Archives for category: Billionaires
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Massachusetts: Waltons Spend Millions to Block New Funding for Public Schools

By dianeravitch
October 24, 2019 //
43

 

Maurice Cunningham, a professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, is renowned for his practice of “following the money” in Massachusetts. He naturally keeps encountering the Walton money that flows generously to torpedo public spending for public schools in Massachusetts. Maurice Cunningham is one of the heroes in my forthcoming book SLAYING GOLIATH.

In this post, he identifies the malign tentacles of Walton money that is currently engaged in trying to block legislation to increase the funding of public schools in the Bay State.

You can’t tell the players without a scorecard, and Cunningham provides the scorecard. The name of the organization is less important than the source of the money. If you spot a group called Latinos for Education, remember they are a Walton front.

When you think of the name Walton, think of a family that has accumulated over $150 billion but abhors unions, detests the minimum wage, and likes to keep their workers underpaid and tightly controlled. And think of a family that is intent on destroying the public schools that 85% of American children attend. How would you describe them? Avaricious. Greedy. Selfish.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Hoax, Privatization, Walton Foundation

Charter Advocates Outraged by Warren K-12 Plan

By dianeravitch
October 22, 2019 //
44

Politico Morning Education reports that charter advocates are furious in response to Warren’s K-12 education plan , especially her intention to cut off federal funding for charters. They are especially frustrated because she is not accepting corporate donations for her campaign, and they can’t buy her support.

CHARTER ADVOCATES BLAST WARREN’S PLAN: While drawing praise from teachers unions, Warren’s hard-line approach to charter schools in a new K-12 plan is under fire from a Democratic group that says her stance is “out of touch” with voters and will hinder opportunities for black and brown students.

— The plan, which would cost some $800 billion over 10 years, would ban for-profit charter schools, end the main source of federal funding for all types of charter schools, and end federal funding for their expansion.

— “While we agree with the Senator that for-profit charters should be banned and that public charter schools should be held to high standards, limiting high-quality options that have been proven to increase equity within the public school system is the wrong plan for Democrats,” said Shavar Jeffries, Democrats for Education Reform’s national president, in a statement

In case anyone from Politico reads this, the Network for Public Education isnot funded by unions and is not a union front. DFER is funded by Wall Street and should be identified as such.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Democrats for Education Reform, DFER, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization

Kentucky: Don’t Be Fooled! Charters and Vouchers Harm Children.

By dianeravitch
October 22, 2019 //
3

 

Rev. Sharon Felton, coordinator of Pastors for Kentucky Children, warns parents and other members of the public not to be fooled by the rhetoric. Charters, vouchers, and tax credits are not good for children, and they drain resources from the public schools that educate most children.

She writes:

Educating our children is the most important thing we do in the commonwealth. Educating all of our children no matter their family’s economic status, their address, the color of their skin, is so critical to our society and our future that our constitution requires it!

Section 183 of the Kentucky Constitution states, “The General Assembly shall, by appropriate legislation, provide for an efficient system of common schools throughout the State.”

People are pouring money and rhetoric into our state to convince us all that privatization, school choice, scholarship tax credits (vouchers), and charter schools are the answer to all our public school issues. What they are NOT telling us is that these programs often tend to harm students, public schools, families and our communities…

It is time we tell the privatizers no, once and for all. Our children are not commodities, available for the wealthy and corporations to profit…

Every time some high-dollar lobby group creates some new scheme to take money out of public schools, scholarship tax credits being the latest example, we take money away from the 648,369 children in public schools and make the job that much harder. We do not need to fund more than one educational system.

We do not need to give wealthy people tax breaks for donating to the private school of their choice. Instead, imagine the return if we invested everything we could into the great school system we already have going. Imagine how all our students would flourish if we provided for their teachers.

Imagine the future of our commonwealth with a fully funded public school system where teachers were paid what they deserve and had the resources to do their jobs and our children were afforded the highest quality education in the country. We will make this a reality when we choose to invest in our children and their public schools.

Join Pastors for Kentucky Children as we advocate for all of Kentucky’s children and our public schools.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Kentucky, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Jeff Bryant: How Billionaires Corrupted the School Leadership Pipeline

By dianeravitch
October 19, 2019 //
16

Jeff Bryant writes here about the billionaires who corrupted the school leadership pipeline. Chief among them, of course, is billionaire Eli Broad, who created an unaccredited training program as a fast track for urban superintendents.

