A friend of public schools in Missouri sent the following excerpt of a report by the League report by the state League of Women Voters.
EDUCATION
Senate Education Committee Votes Out Bills
The committee voted out all bills heard thus far this session on February 10, including:
SB 869 (Koenig) to revise the law specifying payments to charter schools and shift more local school funds to charter schools. The League opposes this, based on our position on charter schools and support for public school funding.
SB 650 (Eigel) to allow charter schools to be sponsored by outside entities (other than the local school board) and operate in many districts around the state. Sen. Eigel also offered a proposed SCS version that would add several other provisions, including moving school board elections to the November election, adding restrictions on approval of debt service levies, preventing schools from requiring face masks, and preventing school districts from requiring students or staff to have COVID vaccinations. The League opposes the bill.
House Elementary & Secondary Education Committee
The committee met on February 8 and heard HB 2428 (Dogan) to impose restrictions on instruction relating to race and history. The bill authorizes lawsuits against school employees for violations of the new requirements in the bill. The League opposes the bill.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
And while we are allowing and encouraging and high-financing anything goes for the Ruling Class. Take a look at another Dialing For Dollars.
So the revelations in a new report from the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, provided exclusively to the American Prospect, should come as no surprise.
In youth behavioral services like “troubled teen” centers, for-profit foster care, and services for young people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (in particular services for people with autism), private equity has increased its investments, capitalizing on government health care dollars and a steady stream of at-risk youth.
Private equity’s goal isn’t to provide a safe and comfortable environment for those in its care, it’s to make outsized returns. And while private equity firms have pulled hundreds of billions of dollars in dividend and management payments out of these facilities, reports of inadequate staffing and training, substandard living conditions, physical and sexual abuse, and the use of restraints and solitary confinement have proliferated. They’re a by-product of the private equity business model.
https://digbysblog.net/
Private equity is also in nursing homes where about 70% of them are operated by for profit companies. In order to generate profit from the service, they are often understaffed. Lots of the problems associated came to public awareness during the Covid pandemic in which many nursing home residents died from lack of care.
“San Francisco School Board Recall Sends a Dangerous Message” (opinion by Nicole Hemmer posted at CNN, Feb. 17, 2021), “…deep- pocketed, right leaning donors shoveled money into the recall while media outlets began using language that lashed together the disparate dissatisfactions into a coherent message…(The deliberate emotional narrative) pits aggrieved parents against a pitiless state.”
Susan Rice, Biden’s domestic advisor, could change the narrative by vociferously opposing the wealthy (and, the media they own) but she’s both one of them and their political champion. Because of her close ties to Silicon Valley especially Netflix who’s founder called for an end to democratically elected school boards, I predict with 100% certainty Rice won’t speak up. Btw- the Trump-supporting Rice son appears not to have fallen far from the tree.
Rice’s husband, Ian O. Cameron, was a long time executive at ABC News. Yesterday, ABC News amplified the school narrative for the right wing just as Hemmer reported.
There certainly was nothing grassroots about the SF Recall.
The leaders of the so-called recall movement, Siva Raj and Autumn Looijen, appeared on Glenn Beck’s radio show in a segment about parents pushing back against schools, drawing criticism at home in San Fran.
The recall was heavily funded by “reformer” billionaire Arthur Rock, a major donor to charter school-aligned Teach For America.
On top of Rock’s contributions to school board elections ACROSS the country, he has funded over $12 million donations to pro-charter school organizations such as the California Charter Schools Association and StudentsFirst during electoral races.
You mean old Arthur (grassroots) Rock?
There are significant people of differing religions who self-appointed to undermine public education. A right wing Christian nationalist state should rise as a threatening specter for them.
Paul Weyrich proposed elimination of public schools. His training manual is posted at Theocracy Watch. He was funded by Koch.
The attitudes of the wealthy like Koch about POC should be considered/discerned by more ed reform activists who profit from them.
