“In The Public Interest,” a nonpartisan organization that supports a healthy public sector, has identified eleven warning signs that privatizers are targeting your school district.
Read them and be prepared to defend your public schools from privatizers and profiteers!
Here are the first six. Open the link and learn about the other five:
As students, parents, educators, and school districts struggle to adjust to the Covid-19 pandemic, others see the crisis as an opportunity to escalate their efforts to further privatize public education. For years, “education reformers,” private companies that want to profit from public education dollars, and others have worked to undermine public education by privatizing all aspects of it—from charter schools, to contracted out bus services and cafeterias, to private testing companies, to software and hardware providers touting the benefits of virtual/online education.
With the current need for districts to rapidly switch to distance learning, many of these same privatization advocates and corporations are using the crisis and the resulting confusion as an opportunity to greatly expand their privatization agenda by offering to help solve some of the problems that the crisis is creating.
The pandemic is creating a fiscal crisis for state, local, and school district budgets and these same forces are also offering up privatization as the solution to these longer-term economic problems. Consequently, we are seeing a major push now by online (virtual) charter schools to greatly increase their number of enrolled students. We are also seeing a major push by “EdTech” companies (education software providers, online pre-packaged classes and tests, computer hardware, cloud computing companies, and others) to peddle their goods and services. These companies seek to offer their services as a way to radically reshape education and education budgets for the long term by dramatically cutting back on qualified classroom teachers and overhead expenses of brick-and-mortar schools.
What to watch for:
Public education advocates need to be vigilant to ensure that during this crisis no long-term commitments are made that increase the privatization of public education.
Below are eleven warning signs and some follow-up questions to help advocates determine whether and how privateers may be trying to make inroads in your school district.
1. Emergency powers have been requested, given, or exercised by superintendents that circumvent normal oversight rules.
• Have emergency powers been granted to district or state superintendents of education? What, if any, are the limits to those powers? When will the emergency powers end?
• How are school boards informed of decisions being made, contracts being entered into, etc., under those powers? Does the board have the authority to review or overturn those decisions?
• Are other emergency orders being put in place? What do they waive or change?
• Are there efforts to suspend open meetings and public records laws?
2. Procurement rules and processes are being suspended, overruled, or ignored.
• In response to the crisis, has your district, locality, or state suspended normal procurement rules?
• Are procurements being made outside the normal process?
• Are there guarantees ensuring that the district isn’t entering into long-term contracts?
• What, if any, transparency is there in the procurement and contracting process?
• Who is responsible for the contracting process and what monitoring and oversight is
there?
3. Virtual/online charter companies are expanding their outreach and recruitment of students.
• Have online charters increased their advertising and recruitment activity in your area?
4. Charter schools and their advocates are pushing to change or ignore authorization and oversight rules.
• Are charter schools attempting to change or relax authorization, oversight, and renewal guidelines?
• Are charter schools requesting or being granted increased funding or extensions on funding or renewal periods?
• Are existing charter schools seeking to expand enrollment caps?
• Are districts providing additional services or technology to charter schools?
• Are there efforts to suspend or disregard open meetings and public records laws for
charter schools?
• Are there efforts to create long-term distance learning contracts with charters?
• Who is monitoring charter schools for compliance with all legal requirements? Are all
the services being delivered?
• Are charter schools ignoring requests for information?
5. Existing charter schools and new charter schools are pushing for immediate charter expansion.
• Are charter school chains or management organizations seeking expansive contracts to provide larger scale education services or replace schools struggling before the crisis?
• Are charter schools advocating for new or additional facilities, or changes in rules regarding facilities?
• Are homeschool charters aggressively marketing payments to families to be used to pay for educational and enrichment programs or services?
6. Education technology companies (hardware and software companies, online testing and lesson planning companies, etc.) are aggressively soliciting the district offering immediate solutions.
• Are education technology companies approaching the district to provide services during the crisis? Which companies? What services? Will those services be needed after the crisis has passed?
• Are companies that already have contracts with the district being allowed to expand those contracts?
• Are companies offering free introductory contracts that are tied to long term obligations?
inthepublicinterest.org
• Are educational technology companies offering free hardware that requires the district to purchase or lease software or other services?
• All students do not have equal access to the Internet. What—if anything—is being done to ensure equal access?
• Who evaluates education technology software for cost and effectiveness? Are new contracts for education technology being executed? What are the durations and terms, and who is providing oversight?
• Is there a protocol for ensuring that student and educator data is secure? What is the policy for responding in the event of a data breach?
Funny how all viruses work alike …
Personalized learning
Injection
Disruption
Infection
Instruction
Diane,
Jackie Goldberg and Scott Schmerelson need to read this.
I will send to Jackie
Thank you.
“The current disruption to the normal model is reaffirming something I have said for years: we must rethink education to better match the realities of the 21st century,” DeVos said in a statement Monday. “This is the time for local education leaders to unleash their creativity and ingenuity.”
