Nancy Bailey writes here about the growing influence and persistence of the billionaire-funded groups that want to privatize our nation’s public schools.
Despite the substantial research that shows the ineffectiveness of free market school choice, the school choice in undeterred. As Bailey shows, “reformers” (disrupters) have become influential voices in the Biden administration and have created new groups to press their agenda of privatizing public schools. The new dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education is a free market “reformer.”
Despite the persistent failure of the “reformers’” strategies, they press on, attacking public schools, supporting state takeovers, fighting to expand charters and vouchers. The billionaires continue to pour millions into their hobby, which is chicken feed to them.
This is an important article. Please read it.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The attempt of anti-government right wingers to takeover local school boards-
Democracy’s traitors use the local election process to put into power the handmaidens of conservative Christian theocrats and globalist oligarchs i.e. the founders of Netflix, Microsoft and Facebook. What could possibly go wrong for America?
Those that seek to monetize our young people have more in common with Wall St. than parents, teachers and communities. These disrupters with degrees in economics, business and other unrelated disciplines continue their assault on public education. The objective is to transfer the public asset of public education into wealthy pockets. They persist despite multiple failures because there are billions of available public dollars that can be legally stolen from public education. They intend to dismantle public education with the assistance of feckless politicians, and these disrutpers reside on both sides of the political aisle. Make no mistake, if these grifters privatize poor minority-majority schools, they will continue to bulldoze public schools everywhere as long as they can make money doing it.
You raise an interesting question, indirectly. Can we think of a billionaire who decides to reinvent public education as a “grifter”? Or is it the hundreds and thousands of hangers-on who have attached themselves to the disruption industry who are the grifters? Or both?
Maybe MLK answered when he said there is socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for the poor. The billionaires are less like grifters who must lift a finger, and more like families of powerful organized crime bosses. All they have to do is tell someone to take the suitcase of cash down to the mayor’s office for them.
” Maybe MLK answered when he said there is socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for the poor.”
So true!
It’s a great article because it vividly illustrates what an echo chamber ed reform is- there are Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, but they all come out of ed reform groups and change places within those groups, over and over, and the agenda of all the groups is identical, which may or may not have to do with the fact that they all share the same set of donors.
I’ve come around to thinking that the only way we retain public schools is for public schools to break with the ed reform echo chamber. If public schools are genuinely interested in serving public school students they need to take a hard look at whether any of these university think tanks or ed reform groups have contributed anything at all of value to children and families who attend public schools.
Ed reform has a super track record promoting and marketing and creating privatized systems of vouchers and charters but ed reform hasn’t delivered at all for students in public schools. They simply don’t serve our students.
This shouldn’t surprise anyone. A “movement” that focuses primarily on replacing public schools with privatized systems the “movement” engineers has no interest in “improving public schools” – their interest and effort is dedicated to replacing them.
One can see this reading ed reformers themselves. All public education policy is viewed solely thru the lens of whether it expands charters and vouchers. If it expands charters and vouchers the ed reform echo chamber endorses it – if it doesn’t the ed reform echo chamber lobbies to make it so. Public schools aren’t even an “afterthought” in ed reform- the “movement” operates as if they are already gone.
This essay needs to be tweeted, Facebooked, or whatever the current method is to get info to go viral. It is well researched and the presentation is not at all hyperbolic. Anyone can read it and engage with it in a reasoned fashion if they so choose.
Whether the sky is falling or not, it needs to reach beyond the people on either extreme who have left reason behind. There are an awful lot of people between the extremes of either right or left who remain silent rather than be battered from both ends. I see Nancy Bailey who is willing to speak up in a way that is non threatening to that group.
Speduktr, Please explain what you mean by people on the left “who have left reason behind.” Are you saying that education critics on the extreme left are taking the same position as those on the extreme right, as Chiara asserts in her first paragraph above? Or do you see the extreme left position as different?
The positions are very different and I definitely lean left. I just don’t see the extreme left or right as tolerant of anyone’s views that are not lockstep with theirs. I miss the days when people could have a discussion/debate and even though their viewpoints might be far apart, they still could respect each other and (horrors!) even be friends, like Ginsburg and Scalia.
I think public school leaders have to ask themselves “what would a pro-public school policy approach look like?”
Turning to charter and voucher promoters for public school policy is unlikely to serve public school students well and has not, in fact, served them well over the last 20 years.
There’s no law that says our schools have to remain within this echo chamber, an echo chamber that spends 90% of their time designing and lobbying for systems that don’t include public schools.
