Answer: They both visited rapper Pitbull’s charter school in Miami.
Pitbull, I have heard, is a misogynistic, foul mouthed rapper who has made a lot of money being crude while singing.
According to Wikipedia:
He attended South Miami Senior High School before graduating from Miami Coral Park High School, where he focused his career on rapping.
Who knew that “rapping” was in the curriculum. Well, it worked for him. Bigly.
Of course, he had to have his own charter school.
His school is part of the for-profit Academica chain.
Happily for Academica, it has close relationships with certain state legislators, so accountability is light to non-existent. Today, he calls himself (according to the NPR story linked below) “Mr. Education.” The National Charter School Conference invited him to be its keynote speaker.
Pitbull’s SLAM Academy has the full support of the national charter leadership. He is a celebrity, so they don’t mind his profanity or his history as a drug dealer. Nor do they care that he never went to college. He has fame, and how he got it doesn’t matter.
Nina Rees, who heads the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, says she’s not about to apologize for supporting the rapper’s school.
“Whether it’s Pitbull or Meryl Streep in Rhode Island or Sandra Bullock in Louisiana,” she says, “charters do benefit from celebrities because public schools, they do have to market themselves to families because these are schools of choice.”
Rees says she has no problem with Pitbull’s music, either.
“We’re not endorsing his music, but welcoming him as an investor,” Rees says. Besides, she adds, everybody is entitled to their own tastes. “I admit that I’m a fan of his music.”
Three of Pitbull’s six children attend charter schools.
“I’m not just a charter school advocate. … I’m a charter school parent,” Pitbull said when talking at this year’s National Charter School Conference in D.C. “And that makes me one of you.”
Indeed.
I wonder if children in his charter study his lyrics.
More news about Pitbull, AKA “Mr. Education.”
He plans to open another charter school in Arizona.
Thus ends American education, washed up on the rocks of capitalism and vainglorious egotism, turned into an international joke, as rappers, sports stars, celebrities, grifters, and entrepreneurs claim public money to open their own school. No experience needed.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane’s final paragraph should be the sole epithet for Gates’ and his paid promoters of privatized education.
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When I paraphrase Diane’s final paragraph, I will change entrepreneurs to “profit takers”.
In business schools, students are taught a definition of entrepreneur as a risk taker. Public education’s profit takers don’t take risks. They buy politicians.
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Q: What do these two leading lights have in common?
A: I say, “Danks God,” neither is Jewish.
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Diane, I hear your criticism of a system that posits celebrities as trusted sources for educational insight and lifts them up to promenance. But criticizing him because of his back ground in rap and hip hop is a straight dead end and reeks of Mrs. Lovejoy’s “Won’t someone please think of the children.” Video games, hip hop, R rated movies. We don’t hear about jingoism of country music, for example, but we’re still treating hip hop like the whipping stone of a lesser culture. This is the rhetoric of a bygone era that, largely but not completely, people of my generation – millennial and younger – care less and less about. The focus should be on system of money and power and the influence it buys in systems people are largely ignorant of, but no here save the right cares about some old vestigial argument of the PMRC in the 80s and 90s.
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Would you agree that uneducated entrepreneurs should not open schools and get public money to run them?
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Well, I think your framing here is problematic. I wouldn’t call him uneducated as much as lacking formal education in education. But, personally, I think that point is moot because I would take it a step further and say I wouldn’t trust any entrepreneurs in public education, whether or not they have any degree in education. We see people hide behind degrees to push bad ideas for personal profit all the time. The profit motive, as we’ve seen over and over again, above all is the crux of the issue. The cult of personality that comes with celebrity too.
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What do Betsy DeVos and Trump have in common with the interim USA Gymnastics president…
The CEO, Mary Bono, proudly posted about covering up the Nike symbol on her golf shoes. When Simone Biles called her on the post, Bono apologized. There’s an e-mail address at the gymnastics site. No person heading an organization should be comfortable publicly mocking the sacrifice that Kaepernick made to improve race relations in the U.S.
No attack on democracy should go unanswered, particularly when they are thinly veiled and from right wing slime who hold leadership positions in high profile organizations.
