Jeremy Mohler of “In the Public Interest” writes about a new report showing that public schools are underfunded on purpose.
“Like many reports, the latest from the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools (AROS) drops a number of disturbing facts.
Between 2005 and 2017, the federal government neglected to spend $580 billion it was supposed to on students from poor families and students with disabilities. Over that same time, the personal net worth of the nation’s 400 wealthiest people grew by $1.57 trillion.
“Seventeen states actually send more education dollars to wealthier districts than to high-poverty ones.
Over 1.5 million students attend a school that has a law enforcement officer, but no school counselor. The school policing industry was a $2.7 billion market as of 2015.
“But Confronting the Education Debt doesn’t just throw numbers against other numbers to see what sticks. It tells a tragic story: the rich are getting richer, and our public schools are broke on purpose. And it comes to an indisputable conclusion: black, brown, and low-income students and their schools are owed billions of dollars.
That’s because many public schools do in fact work, but only when they are fully resourced, which tends to be in white, middle class, and affluent communities.
“These findings drive home that adding market forces to public education — so-called “school choice” — is a superficial and, even, harmful attempt at solving a deep and enduring problem. After being hijacked as a political project by private investors and billionaires, charter schools have begun to threaten the existence of public education itself. As they grow in number, they siphon more and more funding from school districts, forcing cuts at traditional, neighborhood schools. Charter schools are costing San Diego Unified School District, for example, over $65 million annually — or about $620 per neighborhood school student.”
The answer is clear: fully fund our public schools and drop the fantasy that the market will fix the problems of underfunded schools.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
We received yet another unsolicited flyer from a charter school yesterday. It was from Harlem Hebrew, one of your favorite charters (note sarcasm), which has rebranded itself as Harlem PUBLIC (their emphasis). Why are there so many charters, if they can’t fill the seats? Harlem is truly littered with charters. Has anyone done an analysis as to whether this is actually a benefit to this community? If charters are so in demand, why do I continue to receive unsolicited admissions flyers?
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Beth, this is a great post and it really speaks the truth. Why are we getting all these marketing flyers if the charter schools are so full? Further, this proves even more the money behind the fake charters with the fancy marketing pieces. The real truth is that they need students and are pulling out all the stops before the school folds.
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I have been seeing this take place in Michigan for years. Many politicians have attacked public schools and tried to use their attacks to destroy the fabric of public ed. In 2008 the Republicans gained control of the Michigan House the Senate, and won the governor’s seat. These politicians, with the help of the Devos political machine, cut funding for public schools drastically, while lifting the cap on for profit charters. What these Republican figured out was, if we can’t destroy public ed from the outside, we will destroy them from the inside and then attack the schools for lack of performance. Increasing testing, cutting budgets, lifting the cap on charters, and using value added measures for teacher evaluations have all led to putting public education on the endangered species list.
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Those attacks stared back in the 1980s and they were nationwide and have never stopped. We learned from the Nazis that if you repeat the same lie enough people will start to believe it.
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charter/choice school profiteers looking for wealthier and wealthier parents?
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Maybe. Maybe wealthier parents or any parents? We don’t live in Harlem either.
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Our local newspaper just printed my last letter to the editor. It follows:
Watching the Mayo clinic program on PBS initiated a flood of emotions and memories. Doctors, people working noncompetitively together. Ideas shared, ever seeking superior methodology. Patients were people first, not objects, statistical oddities.
Highland’s school system under Allen Warren’s superintendency utilized this modus operandi, people together building a superior school system.
Administrators primary responsibility; helping teachers become better teachers, building on teachers own perceived strengths, overcoming their own perceived weaknesses. A research professional library was initiated. The goal; meeting children’s needs, not test scores.
Under this system one teacher’s students displayed skills and proficiencies far superior to anything evaluators had seen in Indiana. Teachers from many school systems came to observe, learn.
Nowadays politicians impose their ignorant strictured views onto school systems. Test scores supplant children’s educative needs. Political interference results becomes obvious; teacher shortages, discontent. The profession teachers joined, gone. Democratic principles versus autocracy produce vastly different results.
