Lisa Haver is a retired teacher in the Philadelphia public schools and co-founder of the Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools.
In this article, she asks who gave the billionaires the right to reorganize our public schools, when none has any knowledge or experience in education.
None of them has a clue about how to teach r how to run a school. Yet people are lining up to get their money.
Who will hold them accountable when their ideas fail, as Bill Gates Common Core failed?
She is thinking now of Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg. She is thinking of Laurene Powell Jobs. They know nothing about education.
“Over the past 20 years, education policy has increasingly been enacted not to satisfy the needs of the students and their families, but the wants of the wealthy and powerful who are converting public education from a civic enterprise to a marketplace for edu-vendors: the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation has paid to expand charters and lobby for the use of Common Core standards in all 50 states; real estate and insurance mogul Eli Broad now leads a group of corporate funders pushing a plan to move half of all K-12 students in Los Angeles into charter schools; the Walton family has initiated a new $1 billion campaign to promote charters nationwide; Trump financier Carl Icahn has established a chain of charters in New York City.
“No one elected these billionaires, and they are accountable to no one. We can’t call our members of Congress to object to their policies. While Americans continue to condemn the power of the very rich to influence elections, we must also fight to stop them from having more influence over the future of our young people than the constituents of democratically elected school boards.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Our government is run mostly by a bunch of free market zealots that naively believe the magic market will cure all that ails us. This assumption is patently false. Market based education imposes an untried economic system on young people that no other country in the developed world is reckless enough to foster. Markets are not about justice; they are all about winners and losers. When funding is drained from public education, the losers are the 90% that attend public schools. Billionaires are delighted with a system that allows them to use other people’s children as play things or guinea pigs. An added bonus for them is that they get to use public funds for their grand experiments. They are also given generous tax credits and or write-offs for any of their own funds used to conduct their experiments. This is especially appealing to Silicon Valley where if their grand experiments catch fire, they stand to make even more money and acquire more outlets to hide their cash, This is an example of irresponsible government and a disregard for our young people.
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There’s nothing naive about it. They don’t believe the market will cure all our ills. They know – from experience – that it will cure all their ills (well, except for moral bankruptcy, but they don’t seem to suffer from that – we all suffer from their having it; moral bankruptcy is apparently ego syntonic).
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I’m not even sure what that means, ego syntonic, but it sounds so right.
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The void at the core of these billionaires’ avarice can never be filled; thus, to use Bill Gates’ term, their “infinite greed.”
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Ego dystonic symptoms are unpleasant to the sufferer and cause the sufferer to seek assistance. Depression, for instance. Ego syntonic symptoms don’t directly cause any problems for the sufferer – only people the sufferer deals with (grandiosity, for instance). Many of the symptoms of personality disorders are ego syntonic, which is why it’s so hard to treat people with such disorders – they don’t see a problem. Or, if they see a problem, it resides elsewhere – in other people.
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I read some of the comments attached to the Philly Inquirer article and they, especially the one by Denis Ian, were hearteningly focused on denigrating the ignorance and hubris of the wealthy. What was missing was the undeniable fact that these billionaires are monetizing children and profiting from their foray into education. It’s not just ignorance; it’s greed, pure and simple.
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Ciedie, that was funny!
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So TRUE. So what do the billioniares have? GREED and BAD ideas! They have NO CLUE and don’t really care about public schools. Those GREEDY billionaires only think about their endless stream of revenue. They are SICK.
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The only thing they need to know is how to buy legislators and overwhelm democracy. It’s up to those of us who know about education and care about democracy to educate the voters.
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Thank you, Diane.
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Lisa,
It is so inspiring to read such well written truthfulness in, of all places, a major news publication. Thank you!
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Read this about BIG MONEY corrupting: https://www.truthdig.com/articles/growing-danger-dynastic-wealth/
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Teaching English in the Age of Trump: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/09/17/teaching-high-school-english-in-the-age-of-trump-215611
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No one elected these billionaires that are addicted to power. That irrational addiction – that orgasmic rush – causes them to use their wealth to buy the power they have as they continue to subvert the U.S. Constitution and the Constitutional Republic it guides and the role of voters in electing representatives by fooling and confusing as many voters as possible.
No movement based on alternative facts (lies) and conspiracy theories deserves to escape the septic tank.
If it wasn’t for their wealth, they would be ignored by rational, logical thinking people. THey would be labeled crackpots.
They would be irrelevant – just one person with one vote.
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The assumption that the wealthy are somehow better than the rest of us has resulted in a morally bankrupt leader and half baked policies backed by billionaires.
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Billionaires could do more to improve not only public schools, but equally important, to begin to change the racial estrangement that is at the root of all of America’s inequality, by forming a national real estate firm funded by at least $20 billion and which would buy homes for nonwhite families in racially monolithic white cities and suburbs across our nation. The United States Supreme Court recognized the inherent social cancer of our nation’s segregated communities when it ordered busing to integrate schools. We need to actually live together as physical neighbors in order to learn to trust each other, to learn to truly become, as our national mottos declares, “e pluribus unum”. So, which billionaires will take on this challenge?
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“we need to actually live together as physical neighbors in order to learn to trust each other”
yes, yes, yes
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All of this seems, to me, more a cause for sorrow than for anger. Increasingly, in our New Feudal Age, those who wield real worldly power, which is always economic, are isolated in echo chambers–like the Russian nobility in Tolstoy’s War and Peace. They live lives completely separated from those of ordinary people. Very few people–even highly pampered ones–get up in the morning and say to themselves, “I want to go out and wreck havoc today.” I am not saying that it isn’t the case that radix malorum cupiditas est, but the road to hell is also often paved with good intentions that the very wealthy see as a win-win–for themselves AND for others.
No amount of money will purchase humility. This is why the sages have always warned us about how wealth warps minds and spirits. All our wisdom traditions teach this.
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Answer: in the oligarchy which is the U.S., it doesn’t matter who “elected” whom. The Ruling Parasite Class does what it wants, and, controlling both major political parties, gets away with it.
Some history:
US Is an Oligarchy Not a Democracy, says Scientific Study http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article38235.htm
The Lewis Powell Memo – Corporate Blueprint to Dominate Democracy | By Charlie Cray | Common Dreams
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2011/08/25/lewis-powell-memo-corporate-blueprint-dominate-democracy
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The Powell memo is evidence that the “vast right wing conspiracy” Mrs. Clinton spoke of in the late 1990s was not a figment of her imagination. It needs to be shared widely and often…
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Not only are these moneyed reformers not qualified as educators. They never seem to offer their children’s schools (small classes, clean and well-maintained physical plants, arts enrichment of all kinds, professionally-staffed richly-resourced libraries, limited use of technology in early grades, outdoor play equipment and activities) as a model to pursue for all children.
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Until we get a change in thinking in our country about the role of government, we are going to be stuck with plutocrats determining where investments should be made in the public good. As this Slate article from 2006 notes (see link below), we’ve been through this before at the turn of the 20th Century… and the result was the construction of libraries in many small towns across America, the donation of lands for several national parks, and the creation of foundations whose funding sources were the result of exploitative practices by plutocrats who short-changed their employees and the government because they believed they had a clearer understanding of the needs of the country. (http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history_lesson/2006/11/looking_the_carnegie_gift_horse_in_the_mouth.html)
I am no fan of the plutocrats… but I am open to the idea that in some cases their intentions are pure (i.e. see the billions Mr. Gates spent to eliminate polio) and am open to the notion that some of their ideas might have merit (i.e. advances in technology, algorithms and brain science that are being exploited by market researchers could be applied to education).
Here’s a conundrum: If billionaires like Ms. Chan and Ms. Jobs are offering additional resources to public education should we reject the money under all circumstances? I don’t have a clear answer… yet… but I do appreciate the libraries Mr. Carnegie provided and the National Parks the Rockefellers gave to our country.
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Wayne,
There is a difference between the plutocrats of the Early 20th century and those today. The Carnegie and Rosenwald gifts were gifts. They built schools and libraries and gave them without conditions. Today’s ploutocrats engage in venture philanthropy. They expect a return on investment. They give in ways that amplify their business interests.
If Gates and Zuckerberg want to educate the people of Liberia, why don’t they pay for well-trained teachers? Why do they insist on making a profit? Why is CZI investing in technology for schools instead of the kind of schools they attended?
When is enough enough?
Why not copy Carnegie’s example? He created thousands of free public libraries for the public. He wasn’t selling books.
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