Mercedes Schneider writes here about a company that casts its nets widely to profit from money that was intended for instruction.
ERDI: Paying School Admin to Review Ed Products that Those Admin Could Then Purchase… (?)
There is a price to be paid by administrators who betray the public trust. Consider the sad case of Barbara Byrd Bennett, once chancellor of the Chicago public schools, now in prison.
Steven Singer explains here why public schools are the safest environments for children. They are supervised. They are run by professionals, who are licensed and certified.
He writes:
“A California home-school where parents shackled, starved and abused their children is a symptom of a larger disease.
“And that disease is privatization.
“David Allen Turpin and his wife, Louise Anna Turpin, were arrested after police found the couple’s 13 children living in deplorable conditions in their Perris, California, home.
“Some of the children were actually young adults but were so malnourished investigators at first mistook them for minors.
“It is a situation that just could not have happened had those children been in the public school system.
“Someone would have seen something and reported it to Child Protective Services. But school privatization shields child predators from the light and enables a system where minors become the means to every adult end imaginable.
“Let me be clear. Privatization is defined as the transfer of a service from public to private ownership and control.
“In education circles, that means home-schools, charter schools and voucher schools – all educational providers that operate without adequate accountability.
“We are taking our most precious population – our children – and allowing them to be educated behind closed doors, out of sight from those tasked with ensuring they are getting the best opportunities to learn and are free from abuse.
“And since home-schooling operates with almost zero oversight, it is the most susceptible to child neglect and mistreatment.
“Children who in traditional public schools would have a whole plethora of people from teachers to counselors to principals to cafeteria workers who can observe the danger signs of abuse are completely removed from the home-school environment.
“Home-schooled children receive their educations almost exclusively from parents.
“While most moms and dads would never dream of abusing their kids, home-schooling provides the perfect cover for abusers like the Turpins to isolate children and mistreat them with impunity.
“It is a situation that at least demands additional oversight. And at most it requires we rethink the entire enterprise as dangerous and wrongheaded.
“Charter and voucher schools at least utilize whole staffs of people to educate children. The chances of something like this happening at these institutions is much smaller. However, both types of school also are much less accountable for their actions than traditional public schools.
“And that is the common factor – responsibility. Who is being held answerable when things go wrong? At traditional public schools, there is a whole chain of adults who are culpable for children. At these other institutions, the number of people in the hot seat shrinks to zero.”
Read it all. Think about it.
Edward Johnson is an advocate for high quality public schools for all children. He lives in Atlanta. He has studied the works of G. Edwards Deming, who understood that you don’t blame frontline workers for problems with the system. If things go wrong, fix the system.
He wrote the following letter to Rev. Diane Daugherty about the absurdity of “choice” as a fix for the system (see her letter after his). In fact, “choice” is an abdication of responsibility by those who have the power to fix the system. They turn problems over to the market and hope for the best, ignoring the well-documented fact that the market deepens pre-existing inequities.
Of course, anyone who thinks that the Walton family, the DeVos family, Trump, ALEC, and other plutocrats are committed to civil rights and equity is either hopelessly naive or on their payroll.
He writes:
Rev. Diane Daugherty,
Thank you for lending your voice to the matter. Interestingly, one may take your understanding as a key aspect of the law research paper Opt-Out Education: School Choice as Racial Subordination, by Osamudia R. James, currently Vice Dean, University of Miami School of Law.
Atlanta superintendent Meria Carstarphen, Atlanta school board members, and BOOK, including especially its supporters UNCF and Andrew Young Foundation, would do well to learn from Vice Dean James’ paper.
But it may be unreasonable to expect any of them would. For example, this AJC article makes clear the superintendent, arguably Atlanta school choice proponents’ leader, holds an unshakable mindset fixated on commercializing public education in Atlanta by transforming it from a systemic public good into disparate private consumer goods, à la KIPP and others. So transformed, and unlikely to have resulted in improved schools, parents as consumers may then choose a school for their child just as they would choose a McDonald’s Happy Meal for the child. So goes the superintendent’s reasoning.
The pushback that arose in response to the superintendent’s profane conflation of consumerism and public education prompted school choice advocate Robert Holland to rise in her defense, with an attempt to say what the superintendent really meant to say. Holland, at the conservative and libertarian public policy think tank The Heartland Institute, blogged “The School Choice Generation Wants a Full Educational Menu.”