Bryant has collected stories about how superintendents who passed through the Broad program hire other graduates of the program and do business with others who are part of their network. The ethical breaches are numerous. The self-dealing and the stench of corruption is powerful.

Bryant begins with the story of a phone call from Eli Broad to one of his graduates:

It’s rare when goings-on in Kansas City schools make national headlines, but in 2011 the New York Times reported on the sudden departure of the district’s superintendent John Covington, who resigned unexpectedly with only a 30-day notice. Covington, who had promised to “transform” the long-troubled district, “looked like a silver bullet” for all the district’s woes, according to the Los Angeles Times. He had, in a little more than two years, quickly set about remaking the district’s administrative staff, closing nearly half the schools, revamping curriculum, and firing teachers while hiring Teach for America recruits.

The story of Covington’s sudden departure caught the attention of coastal papers no doubt because it perpetuated a common media narrative about hard-charging school leaders becoming victims of school districts’ supposed resistance to change and the notoriously short tenures of superintendents.

Although there may be some truth to that narrative, the main reason Covington left Kansas City was not because he was pushed out by job stress or an obstinate resistance. He left because a rich man offered him a job.

Following the reporting by the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times about Covington’s unexpected resignation, news emerged from the Kansas City Star that days after he resigned, he took a position as the first chancellor of the Education Achievement Authority of Michigan, a new state agency that, according to Michigan Radio, sought “radical” leadership to oversee low-performing schools in Detroit.

But at the time of Covington’s departure, it seemed no outlet could have described the exact circumstances under which he was lured away. That would come out years later in the Kansas City Star where reporter Joe Robertson described a conversation with Covington in which he admitted that squabbles with board members “had nothing to do” with his departure. What caused Covington’s exit, Robertson reported, was “a phone call from Spain.”

That call, Covington told Robertson, was what led to Covington’s departure from Kansas City—because it brought a message from billionaire philanthropist and major charter school booster Eli Broad. “John,” Broad reportedly said, “I need you to go to Detroit.”

It wasn’t the first time Covington, who was a 2008 graduate of a prestigious training academy funded through Broad’s foundation (the Broad Center), had come into contact with the billionaire’s name and clout. Broad was also the most significant private funder of the new Michigan program he summoned Covington to oversee, providing more than $6 million in funding from 2011 to 2013, according to the Detroit Free Press.

But Covington’s story is more than a single instance of a school leader doing a billionaire’s bidding. It sheds light on how decades of a school reform movement, financed by Broad and other philanthropists and embraced by politicians and policymakers of all political stripes, have shaped school leadership nationwide.

Charter advocates and funders—such as Broad, Bill Gates, some members of the Walton Family Foundation, John Chubb, and others who fought strongly for schools to adopt the management practices of private businesses—helped put into place a school leadership network whose members are very accomplished in advancing their own careers and the interests of private businesses while they rankle school boards, parents, and teachers.

Covington’s tenure at the Education Achievement Authority in Michigan was a disaster, and the EAA itself was a disaster that has been closed down.

Bryant compares the Broad superintendents to a cartel.

The actions of these leaders are often disruptive to communities, as school board members chafe at having their work undermined, teachers feel increasingly removed from decision making, and local citizens grow anxious at seeing their taxpayer dollars increasingly redirected out of schools and classrooms and into businesses whose products and services are of questionable value.

In fact, Broad superintendents have a very poor track record. They excel at disruption and alienating parents and teachers by their autocratic style. Despite their boasts, they don’t know how to improve education. They are not even skilled at management.

What they do best is advance themselves and make lucrative connections with related businesses owned by Broadie cronies.

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, Atlanta, Billionaires, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Detroit, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Kansas City, Michigan, Nashville, New York City, Privatization

New York City: Educators Puzzled About XQ-Robin Hood “Innovation” Competition

By dianeravitch
October 18, 2019 //
57

 

Chalkbeat reports on a meeting in New York City where educators gathered to learn about the XQ-Robin Hood competition for “innovative” schools. First they watched a flashy video claiming that American high schools haven’t changed in 100 years, the usual disrupter claptrap. Then, after hearing that schools are obsolete, they were urged to reinvent them.

But XQ and education department officials included few specifics about what problems the city is hoping these schools will help solve, what future jobs they should be preparing students for, or the criteria that will be used to pick the winners. (Education historians have also disputed the idea that schools haven’t changed at all in the past century.)

