Peter agreement has noticed a Democratic think tank in D.C. that sounds like an echo chamber for Betsy DeVos. It is called the Progressive Policy Institute, and back in the 1990s, it inspired many of the Clinton administration’s flirtations with privatization.
It’s back, and it sounds like a np mouthpiece for a Betsy Dezvos. Even DFER and other charter-loving Dems have tried to distance themselves from the Trump administration. But not PPI.
Its spokesman on education is David Osborne, and he adores privatization. He is yet another non-educator who wants to reinvent schools. And of course, he loves charters. Like ALEC, like the Walton family, like the whole privatization industry, he loves deregulation without accountability.
Peter writes:
“You may not have heard of the Progressive Policy Institute lately, but they’ll be coming up more often as their Education Honcho releases his new book. PPI is worth paying attention to, if for no other reason than the organization provides Exhibit #1,635 of Why Teachers Can’t Trust Alleged Democrats….
“I have not read the book (and it’s not high on my list), but I am curious where he stands on the charter characteristics of non-transparency, non-accountability, and generating profits for private corporations and individuals. Nor do I see any signs of Osborne grappling of what happens to “undesireable” students in a charter world in which no charter has to take a student they don’t want (a serious issue in New Orleans).
“There’s a whole world of charter mis-information here, coupled with the tone of someone who has no interest in a serious conversation about any of the issues that charters raise. That’s all just another day at the education debates.
“No, what I want you to notice, and remember as this group pops up, is that these are self-labeled progressives, folks with long and strong Democratic ties. The GOP is no friend of public education, but at least they never pretend otherwise. But here’s evidence once again that when it comes to education, some Democrats are completely indistinguishable from the GOP.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Of course there is no difference, especially when getting money is involved.
Here is what I just found in the Bill and Melinda Gates database”
Grants to the Progressive Policy Institute.
Date: January 2004 Purpose: to build public and political awareness and support for charter schools through targeted outreach, and the publication and dissemination of a report series
Amount: $300,000
Date: March 2005 Purpose: for general operating support
Amount: $210,000
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I’m going to sound like a broken record, but there IS a difference.
The difference is that nearly ALL Republicans — at least the ones I can think of — have been co-opted by the privatization movement and are shills for charter schools.
The difference is that SOME — and you can even say MANY if you feel that is true — Democrats have been just as co-opted and are just as much shills of the privatization movement as Republicans. Maybe Al Gore is one as Osborne seems to be a close associate of his.
But ALL of them have not. And there are also Democrats who are far better supporters of public education than so called independent progressives. And those public school supporting anti-privatization Democrats aren’t drummed out of the party — some are even leaders.
We do public education great harm by smearing all the Democrats — including the ones on our side — with the same brush and looking the other way when progressives are happy to embrace and promote the same philosophical support for “good non-profit charters” that Osborne does.
My only agenda here is for us to work on making sure every self-identified progressive leader is on the side of public school and not giving progressive cover to the shills for the pro-charter movement who are both Dems and progressives.
What makes the Dems more progressives is when the progressive leaders take up a cause. Cuomo is as co-opted as anyone but Bernie’s push for the left made him support free college tuition.
That was a good thing.
How about we get these leading progressives to also push support for public schools from the left? In my opinion, if those progressive leaders took this up, it would be far more powerful than teachers criticizing people like Osborne.
How do we get progressive leaders to take up the anti-privatization movement? And why is it taking them so long to do it?
And is it enough that almost every Democrat opposes “for-profit” charters if they still support “good” ones?
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^^And those progressives can start by endorsing the NAACP’s moratorium on charter schools.
They cannot run away from enough from supporting that. When I see a progressive politician — not a Democrat, but a progressive — endorsing the NAACP’s moratorium instead of doing their best to undermine it (after all, you don’t want to put a moratorium on those many so-called “good public charters”, they say) I will be hopeful.
But I’m not going to hold by breath. I have seen no sign that any but a few Democrats that many progressives dislike — Tim Kaine, Terry McAuliffe, Bill de Blasio — actually care about public schools very much.
