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Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider: Everything You Need to Know about How Billionaires Think

By dianeravitch
October 10, 2018 //
10

Do you want to understand the thinking of Gates, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and other billionaires who are disrupting public education? Listen up.

Jennifer Berkshire (once known as the blogger EduShyster) and Jack Schneider (historian of education) create podcasts in a series called “Have You Heard?” in which they interview interesting thinkers.

In this episode, they interview Anand Giridharadas, author of the important book “Winners Take All.” He lived inside the billionaires’ bubble and understood that they want to be seen and applauded as saviors without disrupting the status quo that keeps them on top.

Here is a sampling from the podcast:


“Just because you once got lucky at a hedge fund trade, you shouldn’t get to decide what our schools are like,” says Anand Giridharadas, author of the best-selling new book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. The book is a scathing indictment of elites who seek to ‘fix’ society, while leaving the inequitable system that has made them so rich untouched. It’s also essential reading for understanding why so many of these billionaire changemakers are intent on ‘disrupting’ public education.

From Bezos to Zuckerberg, the initiatives that these winners champion “mostly aren’t democratic, nor do they reflect problem solving or universal solutions,” argues Giridharadas. “Rather, they favor the use of the private sector and its charitable spoils, the market way of looking at things and the bypassing of government.” Sound familiar?

In the latest episode of the Have You Heard podcast, Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider talk to Giridharadas about education reform in the new gilded age.

Have You Heard: Amazon’s Jeff Bezos recently announced that he’s going to give back by starting up a chain of Montessori-inspired preschools in urban areas. It’s a perfect example of the ‘winner take all’ mentality that your book is about, that someone who has been absolutely central to our age of inequality is now stepping in to offer a fix—on his terms.

Anand Giridharadas: Jeff Bezos becomes the latest entrant to a whole world of billionaire givers, and what’s interesting is that he arrives at a moment of reckoning within both the the tech world where he made his money and the philanthropy world where he’s now alighting. I think five years ago the general attitude to big tech was, ‘thanks so much for this app uncle,’ and you know, in the general attitude to people giving money away was like, gosh, thanks so much. Thanks for giving back. And our culture is changing on both those scores. People are starting to recognize that a lot of the money that is being given away, a lot of how it’s made, a lot of how it’s kept, are themselves the causes of the problems that these rich people turn around and solve. And that we may be better off as a society with people just not causing problems in the first place and then turning around and solving them.

Have You Heard: There’s a common assumption in the education world that elite changemakers, as you describe them, are motivated primarily by the desire for financial gain. But part of what makes Winners Take All such a compelling read is that you really let us see the world through their eyes and the picture we get is much more complex than just ‘I want to cash in on the schools.’

Giridharadas: One of the things I’ll say just overall is that, you know, for Winners Take All I spent about two plus years in the world of elite so-called world changers, trying to understand how they see the world, understand how they try to make change. What I found is much more nuanced story about what motivates the winners of our age and among the things I found was that many, many elites who try to give, who try to donate to a charter school, who try to get on the board of a charter school, who try to, you know, help the Harlem Children’s Zone, who try to do any number of things in any number of other areas—there’s a general sincerity to these people in general. They are not trying to do this to make more money, they’re trying to do this to make the world better.

The problem is that they’re not. The problem is that the good they do, which is real but limited, is often an accomplice to the preservation of a system that keeps generating more harm. The charter school that they donate to, their donation to it as part of a system that allows them to protect the underfunding and unequal funding of public schools across this country. They’re not willing to have an education system that funds public schools equally and adequately because that would cost rich people a lot of money.

Have You Heard: Market thinking has really taken over the education world, and one of the concepts imported from business that you talk about is the “win/win.” It sounds great, but as you argue, it’s key to keeping intact. the structures that make our society so unequal

Giridharadas: The win/win idea originated in business and it’s basically trade and exchange. You have money, I have ice cream, you want ice cream, I’ll get your money. Good—win/win. But what has happened in recent years is that the idea of the win/win has kind of insidiously infiltrated the world of social change, of education, of health, of fighting inequality and poverty. There is now this feeling that both parties—the powerful and the powerless, the haves and the have nots, the rich and the poor—must benefit from a social change for it to be worth doing.