We could go our own way, and we could do it even within the current ed reform dominated state and federal government. If the bottom line is “serve public school students” then ed reformers will not get us where we want to go, because their goal is fundamentally at odds with strong public school systems.
I actually think it’s the DUTY of public schools to find an alternative to the echo chamber. They aren’t in the business of “reinventing” public systems to fragment, privatize and voucherize them- they’re in the business of serving public school students. That isn’t what ed reformers do.
Chiara, How do you propose–SPECIFICALLY– that a public school district accomplish this, financially, legislatively and politically?
Don’t we all need to begin our work with the knowledge that the privatizers couldn’t care less about evidence (or schools or children or democratic public life)? They don’t care about the merits of arguments about public education. They want public education to disappear. Period. They want control.
Once we accept this political reality, we can spend more of our time working with our political friends–Jamaal Bowman, AOC, et al–to wrest power from the monied class. This fight is not about education; it’s about power. And, unfortunately, from this point of view, corporate Dems are as much a threat to democracy and genuine public education as most Republicans, though the Republicans want private religious schools and the corp Dems want private secular charters run by the billionaires.
Shouldn’t our real task be to educate ourselves and our neighbors about the threat posed by billionaires to the idea that we ordinary people are the sovereign in the US, not billionaires? I know it sounds simplistic, but isn’t it the case that millions of people live as if they are in thrall of big money? Which means, in turn, that Bloomberg et al automatically get the attention of voters who take the billionaires’ pitch about charters seriously, with little critical attention. So we are always on the defensive, a position from which we will lose this fight if it goes on long enough. No matter how long real people put up a fight, money will always be around when exhaustion hits. So it’s either us or Money…an American struggle if there ever was one. Either we take control of Money or we lose. Bloomberg et al know this better than we do.
It’s Oligarchy/Plutocracy versus Democracy. That’s what we need to talk to our neighbors about. Public education is just one, albeit very important, aspect of our lives being choked off by Bloomberg et al. And they’re winning because they are focused on what matters: power. (Take a quick look at the fight in Ohio between the Turner faction of the Democratic Party and the corporate faction. It’s Bernie versus Hilary, again. The fate of public education in Ohio hangs in the balance in this fight, and in all others like it.)
Yesterday, Jamaal Bowman suggested that we all re-read Frederick Douglass’s famous July 4th speech, given on July 5, 1852 in Rochester. Together with John Brown’s remarks just before he was hanged, these two great democrats focus our attention clearly on the nature of the fight we’re really in.
The most ludicrous part is public schools taking direction from some of these groups that completely EXCLUDE any public schools or public school advocates.
Charters or private schools would never accept taking orders from a policy echo chamber that doesn’t support charter or private schools but public schools are expected to. It’s ridiculous and I think more evidence of the echo chamber nature of this “movement”. It doesn’t even occur to them that someone from a public school should be at the table when public school policy is being created. That’s nuts and no public school leader should accept it.
Are we actually paying consultants who are ideologically opposed to the basic premise of public schools? Why? How will that EVER benefit students who attend public schools?
Public schools are ALLOWED to advocate on behalf of public school students. That’s permitted. There’s no rule that says public schools must accept the ed reform echo chamber belief system that says public schools have no value and should be replaced. Ed reform has no issue with advocating for charter and private school students- public schools shouldn’t have an issue with advocating for their students either.
But they better do it themselves, because no one in this echo chamber has any interest in that.
“Charters or private schools would never accept taking orders from a policy echo chamber that doesn’t support charter or private schools but public schools are expected to.”
Orders, no; Money and union-busting, yes.
Charter schools and private schools (most, but to be fair, not all) would take orders from anyone who funds them (the schools and the orders).
When charters were co-opted as viable profit centers, union-busters, and a means of controlling children’s actions and thinking; the billionaires and right highjacked the bandwagon and drove straight to buy up every state board, legislative seat, and local board they could dupe.
In Texas, possibly other states as well, public schools are not permitted to lobby on behalf of public schools. That would be characterized as using public tax dollars to advocate for more public tax dollars. The private charter industry, enriched by philanthropists and the federal government, is not bound by such limits.
“Charter industry enriched” by the state taxpayers as well e.g. ECOT
And, because state religious conferences lobby for school choice (benefits the charter industry) as part of their goal for state supported religion, they play a role as well.
I wonder if the public will regret eradicating public schools. If they’ll look back and think the (inflated) promises of privatization were a bad deal and a trade they should not have made.
