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Peter Greene: On Reading “Winners Take All,” a Morality Tale for Our Times

By dianeravitch
July 2, 2019 //
57

Peter Greene read and loved Anand Giridharadas’ Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World.

So did I, which is why it is on my short list of books I recommend for summer reading.

Peter writes:

Every so often you come across a book that unpacks and reframes a part of the universe in a way that you can never unsee. Winners Take All by Anand Giridharadas has been a book like that for me.

Giridharadas is writing about “the elite charade of changing the world,” and while he is taking a broad look at the way the Betters are trying to influence our country and our world, the connections to education reform are unmistakable. I’m about to go ahead and give my grossly oversimplified take on his work and its intersection with public education; as a general guide, assume everything smart came from his book and everything wrong is my fault. There’s a lot to pack into a blog post, and I will cut corners like crazy; there are so many pull quotes from this book that I have put up an entire supplemental blog post just of quotes from the work. My best recommendation if you find any of this striking is to buy the book…

The elite assumption is that the system that put them on top, the game that they are the winners of, is fair and just and unrigged and not in need of being changed in any major ways. They are not part of the problem, and they are hurt that you would even suggest that was true; they are simply the just winners in a meritocratic system.

So the solutions they will propose meet a couple of standards:

1) It will include no challenge to the fundamentals of the current system.
2) The elites will be in charge (because their eliteness is proof of their fitness to run the show).
3) It will harness entrepreneurial energy (i.e. someone’s going to make money from it).
4) It will hand most of the blame responsibility to the people on the bottom who are being “rescued….”

The fingerprints of this mindset are all over education reform.

* The very notion, popular and bipartisan among the Betters, that education is the fix for everything. All the socio-economic inequity in the country can be solved, not by looking at the system that created that inequity– in fact, we’re not even going to admit that the system had any hand in creating inequity. No the system is swell, and the winners are people who are at the top got there by hard work and wisdom and meritocratic excellence. So, no, we don’t need to look at that system– we just need these people on the bottom to get themselves better educations (including things like grit) so that they can win at the game, too.

* Think Bill Gates, deciding that he needs to rewrite and standardize public education, and will have to circumvent, subvert and co-op the actual government to do it. Nobody elected him Grand Poobah of US Education, but he is perfectly comfortable appointing himself to the job.

* Think the deification of business standards in ed reform, and the notion that the free market will fix the system, that we will know which ideas are working best because they will succeed in the market. Think Eli Broad’s assertion that schools don’t have an education problem, but a business management problem.

* Think the repeated notion that democracy is a problem in education. We need to get rid of elected school boards and we need to give school leaders the kind of freedom that an all-powerful CEO has to create his vision. In ed reform, local control and the democratic process are to be avoided.

* Think the constant rejection of expertise. Reformsters don’t need to talk to teachers. What do teachers know? (If they are really such great shakes, why aren’t they rich?) I’ve succeeded at the game, and the same wisdom that made me a winner at that game will apply to fixing education. No other sorts of wisdom are necessary.

The huge irony of this book, which excoriates the elites and the billionaires who pretend to “save” the world by privatizing it, is that one of the blurbs was written by Bill Gates. He (or more likely, someone in his office) wrote:

In Anand’s thought-provoking book his fresh perspective on solving complex societal problems is admirable. I appreciate his commitment and dedication to spreading social justice.

This is a book that lambastes the likes of Gates. Why did he endorse it?

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, For-Profit, Hoax, Privatization

Maurice Cunningham: A Privatizing Philanthropist Buys Space in the Boston Globe

By dianeravitch
June 30, 2019 //
25

Maurice Cunningham is a Professor at the University of Massachusetts who writes a blog that”follows the money.” He also happens to be one of the heroes in my new book “Slaying Goliath.”

In this post, he warns that philanthropists are using their vast resources to buy control of the news, in this case, the Boston Globe. You may recall that Eli Broad gave the Los Angeles Times $800,000 a year yo increase its education coverage at the same time that he was trying to buy control of the LAUSD school board and ultimately put half the city’s children in charter schools. Fortunately, another billionaire bought the paper who was not interested in the schools, and Broad’s money went down the drain.

In Boston, as Cunningham explains, the Barr Foundation made a $600,000 gift to the Boston Globe. He explains that the Barr Foundation has a long history in the privatization movement.

This is not an innocent, no-strings-attached gift.

Cunningham writes:

The announcement last week of the $600,000 grant from the Barr Foundation to the Boston Globe was presented as a public spirited philanthropy offering the Globe the means to research our education system’s failures and report back on how to fix them.  It is not. It is the dawn of philanthro-interest group journalism.

That’s a mouthful so let me explain. Journalism is easy – the Globe is the most important media outlet in the state. Philanthropy is something that generates positive responses as leading citizens “give back” to the community. What? You’d rather have them buy another yacht? But philanthropies are increasingly acting like interest groups[1] and that is what Barr is doing. It’s expending money to gain influence for its policy preferences on education.[2]

Get over the idea of Barr as a disinterested philanthropy scrupulously pursuing only the public good. It’s an interest group. How so?

