Reader Chiara. Has written innumerable comments pointing out that the parents and teachers of public schools have been shut out of policy circles. Why? Nearly 90% of the children in the United States attend public schools, not charter schools, religious schools, or independent schools. Why aren’t their ideas and views considered important?
She writes:
“Echo chamber alert:
“http://pahara.org/2017/02/press-release-february-28-2017/
“Aspen Education Fellows. ONE person from a public school. One.
“Ed reform excludes public schools from public education policy. It’s like how the US Department of Education is now the US Department of Private and Charter Schools.
“So how does one respond to this? Develop a new group of people who come out of public schools and just detach from the whole ed reform “movement”? I don’t really accept that the only people consulted on public school policy come out of charter and private schools. I reject that. Is the assumption that they are somehow “better”? Why?
“When we held community meetings on our public schools we didn’t pack the place with people from the private school. Why? Because 99% of our kids go to the public school.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education and commented:
This a really good question. I suspect that if they let public school advocate participate then they would learn that they are barking up the wrong tree.
If you want a certain message then you surround yourself with only people that want that same message.
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Why do they always frame this as “charter and voucher parents versus teachers unions”?
There are no public school parents in the United States who support public schools?
Really? Ninety per cent of kids in public schools but zero per cent of parents who support public schools? That seems unlikely.
Where are the public school parents in the “ed reform movement”? Isn’t it odd they’re simply missing?
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Love your comments, Chiara. They are spot on.
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There are plenty of public school parents in NY being heard, most of them are in districts that work well . A few hundred thousand voters in NY are opting their kids out of tests , objecting to common core . They are being heard but they are also being played.. So lets see were this goes with a new kind of Public School enemy in charge. One who claims not to like Common Core or Common Schools.
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David Koch is on the Aspen Institute Board. Aspen’s ed. programs like Pahara and Senior Congressional Education Staff Network are funded by Gates.
Pahara is just one of three ed. organizations (other than TFA, of which, Smith is a founding team member) that were funded by Gates and founded/co-founded by Smith. There’s New Schools Venture Fund, which was described by Smith, at Philanthropy Roundtable, as having “marching orders… to develop diverse charter school organizations to produce different brands on a large scale.” And there’s Bellwether, which described schools as “human capital pipelines”.
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This is an example of what is a really consistent narrative in ed reform:
“Some Democrats and union leaders tried unsuccessfully to slow the process during a whirlwind day at the Capitol Wednesday that culminated in votes by the Senate (23–15) and House (53–43), as well as a last-minute funding appropriation attached to a separate budget bill.”
The only public school supporters in Kentucky are “Democrats and union leaders”?
When 95% of kids are in public schools? Really? The parents of 95% of school kids in the state don’t care at all about their child’s school?
I don’t know- is this true where any of you live? Absolute DISINTEREST in public schools by the parents of children IN public schools? I don’t think I’m buying this. We have public school meetings here where a lot of people show up. They’re supporters of the schools. That’s why they’re there. They’re not at a public school meeting pushing charters and vouchers.
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Which of the following describes Gates’ $1 bil. education activities?
(a) selling his privatization and corporatization plan
(b) list other______
When organizations sell products, they select salespeople to attend workshops.
An answer of (b) might be reflected, by a Fellows program, with a representative group of interested parties.
Do most of the organizations represented by Pahara Fellows, have to wedge their way into public schools to make money?
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Does a lion want to hear from a jackal before he grabs it by the throat? A predator is only interested in its prey for how well it can feed him. “Reformers” would like to bypass parents and teachers. Their prize is the public funds they can use for their own purpose. They do not want to hear from stakeholders because privatization is a hostile takeover, and, frankly, they don’t care what anyone thinks.
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Failing to understand the point you make, is hazardous to the prey’s life.
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SO true: “Reform” has become each year more a euphemism for “personal profiteering.” Hearing from parents/teachers or anyone who worries about the children is irrelevant.
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Here’s the US Department of Education dismissing every public school in the country as “one size fits all”:
“Every child is different, with varying skills and learning styles. We shouldn’t then force all children into a one-size-fits-all education system. Our education approaches should be as varied as the students they serve.
I’ve had the joy of meeting many students throughout my decades in education reform. I’d like to tell you about a few of them who, I believe, exemplify the diversity of backgrounds and needs of children.
One young lady, Denisha Merriweather, failed the third grade twice at her assigned traditional school in Florida. Denisha was on the path to becoming another statistic. She appeared destined to follow in the footsteps of her brother and mother, who both dropped out of high school.
But Denisha’s godmother intervened, and, because of Florida’s Tax Credit Scholarship Program, Denisha was able to attend a school that better met her needs.