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The problem is that with dark money funding Dems it’s hard to tell the difference between progressives and neoliberals. And with all that corporate money funding neoliberals, progressives have to pull off minor miracles to beat them.
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Aren’t Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren progressives? I assume they aren’t swayed by corporate money. But they aren’t fighting for public schools. And if they support “good public charters” they are just making it much harder for the people fighting for real public schools.
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NYC public school parent: Thank you for acknowledging differences within the Democratic Party. As a life-long Democrat I am surprised to learn there is a pro-charter element in the Party at this time. Yes, I recall Bill Clinton (don’t confuse his policies with Hillary!!) supporting charter schools before charter schools became a slimy, profit-making cesspool.
I urge caution to all about lumping all Dems in one basket and trashing the entire Party. Have you so quickly forgotten that Bernie Sanders did that very thing in the 2016 presidential election, sharing in great part, along with the Russians, for the election of Donald Trump and appointment of Betsy DeVos?
Do you not remember Senate Dems challenging DeVos in nomination hearings?
Pragmatism is a great virtue to have in the current political time. Whether we like it or not there are only TWO political parties in this country that have any clout at all in law-making, from county school boards to the US Congress. If you trash “The Democrats”/ Democratic Party, turning people away from them as Sanders did, who do you have left to fight for public schools? The small number of Sanders’ so-called “progressives”? Not hardly.
I don’t know a single Democrat in my community who supports charter schools. State Dem lawmakers fought against the recent pro-charter/ anti-public school legislation…… Of course in Florida we know first hand about the evils. And I believe if they knew there were Dems backing profit-making charter schools, they would challenge those Dems. I am sure there are many, many Dems across the country who would join in.
You should instead put your effort into identifying pro-charter Dem lawmakers and alert their constituents to lobby them.
I re-post a lot I read at Diane’s blog on my facebook page. I am one person but I have FB contacts across the country from the 2016 election who are still activists, and they in turn have many contacts – tens of thousands. Our state Dem Party has a “resistance” arm that I am sure would fight charters.
It may take a separate movement but the national anti-charter advocates need to organize and use these leftover Dem activists to identify, lobby and educate Democratic law-makers.
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Dianecbrown,
I hope you are right. Aside from Tim Kaine, I don’t know of any Democrat who understands that charters are a money-making failing enterprise.
Let’s see, there is Cory Booker, now calling himself a progressive. Cuomo and Malloy of CT both favor charters. Jerry Brown of CA started two charters himself when he was mayor of Oakland. There are not many Democratic governors, and I hope you will tell me which of them wholeheartedly supports public schools. During the 2016 campaign, Bernie Sanders said he was opposed to private charters but favors public charters. Does he know the difference? Is there one? If private management makes a school private, then all charters are private.
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There are many areas where huge differences exist between Democrats and Republicans; education in general is not one of them. Look no further than the Obama/Cuomo/Brown administrations, et.al. for proof of that.
With precious few exceptions, Democrats support charter schools, which is to say they support school privatization. When Democrats like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who are both about as good as it gets among Democrats, talk about supporting “public charter schools,” they are either revealing their ignorance, or dissembling and trying not to offend anyone.
Frankly, given their intelligence, grasp of policy and experienced staffers, I have a hard time believing they don’t know what’s going on. After all, it’s not as if these issues have just turned up. It’s just that, according to their internal political calculations, they see no upside to coming out explicitly in support of (real) public schools and against the hostile takeover of public education.
That leaves it up to us to force them and every other member of the political class to re-do their calculations. That can only be done by showing them that there’s a world of electoral hurt in store for any politician who supports privatization. Personally speaking, I’d most like to see the vapid, dissembling Cory Booker pay the ultimate political price for his groveling before the Overclass, but it could be anyone, just as long as the political class getrs the message that there will be a painful price to pay for enabling the privatizers.