Consider the political operating charities Barr has been supporting in the bitter contest between union and civil rights and community groups versus the wealthy interests who wish to privatize public education. Barr’s Form 990 tax returns show it routinely donates to political non-profits that promote privatization.

  • In both 2015 and 2016 Barr gave $200,000 to Stand for Children, a beard for privatization interests. (SFC, then funded by members of Strategic Grant Partners, was behind the 2010 charters ballot measure and the 2012 anti-union ballot proposal, both of which ended in compromise legislation).
  • In 2016 Barr gave $125,000 and in 2017 $175,000 to Educators for Excellence “to support the launch of E4E’s Boston chapter.” E4E is a faux teachers operation, a company union alternative to real teachers’ unions.[3]
  • Barr has contributed to Massachusetts Parents United, the Walton family front that executes privatization activities for the WalMart heirs.[4]
  • Just this year Barr funded the rollout of SchoolFacts Boston, a new operating non-profit headed by former mayoral candidate John Connolly, whose candidacy was backed by $1.3 million in dark dollars from Democrats for Education Reform Massachusetts. Connolly recently appeared at a DFER event.

We also can’t ignore the history of the money man behind Barr, Amos Hostetter Jr. (By the way, did Hostetter donate to DFER for the 2013 Boston mayor’s race? We’ll never know. DFER is a dark money front).

  • In 2009 Hostetter contributed $32,500 to the Committee for Public Charter Schools, the ballot committee formed by Stand for Children to support a ballot initiative in support of more charter schools.
  • In 2016 Hostetter secretly donated over $2 million to Families for Excellent Schools in favor of Question 2 to increase the number of charter schools. Because Hostetter hid his donations behind that dark money front, his largesse was not known until the Office of Campaign and Political Finance ruled that FESA had violated state campaign finance law and ordered it to disclose the true sources of its funding. Hostetter was the fourth largest individual donor to FESA.[5] If not for OCPF, we’d never know.[6]

Keep reading. The Barr Foundation is buying influence. It’s money will be used to point the Globe to ideas favored by Barr and to ignoreodeas that Barr dismisses.

This is a new-dangled kind of corruption.

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

Oklahoma: The Billionaire Who Bought the University of Tulsa and Stifled the Liberal Arts

By dianeravitch
June 29, 2019 //
7

D

Read this sad story. 

A billionaire with too much money and no vision buys the University of Tulsa.

His plan gutted the liberal arts, raised default teaching loads across the university from five courses per year to eight, eliminated all academic departments, created new divisions to house surviving programs (including one called “Humanities and Social Justice”), and established a “Professional Super College” consisting of the formerly independent colleges of law, health sciences, and business.

The author Jacob Howland is a professor of philosophy at UT.

Who needs philosophy these days?

Billionaires do the darnedest things.

Categories Billionaires, Education Reform, Higher Education

Matt Barnum: Is Laurene Powell Jobs Reinventing the High School?

By dianeravitch | Image
June 29, 2019 //
67

 

Let us give credit to Chalkbeat: It is not afraid to give an equivocal review to one of its funders, billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs.

Barnum presents the facts about the spotty record of LPJ’s XQ Initiative. Her goal, she said, is to “reinvent” the high school. She has given grants of $10 million to a variety of high schools, each of which has its own plans and ideas. These high schools are supposed to become beacons of innovation that are copied by thousands of other high school, ushering in an era of breathtaking change.

She launched the XQ initiative with a public relations stunt: a star-studded TV program that ran on all three major networks. This was supposed to be a huge consciousness raiser that stunned the public and ushered in the demand for radical change.

The breathtaking naïveté of the XQ Plan boggles the mind. The goal and shape of change is undefined. All that is clear is that a billionaire wants change.

It didn’t help that Mrs. Jobs surrounded herself with policy types who never taught and never led a school (Arne Duncan, Russlyn Ali, others) and whose policy chops stemmed from failed policies (Race to the Top).

Why would a whiz-bang TV show ignite a revolution? Why would 10-15 examples of schools that are all doing something different create a template for thousands of other high schools?

The first Bush Administration tried something similar (New American Schools Development Corporation), which doled out $50 million to design teams to “reinvent” the high school. Like Ozymandias, it is lost in the sands of time.

Even if many people agreed that the high school years should be different, there is no agreement on how it should be different or that Laurene Powell Jobs and her team of tyros will lead us to the Promised Land.

 

Categories Billionaires, Disruption, Innovation

Some Members of the Billionaires Boys & Girls Club Say: “Tax Us”

By dianeravitch
June 28, 2019 //
20

The New York Times published this story about billionaires who endorse a “moderate wealth tax” on themselves.
The financier George Soros is part of a group of wealthy individuals calling for “a moderate wealth tax on the fortunes of the richest one-tenth of the richest 1 percent of Americans — on us.