It will be just tragic if they end up with a low value voucher and a list of contractors in exchange for a comprehensive public system. It isn’t a good deal but by the time they realize it there will be no going back- nothing privatized is ever taken back public again.
I wonder if the architects and engineers will at least be held accountable for the privatized systems they’ve created.
Other countries that have privatized have had real reckonings where the promises of the privatizers did not meet the sales pitch- I wonder if we’ll even get a real analysis in the US given the dominance and clout of the ed reform agenda’s proponents.
I think we get the same cheeleading no matter the “results” – that has been the pattern and unless the echo chamber is broken up that will continue.
The former Sec of ED DeVos and her extended family, including the Huizenga who owns the Orlando Magic and the National Heritage Academies. Own ever expanding numbers of Charter Schools that generally underperform the local public schools even though they are highly selective about who they will admit. These schools hire “management companies” which the billionaires own and rent from Real Estate Investment Trusts, also owned by the same billionaires. They are making a huge return on the few billions they have invested.
Most use a curriculum which has a strong right wing bias and often has a strong Fundamentalist religious orientation. If you want to stay in power then these schools provide a way to do it. In Proverbs 22:6 the Bible says Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.” When you control what a child is learning in these unregulated tax payer supported private schools you can create a brain washed population who believes that Donald Trump never has lied!
KEY LINE: They are making a huge return on the few billions they have invested.
At least two directors of state Catholic Conferences publicly take credit for the school choice legislation in their states. Some state Catholic Conferences cohost with the Koch’s AFP, school choice rallies in state capitols. The co-founder of the Koch’s Heritage Foundation, Paul Weyrich, also co-founded the religious right and ALEC. (Theocracy Watch has details about Weyrich’s training manual.)
“The new official contents of sex education in Mexico: laicism in the crosshairs”, at the Scielo site, echoes Kenneth’s warning. The article is broad in scope, more so than its title indicates.
Jefferson- In every age, in every country, the priest aligns with the despot.
Sometimes the echo chamber nature of the thing amazes even me. This, for example:
“Curtis Valentine and Tressa Pankovits, deputy director and associate director, respectively, of the Progressive Policy Institute’s Reinventing America’s Schools Project, will lead the initiative following the retirement of David Osborne.”
This group is opposed to public schools. That all of ed reform could read these folks and continue to claim that there is some “pro public school mission” at work here is ludicrous.
They promote charter schools. That’s what they do. Why not just admit that? Is it fair to public school students to present a group as advocates for “public education” when they do absolutely nothing for the 90% of students who attend the public schools they are ideologically opposed to? How is that fair? How is that “serving” students who attend public schools? It has nothing whatever to do with students who attend public schools. It’s an ideological privatization project that in fact works to replace their schools.
I would urge anyone to go to any of the websites of any of these groups and find me actual work they have performed that benefits any student in any public school. It simply isn’t the work they do.
PPI is an AEI mini me. Unlike the NAACP but, like former Georgia Gov. Talmadge, PPI loves school choice.
Guess what the self-proclaimed “intellectual home of the New Democrats”, Bill Clinton’s “idea mill” thinks won’t work- community-owned broadband in rural areas. Also, they think anti-trust action against vertical integration in bioscience profit firms is excessive. Paint me surprised that the staff photos appear to show 3 White guys in charge, one from Trump’s alma mater, Wharton. Out of 41 photos, only 3 appear to show Black faces (of course, one of them is the outreach director).
Valentine’s a graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government which critics describe as the place where elites nest and gather those to groom to carry out plutocratic schemes.
Larry Summers – Harvard’s finest (sarcasm)
The anti-public school bias in the Obama Administration still shocks me. The Obama Administration hired a policy leader for public schools who regularly referred to all public schools as a “cartel”
That was the guy who was supposed to be working for our students. The guy who based his career on an ideological objection to the existence of public schools.
I mean, come on. Who were they kidding with this? Of course public schools didn’t benefit- no one ever intended for them to benefit. The entire objective was to replace them with some think tank engineered “reinvented” model.
The thing seemed hostile to public schools because it WAS hostile to public schools and that was baked in right from the start, when only ed reform echo chamber members were hired.
