Donald Cohen, executive director of the nonprofit group In the Public Interest, wrote the following (co-posted in Huffington Post):
Conservatives seem to have a thing for fast food.
The founder of what would eventually become the country’s largest private prison corporation, CoreCivic (formerly CCA), once declared, “You just sell [private prisons] like you were selling cars or real estate or hamburgers.” More recently, the Foundation for Excellence in Education, an organization founded by Jeb Bush that has lobbied for its corporate funders, including the world’s largest education corporation, Pearson, wrote that public schools should be thought of as fast food restaurants.
But providing public goods and services is nothing like selling hamburgers. In a democracy, human beings should control the public schools, infrastructure, and social services in their communities. Fast food customers vote individually with their wallets, which means they really have very little say. Does anyone really want a handful of corporations, the likes of McDonalds and Burger King, teaching children and locking people up in prison?
This point is especially true of public education, and is driven home by a report we released last week authored by Gordon Lafer, an associate professor at the University of Oregon. Lafer found that taxpayers have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on charter school buildings in California, yet the state has little to show for it.
In the past 15 years, charter schools, which are privately operated, have received $2.5 billion in tax dollars or taxpayer subsidized financing to lease, build, or buy facilities. Yet much of this investment has gone to schools built in neighborhoods that don’t need them and schools that perform worse—according to charter industry standards—than nearby traditional public schools. Taxpayers have provided California’s underperforming charter schools—an astounding three-quarters of all the state’s charter schools!—with an estimated $750 million in direct funding.
Public support has even gone to California charter schools that discriminate against students with poor academic records, limited English-speaking skills, or disabilities. Taxpayers have given a collective $195 million to the 253 schools found by the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California (ACLU) in August 2016 to have discriminatory enrollment policies.
Most alarming is the fact that much of the funding has gone to a handful of large charter school chains, and some have used the money to purchase private property. In Los Angeles, for example, the Alliance College-Ready Public Schools network of charter schools has used subsidiary corporations to build a growing empire of privately owned real estate now worth in excess of $200 million. State and federal taxpayers have given Alliance more than $110 million in support, yet, because of a loophole, the schools built with these funds will never belong to the public.
Simply put, California’s leaders are treating schools like fast food restaurants. Local school boards, who are democratically elected, have little say in whether a new charter school is good for their community’s students. The boards charged with authorizing new charters aren’t allowed to consider the impacts on existing public schools—or whether a school is even needed. On top of that, state and federal taxpayers are subsidizing failing and discriminatory charter schools to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
California needs common sense regulation that returns decisions about charter schools to local school districts. Short of that, the state is slowly handing the keys to its public education system over to the charter school industry and the likes of Donald Trump and new education secretary Betsy DeVos, who are pushing the “school choice” narrative.
“Jeb Bush … wrote that public schools should be thought of as fast food restaurants.”
Then Bush advocates the spread of lifestyle diseases, obesity, and shorter life spans through autocratic, for profit, opaque (secretive), often child abusive, fraudulent and inferior corporate charter schools.
http://www.doctorshangout.com/profiles/blogs/5-lifestyle-diseases-associated-with-fast-food
The Relationship between Obesity (and corporate charter schools) and Academic Achievement of School Age Children
“Just as research about obesity has indicated a negative effect on the body and vital organs, obesity seems to affect the ability to learn.”
http://collected.jcu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1008&context=honorspapers
Will Trump, a fast-food fan, remake healthy school lunches?
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/will-trump-fast-food-fan-remake-healthy-school-lunches/
“The boards charged with authorizing new charters aren’t allowed to consider the impacts on existing public schools”
How can they claim to be “agnostics” when they are not permitted to consider the impact on kids in public schools?
This is an absolute bias towards kids in charters. The public school kids may not even be CONSIDERED.
What’s always interesting to me about California is how low quality the charter sector is there. Everyone knows Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania have lousy charter sectors, but I think people assume California’s is better.
Better marketing and more high profile ed reformers on the national stage 🙂
California has many mansions. The owners gerrymander survey and study results for marketing. The public eats it up because out here in the sunshine, we pay attention to politics the way we pay attention to our local sports teams — only when we’re winning.
