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Peter Greene: Chan Zuckerberg Partners with Sesame Street and Elmo (Oh, No!)

By dianeravitch
September 17, 2019 //
16

Peter Greene demonstrates here (yet again) that there is nothing that money cannot buy (and corrupt). Now it is Sesame Street (although as he points out, HBO already bought Sesame Street). Is there anything not for sale?

Open the link and read the whole sorry story.

If you haven’t been paying particularly close attention, you may have missed the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative slowly inserting its hyper-wealthy proboscis into a hundred different corners of modern life, using its not-quite-philanthropy LLC model to follow in the Gatesian footprints of wealthy technocrats who want to appoint themselves the unelected heads of oh-so-many sectors.

One of those sectors is, of course, education. Their latest bold new initiative is being trumpeted in People, where it is getting exactly the fluffy uncritical reception one might expect, which is too bad, because there’s plenty to be critical of.

The tech mogul, 35, and pediatrician’s philanthropic organization, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, is working in conjunction with The Primary School and Sesame Workshop to help fund a “new curriculum” that aims to “integrate social emotional learning into early childhood literacy lessons,” according to a press release.

The Primary School is out in Palo Alto, “expanding the boundaries of traditional education.” It is the elementary school that Chan co-founded in 2016 to bring together issues in education and pediatrics. They have all sorts of business style leadershippositions like “director of talent” and “director of strategic initiatives” and the teaching staff seems to be made of a few “lead teachers” and a whole lot of “associate teachers.” Their CEO comes from the NewSchool Venture Fund and Aspire. Their “director of innovation and learning” spent two whole years in Teach for America. The school’s principal once founded a charter school and stayed with it for five years. Of the lead teachers a little more than half have actual teaching backgrounds, while the rest are TFA or other “non-traditional” approaches to the field. I admittedly didn’t check every single one, but a spot check of the associate teachers turned up zero with actual teaching backgrounds.

In short, it’s very new, very reform, very Palo Alto-y, and yet, wonder of wonders, the folks at the Sesame Workshop, “the global nonprofit behind Sesame Street and so much more” and who have been at this for fifty years (longer, I’m betting, than virtually every staff person at The Primary School has been alive)– those folks feel an urge to team up with The Primary School.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, Education Industry, Privatization

How a Billionaire Bought the Right to Put His Name on the Yale Commons

By dianeravitch
September 16, 2019 //
55

Yale opened a dining hall for its students in 1901, called The Commons. It was a common meeting ground for students who lived in many different buildings.

A recent history of The Commons described it like this:

They say Hogwarts’s Great Hall, home to treacle tarts and pumpkin juice, was modeled after it. That’s not true — the honor belongs to the dining hall in the College of Christ Church at Oxford University — but it may as well be. High, cavernous ceilings; lights strung around the interior as if it is never not Christmas; long, dark auburn tables; and portraits of mythical (mostly) men who have had some affiliation with the school. Commons is the wizarding world come alive for a few hours a day; it’s the Harry Potter series of dining spaces — some patrons are diehards, others poo-poo the popularity, but everyone recognizes the cultural importance.

But times change, and money talks. Yale has a large endowment, but all big institutions are always on the lookout for more money.

In 2015, billionaire Stephen Schwarzman, class of 1969, gave Yale University $150 Million. He wanted one thing, and one thing only: the historic, culturally significant Commons must be renamed the Schwarzman Center.

The president of the university agreed to the billionaire’s terms.

At the 50th anniversary dinner of the class of 1969, Schwarzman spoke proudly of his gift, but his classmates did not appreciate his beneficence.

At the class of 1969’s 50th reunion dinner in May, Stephen Schwarzman ’69 — a business mogul who founded The Blackstone Group — rose to the podium. Standing under a tent on Old Campus, Schwarzman explained why he donated $150 million to the University in 2015 to transform Commons dining hall into the Schwarzman Center.

“People who have resources get some unwanted friends, and [University President] Peter [Salovey] came to me with a list of projects Yale wanted to fund,” Schwarzman said, as Salovey stood several feet away from him. “I said, ‘I don’t give a shit about this list.’”

Schwarzman went on to discuss his experience as a lonely first year who often ate alone in Commons. He explained that the new student life hub is personally significant to him because he learned to be independent during his time at Yale.

