Wayne Gersen explains here why billionaires are willing to spend millions of dollars to privatize public schools and to keep their taxes low.
Education is the most expensive item in every state’s budget. Teachers are the most expensive component in the budget of public schools. Reduce the number of teachers, reduce costs, get rid of senior teachers, and no new taxes.
The trick for the billionaires is to fool voters who earn $50,000 a year into believing cutting taxes is good for them, and that they share common ground with the billionaires.
Billionaires don’t care about public schools, don’t worry about class sizes, don’t care if kids are taught by machines, because their children don’t go to public schools.
Clever. Mean. Duplicitous.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I tend to agree. Wealthy people understand the value of education. That is why they exercise choice, and remove their children from publicly-operated schools. Many people, lower down on the economic ladder, also understand the value of education. When presented with the choice to withdraw their children from publicly-operated schools, they will do so.
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Charles,
Rich people send their children to private schools because they want small classes, experienced teachers, beautiful facilities, and students from the same social class.
Unless Choice is imposed, most parents prefer their neighborhood public school. In New Orleans, that choice is not available.
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Some (not all) non-public schools, offer full or partial scholarships, that enable children from lower income levels to attend their schools. When parents are empowered by the state (through vouchers or ESAs,etc) more parents will choose non-public schools.
I tend to agree, that most parents will continue to choose their local public schools, for their children, when given the choice. Indiana, has virtually state-wide choice, and less than 3% of parents have chosen to utilize school choice (in Indiana).
There are many excellent public schools in the USA. Some of them are right here in Fairfax, VA.
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Charles
So Charles what can you tell us about that 3% .
Were they in private religious schools before the vouchers?
What is the income distribution?
What are the racial demographics?
I was going to wildly speculate but I will resist.
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@Joel: It is not difficult to learn about the current state of the educational choice program in Indiana. Just do a google search.
Here is a short program from PBS (Not very popular on this blog, now). The report is somewhat negative on the effects of school choice in Indiana. see
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/education-july-dec11-tulenko_11-09/
(This report is from 2011)
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Q Since Charles is very likely on the paid PR staff of the pro-privatization organizations those wealthy people fund, his concern for the children who will be given no choice is exactly zero. Like his underwriters, he believes they are worthless trash to be drummed out and sent to the cheapest funded schools for the children Charles believes are worthless.END Q
@NYC parent: Where did you come up with this speculation? I am a telecommunications engineer, I work at the Pentagon. I am not affiliated with any educational organization of any kind, and certainly not on anyone’s paid staff. I am just a private citizen, who is concerned about education.
I believe that all children are entitled to an excellent education. I do not believe that any children are worthless.
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To justify private charter schools Charles says: “I believe that all children are entitled to an excellent education. ”
To justify repealing Obamacare Trump says: ““I am going to take care of everybody … Everybody’s going to be taken care of much better than they’re taken care of now.”
Trump believes that every American is entitled to excellent health care just as much as Charles believes every child is entitled to an excellent education.
The devil is in the details of the plans they put forward that they claim do exactly that! Privatizing public education is the way to give all kids an excellent education just the way Trump’s plan is the way to give all Americans excellent health insurance. As long as you ignore all the Americans and all the students who aren’t profitable to insure or educate, their plans are just “excellent”.
They are empty words when the policies both promote do nothing of the sort.
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To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, the wealthy know the price of everything but the value of nothing.
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Wealthy people understand that if they use their political donations to insure that the choice is between a public school that has to use its dwindling budget to educate the most expensive children who have more needs and another charter or private or parochial school that can drum out whichever children they decide are no longer profitable to educate, the parents whose children ARE “desirable” because they are cheap to teach will be motivated to choose the private/charter/parochial school that can teach the cheapest kids and still make a profit for its CEO. That’s why they fight so hard to starve public schools of funding.
Meanwhile, the children left behind are offered no choice at all.
Or they have a choice like we saw in Ohio — for-profits whose CEO is delighted to take their money and close down after a few years of failure having profited with enough money to live on for the rest of his life. Kind of like Trump U.
Since Charles is very likely on the paid PR staff of the pro-privatization organizations those wealthy people fund, his concern for the children who will be given no choice is exactly zero. Like his underwriters, he believes they are worthless trash to be drummed out and sent to the cheapest funded schools for the children Charles believes are worthless.
It’s not surprising that Donald Trump loves the philosophy Charles promotes: “I got mine and if I can get rich at the expense of some worthless people (or children!) who have no power I will gladly do it. Just pay me enough and I’ll sell my soul or my government or anything else you want.”
They hope to convince enough parents to follow their philosophy: As long as your child is happy, don’t worry if it is at the expense of far more vulnerable children because if you have to screw the little people (or in this case, the little kids) in order to benefit, well that’s just the new American way. MAGA.
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“don’t care if kids are taught by machines”
Children are not taught by machines! They might learn a little in computer based training, but they certainly aren’t taught. The act of teaching is a very human activity and to suggest otherwise is, well, a crock. No, that’s not a jab at Diane, but at the whole computer based “personalized (sic) learning” lie.
When falsehoods, errors and lies dominate education policy and practice discussions only harmful malpractices can obtain.