Now, the cleverness of this is it still called a win/win, so it still sounds great. But hold on a second. Are we saying that the powerful must always benefit from helping the powerless? Are we saying that social change must always kick something upstairs to the people benefiting from the status quo? Are we saying the only way to empower women is in ways that give a little something to the men? Are we saying that the only way to help poor kids that are screwed by our education system are in ways that also kicked something up to the affluent? Are we saying that the only way to, you know, improve our healthcare system is in ways that take nothing from billionaires and corporations? Yeah, that’s what we’re saying when we increasingly talk about social change as being a win/win.

Have You Heard: One of the arguments you make in the book is that inequality isn’t just about economics but about ideas, and that the more resources a small group of people commands, the more they effectively control the terms of the debate. But there’s obviously a cultural element at work too, that we’ve given, for example, Mark Zuckerberg an incredible amount of authority, including now anointing him as the savior who’s going to fix our public schools.

Giridharadas: In Europe, no one thinks of Mark Zuckerberg as someone who’s changing the world. Now ‘no one’ may not be literally correct, but in European cultures, that’s just not how they see someone like that. Therefore in Europe they’re not as vulnerable to the Mark Zuckerbergs because they know how to regulate them and they fine him and they stand up for themselves. They create data protection laws that are much tougher than ours. They create antitrust scrutiny that’s much tougher than ours, and I think a big reason they do that is they have a culture that’s free of these myths.

We are participating in a culture that valorizes the win/win, that valorizes the billionaire savior, that is grateful when people who have money they probably shouldn’t have give it away. And we can actually participate in not believing those things anymore. We can just stop believing those things. We can actually, the next time someone gives money away and is, you know, at a conference that you’re attending, ask them a question about how they made the money, not how they’re giving it away.

We uphold through what we passively assent to in this world, and schools uphold it by who they put on the board and, you know, and who they raise money from and who they allow to be their advisors. We are all in on a world that has entrusted the super rich to become our saviors and and the replacements of government in many areas of our life, and that’s an empowering message because we can stop participating in that culture today.

Have You Heard: You write about the winners’ disdain for democracy and preference for private-sector solutions that bypass government. I’m guessing this will strike a chord with anyone who is, say, trying to figure out exactly where Mark Zuckerberg’s enormous stake in expanding personalized learning, for example, is going and is being told ‘it’s none of your business.’

Giridharadas: For a long time, we’ve all been on the receiving end of this culture that tells us to solve things privately, you know, either have a billionaire give back or buy a tote bag that’s going to change the world or a red iPhone case that’s going to change the world or, you know, go to a plutocratic conference that’s going to change the world. I want to urge people to, the next time you are walking around your society and you see a problem that disturbs you, you see problem with education or any other area of your life that disturbs you, think of a solution that has the following four qualities: it’s public, it’s democratic, it’s universal and it’s institutional. Think of a solution that actually would solve the problem at the root, not in the branches and for everybody, not just the people that you would want to save that day, and get out of that relationship of saving to begin with.

When we act privately, when you have these foundations or companies picking and choosing people they want to save, again, that’s a feudal relationship. That’s a relationship of master and servant. The servant is having a little difficulty in their life, the master is throwing some gold coins at them, but it’s not changing the relationship of master and servant. When we act democratically through our shared institutions to solve a problem for everybody, in education, in health, whatever else, we are expressing the value of the whole. We are acting together to protect each other and it has a fundamentally different meaning. We are both the object and the subject of the help, and I think we have to, in education and every other sphere, get out of this world in which we think that because you once got lucky at a hedge fund trade, you should decide what our schools are like.

Have You Heard: Winners Take All is an infuriating read—people should probably avoid reading it in the presence of pitchforks—but it’s also kind of liberating, What do you hope readers will take away from the book?

Giridharadas: I think of this book as very much trying to dismantle a culture and it does so through stories of people living in this culture, struggling with these ideas, trying to do better, but being limited inhibited by a bunch of mythology that encircles them, and my book is trying to kind of get rid of that mythology. It’s trying to dismantle it and make you never use the word win/ win or thought leader or innovation non ironically again. I think this kind of this false sense that you can change the world in ways that protect the status quo for the winners of our age is at the heart of why we live in an age that has been so good for winners and so, so you know, mediocre at best or punishing for everybody else.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Disruption, Education Reform

NPE Action Endorses Tony Thurmond for Superintendent of Public Instruction in California!

By dianeravitch
October 4, 2018 //
6

The Network for Public Education Action Fund endorses Tony Thurmond for Superintendent of Public Institution in California!

California is a mess because of the intrusion of billionaires into education, billionaires who do not send their own children to public schools but want to control and privatize them. They pour millions into school board races, and they are now pouring millions into the state superintendent race, in hopes of capturing that important position.