In an email to the News in July, Blackstone spokesperson Christine Anderson clarified that Schwarzman’s comments at the class reunion dinner were “made in jest and in a lighthearted way….”

Still, according to Class Secretary Kenneth Brown ’69, Schwarzman’s comments rekindled the debate around the construction of the Schwarzman Center.

For one, political science lecturer Jim Sleeper ’69, who was present at the dinner, interrupted the business mogul during his speech and criticized Schwarzman for Blackstone’s alleged role in “dispossess[ing] tens of thousands of people out of their homes.” Later, Sleeper revisited the encounter in a blog post on the class of 1969 webpage.

“There is some stuff that Yale simply should not eat, and as I watched some other diners rolling their eyes and shifting uncomfortably in their seats while Steve went on and on, I decided that someone had to object,” wrote Sleeper, who has criticized Schwarzman and his company for their allegedly unethical business dealings in op-eds published in Salon, Dissent Magazine and Washington Monthly, among others.

Moreover, the business mogul’s claims about his indifference towards Yale’s priorities stood at odds with the University president’s previous explanations about the circumstances surrounding the $150 million gift.

In 2015, the announcement of Schwarzman’s gift for a student life hub drew criticism from faculty members and students alike, who argued that the money could be better spent on other projects on campus. Many, including American studies professor and former chair of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Senate Matt Jacobson, expressed concern that major University projects seem to be driven by donors, rather than by faculty members and the University’s mission.

University President Peter Salovey explained that he brought a list of projects to the billionaire, and he wanted his name on the Commons because he “loved” it.

Probably he also loves the New York Public Library, where he donated $100 million, and the library agreed to name its iconic main building—the one with the lions in front—the Stephen Schwarzman building.

Jim Sleeper wrote about Schwarzman’s passion to spread his name on significant cultural institutions in Dissent last year in an article called “Plutocracy Comes to Campus.”

A recent article by Tom White in Medium reported that Schwarzman gave £150 million to Oxford to create the Schwarzman Center for the Humanities. White listed the “dirty money” associated with the Blackstone Group:

Schwarzman’s payment — I decline to call it a “donation” or “gift” — represents a significant transfer of wealth from some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world to an already vastly wealthy institution. At a recent open meeting regarding the new centre, senior management were keen to stress that Schwarzman had passed the University’s “rigorous” clearance tests. Precisely what those tests involve wasn’t made clear. Did they take into account UN special rapporteur Leilani Farha’s recent identification of Blackstone, the largest property owner in the world, as the main contributor to the global housing crisis? Or that in 2013, Independent Clinical Services, a NHS care provider owned by Blackstone, was found to have avoided paying millions of pounds in tax? Or that the company has also made significant campaign donations to climate denier politicians like Republican US senator John Barosso, and has made large investments in shale gas drilling? Just last week, amid raging fires in the Amazon, it emerged that Blackstone owns two Brazilian firms that are “significantly responsible” for its rapid deforestation. The University apparently sees no incongruity between these latter facts and its recent commitment to cut its carbon emissions by 50% by 2030…

The grim irony of building a centre for the study of ethics with money amassed through some of the most predatory and socially and ecologically damaging practices of modern capitalism is apparently lost on Oxford’s Vice Chancellor, Prof. Louise Richardson. “Do you really think we should turn down the biggest gift in modern times, which will enable hundreds of academics, thousands of students to do cutting-edge work in the humanities?” Richardson asked in response to criticism of Blackstone’s business practices and Schwarzman’s connections to Donald Trump.

Last year the New York Times published an article about the competition among billionaires to buy monuments to themselves.

Here is a nugget about the one institution that took Schwarzman s money and didn’t put his name on their building.

In 2014, the Metropolitan Museum of Art cut the ribbon on a four-block-long plaza named after Mr. Schwarzman’s downstairs neighbor David Koch, who paid $65 million for the privilege. Shortly afterward, the Met’s leadership announced that the museum was eliminating the jobs of up to 100 people in administrative, conservationist and curatorial positions in an effort to address a ballooning $30 million deficit.

“All that money for a bunch of useless fountains,” said Michael M. Thomas, the best-selling author who preceded Mr. Schwarzman both as a student at Yale and as a partner at Lehman Brothers.

According to Mr. Thomas, Mr. Salovey is right to argue that Mr. Schwarzman is one of many people at Yale with a space named in his honor. But that reveals the extent of the problem with modern philanthropy, not its absence, he said.

