After I posted the story about the forthcoming PBS Series called School Inc., which promotes privatization, reflecting the views of the privatization movement, I shared the story with investigative journalist David Sirota. He recalled the time that his journalism compelled PBS to return millions of dollars to billionaire financier John Arnold for a program he funded about “the pension crisis.” Arnold has a passion for eliminating pensions for public employees.
He also pointed out a story about Bill Gates’ generous support for PBS programs like The Teaching Channel and for programs advocating for the Common Core.
Now, we understand that PBS and its affiliates need to raise money, but the public expects that whatever they feature will be fair and balanced, not an advertorial.
And we certainly don’t expect PBS to align its programming with the whims of rich individuals who seek to undermine and/or privatize and/or control public education.
I would certainly be shocked to see a program on PBS funded by billionaire Robert Mercer on why the nation does not need public television. Yet PBS has shockingly committed to airing a four-part series attacking public schools and praising the virtues of privatization.
When does the public interest get equal time?
Please call 703-739-5000 to register your protest.
Be sure to ask when they will give equal time to expose the corporate attack on our public schools.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I called and hope with enough pressure we can see a reversal. John
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I called too. Let’s keep up the pressure. Robin
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http://current.org/2014/09/gates-funding-spurs-doubts-over-pubmedias-impartiality-in-education-reporting/
There are a ton of articles about Gates buying media. Makes one realize that while Trump is a danger, he is at least partially right about ‘media bias’. It’s the 1% who are tilting the scales. They never mention that part.
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EXCELLENT point.
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Done. One talks to a live human.
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I just called and the lady took down all of my information with a detailed message! She said that I would be receiving a call this week. Thanks for this information!
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From http://www.pbs.org/wnet/school-inc/2017/02/27/about-the-film/
“…School, Inc. takes viewers on a personal journey, led by an expert so passionate about his field that he made arrangements before his eminent death to ensure the documentary would be completed.” Eminent death? Shame on you, PBS. Try proof reading next time. You’re such an imminent network.
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Wooh. I just called and talked with a person who took my name and phone number. She said that the office would call me back tomorrow. I definitely protested about PBS putting on a program that encourages privatization of schools. I said that the public deserves better than this. I know that they need funding but allowing wealthy people to affect their programing goes against their standards. Blah, blah, etc.
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Yeh, Carol, I did the same earlier. “Blah, blah, etc.” is correct.
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Kudos: What is it about “public” in “public broadcasting system” don’t they understand? And why cannot they apply that to public education?
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The “Schools Inc” series is reminiscent of that “hit piece” series that PBS series you mentioned that was produced a few years ago attacking public employee pensions in order to curry funding from Wall Street. That series was yanked and never aired after a huge ground swell of protest because of its one-sided attack on public pensions. If the National Education Association and all the state and local teachers’ associations deluge PBS and Congress with protests against this new anti-public school series, perhaps it will also be shelved. But the protest has to be HUGE and unrelenting. Teachers need to email, text, post on PBS’s Facebook page and text, tweet, and post to their local PBS stations telling the stations that they will no longer contribute to PBS and no longer purchase and use PBS materials if this series is aired. What action have NEA and state teachers’ associations taken to alert members to protest this PBS play-for-pay scheme that undermines our public schools? No time to waste! Hit the keys now!
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If PBS wants to present issues, they should not only present one view, the perspective of the 1%, but others as well. To be fair and balanced, they should give equal time to other points of view. Otherwise, it is tacky and looks like “pay to play.”
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RT, both PBS and NPR have not been totally balanced for several years. They have, IMHO, been doing “pay to play” a lot in recent years.
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As Sirota described it, “Plutocratic Broadcasting System”.
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Exactly so, Linda.
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I agree. And it’s only going to get worse.
Hate to be doom and gloom but Trump’s taking away federal funding. Where is the money going to come from?
Taking the “Public” out of “Broadcasting”.
Nevertheless: I’ll make that call. Thanks, Diane.
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Correction: Trump WANTS to take away funding. Hasn’t happened yet. Fingers crossed…
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Yes, gitapik.