Tony Thurmond’s opponent, Marshall Tuck, has a long history in the charter industry. Although he claims to be a Democrat (as in DFER), Tuck was endorsed by the California Republican party. Thurmond won the support of 95% of the delegates to the California Democratic party convention. Tuck was also endorsed by Arne Duncan, and Duncan’s endorsement means support of charter schools, high-stakes testing, and misuse of test scores to evaluate teachers.

California desperately needs accountability and transparency for its unregulated charter sector, not a fox in charge of the henhouse.

Please help Tony Thurmond. He is wildly outspent by the candidate of the billionaires, including Eli Broad, Reed Hastings, Arthur Rock, and the Walton family.

This is the NPE Action statement:

The Network for Public Education Action proudly endorsed East Bay Assemblyman, Tony Thurmond, for California State Superintendent of Public Instruction.

We are writing today to remind you just how important your support for Tony Thurmond is.

Marshall Tuck, a corporate reformer, is gaining ground thanks to millions supplied to his campaign by the California Charter School Association and its allies.

Here is what one of the state’s leading public school advocates Professor Julian Vasquez Heilig had to say about this race:

“Marshall Tuck would clearly be an important ally for the Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos education agenda in California. In contrast, Tony Thurmond has vowed to lead the resistance against their education agenda. Marshall Tuck has millions of campaign dollars given to him by his billionaire allies and others lobbying to privately control and privatize public education in California. While Tuck has millions, Thurmond has people power. As Superintendent of Public Instruction he would be our champion for community-based solutions and better funding for education across our state.”

It is no wonder that Tuck is the darling of the charter-school backing billionaires.

Tuck is a former charter school executive and CEO. In 2014, Tuck ran an unsuccessful campaign for State Superintendent, losing to incumbent Tom Torlakson. Tuck was heavily funded by outside money from national charter advocates, including Michael Bloomberg, Eli Broad, the Waltons, Laurene Powell Jobs, Arthur Rock and John Arnold. Thurmond stated that, “California’s voters don’t want this election to be bought by the Walton family, Eli Broad, and other billionaires who want to privatize public education.”

Thurmond is passionate about improving public schools. His public school education prepared him for a 20-year career in social work, where he ran after-school programs and taught life skills and career training. Those years of experience provided him with a unique perspective into the lives of California’s youth.

Thurmond has vowed to “lead the resistance against Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos and their agenda to undermine and defund our public education system,” promising that he will not support policies that seek to divert taxpayer dollars from public education to private schools.

Thurmond has already received numerous endorsements, including the endorsement of Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tom Torlakson. Thurmond will be on the general election ballot on November 6th. NPE Action urges our over 21,000 supporters in California to educate and inform your friends, family, neighbors and colleagues about Thurmond’s campaign and the importance of this election for the future of public education in California.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, California, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization

New York State Tax Agency Could Demand $400 Million from Trump

By dianeravitch
October 3, 2018 //
10

If the New York Times’ reporting about Trump tax evasion is accurate, the New York tax authorities will come after him. They are careful and relentless. According to the business paper Crain’s New York, Trump might owe $400 million in taxes.

https://www.crainsnewyork.com/politics/if-times-right-trumps-could-face-400m-state-tax-bill

Categories Accountability, Billionaires

Audrey Watters: Why Pre-School Should not Be “Just Like Amazon”

By dianeravitch
October 3, 2018 //
75

Audrey Watters, writing a guest post on Larry Cuban’s blog, demonstrates the insidious nature of Jeff Bezos’ plan to create his own chain of pre-schools, where “the child is the customer.”

She writes:

“The assurance that “the child will be the customer” underscores the belief – shared by many in and out of education reform and education technology – that education is simply a transaction: an individual’s decision-making in a “marketplace of ideas.” (There is no community, no public responsibility, no larger civic impulse for early childhood education here. It’s all about private schools offering private, individual benefits.)

“This idea that “the child will be the customer” is, of course, also a nod to “personalized learning” as well, as is the invocation of a “Montessori-inspired” model. As the customer, the child will be tracked and analyzed, her preferences noted so as to make better recommendations to up-sell her on the most suitable products. And if nothing else, Montessori education in the United States is full of product recommendations.

