In the Public Interest is a nonpartisan organization that tracks the privatization of public services and assets.
Its latest report:
Is school security the next gold rush? A year after the harrowing school shooting in Parkland, Florida, investor cash is pouring into the school security market. But big money was already being spent on unproven technology shielded from public view. “Schools and other education-related buyers are the fifth-biggest market for surveillance systems across the world but the top market in the United States, with $2.7 billion in revenue in 2017.” The Washington Post
A warning to D.C.’s education leaders. A former board member at Indianapolis Public Schools describes her experience working with former superintendent Dr. Lewis Ferebee, who also happens to the D.C. mayor’s choice for the next D.C. Public Schools chancellor: “Under Dr. Ferebee’s leadership, we created ‘Innovation Network Schools’— partnerships between IPS and charter schools. But it turned out that Innovation Network Schools aren’t really partnerships at all. In fact, they’re an underhanded way of turning over public resources and assets to private hands.” 730DC
Huge salaries for charter school leadership. Journalist Rachel Cohen digs into charter school administrator salaries in Washington, D.C., revealing startling figures: “The head of Carlos Rosario International Public Charter School and the highest-paid charter official in D.C., received a 24 percent salary increase between 2015 and 2016, from $248,000 to $307,000. Then, in 2017, she received another 76 percent increase, bumping her compensation to $541,000.” Washington City Paper
Police in school don’t make students of color feel safer. Rann Miller of the 21st Century Community Learning Center critiques the final report from President Trump’s Federal Commission on School Safety: “The recommendations from Trump’s school safety panel benefit school privatizers, and institutions like prisons, at the expense of people of color. It’s the American way.” The Progressive
“Wherever there’s a battle over public education lately, a billionaire is somehow involved.” Jacobin Magazine weighs in on the upcoming Oakland teachers strike: “Although charter schools don’t improve student outcomes, they have all sorts of destructive impacts. As noted above, they massively drain resources from public schools. In the 2016–17 school year alone, Oakland Unifed School District lost over $57 million in revenue to charter schools, according to a report by In the Public Interest.” Jacobin
ICYMI: the U.S. spends more on its prison system than it does on public schools. The country’s incarceration rates have more than tripled over the past three decades, even as crime rates have fallen. During the same period, government spending on K-12 education increased by 107 percent. Daily Mail
Diane Ravitch's blog 
America tends to ignore problems until some tragic event awakens us, and we behave rashly. The war in Iraq is a perfect example. School shootings have sparked an interest in armed guards in schools. Vice News recently did a story on a integrated high school in North Carolina where there are armed resource officers. Once these resource officers are on site, they will most likely never confront an armed intruder. They will most likely interact with non-compliant students. While these officers are trained in weapons, they know little about adolescent psychology. They will come with the same bias as many police officers, and it is likely that some of them will overreact with black students. In fact, some of the black students complained that they felt the school had become militarized. This is an unhealthy, added stress to add to students’ already stressful lives. We want our schools to be positive and encouraging, not military zones. Private contractors will exploit our irrational response to school shootings. States like Florida will find money for privately contracted, armed officers, but they still cannot seem to find the money for more teachers and books.
“Is school security the next gold rush? A year after the harrowing school shooting in Parkland, Florida, investor cash is pouring into the school security market. But big money was already being spent on unproven technology shielded from public view. “Schools and other education-related buyers are the fifth-biggest market for surveillance systems across the world but the top market in the United States, with $2.7 billion in revenue in 2017”
It’s a good question and I know school security products and services are heavily marketed, but why do public schools always fall victim to these salespeople?
Stop taking their advice. Stop treating salespeople as “experts”. Stop buying everything they sell.
Schools don’t have to climb on every bandwagon. If they voluntarily turn their schools into prison-like places on the advice of people selling the security services and products part of that is on them. These military terms they’re using – “hardening” and the rest- are intended to frighten us into purchases. Don’t bite.
For once I would like to read how public schools successfully resisted a national marketing campaign- I’d like to see this headline “despite millions spent on lobbying and sales public schools DID NOT BUY ‘X’ product”.
Instead of looking at the schools who fall for each and every one of these sales pitches, expensive and excessive security, ed tech product, whatever the current sales pitch is- let’s look at the schools who didn’t, and made wiser decisions.
Thank you for this reporting!
Ivanka Trump and the CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, seem to have embarked on some kind of sales trip together. If the photos I’ve seen are any indication they are visiting public schools.
Will we buy whatever they’re selling with no analysis or discussion or review, based on their powerful positions and prestige and whatever bribes they’re dangling? What would happen if we actually used our own judgment and experience instead of passively accepting everything they say as fact?
Why do we have school boards at all if they’re this naive and easily duped? We’re supposedly electing these people to use their own judgment, not blindly follow a NY socialite and a CEO.
If we want students to use critical thinking we could start by adults modeling it. For every conman there’s a willing mark. Don’t be the mark.
Cook and Ivanka visited a school in Idaho for a “dog and pony show” on the wonders of ed tech. Not everyone was happy about the visit. When did schools just become a depository for private companies to sell more products? Apparently, some students protested along with the ACLU.
“Cook and Trump’s field trip to the school was accompanied by other visitors: protestors. While there were some (including those from ACLU Idaho) who showed up to protest Trump administration immigration policies, there was also a group of Wilder district students who walked out of school to protest the technology-led education program for its failure to actually further education. “https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-ceo-tim-cook-and-ivanka-trump-visit-idaho-schools-2018-11
Tired of paying those capital gains and estate taxes? Frustrated by the inability of Congress to eliminate Social Security and Medicare so that wealthy families like yours can enjoy their indoor home golf courses in peace?