“That’s why I’m not going to my 60th reunion,” he said. “Yale is Whoresville, U.S.A. You can quote me on that.”

Earlier this year, Mr. Schwarzman gave $25 million to the high school he had attended in Abington, Pa. But plans to rename it after him were scrapped when people in the town nearly had a conniption.

 

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Higher Education

Wall Street Journal: Schools Invest Zillions in Technology, Parents Push Back

By dianeravitch
September 8, 2019 //
56

Technology in the classroom has become so ubiquitous that the use of papers and pencils or pens seems innovative.

The Wall Street Journal published a front-page story about the high-powered push to buy technology and the growing disillusionment of some parents and teachers.

When Baltimore County, Md., public schools began going digital five years ago, textbooks disappeared from classrooms and paper and pencils were no longer encouraged. All students from kindergarten to 12th grade would eventually get a laptop, helping the district reach the “one-to-one” ratio of one for each child that has become coveted around the country. Teaching apps and digital courses took the place of flashcards and notebooks.

Despite the investment, academic results have mostly slipped in the district of about 115,000 students.

Over the last decade, American schools embraced technology, spending millions of dollars on devices and apps, believing its disruptive power would help many children learn faster, stay in school and be more prepared for a competitive economy. Now many parents and teachers are starting to wonder if all the disruption was a good idea.

Technology has made it easier for students and teachers to communicate and collaborate. It engages many students and allows them to learn at their own pace. But early indications are that tech isn’t a panacea for education. Researchers at Rand Corp. and elsewhere say there is no clear evidence showing which new tech-related education offerings or approaches work in schools.

The uncertainty is feeding alarm among some parents already worried about the amount of time their children spend attached to digital devices. Some believe technology is not doing much to help their kids learn, setting up a clash with tech advocates who say technology is the future of education.

Across the country—in Boston, Fort Wayne, Ind., and Austin, Texas—parents are demanding proof technology works as an educational tool, and insisting on limits. They’re pushing schools to offer low- or screen-free classrooms, picketing board meetings to protest all the online classes and demanding more information about what data is collected on students.

In April, a report from the National Education Policy Center, a nonpartisan research group at the University of Colorado at Boulder, found the rapid adoption of the mostly proprietary technology in education to be rife with “questionable educational assumptions . . . self-interested advocacy by the technology industry, serious threats to student privacy and a lack of research support…”

Baltimore County said earlier this year it would scale back the ratio of laptops in first and second grades to one for every five students. A few miles away, in Montgomery County, a new curriculum this fall will return textbooks, paper and pencils to the classroom to supplement laptops.

In both cases, school officials say they were responding, in part, to parents and teachers. Baltimore County’s early-learning teachers said they didn’t need so many laptops. Parents wanted their children to “have a mixed media experience touching paper and reading books and down on the carpet without a device in their hands,” said Ryan Imbriale, who heads the school district’s department of innovative learning

Categories Billionaires, Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Technology

John Thompson: The Corporate Makeover of Tulsa University

By dianeravitch
September 7, 2019 //
94

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, writes here about the philanthrocaptalist makeover of Tulsa University. A tale of our times.

Surely we can agree with The Tulsa World’s Randy Krehbiel, who says that the faculty and administration “disagree bitterly … about whether that transformation will be good or bad for the university.”

Krehbiel provides plenty of space for the case made by T.U. President Gerry Clancy and the city’s philanthropists. Its supporters cite economic challenges, as well an opportunity for new revenue from courses that include cyber and health sciences. They claim that the plan is “not etched in stone,” and that it can evolve as the faculty weighs in.

Even so, Kreibiel reports, “a large number of students and alumni are furious about not only the plan itself but the manner in which it was developed … The Arts and Sciences faculty voted 89-4 not to implement True Commitment.” He also cites the participation of EAB, an education consulting firm. EAB’s role is unknown, but such secrecy is likely to be one reason why Krehbiel closed with a faculty member’s words, “I don’t think anyone is really optimistic.”

To get really pessimistic, read Jacob Howland’ articles in the Nation and City Journal magazines. He acknowledges the role of local philanthropies, especially the George Kaiser Family Foundation (GKFF), in “early-childhood education, delivering health care to indigent families, and making Tulsa more vibrant and economically robust.”