If Trump has his way, funding will be cut for the arts, scientific research, the poor, including housing and help for children in schools, and the EPA, among many other things meant to help people. As opposed to corporations and the wealthy. 😩
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Since when does presenting a balanced picture require such focus on ideas that have not produced any of the results promised? How about spending time on the successes of public education? Heck, they can even talk about some of the documented reasons for struggles in low socioeconomic communities. Wouldn’t it be great to see a documentary on the testing racket? I just don’t buy the equal time argument for a charter school marketing campaign. Chiara, this is an argument that you can make much better than I.
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I posted the information on Facebook and will spread the word to make the call.
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That’s what we all need to do! Yeah!
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The following rewrite of history, is appalling. Sen.Corey Booker, went to Indiana to support Sen. Joe Donnely, a DINO, who announced that he won’t filibuster Gorsuch’s appointment. The Indiana Daily Student published the following quote, Booker told us explicitly he’s against school privatization. (3-27-2017)
Outside of the Donnely event, people protested against school privatization.
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Booker is against school privatization. Really? That is a good one.
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Corey Booker has a long record of supporting school privatization.
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Yes, & he is looking at 2020. Let’s make sure to keep him at bay.
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I called. I told them that I am an art teacher who had to spend over $1200.00 of my own money for art supplies last year because our school’s budget has been given over to the privatized schools in the area. I also said they could forget about any further financial support from me
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Thank you, Karen.
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It would be interesting to get an idea of just how much money teachers pay out of their own pockets.
If it averaged $500 a year per teacher (which may actually be conservative if Karen is any indication), then the total amount paid out by the 3 million public school teachers each year would be about $1.5 billion(!!)
While I applaud teachers like Karen for going way beyond the call of duty to provide for their students, I think it is actually criminal that they are put in this position.
When I try to imagine any politician EVEr doing something similar*, I just burst out laughing.
*paying out of their own pocket. Not the crime part!
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When I worked in the States, I spent an average of $1000 a year on supplies. I was a music teacher and found it to be much easier to teach if I had some supplies. It was always done to make my teaching more interesting and to involve the kids in a variety of activities.
There was no school budget to support music in each of the five districts in which I taught in Illinois.
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Not incidentally, I know that the money paid out of pocket by teachers is just a small part of what they donate for their students.
I suspect that if you tallied up the monetary value (even at a teacher’s meagre hourly wage) of all the time that teachers “volunteered” (running after school and weekend events), it would undoubtedly dwarf the $1.5 billion figure.
Let’s assume the extra time spent each week (on average) by a teacher has a value of $100, which is probably low assuming teachers spent even just an extra 5 hours per week. For the 36 school weeks, that would be $3600 per teacher on average. For 3 million teachers, that would be $10.8 billion dollars per year in donated service.
Of course, if you assumed a lawyer’s salary, the total would be at least 3 or 4 times that. Then again, no lawyer would ever work as a teacher, so I suppose that point is probably moot.😃
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It’s a shame the neutrality rule was dropped in the 80s.
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Do PBS officials really believe that sucking up to Betsy DeVos is going to save them?
If so, I have some prime oceanfront property in Nebraska to sell them.
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Why is this so shocking.The outright purchase of what is supposed to be investigative journalistic reporting might be upsetting . But all too often the press has not done investigative journalism , or for example we never would have wound up in Iraq., with Judith Miller’s weapons of mass destruction.
Could it be that those who control the Newsrooms of various media and print publication are predisposed to want to believe a Gates or an Arnold. Are far more predisposed to please those that they meet at their children’s schools, at charitable functions or the golf course . Than they are to see Trade through the eyes of a blue collar worker. Or education through the eyes of a teacher in an inner city school. …. Might have to blow the dust off my copy of “The Power Elite.”
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After I make the call tomorrow.
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This website “Whowhatwhy” is dedicated to fearless, independent investigative journalism
Check it out
Whowhatwhy.com
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OMG, PBS meets Common Core standards! “Journalists” read, re read, and repeat the oligauthor’s argument rather than construct and contexualize their own. That’s close reading. That’s Common Core! And it doesn’t matter if you have right answers as long as you show work.
