising entity for the program. Broad said his foundation contributed $10 million and that another $10 million came from New York City-based Bloomberg Philanthropies, $6 million from the New York City-based Robertson Foundation and $1 million from the New York City-based Carnegie Foundation. It also has received grants from major foundations, including the Seattle-based Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.”
This is why I think ed reform is an echo chamber. It’s like this never happened.
They’re (now) saying they want more regulation of Michigan charters, but they all lobbied for the EAA and they did nothing about regulating charters. Broad could have conditioned his funding on proper regulation and the Obama Administration could have too. They did nothing about regulating charters in MI, OH and PA. In fact,they all lobbied to fund more and more unregulated charters.
DeVos didn’t do this alone. She had help- from Gates and Broad and Bloomberg and Obama.
http://www.crainsdetroit.com/article/20141019/NEWS/310199974/eli-broad-talks-to-crains-about-the-eaa-and-future-of-education-in
I get a real clear sense already on how Trump and DeVos will be for public schools.
Public schools are completely omitted from the discussion. It’s all charters and vouchers.
Ed reform and national media have omitted any discussion of the schools 90% of children attend. Just think about how insane that is for a minute.
This will be ed reform echo chamber all the way. A closed circle. They may as well bar public school kids, parents and teachers from DC. We’re excluded from this club.
Walt Gardner, a retired public teacher from Los Angeles and a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, wrote a very good essay in this month’s “Pennsylvania Gazette.” The title of the article is ‘Against Radical Disruption.’ He points out that most parents rate their child’s school as an A or a B; yet the false narrative of public school failure is in the national consciousness. What is important about this article is not just its message, but also its location. It is from Penn which has produced its fair share of corporate disruptors including Angela Duckworth with her idea that we can train the poverty out of students. I am pleased to see they printed an opposing view. In any case disruption is mostly what we can expect from DeVos and Trump. http://thepenngazette.com/against-radical-disruption/
Retired teacher, thanks for the link. Disruption is not good for children or schools.
Here’s an example of the ed reform “debate” on DeVos:
“Donald Trump didn’t say a lot about education during the presidential campaign, but he did make clear he favored school choice. His selection of Betsy DeVos, a longtime choice advocate and funder, to be secretary of education seems to indicate this is a policy area where we should, at least for now, take the president-elect both literally and seriously.
A Trump school choice push could be as disruptive as the rest of his unconventional approach to politics. Let’s be honest, there is a comfortable class of education mandarins living in exclusive suburbs enrolling their kids at so-called “public privates,” working out arrangements to send their kids to that one special school that allows them to claim public school parentage while sidestepping the problems other parents face, or taking advantage of private schools while nonetheless fighting tooth and nail to deny poor parents the same options. It’s gross, considered rude to talk about and widely normalized in an education world focused on what’s OK for other people’s kids.”
Every single lower and middle income PUBLIC school is utterly ignored in this echo chamber.
These people really believe that the United States consists of “wealthy suburban public schools” and charters and private schools. They believe that because that’s where THEY live.
It’s amazing. They have omitted 3/4’s of the country. VAST areas, whole states! Gone.
There has not been one word written on the effect of DeVos’ lobbying on PUBLIC schools in Michigan. Our schools are not even valued enough to mention. No one in ed reform cares. As long as she meets the “choice” litmus test they’re willing to throw every public school in the country under the bus.
It’s too little too late for Democrats to start defending public education now. They made their choice. They should all go lobby DeVos for charter start-up money and not bother to pretend they care about what happens to the unfashionable public sector schools.
It sucks that I have to pay Betsy DeVos to launch an assault on the public schools in my own community. I can already hear the marketing machine revving up- it’ll be all public school bashing all the time and every public school parent and child will be paying for this political and ideological crusade. Our schools are just collateral damage in this privatization effort.
John King, today:
“Our primary concern shouldn’t be the management structure of schools, but if they serve all students well.” – @JohnKingatEd #FutureofEd
He’s identical to DeVos. For-profit, private, religious, doesn’t matter.
“Management structure” is an interesting dodge, by the way. That could apply to anything. Under this theory they can and should privatize the US Department of Education. The word he’s looking for there is “contractor”. We could turn his department over to a private contractor- why not? He insists that’s the same as a public entity.
Chiara. “Management structure” is an interesting dodge, by the way.
As usual you are correct. The shift in language includes other other terms “operator.” Anyone can be an operator or owner-operator, anyone can be a manager, anyone can be a contractor or a subcontractor, anyone can be an education service provider–the language of franchising systems is being made normal thanks to the borderless and relentless effort to monetize students and parents as customers in a market of education…
Forget the kids and parents who are not money-makers. The Choice myth is that kids and parents get to choose schools when the case is otherwise.
It is not hard to see that there will be huge increases in advertising for students “of a certain kind,” and less and less transparency on who is getting public funds, and to what ends.
Excellent article. This hits home: “Gates, Broad, and other big foundations have forgotten that public education is a public responsibility, not a consumer good. Their grant-making strategies have endangered public education.”
As a brief aside, at the tail-end of one of the talk shows two days ago, the group went over the litany of how each Trump-appointed department head is opposed to the mission or even the existence of that department. When they got to the DOE and DeVos, one of the speakers–a blond woman (didn’t catch her name) interrupted and said that, NO, Betsy DeVos is not against public education. She said it with emphasis–twice.
I’m sorry not to have the reference (I think it was CNN); but because of that offhand remark, I am wondering if DeVos is feeling the heat and now running a counter-claim campaign–saying she is not against public education?
This insightful essay deserves to have a much bigger audience. Just sent it to a number of friends who know little about public education. I am a Diane Ravitch groupie.
Thank you, Greg.
I wrote this article with the intention of getting it into the hands of the foundations.
wrestling at the chase hotel was a beloved cultural phenomenon many years ago…I do what I can to educate St. Louis….
How appropriate that the worst mistake Obama made….Gates—-Arne Duncan….maybe the greatest disciple in the world of the theology “I am rich, therefore I know more than you do, so shut up and obey” seems all aboard the Trump train…..the only thing left is wrestling at the Chase, when DeVos gets a mean glare from Gates, as he warns her to not do anything with that voucher manure that (messes)up the lucrative charter school swindlers ability to lie and steal from the tax payers. He really is good with money, so the voucher thing might work out for him, eventually.
Gates is good at computers and making money, but the rest . . . not so much.
Recent article “Sanders, Democrats want Trump’s Education pick to pay a $5.3 million fine” on The Hill site describes donations by PAC that DeVos chaired.
FYI; Self explanatory:
Following is a major portion of a Dec. 13 program on Democracy Now. The whole program can be watched and/or read on line.
Investigative reporter Greg Palast has just returned from Michigan, where he went to probe the state’s closely contested election. Trump won Michigan by fewer than 11,000 votes out of nearly 4.8 million votes cast. Green Party presidential contender Dr. Jill Stein attempted to force Michigan to hold a recount, but a federal judge ordered Michigan’s Board of Elections to stop the state’s electoral recount. One big question remains: Why did 75,335 ballots go uncounted?
GREG PALAST: Officially, Donald Trump won Michigan by 10,704 votes. But a record 75,335 votes were never counted. Most of these votes that went missing were in Detroit and Flint, Michigan, majority-black cities. How could this happen? Did the Russians do it? Nyet. You don’t need Russians to help the Michigan GOP. How exactly do you disappear 75,000 votes? They call them spoiled votes. How do you spoil votes? Not by leaving them out of the fridge. Most are lost because of the bubbles. Thousands of bubbles couldn’t be read by the optical scanning machines.
the man who shut down the recount. Bill Schuette is the Republican attorney general of Michigan. He issued an order saying that no one would be allowed to look at the ballots in over half the precincts, 59 percent, in the Detroit area—the very place that most of the votes had gone missing.
Some of the votes missing resulted when 87 machines, responsible for counting thousands of ballots, broke down. Carlos Garcia is a media specialist at Michigan State University. He witnessed the breakdown.
CARLOS GARCIA: The start of polling at 7:00 a.m., the machine didn’t work. And at 9:15 a.m., they brought in a replacement, and it was replaced by 9:30. The people that didn’t wait, their ballots were in the bottom in the ballot box.
But they weren’t scanned.
CARLOS GARCIA: And so, at the time when they started having anyone who was waiting scan their ballots, those ballots were not taken out of the machine. So, any new scanned ballots were falling in on top of the old ones.
GREG PALAST: They weren’t counted. Activist Anita Belle.
GREG PALAST: And so the recount slogged through, uncovering missing votes and missing voters that could change the presidency. So Republicans rushed in to shut down the recount completely. Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, here in Michigan—we may be way north of the Mason-Dixon Line, but the elections are still run by Jim Crow. For Democracy Now!, this is Greg Palast.
Well, you know, people are looking for Russians, but what we had is a real Jim Crow election. Trump, for example, in Michigan, won by less than 11,000 votes. It looks like we had about 55,000 voters, mostly minorities, removed by this racist system called Crosscheck. In addition, you had a stoppage—even before the courts ordered the complete stop of the vote in Michigan, you had the Republican state officials completely sabotage the recount. They said, in Detroit, where there were 75,335 supposedly blank ballots for president—75,000—they said you can’t count 59 percent of the precincts, where most of the votes were missing. There were 87 machines in Detroit that were—that didn’t function. They were supposed to count about a thousand ballots each. You’re talking about a massive blockade of the black vote in Detroit and Flint, enough votes, undoubtedly, to overturn that election.
