I recently had an email exchange with Mike Petrilli, the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. I’ve known Mike for many years, since he was a young raspcallion at TBF and I was a founding member of the board of directors.
Mike and I disagree about choice, high-stakes testing, Common Core, and other canonical features of the Reformer agenda. In a post, I referred to my side (the side supporting public schools) as David, and his side (the long list of billionaires) as Goliath. Mike said it was the other way around, because “my side” includes the unions, administrators, elected school boards, and anyone else with direct involvement in schools. Bill Bennett used to call these groups who were devoted to public education “The Blob.”
Of course, I pointed out to Mike that the Waltons now have a net worth of $160 billion or more, then there is a long list of other multibillionaires (Gates, Hastings, the Koch brothers, Bloomberg, Anschutz, DeVos, Arnold, Broad, etc.). I forgot to mention the U.S. Department of Education, which has been funding charters with billions of dollars since 1994.
I probably didn’t convince him.
But I have the clincher.
The Tuesday before Thanksgiving is called #GivingTuesday. The Network for Public Education started the day on Twitter urging friends and allies to go to a website (#Benevity) that offered $10 for every retweet to the charity of your choice. We urged our friends to tweet to provide gifts of $10.
On #GivingTuesday, I didn’t see a single Reformer group putting out requests for $10. Not one. Not TFA. Not Educators4Excellence. Not Stand for Children. Certainly not the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, which is sitting on tens of millions of dollars and gets huge grants from a long list of foundations.
No, they get gifts of hundreds of thousands and millions from foundations like Walton, Gates, Arnold, Broad, and about 50 other foundations who like to do whatever the big boys and girls do.
Ahem. We proudly claim the title of David to your Goliath. We know how that turned out.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Mike Petrilli is a wanna be and nothing more. Sure, he makes a lot of money and he resides in an area with ZERO poverty, but he will NEVER belong to the Billionaire’s Boy club….. and that eats away at him. The only way to make himself feel better about his “unfortunate” situation is to to keep everyone else down. Poor Mikey really IS a “David” when you look at the company he chooses to keep. Poor Mikey is the loser in his world of competition, comparison and consumerism. He can suck up to the Waltons all he wants, but he will NEVER be one of them OR accepted as their equal. Poor Mike Petrilli!
From Paul Krugman’s Op Ed: Should everything be done by the private sector? I don’t think so. In fact, there are some areas, like education, where the public sector clearly does better in most cases, and others, like health care, in which the case for private enterprise is very weak.”
We are Goliath only if we can mobilize the sleeping giant, the public. Most people support public education, but, frankly, they take it for granted, particular those with the means to send their children to quality public schools. I belong to a progressive Democratic Facebook group that has been discussing the Joe Biden and Beto O’Rourke as possible running mates in 2020. It came up in the discussion that Beto’s wife is wealthy, and she helped found a charter school in El Paso. She is the director of education development for La Fe Community Development Corporation. She’s also the executive director of the La Fe Preparatory charter school, which she helped start. The average member of this group is a politically aware college graduate. I was shocked that most of them knew very little about charter schools and the impact they have on public systems. We have our work cut out for us. I recommended they follow this blog for more accurate information on public education.
I am “wary” of Joe Biden and Beto O’Rourke. Others hold a different opinion.
Biden’s brother owns charters as well, but these two now have name recognition and supporters. Beto had about $39 million in his ‘war chest’ for his senate campaign.
Biden’s brother ran a for profit charter chain in Florida called Mavericks. Joe Biden can’t be responsible for what his brother Frank does, but I want to hear Joe Biden speak out about his own views.
Biden is well liked among beltway Republicans for a reason.
I frankly don’t understand why Biden is so popular. He’s only okay. He has an unfortunate tendency to get really close to women and girls–too close, in some cases. PLUS, he would turn 78 just after the election. No offense to the Boomers on here, but it would be nice for we in our 40s to get someone in our age bracket before the Millennials take over.
I would like to know the name of your Facebook group and if I can join. I am not an educator, but a mom of a WV student in public education. I have been worried about our public schools for the last 20 years that my kids have been enrolled. My state, West Virginia, passed in 2017 charter schools/ESA’s legislation as a fix to our so called failed, broken school system. I didn’t believe that our schools were so broken that they couldn’t be fixed, and that it was a ploy to privatize our schools. So, I contacted a school advocate here and she suggested I read Diane’s book Reign of Error…I did and I want to know how to become involved in advocating for public schools here in my state. Hope to here from you…
Great to hear from you, Robin.