The Atlanta superintendent, school board, and BOOK would also do well to take from their partner and supporter, Walton Family Foundation, a lesson about how consumerism’s choice really works. Last week, the AJC and other media reported that, “based on a number of factors, including financial performance,” the Waltons made the decision to close their Lithonia Sam’s Club at Stonecrest. Was the store’s consumer community consulted or otherwise involved beforehand? Nope. Did the store’s consumer community have a choice? Nope. Now that once consumer community fears the Waltons have put upon it more problematic, if not new, food desert they did not “choose.”
The lesson, then, is who, in consumerism’s commercialized world, truly has choice and who truly does not.
Diane Ravitch offers an excerpt from Vice Dean James’ paper that amplifies the lesson (my emphases):
“James advocates for limitations on school choice ‘to prevent the disastrous social consequences–the abandonment of the public school system, to particularly deleterious consequence for poor and minority schoolchildren and their families–that occur as the collective result of individual, albeit rational, decisions. I also advocate for limitations on school choice in an attempt to encourage individuals to consider their obligations to children not their own, but part of their community all the same….The actual impact of school choice cannot be ignored. Given the radicalized realities of the current education system, choice is not ultimately used to broaden options or agency for minority parents. Rather, school choice is used to sanitize inequality in the school system; given sufficient choices, the state and its residents are exempted from addressing the sources of unequal educational opportunities for poor and minority students. States promote agency even as the subjects supposedly exercising that agency are disabled. Experience makes clear that school choice simply should not form an integral or foundational aspect of education reform policy. Rather, the focus should be on improving public schooling for all students such that all members of society can exercise genuine agency, initially facilitated by quality primary and secondary education. Ultimately, improving public education begins with preventing its abandonment.’”
This is Dr. Daugherty’s letter to the Atlanta Board of Education:
From: Diane Dougherty [mailto:doughertyadd@gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, January 17, 2018 8:01 PM
To: EdJohnsonAfQPE <edwjohnson@aol.com>
Cc: AfQPE@aol.com; bamos@atlantapublicschools.us; cbriscoe_brown@atlanta.k12.ga.us; epcollins@atlantapublicschools.us; jesteves@atlantapublicschools.us; lgrant@atlantapublicschools.us; nmeister@atlantapublicschools.us; pierre.gaither@atlanta.k12.ga.us; mjcarstarphen@atlanta.k12.ga.us; annwcramer@gmail.com; Erika Y. Mitchell <eymitchell@gmail.com>; Kandis Wood <kandiswood@gmail.com>; Michelle Olympiadis <michelle.olympiadis@gmail.com>; education@naacpatlanta.org; president@naacpatlanta.org; info@bookatl.org; david.mitchell@bookatl.org; Naomi.Shelton@uncf.org; sekou.biddle@uncf.org; cmeadows@morehouse.edu; mbinderman@geears.org
Subject: Re: BOOK and newly installed Atlanta Board of Education Members
BOOK seems to promote better outcomes outside any effort to make existing public education better. Their methodology seems to create parallel academic structures diminishing schools that need an infusion of structures and funds. To me their short term efforts will not evolve into a sustainable plan 30 years from now. Without any data that supports their perceived “Better Outcomes, BOOK’S emphasis on School Choice has proven a poor strategy in decimated African American schools in Tennessee, Michigan and Louisiana….in spite of billions spent…why would there be improved outcomes here if it has not worked there? Rev. Diane Dougherty
Diane Dougherty, ARCWP
Avondale Estates, GA 30002
678-918-1945
doughertyadd@gmail.com
The Michigan House passed a bill to let the charter sector—including for-profit charters and cyber charters—share in millage revenues. Voters no doubt think they are underwriting their local community public schools, but they will be paying for the privately managed charters if the State Senate agrees.
Michigan charters are unusual in that they operate with little accountability. Some 80% of the state’s charters operate for profit.
In recent years, with the spread of charters, Michigan’s ranking on NAEP has fallen from the middle of the national rankings to near the bottom.
Michigan believes in investing in failure. Results don’t matter.
Readers of this blog are familiar with the story of ECOT, the mammoth virtual charter school in Ohio. It made over $1 Billion for the entrepreneur who founded it. But it seems to be slipping rapidly down the drain hole.