“There’s another piece to all this, not mentioned in Bezos’s note about building a chain of preschools that “use the same set of principles that have driven Amazon”: Amazon’s own labor practices. The online retail giant is a notoriously terrible place to work – the pay, particularly in the warehouses, is so low that many employees receive government assistance. The working conditions are dangerous and dehumanizing. “Amazon has patented a system that would put workers in a cage, on top of a robot,” read the headline in last week’s Seattle Times. And it’s not so great for the white collar workers either. “Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk,” one employee in books marketing told The New York Times back in 2015.

“The majority of the early childhood educators in the US are already very poorly paid; many preschools have incredibly high turnover rates. As research has demonstrated that preschool has a lasting positive effect on children’s educational attainment, there have been efforts to “raise the standards,” demanding for example that preschools be staffed by more qualified teachers. But that demand for more training and certification hasn’t brought with it better pay or benefits. The median pay for preschool teachers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is less than $30,000 a year. Even those with Bachelor’s degrees earn only about $14.70 an hour, about half of the average wages for all those with the same level of education.

“This is a field in which a third of employees already qualify for government assistance. And now Jeff Bezos, a man whose own workers also rely on these same anti-poverty programs, wants to step in – not as a taxpayer, oh no, but as a philanthropist. Honestly, he could have a more positive impact here by just giving those workers a raise. (Or, you know, by paying taxes.)”

Sadly, there will be parents who will get in line to have their children treated like Amazon customers, as there are parents who sign their children up for harsh and punitive “no-excuses” charters.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Early Childhood Education, Philanthropy

The Guardian Reports on the Showdown Between the Koch Brothers and the Parents/Teachers of Arizona

By dianeravitch
September 27, 2018 //
21

There will be many important elections this fall, with the future of our democracy in the balance.

One of the most notable elections will take place in Arizona, where parents and teachers–organized as SOS Arizona–are facing off against the Koch brothers and the DeVos combine.

The Guardian tells the story here.


Arizona has become the hotbed for an experiment rightwing activists hope will redefine America’s schools – an experiment that has pitched the conservative billionaires the Koch brothers and Donald Trump’s controversial education secretary, Betsy DeVos, against teachers’ unions, teachers and parents. Neither side is giving up without a fight.

With groups funded by the Koch brothers and DeVos nudging things along, Arizona lawmakers enacted the nation’s broadest school vouchers law, state-funded vouchers that are supposed to give parents more school choice and can be spent on private or religiously affiliated schools. For opponents, the system is not about choice but about further weakening the public school system. A half-dozen women who had battled for months against the legislation were angry as hell.

Convinced that the law would drain money from Arizona’s underfunded public schools, these women complained that Arizona’s lawmakers had ignored the public will and instead heeded the wishes of billionaires seeking to build up private schools at the expense of public schools.

“We walked outside the Capitol Building, and we looked at each other, and said, ‘What now?” said one of the women, Dawn Penich-Thacker, a mother of two boys in public school and a former army public information officer. “We had been fighting this for four months. We realized that there’s something we can do about it. It’s called a citizens’ referendum. We said, ‘Let’s do it.’”

Little did they know the challenges ahead. They would need 75,321 signatures to get their referendum on the ballot to overturn the law. They formed a group, Save Our Schools, and set out to collect the needed signatures. Opposing lobbyists sneered, saying no way could they do that.

The six women inspired a statewide movement and got hundreds of volunteers to brave Arizona’s torrid summer heat to collect signatures – in parks and parking lots, at baseball games and shopping malls. Their message was that billionaire outsiders were endangering public education by getting Arizona’s legislature – in part through campaign contributions – to create an expensive voucher program.

“We knew something was rotten in the state of Arizona,” said Beth Lewis, a fifth-grade teacher who is president of Save Our Schools. “We drew a line in the sand. We said, ‘We’re not going to let this happen.’” Lewis said Arizona’s schools are so underfunded that some classes have 40 students and her school needs to ask a private citizen to donate money when a teacher needs a set of books for her class.

One study found that Arizona, at $7,613, is the third-lowest state in public school spending per student, while another study found that from 2008 to 2015, school funding per pupil had plunged by 24% in Arizona, after adjusting for inflation – the second-biggest drop in the nation.

Upset that the vouchers law would funnel money toward private schools, Lewis said: “We can’t fund two different school systems. We can hardly afford one.”

Save our Schools submitted 111,540 signatures to the secretary of state in August 2017, but the Koch brothers’ political arm, Americans for Prosperity, sued to block the referendum. A judge dismissed the lawsuit and approved the referendum for 6 November – it’s called Proposition 305. The vote will be closely watched by people on both sides of the debate as the Kochs and DeVos hope to spread the voucher scheme and opponents look to Arizona for clues on how to stop them.