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I am willing to bet that Sanders, Warren, Booker, and other “progressive” Democrats have education staffers who come from TFA.
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Michael Fiorillo,
I agree wholeheartedly with your comment.
Although I’d probably prefer Andrew Cuomo’s defeat for doing everything he can to undermine NYC public schools. Especially his appointment of a completely co-opted SUNY Charter Institute board that should be the subject of a real investigation as to how they have completely abandoned their duty to do oversight. I wish someone would ask SUNY how in the world they accept without question a charter operator’s claims that lots of non-white kindergarten students act out violently only because they are violent by nature and not because of any of the charter’s practices.
Not only do they accept racist excuses like that, but it appears that SUNY plans to give the people making those excuses the power to train their own teachers to continue those practices.
Booker can do limited harm now, but Cuomo has already done so much.
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Diane, if you are right (and likely so, since it is the explicit purpose of TFA to install its ReformBots in positions of power), then the question has been answered, and Sanders/Warren are being disingenuous, and will betray us unless forced to change direction.
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Michael, there is a billionaire in California named Arthur Rock who gives $500,000 to TFA every year to place interns in Congressional offices. Not the military or healthcare: education. There they can protect TFA interests: a multimillion dollar earmark, definition of TFA as “highly qualified,” anything else that protects TFA.
Several years ago, I went with Richard Rothstein to meet Senator Tom Harkin, who was chair of the HELP committee. On education issues, he deferred to his staffer, from TFA.
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dianeravitch writes: “Several years ago, I went with Richard Rothstein to meet Senator Tom Harkin, who was chair of the HELP committee. On education issues, he deferred to his staffer, from TFA.”
Nice example of how the poison works.
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No surprise here.
Both political parties have been infiltrated by the Koch brothers’ ALEC organization, the Walton family, and the other extremist autocratic billionaires that want to subvert the U.S. Constitution and turn the U.S. Constitutional Republic into a theocratic autocracy or a libertarian (that favors billionaires and craps on everyone else) theocratic autocracy.
I think it is a safe bet that if we looked at the donations from this oligarchs, we’d discover that they donate campaign contributions to candidates running for office in both major parties. The candidates they donate to are in reality, their property. Handpicked to infiltrate and take over both major parties from within.
And we see this happening from school board elections, city governments, to county and state governments, to Washington DC. These oligarchs are spreading terminal cancer for a progressive civilization.
In their bible, slavery to the market they control = freedom.
Most roads leading to the future are moving toward a real dystopian future. What movie is the best preview of this future:
A Clockwork Orange
Blade Runner
The Matrix
Gattaca
Nineteen Eight-Four
Soylent Green
Logan’s Run
THX 1138
Fahrenheit 451
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Good comment, Lloyd. Love your:
“In their bible, slavery to the market they control = freedom.
Most roads leading to the future are moving toward a real dystopian future.” True and very scary. Glad I am old. I would be a school dropout today.
From the book, THE MAGIC of BEING by Kathryn Erskine…
Told from the perspective of Julian, a 9-year-old boy, Julian says this about the question: “Why did the author say this?” I agree.
“There could be a million reasons why: I can think of lots. You can narrow it down, but nobody can say exactly why the author said something except the author. And sometimes I bet they don’t even know. I do’t always know why I say something…They want one answer bubble to fill in on the electronic score sheet and that’s it. Done But the universe is not aht simple. Maybe some people think it is, but I don’t. My answers don’t fit inside a bubble.”
My comment about “bubbling-in.” Those BUBBLE SHEETS are DEATHLY and totally STUPID. The tests are just a source of income of the few. The CCSS and testing have made the people in country dumb — I think that’s one major point of those stupid standards and tests … plus of course KA-CHING … $$$$$ for the few. Sickening.
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You don’t have to bet that those in the 1% and big corporations donate to both parties. Of course many of them do. That DOES NOT mean those politicians are owned by the donors!
Please don’t propose the absurd argument that “honest” politicians would not take their donations. In the age of “Citizens United,” even good politicians must accept donations from many sources in order to run competitive campaigns.
