Mercedes Schneider had the stomach to watch Betsy DeVos and Grover Whitehurst talk about their favorite subject –School Choice–at Brookings today. She noticed their careless use of business language to talk about schools, at one point referring to them as “franchises.”
As I said, Mercedes has a strong stomach, as I find this use of lingo from the business world nauseating. A public school is not part of a chain. It is a community institution.
Unlike charter schools, public schools are fixtures in their community. They are not like shoe stores or fast food restaurants.
When anyone talks about franchises in the same breath with schools, they are not talking about public schools.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It’s starting to dawn on education reformers they offer absolutely nothing of value to children and parents in existing public schools:
https://www.usnews.com/opinion/knowledge-bank/articles/2017-03-30/what-education-reformers-can-learn-from-trumps-health-care-failure
However, because they only have one idea and it’s “charters and vouchers” the plan is to offer charters and vouchers to public school kids and parents, which is identical to the DeVos plan.
They still aren’t offering anything of value to the 90% of children and parents in public schools. That would be okay if this were just a “movement” of activists but they’re not. They dominate government.
It’s as if the Social Security Administration were staffed and run entirely by mutual fund salespeople. They can talk about the superiority of mutual funds at thousands of round tables and conventions but at some point they’d have to offer something of value to improve or support Social Security or just drop the pretense and say “we work for mutual fund holders”. It becomes obvious.
The mutual fund analogy is the best one I’ve ever read. Like letting the fox run the hen house. This administration has in its (limited) mind that government is a business and that we are its customers. They never understood that government is public service and from 45 on down, they are OUR at will employees.
Through lobbying and campaign donations, many our representatives represent us in name only. They work for Silicon Valley, Wall St, other assorted corporations and the 1%. It is time for the rest of us to band together and vote out those that fail to support public education.
Medicare Advantage is a privatized program within Medicare. If a group of Medicare Advantage enthusiasts dominated government and focused exclusively on Medicare Advantage they wouldn’t call themselves “advocates for public health programs for older people”. They’d call themselves Medicare Advantage advocates, because that’s what they are. There would have to be another group of people who focused on the public Medicare program or the public program would have no advocates and no one in government would be working to support it, which is where public schools find themselves.
The only aspect of public in charter schools is the funding so they should stop advertising themselves as public schools. Corporations would love to turn public schools into profit generating “franchises” and teachers into deprofessionalized “MacDonald’s employees.” Free market ideology is a plague that has infected most of the decisions government makes today, and it is very symptomatic of our income inequality. The wealthy are trying to scam the middle class and poor with choice rhetoric to destroy our most valuable asset, public education. Choice is a Trojan horse that creates winners and losers, and the losers are all of us that are not in the private club of the wealthy.
Here in Florida House Speaker Richard Corcoran is proposing spending up to $200 million “emergency” funds to rescue students from “failing schools.” He wants to build “Schools of Hope” in urban areas so every child “can get a world class education.” Yuk! Corcoran fails to mention that his wife, Anne, is in the charter school business. Rep. Shevrin Jones, the House’s Lead Democrat, is opposed to this stating that the goal is to drain public money from public schools.
Diane: you are absolutely correct in stating that public schools are fixtures in their community. When I was young, a shrinking agricultural work force dictated the consolidation of thousands of public schools across rural America. Watching the communities dry up in the wake of the closing of their school could have been a sport during the years from 1970 to 1990. All across America, local school boards heard loud complaints as they confronted rural de-population and its implications for communities.
When my neighbor’s boy was the first one from our county to die in WWII, the community went to the high school for a memorial service. When we integrated, community members got together so it would not be a negative thing. When the local school burned, and the county fathers wanted one central high school, local communities fought hard to keep what was then a rural high school. Now becoming suburban, that seems like a long time ago. Still, there are committee where the local high school is the focus of the community. Picture three retired gentlemen planting flowers and shrubs in front of a nice old building in Battle Creek, Nebraska.
Perhaps these images are just that of a community that was always tightly knit, and the school was just evidence of that dynamic in the community. But I think it was as much a part of that dynamic a a good spice in a recipe. We all know reform of economics like Stalin’s five year plans in the Soviet Union were doomed to failure because there are severe limitations to top down economics. Still, the possibility for government to support local community was also demonstrated during that time with the thousands of schools you find across the country built during the Great Depression.
Roy,
You describe a time when the pubic school was the hub of the community. In many places, it still is.
Reformers have attacked that democratic, binding role of public schools and sought to replace it with consumer choice. Usually by ignoring the choice of the community, which preferred its traditional schools. So, ironically, choice was imposed, top-down.
Public libraries are another good example.
Too bad the billionaires of today are more interested in privatizing the commons than enhancing public resources.
“Lessons from history”
The folks who are remembered
Engendered common good
The folks who were dismembered
Embezzled what they could
It’s all business and profit for Devos. Check out the companies that family owns. She’s going to steal billions from the taxpayers. Next to religion as the number one scam in the world, that family’s AMWAY come s in a close second.
“Next to religion as the number one scam in the world, that family’s AMWAY come s in a close second.”
Considering the DeVos’s xtian fundamentalist dominionist beliefs why doesn’t that seem unlikely?
“The Great Pyramids”
The pyramid memes
Of pharaohs, it seems
Are nothing but beans
To pyramid schemes
Of Billionaire dreams
DeVos and Van Andel own blocks and buildings (Public Auditorium circa 1890-90 for example) of downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan. They have built a meeting and conference hub in central Michigan. Betsy’s parents own buildings and entire blocks of Holland, Michigan.
They will privatize every morsel of publicly owned assets and then suck every penny out of the public to advance their Doministic “Christian” agendas. They are dangerous snake oil salespeople.
They have every intention of turning this country into a Theocracy with good Christians such as themselves as leaders. Only then can Jesus come back and begin the rapture.
We should all be frightened.