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Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
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“These students are among countless others just like them in cities like Detroit — kids who’ve spent their childhoods starting over every couple of years, navigating new schools, trying to fit in.
Stories like theirs ripple through school districts across the country where the growing push to create new options such as magnet and charter schools has put an end to the days when most students enrolled in their neighborhood school. A comprehensive federal study that tracked a group of 20,000 children from 1998 until 2007 found that one in eight had attended four or more schools by the eighth grade. Those students were concentrated in large urban areas where people living in poverty are also grappling with evictions, foreclosures, and other forces that push people from their homes.”
“You can’t create trust between a student and parent and a school when you have this constant disruption,” said Nikolai Vitti, superintendent of the Detroit Public Schools Community District, which runs roughly half the schools in Detroit. “It’s hard to hold teachers accountable to performance if children are not consistently in their classrooms. We are going to set teachers, schools, and principals up for failure if we don’t acknowledge that.”
I was really struck by her use of the ed reform slogan – “disruption”
Of course changing schools so often is bad for them. Only an idiot, or an ed reform billionaire, would apply “disruption” business theory to children and families and communities.
This is what comes from slavishly following fads that come out of the private sector. Just because a CEO or wealthy person says it doesn’t mean we have to do it. We could do our own thinking.
Public schools were never intended to be businesses. That’s why business theories are such a disaster in them.
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There really is hope out there, though. I’ve been listening to the two candidates for Ohio and it is a huge change since 2010, when ed reform and privatization utterly dominated all discussion of public education.
We’re actually talking about public schools in Ohio again. It happened quietly, without a huge PR campaign or lobbyists- it appears we have simply stopped allowing our entire education debate to be dominated by privatizers.
I have heard more discussion of public schools in this campaign cycle than I have heard in this state for 20 years. Last night they were discussing funding. Not charters. Not vouchers. Not how much public schools suck and how we should replace them all. Not anti-union politicking disguised as education advocacy.
Funding. Of existing public schools.
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This report provides insights into how our public schools are shortchanged both by states and the federal government. Charters and/or vouchers have only added to the problem of inequity, and market based education simply perpetuates more separate and unequal policies. The end of this study offers a list of solutions, the most important of which is the need for us to invest in well resourced public schools. Privatization has unfairly targeted poor minority young people. We need to vote for candidates that support strong public education and vote out complicit politicians in the charter lobby’s pocket. Public education is the best hope to provide all Americans access, opportunity and excellence all very possible when we invest in it.
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Of course!!! The title of this post explains it all. Thank you.
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This is XQ Americas advice to state lawmakers:
Click to access XQ_PMG_Graphik_08.30.18_DIGITAL_spreads.pdf
It’s 60 pages of currently fashionable business slogans, but note how they carefully and deliberately avoid any mention of funding. I can’t imagine what it cost. Millions of dollars.
This is true all across ed reform. That’s because their wealthy backers would stop backing them if they drew any connections between funding and strong schools.
So they have to produce these ridiculous cheerleading documents that ignore every practical and real issue and insist it’s all about “motivation!”
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Tech billionaires advise public schools to devote funds to cheerleading for the programs and priorities that tech billionaires prefer:
“Spread the word about rethinking high school far and wide.
XQ advertised the competition on billboards, TV, radio, and
social media. We drove the XQ Super School Bus to
communities around the country, listening to students and
bringing people together.”
These are the kind of super-duper helpful suggestions we get from the ed reform chorus.
They lobby to cut public school funding and then spend tens of millions of their own money telling us how to spend the remaining public funds we managed to hang onto.
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“School choice” — is a superficial and, even, harmful attempt at solving a deep and enduring problem.
I think school choice is not an attempt to solve a deep and enduring problem.
It is one of many strategies of problems avoidance.
It is a scheme to place consumer choice above civic responsibility for supporting the public good, including public schools and universities. Public schools and universities are not the only under-valued and under-funded public goods. Think of the indifference to securing clean air, safe water to drink, affordable housing and health care, public transportation, protected lands and habitats.