Little has been said about where the new schools, 10 of which will be high schools, could be housed or how many students they will serve. Many educators in attendance said they were just learning about the competition for the first time and expressed interest in addressing basic needs, such as more social services and better support for students with disabilities — a contrast with much of the event’s rhetoric about reinventing school.

In the linked article, Historian Jack Schneider scoffed at the idea that high schools have been static for a century and are waiting for a billionaire to redesign them:

“A century ago, teachers were largely untrained and oversaw very large classes in which rote memorization was the rule. Students brought their own books from home and the curriculum varied from school to school. Courses like zoology and technical drawing were common and classical languages still maintained a strong foothold. Students of color, when educated, were largely denied equal access, and special education did not exist. It was a different world.”

XQ is offering “only” $500,000 to reinvent the American high school, which is cheap-o because the last time XQ (Billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs) held a competition, she offered $10 million to the winners of her competition. Four have already failed. If they couldn’t reinvent the high school with $10 million, how does she expect NYC educators to do it for $500,000?

XQ offers advice about how to build a team for your innovative school. Only one educator needed.

Here is an innovative idea for Mrs. Jobs. Open a private school with no tuition. Demonstrate your best, most innovative ideas. Show the world the results of your innovation. Do you have any innovative ideas?

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Education Reform, Innovation, New York City

Cathy Frye: Inside the Shadowy World of the Arkansas School Choice “Movement,” Part 6

By dianeravitch
October 17, 2019 //
1

 

After a long career as a journalist, Cathy Frye worked for the Walton-funded “Arkansas Public School Resource Center,” an organization funded by the Waltons to hoax rural school districts and suck them into the Waltons’ plan to eliminate public education in the state. She has been posting about what she learned as communications director for the APSRC during her three years in the organization. This is her sixth post. Links to the first five are included in her post.

The thing to remember about the Waltons is that whatever they fund related to education is intended to advance their goals of eliminating public schools, destroying teachers’ unions, and undermining the teaching profession.

This, despite the fact that Sam Walton, his wife, and his children graduated from public schools.

Their defining features as a family are greed and a lack of gratitude for the schools that educated them.

 

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Hoax, Privatization, Vouchers, Walton Foundation

Rachel M. Cohen: When Bernie Sanders Stood Up to Teach for America

By dianeravitch
October 17, 2019 //
27

 

Rachel M. Cohen tells an important and powerful story of the time when Senator Bernie Sanders stood up to Teach for America.

His efforts were ultimately defeated by Arne Duncan, Senator Michael Bennett of Colorado, and Eli Broad.

In 2011, the Obama administration and TFA’s friends in Congress were eager to call the program’s inexperienced and ill-trained recruits “highly qualified,” to meet the requirements of the No Child Left Behind Law. At that time, Sanders was the only member of Congress to question how a recent college graduate who had never taught could be considered “highly qualified.”

TFA enjoyed the vigorous support of the Obama administration, which gave the wealthy organization $50 million in 2010 (as did the ultra conservative, anti-union Walton Family Foundation). In addition, TFA placed its alums on the staff of every member of the Senate and House education committees, thanks to the generosity of a California billionaire named Arthur Rock, who are then in a position to protect TFA’s interests as well as funding for charter schools. TFA recognized that few if any members of Congress pay close attention to education, since the federal role in education is small, especially compared to issues like healthcare, Social Security, and foreign policy. Thus, most rely on junior staff to inform them, which gives extraordinary power to the TFA plants.

Cohen tells the story of TFA’s battle to ensure that its uncertified recruits were considered “highly qualified” teachers, an oxymoron.

Beginning in the mid-2000s, the group was enmeshed in a dispute over teacher credentialing under the No Child Left Behind Act that demonstrated its ability to marshal influence in D.C. Under the law, a school district was permitted to hire educators who did not meet the “highly qualified” bar if there were teacher shortages. Schools that did so, however, had to then inform parents if their child was taught by such a teacher, publicly disclose how many teachers in the entire school were not highly qualified, and develop a plan to reach 100 percent highly qualified teachers. The law also barred schools from disproportionately concentrating inexperienced and uncertified teachers in classrooms with low-income students and students of color. In other words, if noncertified teachers had to be hired, they also had to be fairly distributed across schools.