Howland writes:

GKFF spent $350 million on Tulsa’s new Gathering Place, the largest private gift to a public park in US history. The foundation has invested more than $100 million in the Tulsa Arts District since 2009. It is the major funder of early-childhood education in the state, and has spent more than $20 million in Tulsa alone on Educare early-childhood education centers.

But Howland suggests that the GKFF has overreached:

It has also pursued a strategy of populating city boards and commissions. In 2017, GKFF staff members headed the Tulsa school board and the Tulsa Airports Improvement Trust, and had seats on the Economic Development Commission, the Tulsa Performing Arts Center Trust, and the Tulsa City Council. For the past two years, a Bank of Oklahoma executive has chaired the board of directors of the Tulsa Regional Chamber of Commerce.

Howland concludes, “the True Commitment restructuring were all part of Kaiser’s plan to gain control of the university.” And he argues that “TU’s administration has employed smashmouth tactics in dealing with faculty opposition to True Commitment.”

I’ve long admired the great job Tulsa edu-philanthropists have done in early education, “two generation” family supports, and criminal justice reform, and I’ve often asked GFKK leaders why they have also supported their opposite – the data-driven, competition-driven corporate school reforms that have failed so badly in the Tulsa Public Schools (TPS). I’ve repeatedly urged an open and balanced, evidence-driven public discussion of the TPS, which is led by the notorious teacher- and union-basher, Deborah Gist.

I was then saddened when the GKFF even joined with the Bloomberg and Walton foundations in funding “portfolio management” directors to “absorb the duties of the director of partnership and charter schools,” and “in the future, implement ‘new school models resulting from incubation efforts of the district.’” I was later stunned to learn that Stacy Schusterman donated almost $200,000 to California union-busting, teacher-bashing campaigns.

PreK-12 EDUCATION

http://cal-access.sos.ca.gov/Campaign/Committees/Detail.aspx?id=1372632&session=2017&view=contributions

I would now urge Tulsa philanthropists to follow the links cited by journalists and educators and see if the EAB consultants have evidence to support the policies they promote, and then ask whether the values EAB proclaims are worthy of universities in our democracy.

Nowhere on the EAB website, is there any evidence that it’s approach is beneficial to students or society. EAB’s sales pitch certainly doesn’t sound like it has an appropriate role to play in higher education. On the contrary, its claim to fame is being the “brand police.” But how would its “integrated brand strategy” be able to coexist with the founding principles of universities, and their commitment to the clash of ideas? How could a commitment to academic freedom coexist with EAB brand “that all departments, schools, and colleges were onboard with.”

Its blog proclaims:

At EAB we have an ongoing fascination with organizational charts. (Really, we do.) Org charts can tell a story about a university’s strategy, its priorities, and how it gets things done. And when positions start moving on an org chart, we take notice. The latest example: The rise of the strategic marketing and communications (marcom) leader.

The most advanced marcom departments are strategic marketing partners and get involved in everything from institutional branding to admissions to fundraising. And to make sure that there’s a single source of marketing and advertising truth, they function like an in-house ad agency—their clients are departments, colleges, and offices around campus.

https://eab.com/insights/blogs/strategy/its-time-for-marketing-communications-to-have-a-say-in-campus-strategy-heres-how/

But universities aren’t a corporation where everyone is supposed to be on the same page in the search for a single “marketing and advertising truth.” To take one example, tenure protects the clash of ideas. But, EAB’s approach to “‘what you measure matters’” is a “mentality” that “sparks some ambivalence in academia to put it lightly.” So, how do you reconcile the scholarly and the business advertising mentalities? EAB’s response to tenure is:

One solution is to adopt academic metrics that also capture research effort. These metrics can include:
• The number of proposals or papers submitted
• The dollar amount of proposals
• Proportion of funding from different sources
• Benchmarks for the success rates of proposals and papers

https://eab.com/insights/blogs/strategy/3-ways-to-align-tenure-criteria-with-your-institutional-strategy/

Finally, I have enjoyed many conversations with Tulsa philanthropy leaders at events where they assembled talented professors from the O.U. and O.S.U. medical schools. Even though we disagreed on corporate school reform, I’m sure we would share our respect for those medical professionals who are battling the opioid epidemic. We would likely agree that privatization was a major contributor to the deaths of thousands of people in Oklahoma and across the nation.