And that’s only the beginning of the story. Read it all. If you live in Arizona, please vote!

Categories Arizona, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Koch Brothers, Resistance, Vouchers

California: Tony Thurmond Needs Our Help As Billionaires Swarm to Aid Marshall Tuck

By dianeravitch
September 26, 2018 //
15

Tony Thurmond, candidate for State Superintendent of Public Instruction, needs our help. The charter industry and billionaires are showering millions of dollars on his opponent Marshall Tuck. Despite the widespread graft and corruption in California’s charter industry, the billionaires want to continue expanding their “market share” of students and draining resources from the public schools.

Please donate whatever you can to Tony Thurmond’s campaign.

The race for state superintendent has become the key race in the state because the gubernatorial race appears to be a slam dunk for Gavin Newsom, the Democratic candidate, who is leading his little-known Republican opponent by double digits.

Tuck has been endorsed by Arne Duncan and the state Republican Party.

Thurmond has been endorsed by the California Teachers Association and the Los Angeles Times.

Think of this race as the Public School Candidate vs. the Charter School Candidate, and it explains why the usual herd of billionaires are supporting Tuck. If they can capture this key spot, California’s public schools will be in deep trouble.

“With seven weeks to go before Election Day, fundraising for Tuck has already surpassed what his supporters raised in the former school administrator’s unsuccessful run for superintendent four years ago.

“This is going to be the most expensive election, period,” said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a professor at the University of Southern California’s Sol Price School of Public Policy…

“Thurmond is a former social worker, school board member and council member in Richmond. Tuck is the former president of Green Dot Public Schools, a charter school organization based in Los Angeles, and CEO of the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, a district-city initiative that runs 18 district schools.

“Tuck will benefit from $10.8 million raised by an independent expenditure committee backing him as of Monday, compared to $4.9 million raised by an independent committee supporting Thurmond.

“In addition, Tuck raised $3.1 million in direct contributions to his campaign through June 30, the most recent reporting deadline, outpacing Thurmond’s $2.1 million in direct contributions…

“Wealthy donors pushing to expand charter schools in California have driven much of the spending to support Tuck so far by pouring large donations into the Sacramento political advocacy organization EdVoice For The Kids PAC, which runs the committee backing Tuck. Although EdVoice has donated to dozens of candidates over the past two years, nearly 90 percent of the money it gave as of the most recent reporting date went to its Tuck committee, which calls itself Students, Parents and Teachers supporting Marshall Tuck for Superintendent of Public Instruction 2018, a project of EdVoice. EdVoice officials did not respond to an interview request.

“Contributors to EdVoice include venture capitalist Arthur Rock, who gave $3 million, real estate developer Bill Bloomfield who gave $2.9 million and philanthropist Eli Broad who gave $1.3 million….

“Neither candidate can be simply characterized as “pro-charter” or “anti-charter.” Each has said there is a role for effective charter schools in public education and that the schools need greater transparency and oversight. They both support a ban on for-profit charter schools that was recently signed into law.

“But Tuck and Thurmond have differed over how to handle the growth of California’s charter schools, which in some areas have attracted students and state funding from traditional school districts. Thurmond has hinted he could support a moratorium on new charter schools. Tuck opposes that idea and has instead called for the state to keep in place funding for districts affected by charter school growth for a time, so those districts can adjust to lower enrollment.”

There is the key difference between them. Tuck wants to manage the continued shrinkage of public schools, while Thurmond wants to stop the shrinkage and rebuild public schools.

Here is a Tuck supporter:

“Rebecca Morgan — a former Bank of America executive and former Republican state senator from the South Bay — cited Tuck’s time in Los Angeles, where he led Green Dot Public Schools, a charter school network, and the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, as one of the reasons she supports him. Morgan has contributed $500,000 to EdVoice.

“Marshall has proven that he understands education and he knows how to turn around school districts, as he has done in Los Angeles,” Morgan said. “He is not in the pocket of any organization, as Thurmond is with the teachers union.”

“Asked how much more she is willing to spend to elect Tuck, Morgan said, “Lots.””

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, California, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization

Jim Miller: Who Will Save Us from the Billionaire “Saviors”?

By dianeravitch
September 26, 2018 //
26

Jim Miller, professor at the San Diego City College, has posed exactly the right question: Who will save us from “our billionaire saviors?” The question was inspired by Andrea Gabor’s excellent new book After the Education Wars, and by the possibility that billionaire Michael Bloomberg will run for the Democratic nomination for president in 2020.