Glad you all got the Rams out there now instead of here in Eastern Missouri. Sorry you all have to take the brunt of the Kman’s greed.
What’s one more billionaire. We have a ton of them. Rams owner Kroenke can go over to everything owner Broad’s pad and talk about how to get more regressive taxes and make taxpayers subsidize private real estate and business: schools, stadiums, museums, television and movie studios, politicians, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, all owned privately with the financial assistance of everyday Californians like me. We don’t have time to do anything about it, though. Surf’s up, dude!
Like!
If you thought ed reform only had one idea, privatization, well you were wrong.
They have another one! Continue to allow public schools to exist but quietly convert them all to charters:
“That was the argument education expert Andy Smarick laid out during a panel conversation on Monday at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C. His vision: What if a successful charter school system — one of greater flexibility and higher accountability through contracts with third-party authorizers — also applied to district-run public schools?”
If I were Fordham I might focus on fixing the mess they made in Ohio rather than “scaling” that mess to the whole country.
They can’t regulate the charter schools they have. Now they want to turn all schools over to contractors? Thanks but no thanks. I don’t want to turn my solid public school into an unregulated, opaque, for-profit Ohio charter. We have enough of those.
https://www.the74million.org/article/what-if-all-public-schools-had-an-authorizer-a-new-proposal-to-give-more-autonomy-for-more-accountability
I saw the C-Span performances of Andy Smarick with a panel of some notorious characters who have amazingly poor track records in the charter industry showcased as if experts. They all seem to land up in posh positions at foundations.
The Smarick paper under discussion by the panel was a pitch for portfolio districts under mayor control or some other entity, perhaps a governor empowered to set up authorizers.
Smarick says that all district schools, charter and public, should become one system of autonomous charter schools with performance contracts managed by an authorizer. Money follows the student. Existing bricks and mortar buildings are controlled under a separate authority with power to lease them and acquire new properties as needed. Elected school boards vanish.
Smarick thinks direct democracy is wrong for education, because schools that do not meet or exceed expectation are permitted to operate with various props instead of being closed. Smarick also thinks direct democracy is bad for education because school boards and even the people who participate in the governance of charter schools will allow schools to operate without meeting high standards for performance.
Smarick’s paper offers a sop to democracy by saying “indirect democracy” is OK. You elect the mayor and the mayor has the power to appoint people who manage a portfolio of schools. Other examples of indirect democracy would put legislators or the governor in charge of schools.
Smarick’s paper was written while be was still at Bellwether Education Partners. I think he was making a pre-election push for portfolios districts–a market-based system of boutique schools.
Smarick is an ideologue for gaining greater access to public funds. He is paid to come up with schemes to allow private companies to grab gobs of public money with little to no accountability. He is happy to ignore all the millions of dollars of waste and fraud in the charter industry. California should be a cautionary tale, not a model. In Smarick’s view what can be better than cutting the public out of public education. Then, he and his ilk can get a direct line to the cash without all those pesky citizens in the way. It sounds like a plan that would make the Maffia proud.
We should focus on the shortcomings of the “marketplace.” Markets create winners and losers. Why would anyone think a market is a solution for education? Markets are not fair. Charters are not equal. A cheap charter is not the same as a selective one. Promoting schools that increase segregation should never be considered in the best interests of the United States. Public education is not equal either, but at least it aspires to equality. If the local community wants to make a change, they have a democratic voice in public schools, and this voice should never be silenced.
retired teacher: you nailed it.
If I may rephrase a little, corporate education reform is all about mandating, and setting in stone, a system of education that ensures few winners and many losers.
Thank you for your comments.
😎
Trump-DeVos-Weingarten Agenda.
Weingarten is our enemy. Weingarten seeks photo ops and common ground with those who represent all of the ideas a arrayed agains public schools and organized teachers. Weingarten must be associated at every moment and every opportunity with the people she seeks time and common ground with.
I have recently learned (here on this blog), that there is a great deal of dissatisfaction with the current head of the American Federation of Teachers. Notwithstanding her public pronouncements, and on-the-record statements indicating her opposition to school choice/vouchers, I have seen her vilified here (and elsewhere).
If so many of the rank-and-file membership of the AFT are unhappy, why is there no recall? Why is there no challenge?