Now Denisha is not only the first in her family to graduate from high school, but she also graduated from college and, this May, she will receive her master’s degree in social work. ”
It’s amazing. DeVos looks at public schools in all 50 states and sees some hellish landscape where children have been “forced” into “one size fits all” schools. That’s how she sees your child’s school. She assigns public schools no value at all and assumes the public doesn’t either, because she’s lived inside this anti-public school echo chamber for 30 years.
I don’t think that’s reality for most public school parents. We don’t hate public schools.
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This from the same people who used to have a major selling point of the Common Core being that when students moved, they’d be doing the same thing on the exact same day in their new school as they were in their old. (This was all, of course, before Common Core was determined not to be a curriculum but a set of standards.) . If these guys were half as good on substance as they are on rhetoric, we might really have something.
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Well, the people pushing the charters and vouchers are clearly onto $omething and that i$ all that matter$
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Though I ‘m not $ure what that $omething might be.
Perhap$ $omeone can help me?
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Yes, SDP, that’s essentially what I said to NYSTEACHER.
Money makes the world go around, don’t you know? 😔
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This is Jeb Bush:
Look for yourself. It’s all charters and vouchers and charter and voucher parents.
He’s disappeared public school kids and parents. They don’t exist in his world.
I have genuine sympathy for the people in Florida who have the misfortune to use a public school. The state simply omits them from consideration.
They don’t exist in edreformworld.
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This is an ed reform piece that is supposedly about charters and public schools.
Except here’s the role for public schools:
“But making district schools available as an option for families helps address many concerns, including the possibility that the market alone will not serve some students well, and that the market leaves families with considerable uncertainty about what schools their children will be able to get into when they move to a new neighborhood. This means that school districts can be an important part of the managed competition mix.”
Public schools are an afterthought in ed reform. They’re treated as disfavored “back up” schools for the more desirable schools in “the portfolio”.
We’re there simply to provide some temporary schooling to students who are on their way to a private or charter school.
I mean, come on. This isn’t “agnostic”. Public schools are CLEARLY disfavored in all this stuff. There’s this grudging admission that public schools MIGHT have to continue to exist but no one will be particularly interested in them.
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The public schools are not just seen as “back ups” until a “favored” charter school (or private school) becomes available, Chiara.
They are also seen as where the special needs kids, the ELL kids, the kids with behavior problems will be placed- all the kids who either won’t be admitted to the charters and privates in the first place, or who will soon be “counseled out.” Or expelled.
After all, these are the kids who are “more expensive” to teach. Who need smaller classrooms, who need more support staff and resources.
So they can just remain in the public schools, while the public schools receive increasingly reduced funding and will not be able to deliver the highly specialized education and services that these children so desperately need.
These children are way more than “afterthoughts.” But because they are more challenging (and don’t forget expensive) to teach, the charter and public school advocates simply dismiss them from their minds. A wave of the hand, and the “ed reform” advocates don’t have to plan for or worry about them.
{{Sigh}}
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C, That phrase “managed competition mix” is frightening. Who does the managing? How much competition is intended? What is the ideal mix? Ad infinitum. Whoever the speaker is, needs to be called on that.
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I’d add another practical issue as to why public school advocates, parents, teachers, etc are absent from these conferences.
They cost. They cost money in terms of registration fees, and those costs are not insignificant, especially to newbie teachers and parents on the lower end of the economic scale. If you have to travel to these meetings you also incur travel costs, lodging costs, food costs, etc. Certainly local parents and teachers can avoid those expenses, but now we get to another cost, the cost of time.
I don’t have the time to go to meetings and conferences in my current job as a teacher because while agreeing that the conference/meeting has importance, my students are even more important. Parents and teachers have jobs that prevent them from going off to a local hotel/conference center and listen to well dressed ed-reformers drone on and on between meals consisting of golden plastic gravy over slabs of chicken? meat and whipped potatoes. Ask yourself…do these usually occur on weekdays or weekends?
These meetings/conferences self-select their clientele simply by the way they are run, when they occur, and where they occur. Sure, I’d like to see local parents and teachers attend local versions of these conferences, but even then they’d have to take time off to do it. I’d go myself IF they occurred after school let out for the summer, or on a weekend and it was local.
Rant over.
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Rant away, rockhound2. You make an excellent point.
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They don’t want you at their conferences anyway.
You’d probably just show them up on the ski slopes.
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Rockhound2. You are correct.
The charter industry and TFA have deep pockets. They pay for professional lobbyists and train loyalists for policy positions, including school boards. They also enlist and train parent “voice groups” in low income communities who are underemployed. They are enticed to work part time for $10 an hour to do neighborhood surveys of “parental satisfaction” with the schools their children attend. The part-time work comes with paid training and a personal iPad. The iPad can be kept if they complete the whole program. Training includes basics of cold-calling, proper speech to start a conversation, use of the pre-loaded software to record data. These parents do house calls in neighborhoods for the purpose of gathering data of use in recruiting parents for charters. Those who complete the program are given additional perks and invitations to appear at key events celebrating the industry or TFA. One group was sent from Memphis to DC for the 25th anniversary of TFA. Success Academy in NY is infamous for paying the expenses for parents and students to serve as lobbyists. Cost, proximity to the action, knowledge of the stakes, freedom from other responsibilities–all matter. They also matter in getting PTAs organized and with a collective voice.