Teach for America and its allies in the education reform community lobbied the government, and in 2002, the Department of Education issued a regulation that said “highly qualified” teachers could now also include unlicensed teachers for up to three years if they were making progress toward their certification. This effectively resolved the problem for Teach For America, as most program recruits planned to leave the classroom at the end of their assignment anyway.

In 2007, the civil rights law firm Public Advocates filed a suit against the Department of Education over this regulation. In effect, the lawyers argued, it created an exemption that condoned the assignment of novice, inexperienced teachers to students in high-poverty schools, which are disproportionately nonwhite and low-income.

“It seemed pretty simple to us all along that you can’t have a law that requires ‘full state certification’ for teachers to be highly qualified and also say that people who are in the process of getting their certification meet that designation,” said John Affeldt, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs. “Those are two different states of being.”

Affeldt said there was little question as to why the 2002 regulation came about. “Teach for America applied pressure because they saw the original statute as threatening to their model and to the growth of their organization,” he said. “At some point between its founding and the mid-2000s, Teach for America had changed its belief system from ‘Every student needs fully qualified, highly effective teachers’ to ‘Every student needs us.’ TFA’s model depends on being able to concentrate their people in low-income, high-minority schools, and they thought that was a good thing. And if the law incentivized districts to hire other types of teachers ahead of TFA, well, they didn’t want that. They wanted to be seen on the same level, and some in leadership truly believe that TFA’s teachers-in-training are as good or even better qualified than certified teachers who might apply.”

TFA fought the lawsuit in court and lost, then flexed its political muscles in Congress to protect its interests. The Democrat-controlled Congress overrode the court decision, which infuriated civil rights groups, which actually wanted highly qualified teachers in the classrooms of the neediest students.

The civil rights groups turned to Senator Sanders to fight their battle against TFA. He took up their banner, insisting that “highly qualified” should actually mean “highly qualified.”

In a Senate HELP committee hearing, Sanders emphasized that his amendments would not conflict with the goal of attracting new, bright teachers to the classroom, and said he is “a strong supporter of programs like Teach for America and other efforts to attract young people into education.” But, he stressed, it is wrong to characterize someone starting in the classroom two months after college graduation as already highly prepared.

“I think most of the people around this table would agree that doesn’t make any sense,” Sanders said. “That doesn’t make that person not a good teacher, not an inspired teacher; it simply does not make that teacher ‘highly qualified.’”

“If you had a heart condition, and you were going to go to a surgeon, you would go to a surgeon who has many surgeries successfully done,” he added. “And while another surgeon may be wonderful, a young surgeon who hasn’t yet performed his first surgery, you would probably go to the experienced [surgeon] who has already achieved a certain level of accomplishment.”

But Sanders’ efforts were countered and ultimately defeated by the persistent opposition of Senator Michael Bennett, recently appointed to the Senate after serving as superintendent of the Denver Public Schools. Bennett was and is a huge supporter of corporate reform. He is not an educator. Before his appointment to manage the Denver schools, he was a financier.

When the issue came up again a year later, members of Congress were lobbied by billionaire Eli Broad, who was then vice-president of the neoliberal Center for American Progress and an array of corporate charter chains, which needed TFA recruits. They falsely claimed that without the TFA loophole, “hundreds of thousands of tremendously gifted teachers who have a significant impact on students will not be able to continue to teach.”

Cohen points out that Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro conducted a study that determined that more than 800,000 of the nation’s neediest students had teachers who were still in training, not certified, certainly not “highly qualified.”

This is an excellent analysis of how TFA flexed its muscles and power to defend its self-interest, undermine the plain language of the law, and inflict unqualified teachers on children who actually needed—but didn’t get—highly qualified teachers.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Funding, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Teach for America TFA

SCANDAL! Tennessee: Fake “Reform” Group Endorses Annual Testing

By dianeravitch
October 17, 2019 //
25

 

A Corporate Reform group in Tennessee released its own poll claiming that most voters in the state approve of annual testing.

The group called SCORE was created in 2009 by former Republican Senator Bill Frist to promote the Common Core State Standards. Being fast to accept CCSS before they were finished or even released put Tennessee in an advantageous spot for Race to the Top funding. The state won $500 million from Arne Duncan’s competition. $100 Million was set aside for the Achievement School District, which gathered the state’s lowest performing schools, located mostly in Memphis and Nashville, and handed them over to charter operators. The ASD promised to raise the state’s lowest-performing schools into the top 20%. The ASD was a complete failure. It did not raise any low-performing schools into the top 20%. Most made no progress at all.