I hope that philanthropists, who I am confident will contribute to the battle against opioid addiction, will ask a basic question. How many Oklahomans would still be alive and well if it was university medical professors who educated doctors about painkillers, as opposed to the drug companies’ sales reps who would misrepresent medical science in the name of “so-called unbranded promotion?” In times like these, should we not rally behind the principles which drive our universities’ search for knowledge, as opposed to something called “brand equity,” “integrated brand strategy” or whatever profit-seeking consultants spin?

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Billionaires, Education Reform, Higher Education, Oklahoma, Tulsa

The Walton Plot to Privatize the Public Schools of Arkansas

By dianeravitch
September 4, 2019 //
22

The headquarters of the Walton/Walmart billionaires is in Bentonville, Arkansas, so it is not surprising that the Walton Family Foundation and the members of the family (net worth: $100 billion) have decided to privatize the public schools of Arkansas.

Arkansas is a poor state. It doesn’t have an abundance of private schools that are as good as its underfunded public schools but the Waltons want every child to have a voucher or a charter school to attend.

Legislators are easy to buy in a poor state. The Waltons own quite a few.

The Arkansas Education Association did the research and described the empire that the Waltons have constructed in service to their goal of owning and privatizing the public schools of Arkansas. In the Walton plan, there will be no “public schools,” only privately managed charter schools and vouchers for religious schools.

The AEA report lays out the Walton Empire of Privatization in detail, with their bought and paid for think tanks and academics.

Although this report includes a lot of names, it is just one slice of the nationwide effort to plunder our public schools. These organizations have a vast infrastructure and deep pockets that can seem daunting, but our students are counting on us to stand up and speak out.

While they may have more cash, we have the power of numbers and common sense. Arkansas’s taxpayers and students would be better served by investing our scarce resources to improve our neighborhood public schools and helping all of the students who attend them.

Our public schools are the anchor of our communities, and the best way to expand opportunity for all. This idea does not require twisted statistics, or market tested language to trick people into supporting it. It’s as old as the country itself.

Do you think any member of the Walton Family ever feels ashamed of the damage they are wreaking on our democracy?

What about their minions? Have they no shame?

Categories Accountability, Arkansas, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, Shame, Vouchers

Behind the Enemy Lines at the ALEC Annual Meeting in Austin

By dianeravitch
September 3, 2019 //
5

This is a fascinating article by Mary Tuma, published by the Austin Chronicle about the annual meeting of ALEC in Austin, the liberal city in the heart of red red Texas. ALEC–the American Legislative Exchange Council–is a hotbed of rightwing politics, funded by the Koch brothers, Betsy DeVos, major corporations, and other malefactors of vast wealth. (If you want to learn more about ALEC, read Gordon Lafer’s compelling book The One-Percent Solution.)

The 15-foot-tall fat cat clutches his money bag in one paw and the working man’s throat in the other. (Photo by John Anderson)
“Hey hey, ho ho, corporate lobbyists have got to go!” chanted around 100 labor, immigrant, environmental, disability, and social justice advocates outside the JW Marriott Hotel Downtown on Wed., Aug. 14. “Hey, ALEC, you can’t hide, we can see your greedy side!” they later continued. The protesters stood alongside a 15-foot, cigar­-chomping, inflatable cat wearing a pinstriped suit – with one paw he held a construction worker by the throat; with the other, he grasped a bag of cash. The “unwelcome reception,” organized by Progress Texas and joined by a coalition of advocacy groups, rallied against what was gathering inside the high-end hotel: the 46th annual American Legislative Exchange Council conference.

Better known as ALEC, the group markets itself as “America’s largest nonpartisan, voluntary membership organization of state legislators dedicated to the principles of limited government, free markets and federalism.” Gaining public notoriety in the past decade, the group has been around since 1973. According to investigations into the shadowy organization, ALEC is a corporate-backed group with ties to the right-wing Koch Brothers network that drafts “model policy” for member legislators to use as their own at their statehouses.

While keeping members’ identities secret, ALEC claims “one-quarter of the country’s state legislators” participate in its efforts. The “corporate bill mill,” as described by watchdog groups, is behind controversial “Stand Your Ground” gun laws and measures that limit workers’ rights and health care access. With Reaganomics icon Arthur Laffer as a celebrated ALEC scholar, the group supports corporate tax breaks, the privatization of public services (from education to prisons), and voter suppression policies.