Racist Georgia Gov. Talmadge first proposed privatization to avoid court-mandated integration. There are some people who forget the changing identification of non-white in American history. They may find themselves made aware when trying to gain admittance for their children to legacy admission privatized schools.
These red state sheeple are passing these moronic copycat laws to undermine public schools. My local Sinclair TV station has opened a “hotline” for parents to make it easy for them to complain about any problems with the schools. Here in Florida DeSantis is making good on his threat to reduce state funding by $200 million to the twelve county school districts that enforced a Covid mask mandate.
Theocracy/Taliban, repressive regimes- all similar.
“preventing schools from requiring face masks”
The ignorant insanity from the fascist extreme right continues!
GEEZE LOUISE !!! The only thing stranger than fiction is reality.
Yesterday, I had to mail a package from a FedEx location so I left the safety my hose offers from COVID and went out. I’ve been doing that kind of shopping about once every two weeks.
After dropping the package off, I decided to pick up a couple of items at a nearby Whole Foods (WFs). After all I had a good mask and sanitized when I returned to the car. Then I arrived at WFs and was angered, not shocked or surprised, when I saw some of the employees and some of the customers running around without face masks.
The rage I felt was all consuming. This is what i was thinking as I cut my shopping way shorter than usual: “How dare those ignorant, hate-filled, fascist freaks risk my life so they could be free to walk around without a mask during a pandemic that is not over in a country that has had more COVID deaths than any other country on the planet, a country that hasn’t reached herd immunity yet, and may never reach herd immunity as the virus keeps finding willing hosts to mutate in.”
I asked one of the masked employees if Whole Foods had ended the mandatory mask rule. She said yes, the management decided it was too much trouble to require everyone to wear masks.
My going out to shop is going to become almost nonexistent from here on out, as I isolate to avoid the zombie, lunatic freaks that are causing so much trouble, that companies like Whole Foods drop mandatory mask safety features to help save lives.
What kind of BS is that?
And forget about restaurants and walk in theaters to see movies. Those two industries can shutter their doors forever and never open for business again. I’m not returning to those enjoyable habits even if this pandemic had an end to it because the MAGA lunatic fringe that Traitor Trump empowered is never going to go away. Even when the traitor is long gone, we are stuck with these lunatics, thinking they have the freedom to do whatever they want, even attempt violent coups and threaten ANYONE that doesn’t agree with them or think like them.
I enjoy my life too much to gamble throwing it away by going out to shop, to eat out, and see movies in the old fashioned style movie theaters. Eff that!
The zombie, MAGA mob, anti-maskers and anti-vaccine lunatics can have the outside world to rot and die in. I do not want anything to do with them or any businesses wiling to bend over and be bullied by them.
I imagine California will experience a large Covid outbreak after Sunday’s Super Bowl. Few people were wearing masks, and the stadium was packed.
The rage really can be all-consuming because the maskless, indoor behavior looks quite deliberately destructive. Recently saw a maskless shopper at a Whole Foods wedged head-first into refrigerated cooler, exhaling all over the juices. Or a Sprouts chain where two were cross-legged on the floor, searching & breathing across the vitamin shelf.
This behavior will bring us right in line with Denmark where BA.2, a more transmissible subvariant of Omicron, arrived immediately after their mitigation measures were lifted. This week, 7,970 cases per million residents on Feb. 13 which is 13 times Denmark’s peak back in December 2020.
An astronomical amount of virus compared to USA and U.K. which were @ 2,500 cases per million residents at the height of recent Omicron waves. A strategically-inserted extension of the virus into a series of systems already strained to the limit places a privileged class into a prime position for plunder, profit, privatization and plutocracy. They may have a playbook but there is swelling pushback and it is people power coming into its own.
The Rethugs in the Show Me State don’t listen to anyone outside of their clique going so far as immediately passing a “right to work” bill which the Governor (Greitens at the time before he was removed) signed. We’re talking a couple of weeks after the voters rejected the measure by a 2-1 margin.