Tennesse’s SCORE is a member of the rightwing network called PIE (Policy Innovators in Education), created by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute to connect groups that were disrupting and privatizing public education. Like other members of PIE, SCORE favors charter schools.

The board of SCORE is loaded with millionaires and billionaires who should be supporting the state’s public schools, which enroll nearly 90% of the state’s children, but prefer to disrupt and privatize them.

Five years ago, a public school parent blogger called out SCORE for making money off Common Core products. Open this link to see some eye-popping financial transactions, where RTTT money goes into the coffers of corporations owned by board members, who in turn make campaign contributions to Republican Governor BillHaslam. (Former Governor Haslam is now on the board of Teach for America.) The Gates Foundation helped to fund SCORE.

In addition to the oligarchs identified in the preceding post, the SCORE boards includes these super-wealthy Tennesseans:

Pitt Hyde of the Memphis Hyde Family Foundation. Owns AutoZone and the Memphis Grizzlies. The Hyde Family Foundation is the largest funder of the Tennessee Charter School Center.
 
Janet Ayers of the Ayers Foundation, also a funder of Common Core. 
 
Dee Haslam, married to the former governor’s brother. They own Pilot gas stations and the Cleveland Browns. Worth $1.8 billion, according to Wikipedia.
 
Orrin Ingram of the local billionaire family that has pushed charter schools.

Apparently the only plan that SCORE has for Tennessee’s public school students is to inflict Common Core and standardized testing.

SCORE has lots of money, but no imagination and no sense of the public good.

It is committed to charter schools, privatization, and accountability (but only for public schools).

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Hoax, Opinion Polling, Pearson, Privatization, Race to the Top, Scandals, Tennessee, Testing

Peter Greene: Are Corporate Reformers Taking New York City for a Ride?

By dianeravitch
October 14, 2019 //
20

 

Peter Greene took a look at New York City’s decision to go into a public-private partnership with well-known Corporate Reform groups and asked whether the Reformers were helping out or the City was selling out. 

After a fruitless pursuit of “innovation” for 20 years, Mayor DeBlasio has turned to two organizations that have no track record of success.

He writes:

Last week the de Blasio administration announced that New York City schools will be entering into a public-private partnership to create 40 schools. Twenty will be brand new, while 20 will be transformed versions of existing schools, and all will be the result of a competition of school designers in the Imagine Schools NYC Challenge.

The partners in this undertaking are not new to the education reform business. The Robin Hood Foundation will put in $5 million to set up ten new schools. The foundation was launched by hedge fund managers; Fortune called them “a pioneer in what is now called venture philanthropy.” Their board shares memberswith boards of charter schools in New York. The other player in this initiative is the XQ Institute, an organization co-founded by Laurene Powell Jobs. The press release calls XQ “a national leader in transformational high school design,” and the institute has certainly maintained a high profile, most notably in 2017 when it bought time on four television networks to broadcast a flashy special about education. That special boosted the Super Schools competition, a contest in which XQ looked to give away nearly $100 million to ten schools, but many of the winners encountered problems even getting their schools open. XQ has been at the business of “reinventing school” for a while, but it doesn’t have much to show for its efforts.

What are some quick takeaways from this announcement?

First, it’s awfully cheap.

The private side of this partnership has put up $15 million for a plan to open or re-imagine forty schools. XQ has previously put up $10 million per school. This is peanuts, and not nearly enough money to get a new school off the ground. The press release saysthe program will launch with $32 million (so, $17 million from the city), but that is still less than one million dollars per school.

If I were a New York taxpayer, I’d want to know where the money will be coming from once this initial funding runs out. If I were a parent, I’d be worrying about whether or not the funding will come from my child’s school.

He added:

This is a slap at public education.

“This is a big endorsement of public education in New York City,” said de Blasio, according to the New York Times. That’s hard to see. A big endorsement of public education might have been to turn to the people in public education to head up this initiative. There are thousands of public school educators and education leaders in New York, and dozens of college programs invested in the public education system. But instead of turning to any of them, the mayor has brought in some rich amateurs to help him find a big fix.