Activists laid out the charges against ALEC at the Downtown protest. “Hijacking the legislative process to serve corporate interests and right-wing billionaires is not welcome in Texas,” said Texas AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Montserrat Garibay. “ALEC has promoted far-right agendas on the environment, health care, disability rights, voting rights, immigration, and on other issues that we address every day in a quest to build a better Texas. They are a secretive, partisan shadow group. And this week, ALEC is in Austin working behind closed doors to hatch more bad bills.”

Montserrat Garibay (Photo by John Anderson)
Heiwa Salovitz with ADAPT of Texas criticized the group’s attacks on Medicare and Medicaid and its push for a rollback of the Americans with Disabilities Act. “We need to make sure ALEC knows they’re not welcome in Austin, and they’re not welcome in our Capitol,” he said. Jorge Lopez with the Workers Defense Project recounted his traumatic experience in a privately owned Texas detention center (major detention operators CoreCivic and GEO Group are longtime ALEC backers). Anne White Hat, leader of a campaign to stop the Bayou Bridge Pipeline in south Louisiana, told the crowd she’s one of the first people to be charged under ALEC-model laws “criminalizing” environmental and anti-pipeline protests. “I’m standing here and fighting for my life – I’m facing 10 years in prison,” said White Hat.

Council Member Greg Casar noted the symbolism of ALEC’s meeting at the JW Marriott, where workers accused the developer of underpaying them in 2013, as a reflection of ALEC’s battle against the labor movement. He told the crowd, “ALEC is not a bunch of elected officials, ALEC is the corporate special interests that see the best way of making money as trampling on every worker’s rights, every civil right, and trampling on the planet. They are not elected officials, they are just the puppets of these corporations that pick and choose to extract their profit.”

Greg Casar (Photo by John Anderson)
In scorching 100-degree heat, the activists marched along Second Street and blocked shuttles transporting ALEC attendees in front of the JW Marriott garage. “Human need over corporate greed!” they repeated. Eventually, several police officers – who had been trailing the peaceful protest – cleared the way for the vehicles, but that didn’t stop activists from continuing their march along the street.

Categories Accountability, ALEC, Billionaires, Privatization

Answering Jeanne Allen’s Question About Whether “the Union” Paid for My Home

By dianeravitch
September 1, 2019 //
28

Last May 10, Jeanne Allen of the Center for Education Reform sent a tweet my way. Allen is a big advocate for every kind of school choice, except for public schools. Before she started her current gig, she worked for the far-right Heritage Foundation. For years, her organization has been a big cheerleader for charters and has opposed any effort by states to regulate them or hold them accountable.

This was the tweet.

In case you are not on Twitter, she wrote:

And she never mentions the millions in her bank account that pay for her Brooklyn brownstone. Didn’t come from writing books or academia. Perhaps the union?

I responded that I paid for my home myself.

But there is more to the story. I bought the Brooklyn brownstone in 1988, at a time when I was allied with conservative groups. In other words, I was on Jeanne Allen’s side. Checker Finn and I had formed the Educational Excellence Network, to advocate for standards, testing, accountability, and a liberal arts-focused curriculum. Charters did not exist. In 1991, I went to work for the George H.W. Bush Administration.

Jeanne, why would “the union” have purchased a home for me in 1988, given the fact that I was widely seen as a conservative and was on your side?

In another tweet, Jeanne asserted that she visited my home, but I couldn’t remember that she did. I hosted a few gatherings for conservatives, so it is possible she was there. It was thirty-one years ago, so I hope she will forgive me for not remembering her being there.

It was indeed a beautiful home. I sold it six years ago and now live in a beautiful apartment. I paid for that too.

Behind her insinuation that the union paid for my home is the assumption that everyone is motivated solely by money. Everyone is for sale. She projects her own views. The opposition to charters and vouchers is not motivated by money but by a commitment to the common good. Jeanne sees only self-interest and personal pursuit of gain. She has no idea what the common good is. Like her idol, Betsy DeVos, she scoffs at the very idea of society and commitment to ideals larger than self-interest and pecuniary gain.