Mother Jones tells the story here in graphic detail.
“Now, with ECOT imploding, some state politicians have floated the idea that Lager, who has made millions in profits off the school and come a long way from the Waffle House, should be personally held responsible for paying back some of the $80 million owed to the state. But while the coming days will reveal if the political will or mechanisms exist to make this happen, it’s unclear how he might ever be held accountable—because the real scandal is that ECOT grew up legally, with the support of state politicians and national GOP power brokers, and that in many ways it has served as a model for schools like it across the country. Now, the same districts ECOT pulled its funds from are scrambling to find a way to take in its former students, and Ohio is facing a reckoning, after nearly two decades when the state became one of the country’s freest laboratories for pro-charter policies. “Why did it take a generation and a half of kids to go through this crappy system for us to do something about it,” Stephen Dyer, a former Ohio state representative asked me in exasperation in December. “The reason is because a lot of money came in.”
We learned recently that the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow was losing its authorizer, which had made 3% on every student who enrolled. Will ECOT die? Is it really finished? Maybe some other authorizer will step in to claim the commission for running one of the lowest performing schools in the nation. Obviously, no one in state government was willing to close ECOT down.
Meanwhile, give the devil his due. Someone has profited, even if kids have not.
Stephen Dyer writes about the profits extracted by ECOT’s sponsor. More money goes to the profiteer investor than to the teachers.
https://10thperiod.blogspot.com/2018/01/ecot-in-receivership-ecot-paid-more-to.html
How do you spell S-C-A-M?
In Ohio, it seems, if you take care of politicians, they take care of you.
The kids don’t pay the legislators.
I applaud those who defect or dissent from received wisdom. I know from personal experience that it is especially hard to dissent when it means stepping off a money train and leaving behind your friends.
Paul Emerich was a true believer in “personalized learning.” On this Blog, the term is translated to mean “depersonalized learning.”
Peter Greene is not sure whether to congratulate him for waking up or to chastise him for his cluelessness.
Greene writes:
“I’ve been trying to understand why this piece, which confirms so much of what many of us have said, and does so from the perspective of someone who’s been there– why does this rub me the wrong way. The best explanation is this: Emerich calls himself naive, but I think he’s letting himself off easy. I don’t think he’s so much naive as arrogant, and the same arrogance that was displayed in heading off to charter techno-teaching without doing any due diligence is the same arrogance that leads him to make this Momentous Announcement of things that he has personally discovered, as if a few thousand other folks hadn’t already caught on years and years ago.
“I appreciate his point of view, and his confirmation that charter school companies are businesses, not schools, and that personalized learning via computer is a sham and a fraud, and I’m happy that people are sharing this like crazy. But dammit– if more of these tech folks would do their damn homework, we wouldn’t have to keep learning the same old lessons over and over, and we wouldn’t keep subjecting live human children to foolishness that we already know is foolishness. In the meantime, he’s now the Academic Chair at the high-end private Latin School of Chicago. I guess time will tell what lessons he actually learned from his stay in Silicon Valley.”
I’m willing to be charitable and welcome Paul to the Club of Reformed True Believers.
This article appeared in Raw Story in 2011. It remains timely.
It tells about the goal of the religious right to eliminate public education, destroy unions, and dismantle environmental policies, among other unworthy goals.
Is that what Jesus would have wanted?
This article was written in 2015 but it is as timely today as it was then. Maybe more timely, because in 2015, who would have dreamed that Betsy DeVos would soon be U.S. Secretary of Education?
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is a bill mill founded in 1973 and funded by the Koch Brothers, the DeVos family, and major corporations. It operates secretively. It does not issue press releases. It churns out model laws that state legislators introduce into their own states to deregulate business and privatize the public sector for profit. It is a stealth political campaign to privatize everything for profit while classified by the IRS as a charity. Its members include one of every four state legislators in the nation. It’s corporate members include some of the nation’s pre-eminent businesses.
One of the major targets of ALEC is public education, because it is public. ALEC has model legislation for charter schools, vouchers, and cybercharters. It has Model legislation to eliminate collective bargaining and unions. It has Model legislation to lower standards for teachers and deregulate entry into teaching.
To learn more about ALEC, watch DeVos and read the website ALEC Exposed.
Alecexposed.com
Circulate this post and the links to everyone you know.
Diane Ravitch's blog 