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Gilbert: “When everybody’s somebody, then no one’s anybody…”
Bias is the cornerstone of hierarchies, which maintain themselves by
debasing and marginalizing others.
A major component of “right” is “wrong”. West and Devos are wrong
therefore we are right.
Repubs are wrong therefore Dems are right.
Is the “proof” of the strategy (your wrong makes me right) found in the
results?
The ruling rich, are richer than they have ever been…
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This sounds like my grandpa when he was alive. Stick to the for-profit angle, Diane–you lose credibility for attacking his “foul-mouthed” music or even his lack of a college education (Ironic that such a for-profit enterprise gets an endorsement.). There is a lot to be concerned about here, but those aren’t on the list.
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Randy,
I do not believe that foul-mouthed uneducated people should start schools. Do you?
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I don’t see someone’s use of foul language as relevant at all, so long as it isn’t in the school/classroom. That would exclude a significant number of people who are currently in the education field–probably a majority. Just get them on the golf course and see their real personas emerge.
And I disagree that a college degree makes someone more qualified to start a school. Starting a school and running the day-to-day activities are not the same thing, are they? These schools they are starting require funding first, not knowledge of Dewey. Hire qualified leaders that know the pedagogy. Again, I’m against for-profit charters. I just think your attack points are off-base.
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I disagree.
I believe that anyone who manages a school should be certified as an educator.
I do not believe that schools should be owned and managed by non-educators, entrepreneurs, grifters, and celebrities.
I don’t care if educators curse on the golf course or at home. I curse at home too. So do most of us. That is irrelevant. What is relevant is whether we as a nation want to open up the public purse and let anyone at all–with no qualification, no education experience or preparation–receive public money to open their own school, without any accountability or public oversight.
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You have it exactly backwards, Randy. You have to start with a vision of a school and the knowledge and experience to run it soundly on pedagogical grounds. You can always hire managers, bookkeepers, etc. to run the day-to-day business-y aspects of a school, but school leaders need to be qualified, experienced veteran educators.
I sort of agree with you about the foul-mouthed part, but Pit Bull’s misogyny alone disqualifies him, aside from his foul mouth.
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What Dienne said, Randy. Responsible use of public funds lies at the heart of the question. Want to start a private school, do it however you want. Rich celebrities are absolutely free to pool their vast resources for publicity, & make it zero-tuition for poor kids while they’re at it. The reason we’re discussing the ed qualifications of a Pit Bull to start a school is because he’s doing his thing on the public dime– local, state, and fed-level taxes.
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I do not agree that Diane loses credibility for being critical of a genre that is often earthy, foul, and debases women. She was effusive in her praise of the musical, Hamilton, which used hip hop. Can no one have an opinion?
Meanwhile the suggestion that a person without a college education could start a school seems silly on the face of it. Perhaps such a person could fund a school, but it seems to me that modern rich folks usually give their money with strings attached. Let us put school into the hands of the educated, so that the result will be obvious to them.
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And, in fact, the “strings attached” are to the endless flow of tax dollars– guaranteed steady ROI for risk-averse investors via backpack full o’ local/ state taxes & fed grants for tuition, plus hefty tax breaks/ incentives for backers.
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What these people have in common is opportunism. When governments create bad policies that will allow almost anyone to use public funds to make money from education and put that money in their own pockets, the opportunists will line up to take advantage of the free money, Just ask Michael Milken.
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so much deregulated opportunism policy now looking like 1927, 1928, 1929…
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Randy thinks like Trump.
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Is there something fishy going on? I wonder what is being ‘taught’ in these schools since there is no accountability. Is Sanchez stretching the statistics? What is the dropout rate?
……………………………………………
Approximately 97 percent of students who attend the school were minority students, while 90 percent of students were considered economically disadvantaged.
Sanchez said the school had a 100 percent graduation rate last year.
“The vast majority of graduates attend colleges and universities,” Sanchez said
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One of the Pitbull schools was rated D, the other B.
I don’t put any stock in school grades, but by this meyric, one is on the cusp of failure.
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“He has fame, and how he got it doesn’t matter.”
Fame, celebrity, bukubucks all make one an exemplar of a great Amurikan these days.
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