Get me the names of Dems who are cronies with the Kochs and I will start a lobbying campaign against them.
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Sorry, I’m not going to put in the hours it would take to see how many elected Democrats have been linked to ALEC. But you are welcome to do it state-by-state.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/ALEC_Politicians
For instance, I got the ball rolling and checked Alabama where three Democrats were listed as having ties with ALEC, and that was just one state.
House of Representatives
Rep. Richard J. Lindsey (D-39)
Former Representatives (some of the names on this list are not identified as a member of a political party)
Rep. Demetrius C. Newton (D-53), listed as one of the “1999 ALEC Leaders in the States” by ALEC[12]
Rep. Richard Laird (D-37))[14]
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Do the koch brothers publish their political contributions? If they do, please let me know.
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So you looked at one state and found 3 Dems in ALEC, then made the broad generalization that the ‘Party’ has been infiltrated.
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You are the one that is challenging my allegations so it is up to you to prove me wrong by looking at the other 49 states to see how many more Democrats have been linked to ALEC — not my job.
Beyond ALEC-linked Democratic there are other factions in the party like the neo-libs. Don’t forget that the Democratic party before President Johnson launched the Civil Rights movement was the party of the Ku Klux Klan and slavery.
In reality, the Democratic Party had essentially the same fraught relationship with the left during its supposed golden New Deal era that it does today. The left dismissed the Great Society as “corporate liberalism,” a phrase that connoted in the 1960s almost exactly what “neoliberalism” does today. The distrust ran both ways. Lyndon Johnson supported domestic budget cuts after the disastrous 1966 midterm elections, to the disappointment of liberals who already loathed the Vietnam War. “What’s the difference between a cannibal and a liberal?” Johnson joked during his presidency. “A cannibal doesn’t eat his friends.” …
The Democratic Party has evolved over the last half-century, as any party does over a long period of time. But the basic ideological cast of its economic policy has not changed dramatically since the New Deal. American liberals have always had some room for markets in their program. Democrats, accordingly, have never been a left-wing, labor-dominated socialist party. (Union membership peaked in 1955, two decades before the party’s supposed neoliberal turn, and has declined steadily since.) They have mediated between business and labor, supporting expanded state power episodically rather than dogmatically. The widespread notion that “neoliberals” have captured the modern Democratic party and broken from its historic mission plays upon nostalgia for a bygone era, when the real thing was messier and more compromised than the sanitized historical memory.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/how-neoliberalism-became-the-lefts-favorite-insult.html
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There is nothing progressive for every day people that comes from this group. A better name would be the Neoliberal Policy Institute. While they may be more open minded than many Republicans on social issues, their economic policies are all about the miracles of the free market, technological innovation and globalization.
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Diane A bit of history from C-SPAN DECEMBER 2, 1999
The Future of School Governance
“Participants talked about the importance of school governance and how it effects education reform. They stressed that governance is not a solution to education problems, but effective governance creates a climate where reform can occur. They talked about the impact of charter schools and other alternative education methods impact on school governance. After their prepared remarks they answered questions from the audience.”
NOTE: Circa minute 42: Mike Resnick, National School Board Association, talks about the gamut of problems associated with “reform” and its relationship to school boards. It could have been aired yesterday. It’s a part of the cancer-spreading that Lloyd L. talks about:
.https://www.c-span.org/video/?153969-1/future-school-governance
Future School Governance | Video | C-SPAN.org
http://www.c-span.org
The Future of School Governance Participants talked about the importance of school governance and how it effects education reform. They stressed that governance is …
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Peter Agreement seems to do a lot of disagreeing.
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Dis is my middle name
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“Distemper”
Peter has a temper
His middle name is “Dis”
That’s modified by “semper”
Distemper’s what it is
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Sic semper tyrannis.
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They’re arguing over HOW to privatize not WHETHER to privatize.
Once you get that you see it’s one group.