Here’s a tip: the costs of public schools are almost entirely in facilities and teacher’s salaries, but the latter can be almost entirely eliminated by putting 500 prole students in a room keyboards, overseen by a minimum-wage proctor with two weeks of TFA training.
Depersonalized learning. Because prole children need to learn to have the grit to sit down, shut up, and do what they are told for extended periods of time.
And visit our website for information on reviving the droit du seigneur.
–This message paid for by ALECC, the American Legislative Exchange and Coercion Council. All your base belong to us.
cx: but the latter can be almost entirely eliminated by putting 500 prole students in a room with keyboards, where they can be overseen by a minimum-wage proctor with two weeks of TFA training
Time for the Morning Announcements
If any student finds Mr. Pflug’s gun, please return it to Mr. Pflug in the Science department. Thank you.
As you know, since the passage of the state scholarships for religious schools program, less money has been available to public schools like ours. So, there will be a bake sale on Tuesday to raise funds to pay the school’s water bill. In the meantime, please use the restroom at home before or after school. Your help is greatly appreciated.
As you know, we have only three months before the state tests, so we’ll be beginning round-the-clock test preparation this Tuesday in every class. Remember, you’re a score and nothing more. Gooooooooo team!!!!
We had locked teacher bathrooms in my school, and each teacher was issued a key. I cannot tell you how many keys, wallets and even purses I returned to the office. Teachers are busy and fallible. Imagine the scenario with misplaced weapons!
Exactly!!!
and the added insanity of arguing that teachers should “conceal” carry…what kinds of clothing do legislators expect teachers to wear
They probably think teachers should all be dressed like the “men-in-black” and carry exotic weapons designed to destroy alien invaders.
There is and never had been a “School to Prison Pipeline”. That phrase was another PR stunt that rolled out decades ago near the beginning of the billionaire vultures’ war on public education and teachers’ unions.
In reality, prisons are a giant super, money-making magnet that mostly attracts only poor people and minorities with darker skin colors like they were iron staples. Wave the magnet over the cities and up comes the iron shavings, desperate people struggling to survive on poverty wages in mostly horrid, demanding jobs that sometimes cheat them out of the poverty wages they thought they were earning.
And Donald Trump is the perfect example: “Donald Trump’s Business Career Has Been One of Bullying Ordinary Citizens”
https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/02/donald-trump-business-record-bully/
And Bill Gates who still believes in ranking workers. He did it when he ran Microsoft and he’s still doing it to public school teachers and public schools.
Microsoft stopped doing in in 2013, five years after Bill Gates stepped away from Microsoft for good. It took FIVE years for Microsoft to shake off the Gates malignant virus.
http://fortune.com/2013/11/18/microsoft-ge-and-the-futility-of-ranking-employees/
Does that mean we will have to wait five years after Bill Gates is gone from this life before the public schools have a chance to start rebuilding from the wreckage he has caused?
If Bill Gates is gone, there will still be more lined up waiting to take the throne. This mess will never end until every teacher in the entire USofA walks out and strikes at the same exact time. It won’t get shut down until ALL the teachers are willing to shut it down.
I support that … all the teachers in the entire country going on strike and refusing to return to the classroom until private schools are cut off totally from public money meant for public schools and the nation digs a mass grave for all the Common Core Crap and High Stakes tests and burns them before burying them.
The question is, who pushes for, and who approves these purchases?
I gather where Chiara is in Ohio, new charters (for example) are dictated at the state level and pushed onto district regardless of admin or voter opinion. Does the same hold true for public ed policy/ purchases in general?
Here in NJ we get stds/ assessments/ SGO/ teacher evaln shoved down distr throat by state DofEd [active pushback, to no avail]. Ditto re-allotment of prop tax from rich to poor districts (redistributed via state aid)– thus my wealthy distr pays 96% pubsch budget out of pocket, which means very active local input to whatever state doesn’t dictate. Curriculum/ course offerings/ texts, etc. “Personalized learning,” e.g., would be discussed publicly & doubtless rejected. School security is one of those things.
There do seem to be bullet points floated simultaneously amongst district, including school security– brought up by sch supt annually as items to be considered, w/recommendations [perhaps emanating from state assoc of sch supts]. From there all gets hotly debated before making it into distr budget. Camera surveillance, SRO’s [how many, where/ when, whether armed etc] are very much debated in public at [televised] BOEd mtgs.
What I’m getting at is, where is the commercial pressure being applied on these purchasing bonanzas, & how much of a say do voters in district have on whether/ how much they pay for them? Some states seem to have given power of purse to the state in recent decades– so locals are at the mercy of remote bureaucracies which– wielding that much power– are no doubt corrupted to some extent.
One of the reasons often cited for NJ’s being so high COL is its division into many small municipalities which cling fiercely to local power. But voter power over local purse is a pretty good bang for the buck. Republicans give lip service to small govt, but it seems their first move when economy is tight is to grab power at state level & impose “austerity” [= special deals for private-sector cronies] on every public good.
” the U.S. spends more on its prison system than it does on public schools.”
Because of the growing number of “charter” prisons. I wonder if there are proposals for a voucher system for prison choice.
This is an exciting race between school and prison privatization. I am sure school voucher and charter school supporters want public school spending to win this race.
My freshman daughter is doing an English project on US prisons, and one of the findings is that actually, prisons increase crime in this country. Criminals simply become better at their craft in prison.
My colleague has made this video which I am posting with her permission. In the first part, you can see some “great” (and insanely expensive) ideas for how to make schools safer. The whole video is extremely upsetting, so viewer discretion is advised.
[video src="http://wd369.csi.hu/apu/Active_Shooter_2019.mp4" /]
http://wd369.csi.hu/apu/Active_Shooter_2019.mp4