Join the Network for Public Education—no cost—and make contact with others in West Virginia.
Choice is not a fix. It’s a substitute for funding.
Well, here’s another test. Pretty much everyone promoting the “reform” line is doing it for pay. Would they even be touting that crap if the paychecks stopped coming? Upton Sinclair captured it (in the male-focused language of his day): “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
The number of advocacy/propaganda operations that exist entirely to promote so-called education “reform” and suck up money from the billionaires, providing a nice cushy living to an army of advocacy/propaganda professionals, is impossible to keep track of. If the paychecks stopped coming, would those folks do this work as volunteers (insert cynical laughing face emoji here)? Unless they’re idiots, they’d immediately go oh, never mind, and skate off to promote some other billionaire-funded snake oil.
To be clear, I recognize that Diane, as a renowned education historian, makes a living from books and lectures. But the array of bloggers and commentators she often quotes (including me back when I didn’t have a day job and was blogging) are doing it as volunteers.
“Reform” voices retort that many of their challengers are paid teachers, but that’s BS and I’m pre-refuting it before they spout it. Teachers are paid to teach. They blog and comment on their own unpaid time, as volunteers, from their conscience and from the heart. There isn’t a single “reform” voice who could say that.
Part of the crap (messages crafted in the billionaire-funded PR operations of the mighty think tanks/propaganda outfits) they’re paid to spout is the ridiculous notion that they’re the underdogs, along with the image that the Koch brothers and the Waltons would be marching shoulder to shoulder with Martin Luther King Jr. as the “new civil rights movement.” Try this crap with the clueless, Mike Petrilli, but don’t insult us with it.
AGREE, carolinesf.
Caroline,
That is the conclusion of my new book, which I am trying to wrap up right now for fall publication.
If the money stopped, the movement would disappear. How long do the billionaires want to fund failure?
The comparison between me and the folks on the privatization money train is not a good one. I get paid to lecture, but I don’t change my tune because I am paid. I stopped lecturing last July when I turned 80 so I could focus on my book. If it makes money, that’s well and good but I am not writing it to make money.
The corporate privatization and testing group should be called a coalition instead of a movement. Teacher strikes are part of a movement.
I cannot wait for your book to come out!
I mentioned that because I know the messaging machinery for Petrilli et al. will create their response and they’ll all robotically repeat it: But Diane Ravitch gets $X for a speech. (The “reformers’ ” practice is to all say the same thing at the same time, presumably crafted by the messaging machinery. Their current message, as crafted by that same messaging operation, is that they don’t all say the same thing at the same time — nice try at gaslighting, “reformers.”)
I get the simultaneous messaging.
Now it is “personalized learning” and “portfolio districts.” Everything else has failed.
If Mike Petrilli is supporting “personalized learning” and “portfolio districts” it is because the people from whom he takes his marching orders are supporting it.
When they stop supporting it, Petrilli will be jumping to criticize them. But not one day before his funders decide that it what they want.
It’s also important to note that the villainthropies are similar to Wall Street, they drag down the economy – adversely affecting GDP.
You nailed it, carolinesf
I am 100% positive that if Mike Petrilli’s billionaire funders suddenly started saying that public schools needed a huge influx of cash and small class sizes, and charters were not showing results, Mike Petrilli would suddenly be supporting public schools.
These reformers demand high salaries for doing basically nothing but embarrassing PR for the billionaires who they flatter and abase themselves to.
In other words, the way to change Mike Petrilli’s mind is not to have a debate with him but to change the mind of Bill Gates and the other billionaires who fund his overpaid salary. People like Petrilli have absolutely no ethical or moral centers.
By the way, does anyone really know what Mike Petrilli does all day in exchange for his overpaid salary? He writes an op ed or article every few days (or more likely edits what some other overpaid assistant writes for him)?
Petrilli reminds me of the Republicans in Congress. They will support anything their billionaire funders want because that is how they keep their jobs.
I see Ed Reform more as The Terminator.