Osborne actually “reformed” health care
We have the most expensive and inequitable health care system of all developed countries, so that was a big success.
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Chiara Yes. And that 1999 C-SPAN link that I posted was only ONE MOMENT in a long and concerted effort. The people on the panel were Republicans. And the School Board Association person was obviously well informed and had all the right questions, about accountability for charters, about rents and kickbacks, etc. So they go forward ANYWAY.
But as is obvious, the “shadow government,” made up of oligarchs, is not Party-particular. And they’ve had their camel’s nose under the tent for a very long time. It’s just been exponentially exacerbated since techno-oligarchs came on the scene. The imbalance of wealth has ushered in a new and extreme imbalance of power.
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This is a trend worth watching, in particular the Democrats & their BIG funders from Silicon Valley. Like it or not, we have a pay-to-play political system and some Americans matter more than others.
As long as Citizens United remains the law, it will be hard to make this disappear.
As unions are fading out on the Dem side, other donors will fill the void.
Apparently the folks of tech are very alarmed to discover their country is being ruled by idiots. Anti-Science idiots even. (heresy to them!)
They have plans to change that in future elections. Big plans. Look out Koch Brothers & friends.
But what does that mean?
The first article here describes a poll given to tech entrepreneurs to assess what their political beliefs actually are.
While this is not a huge group,
these people will be FUNDING Dems in the next election.
(And many more, though they tend to not like politics all that much.)
Some of this is good news (on some issues, they are super-liberal), but on workplace and education, not so good.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/9/6/16260326/tech-entrepreneurs-survey-politics-liberal-regulation-unions
These next 2 articles describe 2 of these funders, and what exactly they are putting their money into.
If you’re wondering which organizations might be getting some traction in 2018 and 2020, this might be good to know.
http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2017/09/07/546700281/silicon-valley-wants-to-dust-off-the-democratic-establishment
The take away for public ed is that the Dems will be lead by what Silicon Valley wants for education.
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jcgrim Yes. Many of these techies are really young people (relatively) with good hearts and a lot of money; but I’m sure they are not politically, morally, or socially monolithic (no group is). I guess the question is whether these power-players, regardless of old or new party affiliation, will “buy” the reformers’ line, of both badmouthing public education and promoting privatization.
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I don’t mind when Democrats lie to union leaders. I think it’s shameful how they lie to the rank and file, though.
Give them a break. Tell the truth.
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Money rules politics and with their eyes on the Big Money behind charter schools, the DNC and Congressional Democrats are deliberately completely, utterly, totally, absolutely clueless about education issues, other than “charter schools are the answer to all the problems.” Obama was no friend of public schools — in fact, he was hostile — and did more to advance the special interests of charter school operators than W ever did. Hillary would have been no different than O, based on her public statements. Bernie was/is clueless about anything other than his core issues, among which public schools aren’t included, and Liz is likewise. NEA and state teacher associations have failed to aggressively educate politicians, the media, and the public about the issue of charter schools.
he non-political watchdog Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education has issued a report warning that so much taxpayer money is being skimmed away by charter school operators that the IG investigation finds that: “Charter schools and their management organizations pose a potential risk to federal funds even as they threaten to fall short of meeting goals” because of financial fraud and their hidden ways for skimming of tax money into private pockets.
Charter schools bill themselves as “public schools”, but Supreme Courts in states like New York, Washington and elsewhere are catching on to the scam and have ruled that charter schools are really private schools because they aren’t accountable to the public because they are run by private boards that aren’t elected by voters and don’t even have to file detailed reports to the public about what they’re doing with the public’s tax money.
Charter schools should at the very least be required to file the same annual public domain financial reports that genuine public schools file to detail how the public’s tax money is being spent. But the private charter school industry is bitterly opposing that financial accountability.
In addition to siphoning the public’s tax money away from the education of children and into private pockets, non-political researcher organizations, such as UCLA’s Center for Civil Rights Remedies, have thoroughly documented the many ways in which charter schools discriminate against children of color and are, in actual fact, in the process of resegregating our nation’s schools.