In New York City, we remember him as a data-driven, test-loving, top-down Reformer, who hired non-educator Joel Klein to terrorize teachers and principals and introduce choice and charters. The result was a public relations success and an education failure. Much boasting, vast disruption, constant reorganization. Change for the sake of change. Bloomberg is one of the billionaires identified in the NPE report about the super-rich who fund anti-public education candidates in state and local elections.

Miller writes:

After failing to prop-up Antonio Villaraigosa’s flagging gubernatorial campaign last June, Michael Bloomberg apparently spent the summer pondering whether it would be wiser for him to personally save the United States rather than waste his time trying to rescue California by proxy. Last week the New York Times reported that Bloomberg was mulling a run for the Presidency as a Democrat because that represented the most viable path to victory. As the Times story observed, while Bloomberg has engaged in some good work on guns and the environment, many of his other positions might not be very likely to win over the liberal base of the Democratic Party…

As Andrea Gabor, (ironically) the Bloomberg chair of business journalism at Baruch College/CUNY, writes in her excellent new book After the Education Wars: How Smart Schools Upend the Business of Reform, Bloomberg’s reign in New York hardly represented a golden era for education: “to be an educator in Bloomberg’s New York was a little like being a Trotskyite in Bolshevik Russia—never fully trusted and ultimately sidelined…”

The business reformers came to the education table with their truths: a belief in market competition and quantitative measures. They came with their prejudices—favoring ideas and expertise forged in corporate boardrooms over knowledge and experience gleaned in the messy trenches of inner-city classrooms. They came with distrust of an education culture that values social justice over more practical considerations like wealth and position. They came with the arrogance that elevated polished, but often mediocre (or worse), technocrats over scruffy but knowledgeable educators. And most of all, they came with their suspicion—even their hatred—of organized labor and their contempt for ordinary public school teachers.

What this has resulted in, according to Gabor, is that the corporate reformers “adopted all the wrong lessons from American business.” Rather than innovating by harnessing “the energy and the knowledge of ordinary employees,” who are the most “knowledgeable about problems—and solutions” because they know the process, the billionaire boys club has favored a punitive, hierarchical, undemocratic, one-size fits all approach that has hurt students more than it has helped them.

Wedded to a factory-style approach to education, corporate reformers “focused on a Taylorite effort to standardize teaching so that teachers can be easily substituted like widgets on an assembly line. This despite the fact that, on average, ‘unions have a positive effect on student achievement’ and the best charter schools are often the independent charters that give teachers voice, often via union contracts.” All of this reflects the fact, Gabor reminds us, that “the corporate education-reform movement has deeply undemocratic roots.”

What this movement has brought us is not pretty. We have systematically devalued the “art” of teaching in favor of a dumbed-down, accountability regimen that prefers standardization and over-testing to empowering educators and students to think more creatively and independently. It has assailed teachers and attacked educational culture to such a degree that it should be no surprise that our society has become increasingly anti-intellectual and hostile to fact-based analysis. As Gabor observes of the Trump era:

[T]he election of this larger-than-life Chucky demagogue, with his multiple bankruptcies and divorces, his sexual predations and business malfeasance, his hate-filled speeches and tweets, also represented a failure of corporate-style education reform as it has taken shape over more than twenty years. Among an electorate that often favors “ordinary” people they can identify with, Trump, the consummate philistine—unread and uninterested, crude, unthinking, and disdainful of facts and any attempt at rational truth—holds up a dystopian mirror of the electorate…

It may not have been the intended outcome of those who simply wished to produce a more useful workforce, but it does show the profound limits of their debased instrumentalism. Hence Gabor again observes: “Corporate education reformers cannot be directly blamed for the ascendance of Trump. However, over two decades of an ed-reform apparatus that has emphasized the production of math and ELA test scores over civics and learning for learning’s sake has helped produce an electorate that is ignorant of constitutional democracy and thus more vulnerable to demagoguery.”

Gabor’s thorough study does more than just criticize the failures of corporate education reform. She outlines how multiple examples of innovative educational practices across the country have defied the technocratic dictates of the well-heeled and focused instead on “bottom-up” strategies that have relied heavily on “a participative, collaborative, deeply democratic approach to continuous improvement, drawing on diverse constituencies—including students, teachers, and local business leaders—in their effort.”