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Once again, Diane, you have done a great service to public education.
I will call pbs tomorrow. I am organizing my points. Will report back.
Just had to write, “Thank you, Diane.”
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Perhaps Mr. Gates would care to explain the NAEP math score declines from 2013 to 2015 especially in States and Districts leading the bleeding edge Common Core charge.
http://mathunderground.blogspot.com/2017/04/time-for-common-core-math-reality-check.html?showComment=1491073743110#c3787679740022256429
http://mathunderground.blogspot.com/2017/04/college-and-career-ready-for-stem.html
The decline in NAEP math scores in 2015 shows in all likelihood that the expensive move to Common Core has been counterproductive. Students get one life and one shot at k-12 education, can destructive direction be ended?
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When has PBS or NPR not been a megaphone for so-called reform?
Here in New York, the local NPR affiliate has been a platform for reform propaganda for years, with “reporters” having devolved into stenographers passing along so-called reform talking points and propaganda.
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The Democratic Party white-washed Bill Gates, making him appear to be different than the Koch’s.
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Bill Gates whitewashed the Democratic Party making them appear different from the Republicans, at least on education issues.
Selling junk is Bill Gates’ forte’
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As always, you’re one of the most insightful-
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On March 27, 2017, the Gates’ Impatient Opportunists published an article about the Frontier Set program. The usual slick-sounding corporate, outcome drivel is front and center.
Three universities are held up as examples in the program, Florida International, Sinclair Community College (Dayton, Ohio), and Arizona State University.
If Gates’ ed. programs were a “philanthropy” that cared about future economic prosperity and opportunity, they would address Wall Street’s 2% drag on the economy and, the concentrated wealth that Picketty documented, which will be disastrous to the world economy.
Gates lives in the state with the most regressive tax system in the nation. The poor pay a rate of up to 7 times the rate that the rich families pay in the state of Washington.
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Linda,. Washington state now has the world’s two richest people as residents Gates and Bezos. Washington state has no income tax and no capital gains tax. The McCleary case has the legislature being fined by the State Supreme Court for failing to adequately fund schools in violation of the state Constitution. …. Currently there is proposed legislation for a capital gains tax in the current legislative session, it happened last week. Yet to be voted upon if ever.
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During the Nov. election, Gates spent money to defeat 3 Washington state judges because they had made decisions favorable to public schools.
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Linda,
Note that the three judges targeted for defeat by Gates all won.
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No matter how much evidence there is that Gates’ ed. plans are unwanted e.g. the Massachusetts vote on Issue 2, voter calls from 1400 citizens, in N.D., who oppose DeVos privatization, Gates’ defeat in Washington judge elections and, the NAACP’s recent statement opposing expansion of charter schools, etc., there will always be those who take 30 pieces of silver.
The unpopularity of the the Gates’ plan is only one factor, the other is the documented failure, e.g. the indisputable facts at KnowYourCharter.com, the segregation that privatization has proven to foster, the corruption of state governments by charter operator campaign donations (Ohio), the skewed performance results of charters, who have cherry picked students, the counseling out of poor performers and/or temporary financial propping up, by vulture philanthropists.
It has to be obvious to PBS staffers, that those in the hedge funds and the tech industry, have records of greed, with no concern for the 90%, unless they can exploit them.
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Reblogged this on Momma Brown's Blog and commented:
A hard look at PBS.
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Ed reforms newest sales pitch:
“Gone should be the days when kids are arbitrarily lumped together into classrooms full of students all forced to learn the same thing at the same pace. We have the ability to customize learning to fit each individual’s needs and desires and should do everything we can to take advantage of that ability. There already exist multiple online learning platforms, such as crash course, that teach a variety of subjects better than just about any teacher could.”
There have been teachers for 5000 years but now they’re obsolete, replaced with something called “crash course”.
We are doomed as long as these people dominate policy. DeVos will be pushing crash course in her next speech, after her Uber plug.
https://futurism.com/its-time-to-rethink-how-we-are-educating-our-children/
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The title School, Inc is cleverly deceptive. It mirrors the anti-privatization movie ‘Education, Inc. (2015) edincmovie.com to trick people into watching their propaganda. If I was FastForward Films I would challenge the title as a copyright violation.
