If you are old enough, you may remember that David Osborne was the guru of privatization and competition during the Clinton administration. His message was that public servants are lazy and unaccountable and need to compete with private vendors. That competition will make government workers try harder and deliver better service.
That was more than 20 years ago, and apparently Osborne hasn’t learned anything new. Now he is hawking a book that advocates charterization of schools and districts.
Jeanne Kaplan, who served two terms on the Denver school boards, believes that the much-touted success story of Denver is a hoax. She first encountered Osborne’s inaccurate account of the Denver “miracle” last year, and she took it apart then.
A few days ago, she turned out to hear Osborne speak about his new book on the virtues of privatization, and she heard the same tired song. His visit to Denver was sponsored by the pro-privatization “The 74,” the Public Policy Institute, DFER Colorado, A+ Colorado, Gates, and other reformy groups. The room was half-full of reform types, almost all white.
Osborne pointed to D.C. (which has the largest achievement gaps in the nation), New Orleans (where ACT scores are in the cellar compared to the rest of the state, and charter schools are highly stratified by race and income), and Indianapolis as exemplars of “success.” He also praised Memphis, and when someone pointed out the failure of the Achievement School District (mostly Memphis), he simply denied it, having no facts in hand.
Osborne’s Message: All charters, alll the time.
Don’t let facts or reality or multiple scandals get in the way.
Jeanne said that Osborne had a book signing at Denver’s famous Tattered Cover bookshop that evening. Only about a dozen people showed up. Sad. But not very.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
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“David Osborne was the guru of privatization and competition during the Clinton administration. His message was that public servants are lazy and unaccountable and need to compete with private vendors.”
When I read what Osborn thinks about people like me, I have to take calming breaths as I thought about the 60-to-100 hours a week I worked for thirty years as a public school teacher. I came in hours early. I stayed hours late. I corrected papers at home late into the night until my vision blurred. I worked weekends to correct student work, do grades, and plan lessons.
Even in the Vergara court case, the experts for the corporate reformers could only guess that 1-to-3 percent of public school teachers were incompetent and on that guess, they wanted to punish 100 percent of the teachers by stripping them of due process rights.
What am I still thinking? That David Osborne and idiots like him are more dangerous to the United States than Osama Bin Laden was … Conclusion: Treat Osborne like the U.S. did for Bin Laden – send in Seal Team Six or a Delta Force team to take out David Osborne and the rest of the corporate reform idiots like him with shoot to kill orders.
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Yes, truly a “calming breath” moment: I have been working on that one for long, long years as my decades of hard work somehow repeatedly get turned into words like “selfish,” bad,” “ineffectual” and “lazy.”
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This study came from the BBC:
What hours do teachers really work?
Teachers’ unions have warned about excessive workloads and complained about staff being put under too much pressure. The long working week has been one of the grievances prompting teachers to go on strike. …
So how long is the working week (for teachers)?
“For secondary head teachers, it stretches to an average of 63.3 hours per week – the longest of any of the teaching jobs. Primary classroom teachers worked longer hours – 59.3 hours – than their secondary school counterparts, who worked for 55.7 hours per week. The hours in a secondary academy were slightly less, at 55.2 hours.”
http://www.bbc.com/news/education-27087942
The Washington Post ran a Survey: Teachers work 53 hours per week on avearge (the source of funding for this survey will surprise some if not many?
“Teaching is a much talked about yet often misunderstood profession. Educators frequently hear well-meaning comments from parents and friends like “It must be so sweet to spend your days with children” or “How wonderful to be done for the day by three o’clock.” Are they serious? …
“A new report from Scholastic and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, called Primary Sources: America’s Teachers on the Teaching Profession, finally quantifies just how hard teachers work: 10 hours and 40 minutes a day on average. That’s a 53-hour work week! …
The 7.5 hours in the classroom are just the starting point. On average, teachers are at school an additional 90 minutes beyond the school day for mentoring, providing after-school help for students, attending staff meetings and collaborating with peers. Teachers then spend another 95 minutes at home grading, preparing classroom activities, and doing other job-related tasks. The workday is even longer for teachers who advise extracurricular clubs and coach sports —11 hours and 20 minutes, on average.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/survey-teachers-work-53-hours-per-week-on-average/2012/03/16/gIQAqGxYGS_blog.html?utm_term=.19ca1bb2418a
But how long does the average American work in a week?
“Americans do work hard. Americans work an average of 34.4 hours a week, longer than their counterparts in the world’s largest economies. Many work even longer. Adults employed full time report working an average of 47 hours per week, which equates to nearly six days a week, according to Gallup.”
https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+hours+a+week+does+the+aveage+american+work+full+time&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8
Conclusion: Public School teachers work, on average, almost twice the number of hours a week than the average American that has a full-time job and doesn’t teach.
http://money.cnn.com/2015/07/09/news/economy/americans-work-bush/index.html
Then there is this well-documented fact that reveals how much U.S. public school teachers spend to buy supplies for their classrooms. This fact alone proves that most if not all teachers care about the children they teach putting another lie in its grave and again I ask, “Who and why are these lies being spread?”