The example of the ed reform focus on charters and vouchers to the exclusion of public schools are really too numerous to mention, but this is typical:
Matthew Ladner
Ohio dots the “i” in CHOICE at the conclusion of a remarkable 2021 legislative season
Ohio put together a public education budget. Obviously that budget has a huge effect on public schools and thus public school students. So how does ed reform analyze the budget? EXCLUSIVELY as to charter and private school vouchers. The public school students in this state (90% of all students) apparently no longer exist within the echo chamber. They’ve been erased.
And public schools are accepting direction and mandates from these folks and hiring them as consultants? Why? They don’t serve your students. Hire someone who does.
I am concerned about the direction of ed “reform”, but regret that I cannot follow your argument without more specific information—-
“Ohio put together a public ed budget. Obviously that budget has a huge effect on public schools and…students.” What SPECIFICALLY are the effects?
“So how does ed reform analyze the budget? EXCLUSIVELY as to charter and private vouchers.” PLEASE be specific: HOW MUCH money goes to charter and private vouchers and HOW MUCH goes to the 90% of public school students and their schools?
In the just concluded session, the Ohio legislature merged the cost of charters and vouchers into the public education budget so that citizens can’t separate the cost of privatization. But I am sure one of our readers has accurate data.
Mark,
It doesn’t directly answer your question but, the following may be of interest. A substantial amount of Ohio voucher money goes to Catholic schools. In some states charters are the smaller stepchild to vouchers.
Ohio state senators, Matt Huffman (his religion’s schools benefit from vouchers) and his first cousin, Steve Huffman, are school choice proponents. Steve was in the news last summer when he lost his job in the private sector for a racist comment he made in congressional/committee hearing.
In at least two states, the directors of state Catholic Conferences publicly take credit for the school choice legislation in their states. In some states, the Koch’s AFP co-hosts with the state Catholic Conferences, school choice rallies in state capitols. The Koch’s Heritage Foundation was co-founded by Paul Weyrich who also co-founded the religious right and ALEC.
After the Jan. 6 riots, much has been written about the Tea Party e.g. “The Tea Party’s low key racism is now center stage.” Much has also been written about Koch and the Tea Party.
Recommended reading, “The new official contents of sex education in Mexico: laicism in the crosshairs”, at the Scielo site. It is broad in scope explaining the worldwide attack on public schools.
The architect of the Citizens United case which was disastrous for American democracy was the head of National Right to Life (IndyStar article about James Bopp).
The Gates Foundation and Walton heirs provided funding to the Cristo Rey Catholic school chain which is in 17 states (including Ohio). Reportedly, Cristo Rey students lose 20% of the school week working at private, entry level jobs. Some return their pay to the school despite state taxpayer funding for the schools. A Cristo Rey prototype in Calf. had 60 students in a class (Christiansen Institute profiled the school).
Research found that In some parishes education vouchers generate more revenue than worshippers.
Bellwether, co-founded by the same person as Aspen’s Pahara Institute (both received financing from Gates) wrote a report in recent years that advised ed reformers to approach churches to achieve their objectives
Public schools have had a lost decade the past ten years under ed reform policy dominance. They can either stay within this echo chamber and suffer another stagnant decade or break loose and start focusing on public school students rather than taking direction from people who work full time at engineering a privatized public K-12 system.
Their goals are fundamentally different than that of ed reform- their duty is to their students, not a think tank ideological theory of the inherent superiority of privatized systems. Those are two different things.
The question is: Can we save our democratic schools from the Democratic Party? Obama gave the keynote address at the founding of the so-called “Democrats for Education Reform” (DFER) which was established by hedge fund billionaires to advance charter schools from which they could reap billions in public tax money that was intended for genuine public schools. As President, Obama did DFER’s bidding and installed Arne Duncan as his Secretary of Education who proceeded to expand the number of charter schools at the expense of genuine public schools…and Biden continues the charter school push. Democrats are not only killing public schools, they are pushing the Republican agenda because the Republican pro-business/anti-public interest message is woven into every aspect of charter school curricula. It’s self-defeating for the Democrats in the long-run, but Democrats can’t bring themselves to stop taking the DFER money.
Very well said. The Democratic Party is complicit in advancing the far-right agenda of the Republican agenda. Behind it all is a lust for the campaign contributions of the hedge funders and the financial industry.
If we use the lens of critical race theory on public education in traditional school districts, what would we see?
Given the universal support of Nikole Hannah-Jones on this blog, I again recommend her reporting in this two part podcast “The Problem We All Live With” (https://www.thisamericanlife.org/562/the-problem-we-all-live-with-part-one).