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This article highlights the importance of overturning Citizens United, and limiting campaign spending. Without these changes, democracy has no hope. Our income inequality is so skewed, billionaires and corporations are crafting laws to benefit the wealthy and impede the middle class. Public education built our country and provided the type of upward mobility that these billionaires or the parents and grandparents of these billionaires achieved. It is now convenient and beneficial for them to close the doors on others. These billionaires are not interested in our collective future, and they are not patriots. They are selfish and manipulative as they buy representatives and lobbyists to do their dirty work. Without limiting the power of the oligarchy, our collective futures will be diminished as our government no longer represents working families. They will continue to disinvest in all aspects of our common good with devastating consequences for average Americans, our children and future generations.
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I resent how we’re ordered to feel grateful. It’s a bad idea to have the citizenry genuflecting in front of the wealthiest .00001%.
Yuck. No thanks.
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It truly astonishes me that people can have so much money and yet begrudge paying high tax rates.
How are people so greedy? What is it they are lacking inside that makes them believe that if they accumulate even more wealth they will be happy?
Do they really believe that they can substitute real connection with their children with tens of millions of dollars — or hundreds of millions — inheritance for their children? Do they believe their children will love them less if they only receive $200 million instead of $400 million because their daddy didn’t fight hard enough to end the estate tax?
Why is it I feel so rich because I have a tiny % of the millions and billions those people have? Why does anyone begrudge spending money on public schools? Who cares if maybe some tiny amount of it is spent on unnecessary luxuries or some of it is spent on the occasional teacher who isn’t superb?
These people don’t really believe good schools are about good teachers. Eli Broad just proved it to us when he rewarded the charter chain that specializes in shedding unworthy children. Eli Broad wants lower taxes period, because he is a greedy, ugly little man who looks at public school students in terms of how useful they are to promote his agenda. The ones who aren’t are no better than garbage which explains why he just gave money to a school who doesn’t need it that specializes in throwing out the unworthy children as if they were trash.
Eli Broad is no better than Trump, though I imagine he believes he is a good man. He is not. His largesse is all about promoting himself. He might as well spend his foundation’s money on a painting of himself he can hang in his office. He does great harm by encouraging the expelling of unworthy children from charters and rewarding it as “EXCELLENT”. And expelling unworthy children IS excellent for the Eli Broads because he loves the idea promoted by them that you don’t need money to achieve great results (as long as you are ruthless in throwing out the unworthy kids who are no better than garbage to people like Broad). It doesn’t matter whether it is morally or ethically good. It makes Eli Broad LOOK good and that seems to be all he cares about.
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I think we need to talk about “free”, too.
If you’re volunteering your students for some sort of billionaire-launched experiment on software or anything else, that is not “free”.
Time has value and work has value- student time and teacher time. You’re paying for it. There’s opportunity cost, too. If you weren’t conducting the experiment you would be doing something else that might have more value, and so would your students.
Betsy DeVos is wrong. Experiments come with downside risk and built-in cost.
Her shangri-la version of “plus/and!” and “win/win!” is nonsense. Those are slogans for business seminars. No one was supposed to actually believe them.
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The disturbing amount of time wasted on endless experimentation costs billionaires like DeVos very little; yet it can turn a student’s world upside down. There is a human toll the wealthy won’t discuss because it is irrelevant to them. When you watch interviews with students whose public school has been closed or whose neighborhood has been gentrified while the poor family has been kicked to the curb, it hurts these young people. The decision makers only see the monetized value, not the human toll. The other 99% are just cogs in the corporate wheel, not people of value like the wealthy.
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And a concomitant benefit is that in the process teachers’ unions are destroyed, which is the first step to destroying the Democratic Party–which in any case will be complicit in its own destruction.
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First step in Destroying the Democratic party?
Unfortunately, that was taken long ago.
It is currently in it’s death throes.
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Which is why Democrats did so poorly against Donald Trump.
If they can’t beat Trump, they can’t beat anyone.
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Don’t you mean “Trump change”?
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Contemplate this : Gates is on his way to becoming the Worlds first trillionaire . By the way spell check does not contemplate the existence of that category of wealth, yet..
It is not just the taxes or lack of taxes . The entire economy has been “Rigged” to divert enormous wealth to the top. In all honesty it has always been rigged ,but there were periods in our history ,in the worlds history that self preservation dictated correcting some of the excesses . Fewer that the re balancing reached the poor or working class.
The period between 1932 and 1970 was a re balancing after the age of the Robber Barron’s. . As progress was made the oligarchy never surrendered they just exerted less influence . In 1948 they started the long road to recovery with Taft Hartley. By the early 70s they were ready for a full scale assault. Their sense of entitlement is profound, Marie Antoinette never had anything on this group.
So what will it take to send them back into retreat . What outrage will be so great as to reverse this trend . It should have been 2008 but the crises was skillfully managed by a con-artist who took his entire policy team from a list generated by an officer of a failed bank, bailed out to the tune of 350 billion dollars..
A few years back someone gave me a copy of Jack London’s “Iron Heel ” . London had some keen perceptions in 1908 . Perceptions on the nature of the Labor movement and the nature of the Oligarchy. Things have not changed all that much. I told that friend the ending was depressing . He said what do you mean, it all worked out in the end . I wont spoil it for those that haven’t read the book that inspired Orwell . The end was a long,long way off.
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