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Not a complicated or particularly sophisticated answer here: to bust unions. Period. End.
“Education Policy” discussions at the national and state level, whether chaired by republicans or democrats, are never and haven’t been about education at all. They are squarely about breaking up teachers unions. Period. After the pesky organized and semi-well-paid teachers are out of the picture there is no real hurdle towards the fantasies and dreams of “Ed reformers” becoming reality.
It’s about the teachers! Why would you invite teachers to have input into their collective demise?
Lets not overcomplicate the legible and obvious here.
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Busting unions in order to pay teachers much less, remove or down-size their health care costs, pensions, etc, is an important reason.
But I would say that there is also another reason. Money to be made. Money for the test writing companies, the companies that sell educational products and programs, the companies that are in “the background” of charter schools (even those which are supposed to be non-profits), and so on.
Cheaper teachers, and more money for edu-businesses.
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Start with fighting for vouchers to get money flowing to segregated private schools. Then make the fight against unions. Then while fighting for both ends it is always nice making some money for doing what you set out to do.
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Because when parents show up at school board meetings to speak, they are ignored. Because when teachers show up to speak at board meetings, they are ignored and they are threatened with losing their jobs. The parents that show up every month to speak (and you have to sign up to speak for your 3 minutes) get the reputation of being crazy. It’s not fun being a public school parent, knowing how bad it is in the school system and to have no control over any kind of change. Parents stop trying….and that’s what Superintendents want. Remove the parents out of the equation and that is one less thing to worry about when you are trying to run your school system like a business.
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Spot on, parents are viewed as unwelcome competitors, not essential collaborators.
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i honestly think that there is a grand design for the government to get out of the public school business. i think that the exclusion of parents from policy decisions is calculated to erode local control. i’ve seen it here in lorain county where the state goverenment is taking over. parental concerns have been largely ignored by the state superintendent. he has been genial, even avuncular; but presentation means nothing. be assured that the grand design is to turn public education into a private model. i think that this as well as the governement making draconian cuts to social programs is their way of paying for all of the wars they are getting us in. the iraq war continues to cost us billions, we have tension with north korea and more troops have been sent to syria.
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Parents and teachers of public schools have been shut out of policy circles. Why? Nearly 90% of the children in the United States attend public schools, not charter schools, religious schools, or independent schools.
Parents and teachers of the “community based, locally controlled, democratic, transparent, non-profit, traditional public schools” …
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The public schools are a monopoly. A monopoly need not concern itself with the consumers’ wishes, because the monopoly will continue. Public Schools can ignore parents, why should they be responsive? The schools will continue whether the parents are satisfied or not.
The “buck” stops with the citizens and taxpayers who are paying the “bucks”
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“A monopoly need not concern itself with the consumers’ wishes, because the monopoly will continue. Public Schools can ignore parents, why should they be responsive?”
They are responsive, because public schools are not Exxon, not Microsoft. If your goal in life is to make money, you work for those companies, and you want monopoly, because what you care about is profit and monopolizing the market gives you more profit, and you care about consumers only to the extent that they buy your product and make you profit. Teachers are not there for the money; their job satisfaction comes from seeing how well the kids learn.
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Yes, MW, you are correct. But the person you are replying to has a history of trashing public schools and proselytizing for vouchers.
He seems to think that public schools are just like for-profit companies.
Our children are not “products.” Our schools are not companies.
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“Ed reform excludes public schools from public education policy. ”
Of course, because public schooling is reinvented, and public schools represent the old idea, that public schools are controlled by the public.
Just today I read about the most outrageous statement made by a Tennessee state rep at a state ed committee meeting where they voted for a voucher bill. Apparently, John DeBerry, state rep said that teachers had no ethical right, along with truckers, to try to influence public policy.
I am telling you, these guys actually believe, teachers are too partial to take part in any discussion about public education.
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Do not the citizen/taxpayers who are paying for the public schools, represent the ultimate arbiter of education policy? Exxon/Mobil does not ask its employees how to run the company, the company is run by the stockholders!
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If the vast majority of the parents wanted to get rid of public edu, you’d be correct.
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Let me add, that in Memphis, people are united against a voucher bill, but TN lawmakers want to run a voucher pilot program in Memphis. And this seems to be the general principle: some lawmakers want to implement charter and coucher bills despite people’s objections. It seems, policymakers believe, they are holding our stocks. Pretty upside down, isn’t it?
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