No, Mr. Mayor. Turning 40 schools overto Laurene Powell Jobs, who knows zip about education, and the Robin Hood Foundation, which has raised millions for Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy charter chain and other charter operators, is definitely not an endorsement of public education. It is a slap in the face to the city’s thousands of experienced, dedicated educators.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Innovation, New York City, Privatization

Arkansas: Inside the Shadowy World of the School ”Choice” Movement, Part 3

By dianeravitch
October 12, 2019 //
2

Cathy Frye was a journalist for 21 years, then changed careers and eventually landed a job as communications director of a Walton-funded organization called the Arkansas Public Schools Resource Center (APSRC), which was actually a covert front for the school choice movement.

I previously posted her Part 1 and Part 2.

In this post, she reveals more about the deceptive organization that existed to suck public school districts into the Walton school choice universe by pretending to help them.

Frye describes a secretive office where no one one was allowed to collaborate with anyone else. When she was told to apply for a new round of Walton funding, she couldn’t discuss her grant proposal with other department heads, who were writing their own proposals. For years, she never learned whether her proposal was funded.

She writes:

To this day, I don’t know whether the Waltons ever signed off on the grant application or not.

I asked several times in 2017, 2018 and 2019 to see the entire grant application so that I would know what I needed to do to assist other departments in meeting their goals. I never received one. Nor did I ever hear an explanation as to why not.

Why all the secrecy?  Because if you read the application in full, you’ll notice that that APSRC’s focus isn’t on all public schools. 

While the number of traditional public school districts – with or without conversion charters on their campuses – far exceeds the number of charter schools in Arkansas,  a reading of the grant application will make it clear who gets priority standing. 

Yes, 100 percent of Arkansas’ open-enrollment charters are members of APSRC. But they are far fewer in number than the state’s many rural school districts, and, really, if they want Walton support, they have no choice but to become members. Also, bear in mind that more than 85 percent of APSRC’s members are traditional public school districts that may or may not have conversion charters on their campuses. 

I finally managed to snag a copy of the entire grant application and feel compelled to share this little gem from “Request/Purpose” section: 

APSRC has long been a strong advocate for the improvement of educational policy and advocacy for issues at the core of our work which matches the Walton Family Foundation’s principles of accountability, transparency, choice, and sustainability. 

Before moving on to the next topic, I’m just going to note that a lack of transparency and accountability will one day be APSRC’s downfall. 

As a journalist, I know that people who are secretive, deceptive and paranoid are more than likely hiding something. 

Her boss, she says, was secretive, deceptive, and paranoid.

When the legislature convened, she was warned not to talk to any legislators she knew.

She covered a news conference called by State Senator Joyce Elliott. Frye covered the news conference and quoted Senator Elliott in a story she sent out to members of APSRC. Her boss was furious.

The next day, Smith asked why I had quoted Elliott.

“Well, she’s the person who called the news conference,” I said. “It would be kind of weird to not quote her.”

“Well, nobody likes her,” Smith shot back. 

Said no newspaper editor ever.

This is getting long and time is getting short – my family is still waiting on dinner – but this is what I want those of you residing in – or supporting – the Little Rock School District to know. 

Yes, APSRC has some talented folks on staff. And they do a great job of trying to provide professional development. That said, the organization’s primary role is to lobby on behalf of school “choice.” It is not a friend to public schools. It is using them to help shroud its true mission…

Supporters of a return to local control within LRSD – please hear me: 

APSRC wants your facilities. Each year, the organization’s charter director is required to court and bring in potential CMOs. These charter operators always tour the same two cities – Little Rock and Pine Bluff. Sometimes they meander down to the Delta, but they are most interested in Little Rock and Pine Bluff. Again, read the grant application. It’s a road map to Walmartized education. 

Meanwhile, APSRC is charged with propping up any failing charters. Why? Because school facilities are a prize to win and keep. Just look at how things unfolded in the Covenant Keepers/Friendship drama. (More on that in another post.) 

I’ll end by saying this: APSRC wants your buildings. It wants your students and the funding that goes with them. It does not care if its actions result in re-segregation. It will do everything it can to help the State Board do away with legit unions.

Think of it this way – open-enrollment charters are merely placeholders in the Waltons’ endeavor to dismantle public education.

  • Get the building.
  • Get the students.
  • Get the funding that follows the students.
  • Prop up the failing charters. Continue the pursuit of private-school vouchers. 
  • Rinse. Repeat. 

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Disruption, Education Industry, Privatization, Walton Foundation
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »