Tom Ultican, on his way to becoming the chronicler of the shape-shifting Destroy Public Education movement, brings us up to date on the personnel changes and name changes of the personnel on the DPE Gravy Train.
There is a money a-plenty, but there is also a sense that things are going terribly wrong.
There is no vision. They want change but they seem to have no game plan other than to collect the money, and make sure the millions are transferred in large bills.
There is a Yiddish expression, which I don’t know how to transliterate (and my Texas Yiddish is pretty awful), and it goes like this: “gournish helfem.” My spell check doesn’t want to write this, but there you are. It means literally, “This won’t help, nothing will help.” Or as the Monty Python skit said, “This is a dead parrot.”
Read Tom’s account to learn about the latest organizations, the newest players, the latest strategy, the flailing and obeisance to the Almighty Dollar.
They will keep changing their names, but it is the same old garbage and it stinks.
Ultican concludes:
This October, Diane Ravitch addressed #NPE2018Indy asserting, “We are the resistance and we are winning!” 2018 certainly was a hopeful year for the friends of public education and professional educators. Charter school growth has stagnated and “choice” has been shown to be a racist attack rather than an expanded right. In Arizona, an ALEC driven voucher scheme was soundly defeated and in California, Tony Thurmond turned back the nearly $50 million dollar effort to make a charter school executive Superintendent of Public Instruction.
The DPE response is a new more opaque and better funded effort narrowly focused on its theory of quality schools through the portfolio model. It is yet another effort to transform education with no input from educators. Without billionaire money tipping the scales of democracy; vouchers and charter schools would disappear because they are bad policy. Educators ache to focus on improving public education but must use their energy fighting for the survival of America’s public education system, the world’s greatest and most successful education institution.
America’s teachers are educators who will continue sharing lessons on how to recognize highly paid political agents and profitable propaganda centers masquerading as “think tanks.” I predict, even with the greater spending and reorganization, 2019 will be an awful year for the DPE forces.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
gornisht
helfn
The echo chamber are all backing “the portfolio model”:
“Four current and two newly elected members of the East Baton Rouge Parish School Board visited Indianapolis last week on a two-day trip showcasing that city’s mix of charter schools and autonomous district-run schools.
Smith said while BRAC organized the two-day trip on Dec. 18-19, the cost of hotels and meals in Indianapolis was covered by a new nonprofit, City Fund. Board members fronted the cost of their flight but BRAC’s political action committee, Future PAC, is reimbursing them in the form of campaign contributions, Smith said.
City Fund was created earlier this year by charter school supporters. The fund has reportedly raised $189 million already, making it one of the richest educational nonprofits in the country. Its seed money came from large donations from a private foundation of Houston hedge fund manager John Arnold and his wife, Laura, and from the Hastings Fund, a philanthropic created by Netflix co-founder and CEO Reed Hastings.”
The “portfolio” model is exactly like the old “privatization” model – same leaders, same funders, same plan.
As usual in ed reform, the schools that remain public in these districts are completely ignored and neglected- those schools are never even mentioned in the article.
If the “portfolio model” is coming to your city best to transfer into a charter school right now- public schools in these places will receive no investment or support.
All the “gains” in Indianapolis came because ed reformers inflated charter school grades as compared to public school grades. They gave charters a special, more generous grading scale that public schools don’t enjoy. This was done to promote charters and drain public schools of students.
The gains are fiction. They invented them. I guess the hope is they can vastly expand “the portfolio model” before anyone catches on.
https://www.theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/news/education/article_4fef71ae-0a24-11e9-a51b-e38e4749624d.html
City Fund was created earlier this year by charter school supporters. The fund has reportedly raised $189 million already, making it one of the richest educational nonprofits in the country. Its seed money came from large donations from a private foundation of Houston hedge fund manager John Arnold and his wife, Laura, and from the Hastings Fund, a philanthropic created by Netflix co-founder and CEO Reed Hastings.”
Oh, look! It’s exactly the same funders and leaders who have funded and led every other privatization effort over the last 20 years- same billionaires, same think tanks, same university experts, same people.
Boy, this is sure a lively and rigorous “debate” they’re having. Very diverse opinions. It ranges all the way from zealous charter supporters to….anti-public school lobbyists. It’s about an inch wide.
It’s the exact same choir members singing the same song, slightly different arrangement.
It’s about 100 organizations funded by the same dozen billionaires, staffed by same rotating cast of characters. All making lots of money.
It’s crazy I know, but maybe ed reformers could consider contributing something of value to the PUBLIC schools that the vast majority of kids attend?
I ask because we’re paying a lot of them in government. Shouldn’t they be adding value to existing public schools instead of working as hard as they can to eradicate them and replace them with the privatized systems they prefer?
Does the public hire and pay these people to harm public schools? I don’t think they do.
Maybe one or two of them could consider putting in a day’s work on a PUBLIC school, instead of their theoretical privatized systems?
I know they oppose our schools on ideological grounds but since 90-some per cent of kids attend the unfashionable public sector schools perhaps they could lower themselves to put some work in there?
Meanwhile, in Florida, the DeSantis commission on education is giving the forces of privatization the cover to do what Arizona’s voters overwhelmingly said no to. DPE is off the chain in this state.
and FL held up as a “model” by those who would continue the trend
America’s philanthropic organizations like the Luce Foundation fail through their neglect of American democracy. Villainthropic organizations like those of Arnold, Gates and the Koch’s actively destroy American democracy.
“School Board Partners is not a good Samaritan group filling a void. It is a DPE (Destroy Public Education) organization looking to co-opt elected board members into furthering the portfolio model of education reform.”
This is another well funded “death by infiltration” attempt to launch a hostile takeover of public schools. It comes with ways to suppress democratic input and a propaganda machine designed to retool school board members into corporate Trojan Horses. I notice that Gates is the largest funder. He also stands to gain the most by taking over the education in a city. He can impose “personalized learning” on students en masse.
Parents in the targeted cities should refuse to allow their children to take any standardized tests that will set the juggernaut in motion. They should oppose any DPE endorsed school board candidates. Targeted cities should organize communities to fight back and resist this attack on democracy. Our young people deserve to be more than a line item in a billionaires portfolio. They deserve legitimate democratic public education. Billionaires are impatient to gain access to public money. The portfolio model is a manipulative political smash and grab strategy.
The less infamous among the School Board Partners’ management team are Pahara-affilliated (Gates-funded). In an American democracy, pariah and Pahara would be synonyms. The founder of Pahara publicly identified the goal of charter schools, “…brands on a large scale.”
Unrelated… management of a school chain linked to Gulen also claims Pahara connection.
TWO thoughts:
Something in Tom’s article reminded me of the old Godzilla film, “Destroy All Monsters.” To quote Wikipedia (and Wikipedia is a reliable source for all things Godzilla): “The film story features aliens known as Kilaaks, who have released the giant monsters from Monsterland and have planted mind-control devices on the monsters to control them. The monsters are eventually freed from the mind control, which leads the aliens to release King Ghidorah from space to challenge them.”
Yeah, I never really understood the plot lines in Godzilla films. But I’ve never really understood the whacked-out thinking of the pro-charter forces either. Suffice to say, there’s this dangerous, weirdo group of monsters. There’s lots of them. Their identities seem to shape-shift from movie to movie. But, inevitably they mess up whatever city, town or burg they visit. Despite whatever “help” they seem to want to offer, they end up crushing all things human.
“Head for the hills!” You know, that scene when all the villagers run away from the creatures? That’s the feeling I get when some “reformer” pulls up to my school with the latest educational innovation. In my mind, Betsy DeVos is like a Godzilla-type monster, come to life.
Second thought, and a little more serious. I was just cleaning up the folders and piles of papers I’ve accumulated from 2018 and beyond. it’s a good task for the last day of the year. And I happened upon my folder containing about three inches of information about choosing an electricity provider. For years, New York State has given consumers a choice to choose what company produces the electricity that zips through the wires into our homes. A “choice”. A confusing choice. A dysfunctional choice. A system of choice so bad and even corrupt that the official New York State website for this asinine “NYS Power to Choose” idea now has an immediate, pop up “Consumer Advisory” that warns citizens that this whole choice thing is a freakin’ MESS. And, we might get ripped off. (That’s my paraphrase but check it out yourself.)
http://documents.dps.ny.gov/PTC/home
I’m going solar in 2019 through a local, cooperative group of very hardworking neighbors. So, I’m excited about that.
Bottom line: free market, capitalist “choice” does not always work for a number of important parts of our lives. Bringing electricity into our homes. Educating and caring for our children. There are public goods that will just get screwed up royally if the Trump-like thinkers in our nation get their grabby little hands on them. Of course, that’s a lesson I see backed up day after day with real life, hard facts thanks to the people who take the time to contribute to this blog. Thank God for you all.
So, best wishes for 2019, denizens of DianeRavitch.net. And, now back to cleaning up 2018.
Wonderful thoughts, John!
When Houston went to a “choice” system for electricity, we had the same deluge of providers with lots of hidden fees to drive up costs. Another property I owned offered electric service through a co-op. All fees for service were reasonable and clearly explained. The result was the co-op offered better service for less money than all the “choice” providers.
I long for the days of regulated Ma Bell when my phone bill was about $8 a month.
Now there’s lots of competition and it’s nearly way more than $100 a month.
what feels to be more and more “business normal” is the game of placing layers and layers of management between the client and the CEO — and each layer demands yet another “fee…”
@Diane: If you are paying that much for landline phone service, you are being ripped off. I negotiated a deal with my phone company. I have unlimited long distance (including Mexico and Canada) and home landline service for $14 per month. (I have separate internet and satellite TV).
I found an online English to Yiddish translator and here are the results wrong or right:
This won’t help = dos vet nisht helfn (דאָס וועט נישט העלפן)
Nothing will help = gornisht vet helfn (גאָרנישט וועט העלפן)