Thus, there are some insights to be found in approaches that rely on “local democracy” that can help do right for our children and the society at large. Following these examples, rather than the lead of self-important billionaires, is where we can find hope for a better education system and a more democratic society.

As for Bloomberg, maybe he should just go away and let the people lead. We’ve had too much “reform” from self-declared rich saviors and philanthrocapitalists already. In fact, it’s long past time that we save ourselves from them.

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

Mira Debs: How Jeff Bezos Should Spend His $2 Billion in Philanthropy

By dianeravitch
September 24, 2018 //
17

Mira Debs, Executive Director of the Yale Education Studies Program, thinks Jeff Bezos should use his riches to help existing, top-quality Montessori programs instead of starting his own schools. He got off to a bad start by saying that “the child is the customer.” Ugh! Children are children, not customers!

She writes:


Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and the owner of The Washington Post, surprised the education world when he announced this month that he was donating $2 billion to support homeless families and create a network of free Montessori-inspired preschools.

It’s a compelling demonstration of the power of quality early childhood education that Mr. Bezos may have been inspired by a Montessori program he attended for a year and a half in the 1960s.

At face value, the donation is a much needed investment in early childhood education that could potentially help fill the child-care gap for many low-income families. In his announcement, Mr. Bezos highlighted his desire to find and spread the “good in the world.” But his plan to create new organizations, however worthy, would duplicate the efforts of grass-roots programs in need of a serious cash infusion.

Mr. Bezos should be congratulated for moving beyond the small circle of urban charter schools favored by other philanthropists. Many of these charter schools have been criticized for their rigid discipline. In contrast, Montessori classrooms focus on developing children’s independence and self-control, delivering academic results along the way. Recent research by Angelene Lillard of the University of Virginia and colleagues found that children from lower-income families who won a lottery spot in a public Montessori program were more likely to catch up to their wealthier peers than children who did not get a spot and attended programs elsewhere.

Mr. Bezos could follow in the footsteps of Roslyn Williams, a Montessori educator who founded the Central Harlem Association of Montessori Parents in 1967 to create integrated Montessori preschools in New York. Ms. Williams argued that Montessori education should go from being the “the rich child’s right” to “the poor child’s opportunity.”

Yet Mr. Bezos’s aim of creating his own network to run these preschools puts him in danger of falling into the trap of the “charitable-industrial complex,” following tech colleagues like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates who have poured large sums of money into top-down educational strategies: saving Newark’s schools and improving teaching, gifts that have been shown to have a limited impact.

In this case, it’s not that families from underserved communities don’t want Montessori preschools, it’s that they have been creating them for a long time. Over the last four years, I’ve been doing research on public Montessori schools, and I helped start a public Montessori school in New Haven and a grass-roots network of Montessori educators. I learned that even though Montessori has a reputation for being a private, elite form of schooling, there is a long history of educators who have worked to make Montessori accessible to children from low-income backgrounds.

In Washington, Detroit, Dallas and other cities, there is a growing momentum to expand public Montessori programs. Today, 511 public Montessori programs have approximately 125,000 children ages 3 to 18 around the country, more than half of them students of color.

Instead of creating his own network, Mr. Bezos should consider funding schools that are already doing the work he admires. Consider the 50 public Montessori programs in Puerto Rico created by Ana María García Blanco beginning in 1990, programs that are now at risk of closing because of school reorganization efforts after Hurricane Maria. Public Montessori programs could use a fund to train teachers, buy materials and build buildings. Groups like Embracing Equity, City Garden Montessori and the Indigenous Montessori Institute are working to develop anti-bias, anti-racist curriculums and diversify the pool of Montessori teachers.

Rather than considering the children of these future schools his “customers,” albeit tuition-free customers, Mr. Bezos could orient himself toward viewing the underserved as his collaborators. Families have been organizing to create Montessori and other preschools for their children for a long time. A truly revolutionary philanthropic fund would not create a separate network, but seek out the schools, the community centers, the storefront start-ups and the other dreams in waiting.

Mira Debs (@mira_debs) is the executive director of the Yale Education Studies program, a lecturer in sociology and the author of the forthcoming book, “Diverse Families, Desirable Schools: Public Montessori in an Era of School Choice.”

Categories Billionaires, Early Childhood Education

Mercedes Schneider: The Billionaires Behind TFA’s Drive for Power

By dianeravitch
September 23, 2018 //
11

Mercedes Schneider will lead a workshop at the Network for Public Education conference in Indianapolis on Oct 20-21 about how to be a financial sleuth. Find out who is funding the “rephormers” in your state or community.