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Yes, that is precisely how I read the title, “School, Inc”. I thought it was about the efforts by hedge funds and others to make money off of schools.
And FWIW, copyright doesn’t apply to titles
Trademarks can apply but “Education, Inc” is not a registered trademark so FastForwardFilms probably does not have a case.
PBS undoubtedly had their high paid lawyers look into this before they went with that title.
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PBS and NPR want to have their cake and eat it too. They want both public funding and corporate funding.
Their fundamental claim that corporate “underwriting” does not influence their programming is simply a fraud.
It’s amazing that anyone buys this claim, but lots of people apparently do because PBS and NPR trot it out every time someone points out the contradiction.
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Exactly so, Poet. When the corporate “underwriting” and corprorate “sponsorship” of NPR and PBS started to affect their programming, I pulled my yearly contributions to both of them, and told them why.
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I called
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Our Indivisible Public Education Group in Northern California held a screening of Education, Inc. this Sunday, which was very well received. I also put on a separate presentation using data gathered by the Cal. Teachers’ Association showing exactly how the same few billionaires massively funded 2016 political campaigns for Assembly and Senate seats in Northern California. I will bring this to the Group’s attention. Thanks.
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Thank you for your efforts.
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“The greatest innovations are routinely replicated world-wide, except in education which has remained stubbornly at anchor while the rest of the world has sailed past it” — Andrew Coulson, host of School, Inc
Coulson fundamentally misunderstands how education relates to innovation.
Take the example of how learning physics relates to innovation in technology. Virtually all of modern technology is based on quantum mechanics, whose most important ideas were developed and written down over half a century ago.
In order to innovate in technology, the most important thing is understanding how the world works at a fundamental level. There are many ways of achieving such an understanding and they do not require any revolutionary “innovation” in teaching or learning. Certainly not any technological innovation (iPads and all the rest).
Many of the best sources for learning science were written decades (or in some cases centuries) ago by the very people who invented the ideas(Einstein, Fermi, Feynman, Dirac, Newton, etc)
One can learn far more about how the world works simply by reading the works of the masters (the way we have done for centuries) than one could ever hope to learn from a million software programs written by the Bill Gates’ of the world.
The same is true of other subject areas as well.
The idea that “real” education. Only happens with the use of some newfangled technogadget is just dumb.
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Done. I called and left a message after speaking to a real human. Thanks for keeping us informed!
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I am certainly concerned about all the Education Outlets that receive funding from Gates, yet pose as unbiased promoters of truth.
One in particular : The Hechinger Report
Covering Innovation & Inequality in Education.
These days we are looking at Ed Media often printing all the news that is fit to bend.
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IMO, the worst part about PBS’s involvement, will be if they fail to emphasize that the community will lose (1) it’s right to democratically elect school boards and (2) will lose the economic multiplier effect from local tax dollars spent locally (community taxes will go to Gates’ schools-in-a-box, he’s invested in the largest seller of the product or, to the charter chains of men, like Reed Hastings, Netflix CEO.)
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Everyone should you tube John Oliver’s presentation on charter schools. He did an excellent job of presenting the misconceptions of quality and the foils of a private system for “all”. It’s gold.
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Yeah…he’s excellent. His show on standardized testing is great, too:
Seems like our comedians are our most powerful spokespeople, nowadays.
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Here’s the charter school one:
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I tried calling the PBS line and was put through to voicemail twice. For over 30 years,
I have supported PBS to the tune of hundreds of dollars a year,but was
outraged by the lack of coverage of Bernie Sanders during the primary.
He literally was not mentioned in various pre-primary programs that I listened too.
PBS also undermines their credibility and fairness when they choose to air only the opinions of pro-war ex military generals (who now work for the military industrial
complex) for foreign policy coverage.
When I received dozens of letters, emails and phone calls from my
local PBS station during a recent fund drive, I responded that I thought that they only cared about their corporate sponsors. I plan to find a way
to support our state wide coverage, which is balanced and excellent.
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