1) There are no mechanisms for recall and replacement as such.
2) Teacher apathy.
3) The deminishing role teachers unions have played in the fight against privatization and reform movement. They are simply not organizations rank-and-file teachers, for the most part, turn to for the broader protections of their jobs and the institution of public education. This deminishment has been willful in that union leaders (broadly though with some exceptions) have refrained from being a voice and offering a counter narrative AND by actively seeking “seats at the table” with those forces, (corporate, political, and philanthropic), that seek to destroy organized teachers and privatize the commons of public education.
Weingarten has been at the absolute forefront of all of these things: refusing to create a meaningful union opposition, seeking seats at the table, and allying herself with some of the most flagrant of our enemies.
That she remains in her position is a daily travesty. As such, our side will be explicitly hopeless in the face of the reform movement until we can at the very least remove her.
She will go down in history as the most known of the last teachers union leaders….those that gave away the store.
Anything any of her defenders could bring to the table as positives about her time in leadership are all wildly thin and deeply open to withering critique.
We should drop everything as teachers nationally to unseat her….if for no other reason to see if we could do that. If we can pass that very low hurdle then maybe we can talk about putting up a fight against the reform movement.
I have no hope.
As a suggestion: As with Donald Trump, it’s best to not get bogged down in Weingarten’s spoken positions. She says precisely what she needs to to whatever audience is in front of her. Watch what she does. What she does is try to connect herself to whomever is in power. DeVos in power=Weingarten photo op with DeVos.
No absolute resistance there! Wengarten has but one absolute, try to find standing room on whatever coat tails of power are before her.
Disgusting.
Reed Hastings is the keynote speaker at the national charter schools conference.
We’ll have to listen to find out whether they still plan to eradicate 95% of public schools and leave 5%. When do they plan on letting the public in on these high level plans?
That’s incredibly generous of Mr. Hastings, don’t you think? He’ll allow a small number of public schools to exist, but NO MORE than 5%. 6 or 7%? No. 5.
I read one ed reform piece where they “envisioned” public schools as serving people who are new to neighborhoods. Sort of an entry point into the marketplace. Like a waiting room where they can be sorted and directed to the preferred “choice” schools.
They used the word “default” which I use but had no idea this is actually how they see public schools at these events. Good guess on my part! I thought I was exaggerating but this is the actual language. Did you know your kid attended a “default” school?
http://www.publiccharters.org/involved/conference-2017/about/speakers/
Cross-posted at OpED News : https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Donald-Cohen-In-the-Publi-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Corporate_Democracy_Diane-Ravitch_Donald-Trump-Lies-170422-458.html#comment655581
with my comment which has embedded links at the site… so go there!!!!
There has been NO DISCUSSION by THE MEDIA, OR ANYONE about the legislative take-over of the public school systems, that Diane Ravitch covers at her site and by the NPE —
if you are new to my writing, or want to access what is happening under your nose, here are a few links, taken from Diane’s posts:
Charter School Movement’s: ‘Insidious Plan’ to Take Over Public Education
Quicklink: “Billionaires Push School Privatization;” The Truth & the Facts!: American Schools Rock! by Thomas Ultican | OpEdNews
Or See my series on Legislative take-overs or privatization,https://www.opednews.com/Series/legislature-and-governorsL-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-150217-816.html?f=legislature-and-governorsL-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-150217-816.html
You see Fake News began the rant to demonize our schools, 2 decades ago when they saw simple ploy to cause failure…take out the professional practitioner. Target the teachers !
Look at LAUSD– And remember this is the SECOND LARGEST school district of the 15, 880 districts; (would I kid you?)
For decades LAUSD promoted and graduated kids with 2nd grade skills. Money was flowing; and the media did its “thing”, what it does everywhere that money talks… distract the public with lies.
Fabricate charges and sell in the media,”reform and testing.” Get the teacher’s unions to look the other way,while selling the public the lie that union protect those incompetent ‘tenured teachers.”
Imagine taking the most experienced doctors out of the hospital!
So, begin your trip through the 15,880 with LAUSD, and then take a look at what happened to the FIRST largest of almost sixteen thousand school districts…nYC… get a cup of coffee and watch “The Inconvenient Truth About Waiting For Superman.