The “us” includes self-made billionaires like the financier George Soros and Chris Hughes, a Facebook co-founder, as well as heirs to dynastic riches like the filmmaker Abigail Disney and Liesel Pritzker Simmons and Ian Simmons, co-founders of the Blue Haven Initiative, an impact investment organization….

Categories Billionaires

Steven Singer: Joy on the Last Day of School!

By dianeravitch
June 28, 2019 //
7

 

Open this link to discover the big surprise that Steven Singer’s students gave him on the last day of school.

It defines the term “psychic income.”

it explains the rewards that teachers may get that are never never never available to lawyers, hedge fund managers, even billionaires. Eli Broad will never win this prize. No member of the Walton Family will ever receive what Steven got from his eighth grade students on the last day of school.

Categories Billionaires, Education Reform, Joy

Tom Ultican: How the Billionaires Took Control of an Impoverished District in New Jersey

By dianeravitch
June 27, 2019 //
8

 

Tom Ultican writes here about the billionaire takeover of Camden, New Jersey. It was easy. Working with Republican Governor Chris Christie, who was eager to have someone take responsibility for the schools in the state’s poorest district, the billionaires got what they wanted.

Camden was their plaything, their Petri dish.

Have they ended poverty yet?

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Education Industry, New Jersey, Privatization

How Walton Money Influences Charter School Debate

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2019 //
11

 

This article was published in the Detroit Free Press on a day when not many people were paying attention, December 25, 2018, but it should have been national news.

The Waltons, heirs to the anti-union Walmart empire, have been investing in black organizations to spread their views about charter schools.

The fact that the NAACP and Black Lives Matter have stood up to the bully billionaire behemoth and demanded a moratorium on charters is astounding and a great credit to their integrity.

It begins:

Amid fierce debate over whether charter schools are good for black students, the heirs to the Walmart company fortune have been working to make inroads with advocates and influential leaders in the black community.

The Walton family, as one of the leading supporters of America’s charter school movement, is spreading its financial support to prominent and like-minded black leaders, from grassroots groups focused on education to mainstream national organizations such as the United Negro College Fund and Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, according to an Associated Press analysis of tax filings and nonprofit grants data.

Here is the most astonishingly hypocritical statement in the article:

“Those closest to the challenge often have the best solution,” Marc Sternberg, who leads the Walton Family Foundation’s education efforts, said in a prepared statement.

 

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, Walton Foundation

My List of Books for Summer Reading

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2019 //
23

In no particular order.

These are books I enjoyed and learned from.

Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

Rucker Johnson, Children of the Dream: Why Integration Works

Noliwe Rooks, Cutting School:  Privatization,  Segregation, and the End of Public Education
Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America 
Gordon Lafer, The One Percent Solution: How Corporations Are Remaking America One State at a Time
Nancy McLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America
Daniel Koretz, The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better
Yong Zhao, What Works May Hurt—Side Effects in Education
Pasi Sahlberg and William Doyle, Let the Children Play: How More Play Will Save Our Schools and Help Children Thrive
Eve Ewing, Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side
Sent from my iPad
Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Closing schools, Corporate Reformers, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, History, Privatization, Racism, Segregation

The Billionaires Who Bought the West

By dianeravitch
June 25, 2019 //
12

 

The front page of Sunday’s New York Times has a story titled “Who Owns the West?”  

A couple of billionaires, that’s who.

The U.S. used to be the Land of Opportunity.

Now it is the Land of the Oligarchs.

IDAHO CITY, Idaho — The Wilks brothers grew up in a goat shed, never finished high school and built a billion-dollar fracking business from scratch.

So when the brothers, Dan and Farris, bought a vast stretch of mountain-studded land in southwest Idaho, it was not just an investment, but a sign of their good fortune.

“Through hard work and determination — and they didn’t have a lot of privilege — they’ve reached success,” said Dan Wilks’s son, Justin.

The purchase also placed the Wilkses high on the list of well-heeled landowners who are buying huge parcels of America. In the last decade, private land in the United States has become increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few. Today, just 100 families own about 42 million acres across the country, a 65,000-square-mile expanse, according to the Land Report, a magazine that tracks large purchases. Researchers at the magazine have found that the amount of land owned by those 100 families has jumped 50 percent since 2007.

Much of that land stretches from the Rocky Mountains down into Texas, where, for some, commercial forests and retired ranches have become an increasingly attractive investment.

Battles over private and public land have been a defining part of the West since the 1800s, when the federal government began doling out free acres to encourage expansion. For years, fights have played out between private individuals and the federal government, which owns more than half of the region.

But now, with wealthier buyers purchasing even larger parcels, the battle lines have shifted. Many local residents see these new owners as a threat to a way of life beloved for its easy access to the outdoors, and they complain that property that they once saw as public is being taken away from them.

The Wilkses, who now own some 700,000 acres across several states, have become a symbol of the out-of-touch owner. In Idaho, as their property has expanded, the brothers have shuttered trails and hired armed guards to patrol their acres, blocking and stymying access not only to their private property, but also to some publicly owned areas. This has drawn ire from everyday Idahoans who have hiked and hunted in those hills for generations.

I think so.
Categories Billionaires
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