Charter schools are the lucrative profit-making part of the “education reform/choice/voucher” movement that has from its very beginnings has been rooted in racism. The movement has always had resegregation of America’s schools as its core agenda: The deceptive call for vouchers and “choice” was the first racist response to the 1954 Supreme Court ruling on Brown v. Board of Education in which the Court declared that “separate but equal” public schools are inherently unequal and ordered racial integration of the public schools. That ruling triggered “white flight” from public schools to private schools — but parents quickly realized that the tuition cost of private schools was more than they wanted to pay out-of-pocket. That realization led political and private resegregationists to the concoct the “reform” of vouchers, and to sell it to eager parents by deceptively marketing it then —and still today — as merely giving parents a “choice.”
The segregationists’ 1950’s voucher crusade faded away when it became clear that, because of school attendance boundaries and racially segregated neighborhoods, no more than a few token blacks would be attending formerly all-white public schools. In 1959, just before the Court’s deadline for racial integration of public schools, a prominent newspaper in Prince Edward County, Virginia, published the outline for the charter school scheme to resegregate education: “We are working [on] a scheme [with members of Congress] in which we will abandon public schools, sell the buildings to corporations, reopen them as privately operated schools with tuition grants [vouchers] from [the State of Virginia] and from Prince Edward County. Those wishing to go to integrated schools can take their tuition grants and operate their own schools. To hell with [the Supreme Court and non-whites].”
At the same time, a prominent Virginia attorney who was an advisor to Virginia politicians announced a corollary scheme for resegregating public schools by means of standardized testing: “Negroes can be let in [to white schools] and then chased out by setting high academic standards they can’t maintain. This should leave few Negroes in the white schools. The federal courts can easily force Negroes into our white schools, but they can’t possibly administer them and listen to the merits of thousands of bellyaches [from white parents].” That was the conceptual beginning and foundation of all the standardized testing we see today, many of which tests are are designed with built-in racial and cultural biases to manufacture failure. The test results were and still are used to “prove” that traditional public schools are “failing” — a claim abetted by drastic underfunding of public schools so that they lacked the resources to teach effectively. The “failing” test scores were and are also used to “prove” that unionized public school teachers are “ineffective”.
That’s the beginning of charter schools, vouchers, and testing.
In 1971 when the Supreme Court finally ordered busing to end this ongoing de facto segregation, the segregationist “reform” movement rose from its grave and has been alive ever since been trying new tactics to restore racial segregation. That’s why the ACLU has called for a total moratorium on charter schools.
To date, the most successful resegregation scheme is charter schools because charter schools are profit centers to unscrupulous profiteers who recognized charter schools as a way to divert vast amounts of tax money into their own pockets and into the pockets of supportive politicians at every level of government.
An essential part of the strategy to mask their underlying motives has been for segregationists to sell the public on the necessity for charter schools because public schools are allegedly “failing” (Read this book: “The Manufactured Crisis”). With all manner of “research” that essentially compares apples to oranges against foreign nations’ students, and with the self-fulfilling prophecy of dismal public school performance generated by drastic underfunding of public schools, and with condemnation of public school teachers based on statistically invalid student test scores, the segregationists are succeeding in resegregating education in America via what are basically private charter schools that are funded with public money.
No charter school should receive public tax money unless if files the same detailed public domain financial reports that genuine public schools file to be accountable to the taxpayer about what’s happening to taxpayer money — that’s just common sense protection of taxpayers’ money.
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Democratic People’s Republic of Korea / Progressive Policy Institute perfect examples of New Speak. There is nothing progressive about NDC / DLC style democrats . But us progressive better just “stop our whining” .
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The Progressive Policy Institute is the think tank of the conservative Democratic Leadership Council. It is not a progressive think tank and never was one. It is not accurate or appropriate to judge all democrats by PPI.
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Julia Who here cannot think of Orwell, who is apparently reaching cliche’ status in the USA.
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