There is one super-smart columnist writing in Esquire, and his name is Charles P. Pierce.
Unlike the editorial boards of the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post, he understands that schools don’t get “better” by competing.
He understands that what is called “reform” these days is a massive failure.
He knows that charter schools, despite the boasting, despite the hundreds of millions squandered on them, don’t get better results than public schools and usually get worse results.
He has been paying attention.
In district after district, public schools are outperforming charter schools.
Will someone tell the Walton Family?
Will someone tell Eli Broad and Reed Hastings?
Will the editorial writers wake up anytime soon?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It is a market place when you talk to the 1% like the walton family. This whole thing with Devos is conflict of interest and why is nobody stopping her? We have the best government MONEY CAN BUY.
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alpahwolf1,
We don’t have the best government MONEY CAN BUY. The billionaires do. The rest of us are just stuck with what they bought.
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“If voting made any difference, they wouldn’t let us do it.” M Twain (?)
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Sometimes I question why I continue to vote when the choices of who we vote for almost always do not offer a real choice but just more of the same and the difficulty of deciding which candidate will do the least damage – the lesser of two evils.
Some countries have laws that require everyone to vote. For instance Brazil.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-n6hvPP06Rs
We can groan and moan about all the Americans that don’t vote but watch that video and learn who or what those Americans might vote for if they were forced to vote.
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Diane Here are some snippets from an LA TIMES article about the Koch brothers’ influence in Washington. They’ve succeeded in making “freedom” a bad word. This article is about the health care situation; but I think it shows just how cozy the administration is with the Koch’s–and the oligarchic influence, even CONTROL, in our time. I doubt education has gone unscathed in these Colorado Springs “Koch network” meetings. A few snippets, then the link to the full article: (my emphases)
TITLE: “GOP’s Plan B for Obamacare — repeal first, replace later — began with quiet push from Koch network. by Lisa Mascaro”
In the article: “Pence met privately June 23 with billionaire Charles Koch ahead of the weekend seminar.
President Trump’s surprise suggestion Friday Senate Republicans . . . has its roots in a Koch network proposal that has been shopped around Congress for months.
“The influential Koch network, backed by the billionaire industrialists, floated the idea most recently at a retreat last weekend in Colorado Springs, Colo., where key conservative lawmakers heard an earful from frustrated GOP donors about the party’s failure to deliver on their signature campaign promise.
“Among those attending the gathering at the luxurious Broadmoor Hotel was Republican Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska, who has been working with the White House behind the scenes on the idea.
The Republicans . . . “want to avoid turning to Democrats for help. . . . ”
“McConnell said as much last week, warning senators he would have no choice but to reach out to Democrats for a bipartisan deal that would likely ‘include none of the reforms we would like to make.’”
“Getting the healthcare issue off the agenda would also free up time for the other main Republican priority — tax reform — which has stalled amid the Senate’s logjam, and is also a Koch network priority.”
“Political strategists at the Koch network — a conglomerate of small-government advocacy groups — lauded Sasse’s approach, which largely aligns with what they have been promoting in a position paper issued in January.”
“’While we are continuing to work with the Senate to help improve their current legislation, the two-step repeal and reform approach that Senators Paul and Sasse have proposed would put Congress and the administration in the position to keep their promise and deliver that relief,’ said Nathan Nascimento, a vice president at the Koch-backed Freedom Partners chamber of commerce, in a statement.” . . . .
“It wouldn’t be the first time the Koch network has provided a legislative road map to Republicans in Congress in the Trump administration. . . .Freedom Partners encouraged Congress to use the little-known Congressional Review Act to rollback more than a dozen Obama-era regulations – even helping to compile the list — which Republicans now count as one of the chief achievements of this Congress.”
“Sasse’s office said the senator did not discuss the healthcare plan when he attended the Koch seminar last weekend in Colorado, where he delivered a lunchtime speech on Sunday. . . . But the senator has been working with the administration, including Vice President Mike Pence’s office, for months on the healthcare plan. . . . Pence met privately June 23 with billionaire Charles Koch ahead of the weekend seminar.
“Trump had once panned the two-step approach, disagreeing with McConnell and other congressional leaders who early on also preferred the repeal now-replace later strategy. . . . When Sasse floated it anew, the administration signaled its support.”
http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-senate-healthcare-20170630-story.html
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CBK,
Betsy DeVos is part of the little group run by the Koch brothers.
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Diane Koch and Devos: No surprise there.
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And the Kochsuckers are supposedly devout xtians. A bigger joke can’t be made.
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“DAMmed Schools” (Devalue Added Model)
The public schools are DAMmed
By teachers who are VAMed
By students who are tested
And billionaires invested
By Races to the Flop
And Children Left Behind
The DAMmage just won’t stop
Cuz pol is wined and dined
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I guess that should be spelled DAMned
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DAMed would be the most accurate, considering the meaning of the acronym. I’ve been devalued by the method. I’ve been sold to Pearson, and I didn’t even know I was for sale.