It’s the latest example of the department aligning its coronavirus response to the Trump administration’s political preferences, including limiting dollars going to teachers unions and undocumented immigrants.”
They should correct that from “Trump Administration’s political preferences” to “ed reform’s political preferences”.
Ed reformers all push these same policies. You can read Betsy DeVos’ “ideas” on any one of the tens of ed reform sites. Pulling funding from public schools and distributing it to private contractors to provide education “services” and replace schools is hugely popular in the echo chamber. DeVos actually admits that part of the goal is to save money on educating lower and middle class students- the “voucher” will be much lower value than what we currently spend on public schools. I appreciate her honesty about the objective here. Education on the cheap for the children of the lower and middle classes. Fads and gimmicks and cheap junk.
I think they’ll be a huge role for public school advocates going forward- ed reformers will swoop in and slash public school budgets just like they did when they took power in 2009-10.
Public school students will need adult advocates and they aren’t going to find any among the anti-public school crowd.
and they don’t seem to have advocates in the Silicon Valley world now: online may become their be-all and end-all
Not so “Funny how all viruses work alike.”
Testing Virus…
Have TESTING powers been granted to district or state superintendents of education? What, if any, are the limits to those powers? When will the TESTING powers end?
How are school boards informed of decisions being made, contracts being entered into, etc., under those powers? Does the board have the authority to review or overturn those decisions?
Who evaluates the TESTING BS for cost and effectiveness? Are new contracts for
TESTING being executed? What are the durations and terms, and who is providing oversight?
Has the “know-that” (ABOUT TESTING) strategy , negated the testing virus?
Has the “know-that” (ABOUT BETSY) strategy , negated the BETSY virus?
Has the “know-that” (ABOUT TRUMP) strategy , negated the TRUMP virus?
Has the “know-that” (ABOUT REPUBS) strategy , negated the REPUB virus?
How can we change anything if we don’t/won’t change our mind or strategy?
How can we improve anything without considering, what improves and what
does not provide improvement?
It’s too bad the corona virus testing hasn’t been as invasive as the testing our student have to endure. It would certainly cost less by comparison. Of course, then Pearson wouldn’t be making any profits, I can just imagine their outcry over this years cancellation of “assessments”. No bottom 5 percent this year to charter up.
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
The public education deformers love chaos and are using it to steal more public money and destroy more public schools.
Now that my grandkids are involved with distance learning, I wonder how the virtual schools operate.To be done properly it needs a lot of parent input/cooperation along with teacher guidance. Or do they just let the kids “do their own thing”.
I bet now that we have all experienced on line education, especially at the elementary level, I guess parents will think twice about the benefits of this sort of charter school. It is definitely not for everyone,
Posted at OEN https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Eleven-Warning-Signs-that-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Corporations_Diane-Ravitch_Education-Funding_Educational-Crisis-200430-934.html#comment762695
with comments containing links.
Comment one: Veteran educator Nancy Bailey. https://nancyebailey.com/2020/04/26/8-ways-to-save-public-school-funding-during-and-after-covid-19/. knows that public schools will be confronted with the threat of deep Bridget cuts in the wake of the pandemic.She here presents eight excellent ideas to stave off the pain of budget cuts and save public schools. Betsy DeVos offered her ideas, which are the same-old same-old stale voucher schemes. Privatization only hurts public schools, which enroll the vast majority of American children. Let’s put our money where the kids are.Bailey explains her eight ideas.
Comment 2
Is Distance Learning the Wave of the Future? asks Diane Ravitch. https://dianeravitch.net/2020/04/11/is-distance-learning-the-wave-of-the-future/
“We are in the midst of a pandemic and most schools have been shutdown to protect students and staff from exposure to the coronavirus. Almost overnight, millions of students were required to continue learning by going online. The platforms are different, but tens of millions of students are engaged in distance learning.
Kathleen Porter-Magee of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute sees this asa fortuitous moment, an opportunity to revolutionize education. She calls it “A RevolutioninEducation, Born of a Necessity.” https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/commentary/revolution-education-born-necessity
“We have known for a long while that the worst scandals in the charter sector are intertwined with online learning and cyber charters. Consider the bankruptcy last year of ECOT (the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow) in Ohio, whose owner collected $1 billion from the state over nearly 20 years, but declared bankruptcy rather than pay the state $60 million for inflated enrollments.”
“Then there is the infamous A-1 scandal in California, where the owners and several cooperating school districts were indicted in San Diego nearly a year ago for the theft of $50 million from the state, a scheme that involved phantom students” Read more…
Susan, from my experience with distance learning with a six year old, it is not an independent activity, requiring the participation of an adult to keep the child on task. It also isn’t the same as “live” school, needing one on one time with an adult to complete other tasks to round out the experience.
I find it lacking and just a stop gap way to have school. I would definitely not recommend it in a normal situation. I don’t know a parent that would.