This is what the Corporate Disrupters can’t understand. Dedication motivates people more surely than money. There are rewards in this life that are greater than money. Neither she nor DeVos nor the Waltons understand that.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Education Reform, Personal, Privatization

Bombshell in California: E-Mails Reveal Charter Lobby’s Goal of Complete Privatization of All Schools in the State

By dianeravitch
August 29, 2019 //
42

Blogger Michael Kohlhaas received a huge trove of leaked emails from the Green Dot Charter School organization in Los Angeles.

He has been releasing them as he reviews them.

No one has disputed their accuracy.

Yesterday, Kohlhaas released one of the most startling of these documents, in which the charter lobby reveals its ultimate goal: by 2030, every student in the state of California will attend a charter school or a “charter-like public school.”

He writes:

It’s not clear at all what they mean by “charter-like public school[s]”. It’s especially unclear given the amount of time they spend ranting about how charter schools are in fact public schools, so presumably charter schools are the most charter-like public schools of all, but whatever. The point is that this is an acknowledgement by the CCSA that they are in fact trying to destroy public education in California by removing ALL students from it or, if that’s not possible, making public schools be so much like their private charters that there might as well be no public education. In any case, please read the whole document. It is a revelation.

And they’re not just trying to destroy all public schools in California by taking away their students and, with them, their funding. They’re also trying to take away all their land. On a local level they have been working with LAUSD Board Member Nick Melvoin on a proposal to take facilities away from putatively low-performing schools and hand them over to putatively high-performing schools. And before facilities can be confiscated on the basis of performance, a ranking system is necessary. Melvoin’s recent school performance ranking proposal is step one in this playbook.

And the CCSA and its member schools don’t just want control or ownership of the property to help them educate children. Real estate is a key element of the private charter school investment market. The more real estate charter schools control the more money the private investors can make. This is a huge business.

Thank you, Michael Kohlhaas, for performing a public service.

And thank you, also, to the anonymous leaker who provided this frightening insight into the nefarious machinations and goals of the charter school lobby.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, California, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization

Mercedes Schneider: Can Privatizers Win Elections Without Billionaire Cash?

By dianeravitch
August 24, 2019 //
8

Mercedes Schneider reports that the Louisiana PAC created by a small number of out-of-state billionaires to buy control of the State Board is disbanding.

She writes:

In 2015, six out-of-state billionaires from four families contributed a combined $3M to influence the outcome of Louisiana’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) election.

The PAC was just dissolved.

What will happen in Louisiana without millions from the Waltons, Michael Bloomberg, John Arnold, and Eli Broad?

Categories Billionaires, Corporate Reformers, Louisiana

Hollywood Divided About Charters

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2019 //
15

As the backlash against private charter schools intensifies, even Hollywood recognizes that the grand experiment in privatizing the nation’s public schools is a dying cause.

Reed Hastings, billionaire founder of Netflix, made charters a fashionable thing in Tinseltown, but critics have emerged to shatter the money-powered consensus. Some of them woke when charter founder and LAUSD Member Ref Rodriguez was indicted. Some no doubt did not wish to be allied with Betsy DeVos and the Trump administration. Perhaps some are graduates of public schools, like 90% of the populace.

In any event, the waning acceptance of charters and privatization is a sign of the changing times.

When LAUSD board member and charter school advocate Ref Rodriguez pleaded guilty in July 2018 to a felony count of conspiracy, it seemed that Los Angeles’ charter school movement had hit a critical low. Rodriguez’s unraveling over campaign finance violations tipped the balance of power on the seven-member board that oversees the nation’s second-largest school district, weakening its charter school block.

Tensions between proponents of public schools and of charter schools — which are started by parents, teachers or community groups and receive government funding but operate independently of state school systems — were already high. The January teachers’ strike won concessions for LAUSD public schools ranging from smaller class sizes to hiring full-time nurses but was marked by heated anti-charter rhetoric. Critics of charters say they continue to drain much-needed resources from public schools. “If LAUSD were properly funded, then I think the choice that a charter school gives would be a nice one,” says writer Audrey Wauchope (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend). “Unfortunately, it often seems that going charter is now just another way for parents to leave behind their neighborhood school.”

Public-school proponents contend that charters operate without sufficient oversight (proof of which came in May when California authorities arrested two men for allegedly stealing more than $50 million in state funds via a network of online charter schools). For their part, charter school operators argue that they provide parents with other, better options than LAUSD, which they say is failing many of the city’s underprivileged kids.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Los Angeles, Privatization
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