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If I moved to a charter school, and there’s one not 5 miles down the road from my high-performing public high school, I’d have to take nearly a $20,000-a-year pay cut — plus my pension!. What I’d ask of any of these editorial boards or the advocates of charter schools is this: Do you think you’re going to get BETTER teachers this way? Are you looking for a reason WHY there’s so much turnover at these schools?
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You would also lose your due process rights if you still have those rights to protect you from being fired arbitrarily and without a reason.
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Public Education appears to threaten these billionaires. Control and greed are their mantras. My hope is that the proponents of Public Education will stand strong and be spokes persons for it.
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Here’s my favorite quote: “Resolved: No matter how noble the original motives, public school “reform” as pursued by private interests in general, and by plutocratic dilettantes in particular, has been an abject failure and an almost limitless vista of low-rent scams and high-tech brigandage.”
Privatization has make baseless claims about their superior programs for years. The reality is stark contrast to the claims. Profiteering has far exceeded any progress. What is worse many of our representatives are receiving generous contributions to campaigns with the assumption they will keep the cash flowing. These complicit representatives look the other way when charters are charged with fraud or embezzlement. As a result, despite meager results, charters keep expanding, and few governments provide much needed oversight and accountability. At the same time public school budgets are being drained in order to fund more charters. What is in the best interests of our young people has taken a backseat to what is in the interests of corporate privateers. Privatization is a huge corporate welfare scheme designed to produce profit, not achievers. The public needs to wake up and demand investment in legitimate public education whose primary goal is to teach young people, not profit from them.
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‘ Here’s my favorite quote: “Resolved: No matter how noble the original motives, public school “reform” as pursued by private interests in general, and by plutocratic dilettantes in particular, has been an abject failure and an almost limitless vista of low-rent scams and high-tech brigandage.” ‘
Mine, too. “Plutocratic dilettantes” sums that particular crowd up pretty accurately. It’s like they view themselves as the new pantheon of Greek/Roman gods who like to mess around in mere mortals lives for the fun of it and expect us to worship them for their beneficence.
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Education isn’t a marketplace?
https://www.niche.com/k12/search/best-school-districts/m/boston-metro-area/
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No, Tim, education is not a marketplace.
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In a diverse metropolitan area anchored by a city that is 25% black and 25% Latino, there sure seems to be a high real estate premium in towns whose schools are mostly white and where zoning ensures there will be as little affordable housing created as possible.
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Tim,
Why would you make this about race? Do you not understand that there are affluent college educated parents who are non-white? And there are poor, not well-educated parents who are white? Race isn’t nearly as important as socio-economic status.
The schools for the poor have been starved of proper funding and the reformers answer is “give me money and we’ll educate the cheapest of then, enjoy the profits (we’re non-profit so we spend it on high CEO salaries and payments to our PR/marketing firms), and starve the schools for middle class kids too so we can cull the cheapest from them to teach.
What I find interesting is that reformers like you have no big plan for reform because you actually don’t care about the kids. Oh so what if some — or many — get drummed out of the charters whose billionaires supporters underwrite a whole economy of paid shills for the reform movement and Betsy DeVos. You DO NOT CARE. You never have. That’s why you are so angry at Black Lives Matters and the NAACP for daring to question your favorite charter CEO who claims that 20% of the 6 year old kindergarten and first graders are violent.
A normal human being would say “yes, that is worthy of examining closely because only a racist would believe that 20% of the kindergarten children — all of whom have involved parents willing to commit to anything to get their children a better education — are violent.
A person like you says shut up. Let our most celebrated charters label the unworthy 5 year olds because who do you trust? The charter school CEO who has got to go lists and chooses and promotes MODEL teachers who then are caught on video punishing non-white children for not knowing the right answer? Or the “corrupt” NAACP and all their members who don’t care about African-American children as much as the white charter CEO who embraces Betsy DeVos as their savior?
We know who you trust, Tim. And that speaks volumes. It’s not about the market. It’s about your belief that the CEO who labels young African-American children as violent and embraces Betsy DeVos is more trustworthy and cares more about African-American children than the entire membership of the NAACP.
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Interesting article. This is news? Publicly-operated schools in rich, affluent areas are “Taj Mahals”. Publicly-operated schools in inner cities and economically depressed areas are (EXPLETIVE).
Until our nation has equitable funding, for all children in publicly-operated schools, and has additional funding in the depressed areas, we will continue to have “educational apartheid”.
The children of the poor will get an inferior education, and the children of the wealthy will get a superior education.
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The children of the rich get a superior education because they send them to $40,000/year private schools.
The problem is that the children of the middle class are getting a decent education and the children of the poor are not.
So the rich people say “have those middle class people share their money with the poor because we refuse to pay for the poor to have good schools and want the middle class to pay for it instead.”