In August 2016, Time.com reports, “The Education Market Association says that virtually all teachers wind up paying out of pocket for supplies, and it’s not chump change, either. On average, most spent nearly $500 last year, and one in 10 spent $1,000 or more. All told, a total of $1.6 billion in school supply costs is shifted from parents — or, increasingly, from cash-strapped districts — onto teachers themselves.”
http://time.com/money/4392319/teachers-buying-school-supplies/
Then there is this:
How does teachers’ pay compare to other Americans with the same level of education?
The Economic Policy Institute says, “A comparison of teachers’ wages to those of workers with comparable skill requirements, including accountants, reporters, registered nurses, computer programmers, clergy, personnel officers, and vocational counselors and inspectors, shows that teachers earned $116 less per week in 2002, a wage disadvantage of 12.2%. Because teachers worked more hours per week, the hourly wage disadvantage was an even larger 14.1%.
“Teachers’ weekly wages have grown far more slowly than those for these comparable occupations; teacher wages have deteriorated about 14.8% since 1993 and by 12.0% since 1983 relative to comparable occupations.”
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When they first started promoting charters they referred to them as “contractors” – which is what they are.
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The most surprising thing about Osborne is he says private contracting could turn the K-12 school system into the health care system- as if this is a plus.
The US health care system is wildly expensive and wildly inequitable. Why would you want to model anything on it?
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Bill Gates says his foundation will be “investing” more in public schools- as opposed to charter schools.
But you have to use “data” to get the money 🙂
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Now this is SCARY. Bill Gates is just another JERK. Get him away from our young. He eats our young for his meals.
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Does that mean we also have to give them data – such as student information, results of teacher evaluations, etc?
Data is a four-letter word.
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“Sad. But not very.”
Oooh, SNAP! Love it!
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I’m off topic, sorry, but I am excited. Congratulate my students! I have just been able to Opt Out all my English classes from taking the SBAC Interim Assessments. I work in a district with criminals on the board and their deform appointees in administration, so the entire district is being forced to take the computer-based interim assessments made by the Smarter (dumber) (un)Balanced Assessment (not) Consortium (conspiracy), or SBAC. You know those interim tests are just a stepping stone toward Competency Based data collection taking over instruction time completely.
In California, schools and districts are required to inform parents of their right to Opt Out of state tests. So, I went to admin and asked for the form letter to parents before Back to School Night so I could ‘make sure parents are informed of their rights’. Admin said, Gulp. There was some back and forth about whether state law was in play for tests required by the district versus by the federal government. I insisted that California parents always have the right to have their children receive instruction instead of standardized testing, and always have the right to refuse having their children forced to sign in to a website that collects testing data.
I am being granted a waiver Out of the SBAC IAB’s. I get to instead design and implement my own formative assessments. We are going to read — together — some great, whole fiction and poetry (on paper), and write some essays about what we read. On paper. With pens. We will discuss the results — together — and learn from the experience. I won. My students won.
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Congrats, LCT!
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That is GREAT … GREAT x 1000!
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LCT,
Congratulations!!!!!
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Awesome, LCT! Way to fight the good fight. Hope this serves as an example and many of your colleagues follow suit.
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Thank you all. I read your congrats over and over again.
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Diane,
The 1-1/2-y.o. post you linked from Jeanne Kaplan is wonderful for its focus on RESULTS.
This is our strongest suit against ed-reformers, & it grows in power with each year of data that pours in– 20+ yrs of results from the charter movement, 16 yrs from the accountability movement, 5 – 10 yrs from voucher schools. Where is the improvement in ed-achievement? –yes, let’s measure it in faulty stdzd test results, since that’s the measure ed-reformers chose. And compare it to gold-std NEAP sampling, which gives the lie to trumpeted local results. And let’s compare pre-to-post ed-reform v-a-v hs grad results– highlighting the failure of online schools.
The comparison I’m waiting to see is taxpayer investment in ed-reform vs results. This will be trickier to reveal, because most states which have promoted the privatization movement for yrs make their school-funding formulas murky. That’s because they approve & fund charters at the state level, making it difficult to glean the effect on the local district, even tho those folks bear the brunt of the costs.
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President Trump is seeking $1 Billion, to set up ESAs for children of military families. See
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/campaign-k-12/2017/10/trump_team_school_choice_military_families.html
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Further proof, as if needed, that Trump is an idiot. Department of Defense Schools are known to be very good – that’s where the International Baccalaureate comes from. Other military kids, depending on their situation, have the same options for public or private schools as any other kids. I grew up near Chanute Air Force Base in Rantoul, IL and our schools had plenty of military kids. (The local Catholic school, incidentally, had very few military kids – I guess members of the Air Force know the value of public education.)
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Dienne,
Correction. Trump is not an idiot. He is a moron. Rex Tillerson said so, and he knows Trump.
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