Reader Michael Fiorello commented on an article about charter schools. It is no accident that the Walton family (the richest family in America, thanks to Walmart) is spending $200 million annually on charter schools. It is not about children; they could do a lot with $200 million to help children in their home state of Arkansas. They could build health clinics or provide nurses for every school in a poor community. They could pay their parents $15 an hour. But, no, they want charter schools, and they will give $200 million a year for five years (that is $1 billion) to create new charter schools. Why? They hate unions. As Michael notes below, more than 90% of charters are non-union.
He writes:
There are issues of control woven throughout the charter issue, separate from the looting they are prone to.
There is the desire to have iron control of the labor force, explaining why charters are over ninety percent non-union: the desire, as seen virtually everywhere else in the labor markets, to replace full-time employment with temporary/ contingent labor, the desire to pay teachers less, and the desire to have them under the thumb of management, which is much more difficult to maintain in a union, career-oriented environment where institutional memory has value. Thus, it’s no accident that charters have such extreme staff turnover, and often have teachers working from scripted lessons. As has occurred in so many other industries, the de-skilling of the workforce is a management axiom.
There is also a social engineering aspect of charter schools, especially prevalent among the “no excuses” chains (KIPP, Success Academies, Uncommon Schools, et. al.), which are obsessed with herding and controlling children in punitive, Skinner Box- type environments. It’s about training children, not educating them, to be docile and obedient, no matter the oppressiveness of the environment, prepping them for the lack of autonomy they’ll face in the adult workforce, and preventing them from having even an inkling that another world is possible.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
One of my uncles, the one I was named after because I was born on his birthday, was 96 when he died. He was born in the late 19th century. He told me what it was like to work for the railroads at the turn of the century. He said hundreds would gather outside the railroad company gates and wait for the foreman to come with a handfull of chips.
The foreman would stand in an empty freight car high above the crowd of desperate men and announce he had 20 chips (less or more) because that was how many workers they needed that day and then he would throw the chips at the crowd of hundreds waiting to see if they would work and earn not enough to survive but enough to make watery soup so their still hungry family didn’t starve. After the tussle and struggle to find a chip and keep it, the winners came forward. This process was repeated on daily.
When there was no money, the people couldn’t buy coal to heat their shacks or food to heat. Electricity was for the wealthy. But the working class could take empty buckets to the railroad tracks and hunt for lumps of coal that fell off the trains as they pulled out of the rail yards.
Social Security, unemployment, and Medicare didn’t exist when my uncle was a young man struggling to find work and earn maybe a quarter a day with no benefits, none, not medical or retirement. If you were too sick to work, you starved and never had medical care. For that quarter, he had to work about 16 hours without a break.
That is what a world where the Trumps, the billionaire oligarchs and corporate CEO’s, rule is like.
Thank you for keeping it real.
Not rheeal.
😎
“rheeal” has to be the heartless place where Trump goes when he sleeps, right before he wakes up and starts tweeting at 3 a.m. That is the time of day the malignant narcissist warms up his CO2, fast-food powered carbon engine between his ears so he is alert for the first lie of the day at 3:000001 a.m.
Lloyd Lofthouse
Come on Lloyd, you don’t believe him when he said he was touched by those pictures of Syrian children . (sarcasm noted)
If he admits he was fantasizing about groping some of those children once they are a bit older, maybe I’d give him the benefit of a doubt.
Hit the nail right on the head. The oligarchs have decided that since they cannot prevent the government from becoming tyrannical, they will capture it and run the tyranny in the directions they choose. It is only logical.
The best evidence that this is true is that the charter movement is completely dishonest. That’s not to say there aren’t a few mom and pop charters who truly mean well, but the big money and big megaphones go to people willing to lie and mislead about what charters do. The charter movement — at least the big money and people like Petrilli at TPM who is apparently getting paid nearly $300,000/year to promote the notion that charters were never supposed to improve schools — they were supposed to pick out the “strivers” at those failing schools and leave the rest to rot!! It’s hard to imagine a man like him depositing his huge paycheck and knowing he so quickly abandoned the poor and vulnerable because rich billionaires paid him to do so. On the other hand, it is possible Petrilli has always found poor kids to be rather expendable when the choice comes down to his bank account (and working hard for the money) and getting well-compensated to doing the bidding of millionaires. And that the billionaires found the perfect man for the job!
“The real moral duty of charter schools: The goal should be to create orderly and challenging environments where strivers from poor families can learn”
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/michael-petrilli-charter-schools-aren-article-1.2418153
STRIVERS. Those are the only kids the billionaires and their (very well-paid) toadies like Petrilli want in their charters. In that, they have much in common with DeVos. And absolutely nothing in common with the public school teachers who don’t have the moral corruption to simply abandon those kids to rot as Petrilli encourages charters to do.
The stink of people willing to sell out children for their own bank account….
^^Sorry, Petrilli at TBF Institute (not TPM)
We should also note that the teaching workforce is dominated by women, and with huge descrepancies in pay between men and women as well as between early childhood and high school teachers. Although there are general attacks on all unions and collective bargaining rights, the targeting of teachers strikes me as another case of gender bias.
https://theestablishment.co/how-gender-bias-affects-teachers-salaries-db78356063f2
Perhaps the fact that 1/5 people who have a Union card is a teacher makes them a target . More so than any gender bias . The Post office was also a target and I do not associate gender with postal workers .
Seeing this comment and the many others re: Diane’s Hillary Clinton and sexism post gives me a lot of empathy for Black Lives Matter.
I agree with Laura that the prevalence of women in the teaching profession makes it a target. What makes it so difficult @Joel to acknowledge that sexism is endemic in our society?
That said, it could be argued that both the size of the teacher’s unions and their gender play a part in what makes them a target. However, to minimize the shadow of sexism on every woman’s life is wrong. You don’t know what it is like to be constantly second-guessed, to have to prove yourself more than a man would have to, to be judged based on whether you are pregnant, if you have children, how you look, or how old you are. I wish people would come to the terms with the reality that even if they don’t consider themselves sexist, that the society as a whole is.
This is why we should work on helping charter school teachers form unions.