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“The problem is that the children of the middle class are getting a decent education and the children of the poor are not.”
I taught for 30 years in schools that had a child poverty rate of 70 to 100 percent depending on where in the ghetto I taught. I started teaching in 5th grade and after a few years moved up to middle school and then taught high school English and journalism for the last 16 years all in the same district and the same ghetto.
What you said above is correct but doesn’t go far enough to explain why those poor children are not getting a decent education.
The main reason is that too many of those students that live in poverty do not like to read, they do not cooperate in class, they do not do homework, etc. – not because the school is a failing school and the teachers are all incompetent and/or burned out even though the few studies of PTSD in teachers do indicate that teachers in those embattled school environments get PTSD at higher rates since they are often in daily combat to motivate many of the students they work with to cooperate and learn what they teach.
In every class I taught, there were students from poor families that cooperated and did the work, learned, graduated from high school and even went to college. But the majority of the poor students were either passive or aggressive in their resistance to learning what I taught and this carried to the other classes they were in with other teachers.
There is a reason a Stanford Study found this fact was true for every country that took the PISA test:
“The report also found:
“There is an achievement gap between more and less disadvantaged students in every country; surprisingly, that gap is smaller in the United States than in similar post-industrial countries, and not much larger than in the very highest scoring countries.
“Achievement of U.S. disadvantaged students has been rising rapidly over time, while achievement of disadvantaged students in countries to which the United States is frequently unfavorably compared – Canada, Finland, and Korea, for example – has been falling rapidly.”
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/january/test-scores-ranking-011513.html
Great teachers and even average teachers in every country are in an uphill battle with the ravages of poverty to teach children to learn, children that live in poverty.
Poverty is the problem – not incompetent teachers and so-called failing schools that are labeled failures because of the test results of students that live in poverty.
This is a fact I stand by 100 percent – most if not all of the children living in poverty in the United States are offered the same chance to learn as middle-class children but those middle-class children almost always have more involved parents who support their child’s education and the schools the middle-class children attend are in better shape with newer books, etc.
And for evidence I submit my thirty years as a classroom teacher and repeat this quote from that same Stanford study:
“Achievement of U.S. disadvantaged students has been rising rapidly over time, while achievement of disadvantaged students in countries to which the United States is frequently unfavorably compared – Canada, Finland, and Korea, for example – has been falling rapidly.”
And my evidence was documented in a daily journal for one entire school year in the mid-1990s, and almost twenty years later I used the hundreds of detailed pages in that daily journal to write a fact-based memoir that reveals in tedious detail what it is like to teach in schools with high levels of poverty in the United States.
Here’s a few pull quotes from reader reviews on Amazon of that award-winning memoir.
“His portrayal of life in the class room is stunning, realistic, and even a little scary. You really get the feeling your are that little fly on the wall.” – Dr. William L. Smith, Professor Emeritus status, Emporia State University
“An eye-opening look into a tough high school classroom. … made for some good reading. Any teacher can quickly identify with Mr. Lofthouse’s daily battles.” – 2015 Benjamin Franklin Awards
“Readers who envision eager students lapping up learning led by a Tiger Teacher will be disappointed. Lofthouse presents us with grungy classrooms, kids who don’t want to be in school, and the consequences of growing up in a hardscrabble world. While some parents support his efforts, many sabotage them—and isolated administrators make the work of Lofthouse and his peers even more difficult. Throughout this journal, though, Lofthouse seems able to keep the hope alive that there’s a future for each student that doesn’t include jail—thanks in large part to his sixth-period journalism class and its incredible editor, Amanda.” – Bruce Reeves
That memoir is called “Crazy is Normal: a classroom expose”
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Lloyd,
I agree with all your points. I was certainly not trying to imply that the schools that educate the poorest children were not giving their students a decent education because of the teachers in them.
What has never truly been addressed is what are the best ways to deal with high poverty schools that have a disproportionate number of students who are resistant to learning and don’t have family support?
One reason I utterly despise the entire reform movement is because of their willingness to sacrifice honesty in exchange for high paid jobs promoting the fake reform that is absolutely not interested in those children who cause schools to be failing!
Instead, they promote a hypocrisy that is never challenged. Teachers are at fault in public schools when they don’t get results with those students. But when charters — who already have an advantage because every student who signs up has a parent who cared enough to do so — fail with their students, it is the fault of the 5 or 6 year old children themselves and they are obviously not worthy of their seat.
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I believe they know damn well it isn’t reform. I believe the billionaires see it as a chance to privatize and therefore make millions of dollars, a chance to break unions, and a chance to control what future generations are taught. So for them, a win win win. For democracy, not so much.
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Charlie Pierce is pretty darned astute.
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It’s a marketplace for those who see education as a huge pot of money that can fund their lucrative investments. If philanthropists and hedge fund managers had to rely solely on their own funds to start and maintain charters without access to public school tax revenue, you’d see a lot fewer charter schools.
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