The Rethugs know that their sky-daddy, guns and nativist dog whistles will get the votes out for them. Most people have no clue that by voting for the Rethugs will only bring worse economic and social outcomes.
But Republicans only have to look at the most blue voting sections of Missouri and determine that such conditions are not something they want either. It is hard to argue that Republicans are hurting the economy and social outcomes when looking at St Louis. Look up the NAEP scores for each school district and determine who is the worst.
sd,
You are speaking to the wrong person in using NAEP scores for anything. NAEP is as conceptually foundationally bankrupt as any other standardized test given to students en masse.
Why don’t you just say that those “blue voting sections” are mainly POC? Certainly would coincide with the racists I know have to say about St. Louis.
Duane, lots of cities are blue regardless of color. There’s something about city air and mingling with all kinds of people that opens minds.
There is also something about wide open country and forests that can open the mind in many ways!
Stadt luffe macht frei
No se aleman. . .
. . . that’s what online translators are for.
So more charter schools, more funding for charter schools, and another punishment bill restricting speech in public schools.
Just more great, productive work on public schools from the ed reform echo chamber!
Boy, public school students are lucky to have these great advocates. Any word on when they might think about accomplishing something productive and positive for the unfashionable public schools, or is that next session? Next session will be devoted to vouchers, I’m sure. Maybe the one after that.
Heady times in the ed reform echo chamber:
https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/03/07/the-new-politics-of-school-choice/#slide-1
Full on privatization- just hand out a low value voucher and “public education” is taken care of. But we all knew that was the goal.
It’s really very efficient. They’ll be able to cut public education funding in half if every family gets a low value voucher to buy a package of educational services from the edu-marketplace. By the time the public figures it out all the public schools will be gone and there won’t be any “choice” at all- you’ll use your low value voucher to purchase low quality services from their preferred contractors and that will subsititute for “public education”. What a great deal!
A great deal for those who want lower taxes.
Career training, ed reform style:
“A 2021 New York Times Magazine article about Amazon’s influence in California included a section on career and technical education courses taught at a high school in San Bernardino. Here, students wear shirts “emblazoned with the Amazon logo” and learn in a classroom “designed to emulate the inside of an Amazon facility.” According to the article, “The lesson of the day was on Amazon’s ‘14 Leadership Principles.’ ”
A “giant sweepstakes-style Amazon check” in the classroom bears the $50,000 figure that Amazon donated to start the program—a sum that likely doesn’t even cover the costs of employing the teacher.”
If the United States public allows this echo chamber -one that is utterly dominated by and beholden to the wealthiest people in the country- to design career and technical education like they have designed the privatization of public schools we deserve the cheap junk we are going to get.
We have some solid apprenticeships and career training programs. Let’s not outsource them to the same ed reform orgs and lobbyists and university departments who make up the echo chamber. It’ll be low wage, anti union and wholly determined by the needs of Wal Mart and Amazon. That’s not putting students first.
https://progressive.org/magazine/big-businesses-colonizing-classroom-bryant-hillman/
Off-topic
Lindsey Graham and Clyburn’s pick for SCOTUS, Judge Michelle Childs, sentenced a non-violent offender in 2009, upon his 3rd arrest for marijuana sales- 8 oz.- to 12 years hard time. (Raw Story)
Add, that event to her record for siding with corporations in alleged discrimination cases and her time as an anti-union lawyer. My opinion- she’s unfit to serve.
Governor Parson is likely to sign bills that harm public education. Missourians are still waiting for him to apologize to Josh Renaud, a St. Louis Post Dispatch newspaper computer specialist that pointed out privately to MO state government that the website was not secure regarding the social security numbers of teachers. Yesterday St. Louis Public Radio interviewed the computer specialist. The Governor wanted to prosecute him.
The Governor is an idiot, plain and simple.
I am hoping Missouri doesn’t send the ex-Governor Eric Greitens to the Senate. I remember when he resigned in scandal. This is Harry Truman’s state!
You and I both!