I think listening to Nikole Hannah-Jones reporting on the Normandy School District would generate an interesting and fruitful discussion that would tie together several issues that have been taken up on this blog.
The recipe for the privatization of our public schools was simpler than could be imagined. A 100+ year old public institution that was the cornerstone of our democracy has been brought to its knees in a few easy steps, and with one remarkable stroke of luck (if that was your goal).
The Recipe:
1) Make the system easy to replicate.
2) Prove that the system is failing.
3) Offer “better” alternatives (see #1)
4) Luck into a pandemic dilemma for public schools
Directions:
1) Enact education laws that coerce public schools into making (virtually) their only goal the improvement of test scores in just two subjects narrowed further by a small handful of Common Core learning standards.
2) Create mandated assessments that the majority of Title 1 and IEP/504 students cannot pass. Use the artificially induced, hyper-failure rates to “prove” that America’s public school (and teachers) are indeed “failing”.
3) Develop a competing system that get’s to select its test takers and then use those improved test scores to create the false narrative of a superior choice.
4) Watch gleefully as the public school response to the pandemic dilemma is misrepresented and savaged in the both the journalistic and social media. Smile knowing that we have even lost what used to be our staunchest support group – the parents.
Game over.
One point missing from your recipe for destroying public education. Insist that the public schools are “failing” and are causing the nation to slide into economic distress, despite the lack of evidence. That was the effect of the 1983 “Nation at Risk,” which set off a national panic about “failing schools,” based on assertion, the diversification of the college-bound group to include students with lower scores than those who preceded them. “Chicken Little” preceded the privatization movement by almost a decade. Then came charters and vouchers and a new industry was born.
Point well taken.
I also think that we had an unforced error that has pushed parents into charters: failing to effectively address chronically disruptive behaviors by students who demonstrate no intention of taking schoolwork with even an iota of sincerity.
Another example:
https://kappanonline.org/roza-russo-an-experts-advice-on-how-to-report-on-the-year-of-ed-finance/
It’s a demand for public schools to be transparent on how they spend federal dollars.
No demand for charter schools or publicly funded private schools to be transparent with how they spend public dollars.
Why the higher standards for transparency in public schools? Ed reformers seek to fund all schools with public dollars. Why would they exempt the privatized systems they design from public systems transparency requirements?
Why the disparate and disfavored treatment of public schools? Charters will receive additional federal dollars and so will private schools. Transparency mandates imposed by ed reformers should also be imposed on the privatized systems they design and promote.
Should public schools accept mandates from ed reformers when ed reformers don’t impose the same mandates on the schools they prefer?
All of this can and should be questioned. They should no longer get a blank check or be permitted to have fellow echo chamber members be the sole evaluators of their work. It’s past time to get input from people outside this “movement”. They run public school policy. Public schools are permitted to question their demands.
Check out the racial history of Phi Delta Kappa at Wikipedia.
The question about who funds the group is always a good one.
Thanks to lobbying by the ed reform echo chamber, we will now be publicly funding thousands of private schools and private contractors.
Will those schools be subject to the many and varied ed reform mandates or have they been deemed exempt?
Why?
We now have state laws dictating whether “controversial” subjects are permitted to be discussed in public schools. Ed reform funds private entities. Are the contractors exempt from these requirements? How is that a coherent plan? Why would public schools accept it? It’s a disfavored position for public schools. Why would they accept this “movement” disfavoring their students and schools in pursuit of the “movement’s ideological goals of privatization? How is that fair to public school students? We’re subject to their mandates but they exempt their own schools?
Obvious anti-public school bias and it runs thru the whole “movement”. Does not have to be swallowed whole. Can and should be questioned by public schools.
The billionaires’ echo chamber found in both Republican and Democratic education policies for decades forms a key aspect of the unscrupulous and destructive privatization of public schools. Deformers seem to have charmed lives and usually fail upward. The other key aspect, that has been exacerbated by the effects of the pandemic, is the technocratization of education. This, too, siphons off huge amounts of money into private coffers, money that should have been spent for decades on smaller class sizes and ample support services. But the money is not the only problem–who develops the content that students are fed on these computer modules? The war on human teachers (and teachers unions) is a war against human connection in education, and against (yes) critical thought. If this is not successfully confronted and overcome, there is little hope left for our society to thrive as a diverse, inclusive, and civil (in the sense of “civility”) society.
Poste at OEN. https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Independence-Day-and-the-L-in-General_News-Education_Education-Funding_Educational-Crisis_Educational-Facilities-210719-172.html#comment792219