Goliath is too big to fail, that’s how big. He his a corporate welfare recipient. He gets bailouts. Petrilli making an argument that the struggling working class, with stagnant wages during on long period of rising costs of everything, is anything other than David, the little guy who needs a miracle, reveals a staggering lack of understanding of where society stands today. He is out of touch.
I also want to add that the Terminator line was great, and that O’Rourke and Biden take large donations from investment banks and oil companies, and both neoliberal facemen have histories of taking sides with Republicans against labor, the poor, and the environment.
I donated to Beto’s campaign, even though his wife is a major player in the charter movement in Texas. I thought that it would be wonderful to beat Cruz. But that election is over, and I want Beto to renounce any support for school privatization.
It would have been great if he’d beaten Ted Cruz, but I will be fully opposed to his campaign for president before and during the primaries. He is as far to the right as any Democratic candidate:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/22/beto-orourke-voting-record-2020-election-democrats
NBC journalists quoted CAP’s leader, Neera Tanden, as if the Gates-funded organization was from the political left. CAP which gave hedge fund-loving Booker the most money is one of the faces of disaster capitalism in Puerto Rico. Tanden tweeted it was “seriously dangerous” to attack Beto. Paint me surprised that a charter loving organization linked to tech tyrants and hedge funds favors Beto.
Clincher #2: the “communicators” for the Goliath side are doing that job full-time, and being compensated handsomely by their wealthy funders. at EdPost, one of the leading corporate reform “mouthpieces,” there are basement rooms full of eager, young interns and low-level worker drones, searching the web for any negative mentions of charts and choice, and responding with well-crafted letters to the editor that are devoid of first-hand knowledge of teaching or education policy.
the “communicators” for David, on the other hand, are teachers, both active and retired, writing their blog posts and commentary for free, in their spare time, in between classes, and preparing meals for their families, and late at night while they are lesson planning for the following day’s classes.
Goliath is well funded with billions of dollars from the hedge fundies and investment bankers who profit from charters and privatization, and see visions of dollars from the “get rich quick” schemes of “personalized learning” and “virtual charter schools.
David is funded by the sweat equity of career educators and well-informed parents and community members who realize the value of supporting and protecting our public institutions, like neighborhood public schools, and understand that charters, choice, and vouchers present existential threats to public education
Thanks. The Goliath bloggers are well paid. No one pays the David bloggers.
Including Petrilli, to deliver the scripted lines about how his billionaire-funded peeps are “David.”
agree rob,
Without Arnold money, the university groups designing products and marketing plans for the private education sector (U.S. Dept. of Ed. REACH grant) wouldn’t exist to do DeVos’ bidding.
This is the same projection response children use when they blame each other for their own misbehaviors. Trump is the master of this. His defense when he is accused of some improper act is to accuse his opponents of impropriety.
If teacher and their professional organizations were the big bad guys, they would not be subjected to inhumane treatment at the hands of all those who know more than they do.
“Mike said it was the other way around, because “my side” includes the unions, administrators, elected school boards….”
Petrelli should learn not to talk when he’s high. Seriously, he thinks school administrators and elected school boards aren’t part of his rephormster pack? I wish the people elected and charged with protecting public schools would actually do so. And many unions too are unfortunately far too cozy with rephormy nonsense (lookin’ at you, Randi)..
cx: Petrilli.
He’s reciting his lines from the script, not talking when he’s high. And of course trying to argue with him is like getting onstage during the performance and arguing with the actors performing the play.
Explanation for what Petrelli meant- democracy is Goliath, oligarchs are David.
The richest 0.1%, who Fordham speaks for, feel threatened. They are well aware that the income inequality in the U.S. is at the point historically that the overlords are targeted for attack.
But, you’ve got to give the conniving rich a nod for postponing the inevitable by labeling what they do as “philanthropy”- a way to screw the public out of their schools, Social Security and pensions while getting a tax advantage as a charity. There’s no ethical bottom for the wealthy.
The “Ravitch side” includes taxpayers (like those in Ohio) whose only direct link to schools is having been fleeced by charter operators and the politicians paid by the charter
industry.
Petrelli must have missed the memo about corporate DINO’s like
charter-loving U.S. Representative Susan Davis, who is financed by the AFT and who is a DFER preferred candidate. She’s third-ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Education and Workforce.