Distracting attention from all things “public” is the master plan behind “customer choice,” “personalizing” everything in sight, unbundling goods and services: You want more? You pay extra.
Now of course, many in the billionaire class feel entitled to show that democratic governance is so inefficient, ineffective, and time consuming that public services should be entrusted to the profit seekers.
The billionaires want to ramp up all things innovative and entrepreneurial. They have the know-how to be disruptive. They are not afraid to fail. Above all else, the very rich know how to make money. And they are marketing all of this “innovative” stuff as better than sliced bread, at best, promising everyone that they alone kave the know-how to “do well financially while doing good.”
The billionaire class wants to have a “collective impact.” In addition to controlling shaping and controlling specific markets, we now have financial products called Social impact bonds or pay-for-success contracts. Investors in these financial products are funding pre-schools in Utah, Chicago and elsewhere. The investors call the shots about who can attend, what metrics will be used to measure “success,” and in other ways rig the scheme to earn money, from 7 to 12 percent return on investment for each cohort of students who meet the criteria for “success.” Where does this return on investment come from? From taxpayers, it is the “government money saved” by outsourcing control of preschool to private investors.
Robinhood.org has a website that shows some of the “metrics” that can be used to calculate the value of a preschool program in NYC. The basis for each calculation is given in detail. The overall result is an estimate of $50,650 per child…in 2014. See pages 3 to 6 for the specifics. There are additional calculations of the dollar value of expected social costs avoided, if “proper” interventions are made and produce the best outcomes.
You can bet your whatever that these programs do NOT invest $50,650 per child in preschool. The calculation is designed to market the program to government officials who have a short term goal of cutting budgets for social services, including pre-school. The marketers tell citizens ( and government officials) that the “deal” will save taxpayers $50,650 per child in the long run. In fact, if the program succeeds in producing the carefully selected targets, taxpayers pay the investors back with an estimated 7% profit part of the payback.
This kind of financial product is being marketed internationally. One effect is that governmental responsibilities for the public welfare and the common good, especially social services, are transformed into opportunities for government-endorsed private control and profiteering. Notice that Robinhood even has a metric for “quality of life.” It is appropriated from finance in medicine. https://robinhoodorg-production.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2017/04/Metrics-Equations-for-Website_Sept-2014.pdf
So-called social impact bonds or “pay for success contracts’ are now being offered so widely that marketers are now offering investors “insurance” they will not lose money even if the project tanks.
If you liked the sliced and diced and repackaged mortgages that helped tank the economy in 2008, you will love the new thinking about how to profit more and risk less by privatizing almost everything while diminishing (and trivializing) public voice.
Substituting “the collective impact from the billionaire class” for what once was viewed as democratic governance is well underway. Please read this splendid account of what’s happening, too rarely in plain view. https://wrenchinthegears.com/2018/09/30/dont-let-impact-investors-capture-the-non-profit-activist-media/
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The invisible writing on the wall is clear to me. Many of the elite ruling class, the wealthiest and most powerful Americans define MAGA as a return to the era or the Robber Barons in the 19th century before the progressive movement and the growth of labor unions put limitations on the elite ruling class of that era.
MAGA means a return to the 19th century, literally. To make this happen, the U.S. must become totally isolated from the world. The public schools as we have known them since the 20th century will be swept into the garbage of history and forgotten through controlled censorship.
In 1900, near the end of the MAGA Robber Barons era, 40-percent of the US population lived in poverty, only 7-percent graduated from high school and 3-percent form college.
If the want-to-be robber barons of the 21st century succeed, the rest of the world, led by China and maybe the EU, will move on while the U.S. falls into a sink hole and vanishes from sight behind its opaque walls, and inside the people will fester and suffer under the cruel and relentless thumb of the MAGA ruling class.
Nothing else can explain what has been happening in the United States since President Ray-Gun released the flawed and misleading “A Nation at Risk” report.
The real risk to the United States is Trump’s MAGA.
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Thanks Let’s pursue
Sent from my iPhone
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