And you saw a mirror of this in Wisconsin, where, for example, there were many, many votes, thousands of votes, lost in the Milwaukee area, another African-American-heavy area. And there, instead of allowing that eyeball count of the votes that are supposedly blank, they said, “Oh, we’ll just run them back through the machines.” It’s like betting on an instant replay. It’s the same game. They just put them through the bad machines again. This is not just a bad way to count the ballots; it’s a way to not count African-American ballots.
And I want to emphasize that, Amy, which is that when we use the term “recount,” we’re actually talking about ballots that were never counted in the first place—way over 75,000 in Michigan. There are enough ballots uncounted that if you looked at them with the human eye, because the machines—these are terrible machines which can’t read your little bubble marks next to the candidate’s name on the piece of paper. If the human eye looks at these things, it’s easy to tell that someone voted for a presidential candidate. A lot of the machines said that they voted for two candidates. Not many people do that. The human eye could do that.
But the question is: Where are these ballots not counted? They are not counted in African-American areas, in Dearborn, where there’s a heavy Arab-American community, in Latino communities. So, while we’re discussing hacking the machines, a lot of this was old-fashioned Jim Crow tactics, you know, from way back. And by the way, a lot of this is the result of the destruction and the gutting of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which this is the first election post the Voting Rights Act. So, we saw—and Jill Stein said it correct—she expected to see a lot of hacking. What she found was, as she said, a Jim Crow election.
On NPR this morning Alina Selyukh was reporting on the tech billionaires’ meeting with Trump. They want to shape education to create a larger pool of tech workers. There it is, what we’ve thought all along.
Too bad if you don’t fit into their one-size-fits-all model or want to do something else with your life.
Why doesn’t the tech industry fund the education of the employees they want? Answer, they are exploiters. Bill Gates offloads his fair share of education costs in his state, by living in Washington, which has the most regressive tax system in the nation. The colony of Washington is one of 7 states that has no income tax. And, property tax on the Gates’ palace, is limited to 1%. In Washington, the poor pay a rate up to 7 times the rate that the rich do.
The only good thing about the DeVos nomination is that it is bringing privatization out of the shadows and into the sunlight. You’ve been writing about the negative impact of the privatization movement for years and while it has gotten some coverage in the mainstream media it has taken a back seat to other issues. It has taken the election of Donald Trump and his subsequent nomination of a “team” of oligarchs to awaken voters to what is happening to their democracy. You should send a complementary copy of your recent books to the staffs of Democrat Congressmen and Senators so they are prepared to not only argue against Ms. DeVos appointment but undercut the whole “reform” movement that led to her even being considered a serious nominee.
Wgersen,
You are exactly right. I couldn’t get anyone to pay attention when Ibama and Duncan pushed privatization. With Trump and DeVos in charge, the goal is clear.
Sorry for adding cold water on a frigid day. Did the 5 Democratic senators, calling on DeVos to pay the PAC fine, use the opportunity to talk about privatization. Or, did they box in the topic, avoiding the elephant in the room?
Isn’t Trump taking over where Obama left off? The June 26, 2013 appointment of . 01%’er, Penny Pritzker, as Secretary of Commerce set the stage for everything else to fall in line. Who’s controlling the appointments?
Clarity,
Trump’s appointments are far worse than Obama’s.
Far, far worse. A labor secretary who opposes the minimum wage? An EPA administrator who doesn’t believe in climate change? A Secretary of State who has spent his entire career at the world’s most powerful corporations, making deals with corrupt dictators, human rights violators, and countries where business depends on bribes.
And the speech by Matt Farmer about his Pritzger interview should not be forgotten…. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMUboOIQT48
I work at the National Weather Service, which is under the Department of Commerce. Penny Pritzker is the Secretary of Commerce. She is wealthy, and the Commerce Department seems to operate very well.
Well, that settles that! Just hire billionaires and all will be well.
I have worked for the Commerce Department (Census Bureau, and the National Weather Service), The Defense Department (civilian), The State Department (Diplomatic service), and I am a veteran of the US Air Force.
We have had some very rich people in government service. John Kennedy and Herbert Hoover come to mind.
Rich people cannot be bribed, sometimes they even forego a salary. (Nelson Rockefeller was vice-president, and he served for no salary.
There are advantages to having wealthy people in government!
Trump is both rich and corrupt, note his unwillingness to eliminate conflicts of interest or disclose his tax returns. Note Trump University, which fleeced many thousands of people of their life savings. My guess is that he will use the presidency to get richer