In this post, she gives a lesson and unmasks TFA’s drive for political power.

Teach for America presents itself as a wholesome charity and raises money to send fresh-faced, inexperienced young college graduates into needy schools. At its inception, it was supposed to fill vacant positions, but now TFA will cheerfully replace experienced teachers for districts trying to save money. TFA is also the labor force for non-union charter schools (i.e. scabs), with the energy to work 70-hour Weeks and no family obligations.

TFA has a political arm, which is not so well known. It is called Leaders for Educational Equity (LEE),which is deceptively named, like all rephorm groups (which swear they are in this business “for the kids,” for “equity,” to ”close achievement gaps,” etc.).

Schneider investigated the funding behind LEE. You will not be surprised to learn it is the usual billionaires.

“According to the LEE site, LEE membership is free to all TFAers. And why not? The purpose of TFA and its related orgs is to catapult those who taught for five minutes into positions of power and authority over the American classroom.

“Such catapulting requires loads of money– which brings us to those financially-loaded, Leaders in Education PAC donors:

“The PAC is primarily funded by members of the Walton family (note that Carrie Penner is Carrie Walton Penner) and by Arthur Rock. Michael Bloomberg makes an appearance, as does Purdue Pharma-OxyContin first son and venture capitalist, Jonathan Sackler.”

Aren’t you relieved to know that the opioid billions of the Sackler family are being spent on helping TFA grads gain political power, in addition to the expansion of the charter industry?

Wherever you see the name Walton, you can be sure they are pushing non-union charters and a vision of corporate charter chains that reflect the Walmart ideals of cheap and fast and everywhere.

I am in the middle of reading “Winners Take All,” and hear the author’s words in my head. The elites like to destroy public institutions, then offer to step in and solve the problems they created by funding a new institution, under their control.

Teach for America is meant to undermine the teaching profession by offering up eager and idealistic young people who are happy to work for a meager salary that won’t support a family or a decent standard of living. They provide the workers for the charters beloved by billionaires, whose purpose is to drain resources and destroy the public schools.

Be informed. Vote.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Education Reform, Teach for America, Teachers, Unions

District Court in D.C. Strikes a Blow Against Dark Money

By dianeravitch
September 19, 2018 //
9

One of the stains on Democracy is “Dark Money,” that, anonymous donors who make large political contributions while masking their identity. The Koch brothers and other funders of corporate assaults on democracy used such conduits. In education elections, such groups as Education Reform Now and the California Charter School Association Advocates hide their donors names. A few years back, California held a referendum about raising taxes to support schools. Certain well-known billionaires publicly supported the tax but quietly funded a Dark Money campaign to defeat it.

The chief judge of the Federal District Court ruled that the names of all those who make political donations must be released, and the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal. This is great news for those who believe in transparency and democracy!

Advocacy groups pouring money into independent campaigns to impact this fall’s midterm races must disclose many of their political donors beginning this week after the Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to intervene in a long-running case.

The high court did not grant an emergency request to stay a ruling by a federal judge in Washington who had thrown out a decades-old Federal Election Commission regulation allowing nonprofit groups to keep their donors secret unless they had earmarked their money for certain purposes.

With less than 50 days before this fall’s congressional elections, the ruling has far-reaching consequences that could curtail the ability of major political players to raise money and force the disclosure of some of the country’s wealthiest donors.

In an interview, FEC Chairwoman Caroline Hunter said that the names of certain contributors who give money to nonprofit groups to use in political campaigns beginning Wednesday will have to be publicly reported.

Hunter and other conservatives warned the decision could have a chilling effect just as the midterms are heating up.

“It’s unfortunate that citizens and groups who wish to advocate for their candidate will now have to deal with a lot of uncertainty less than two months before the election,” said Hunter, a Republican appointee.

Advocates for stricter regulation of money in politics celebrated the move.

“This is a great day for transparency and democracy,” Noah Bookbinder, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), which brought the case, said in a statement, adding: “We’re about to know a lot more about who is funding our elections.”

Yes, it throws “uncertainty” into the election when donors have to be known to the public.

It is unclear whether the decision is retroactive.

Since Citizens United was approved by the Supreme Court, Big Money has been unlimited in campaign spending. Now it faces the “uncertainty” of being publicly identified.

Boo hoo.

NPR reports:

“The Supreme Court’s decision comes less than a week after a new research report by the government reform group Issue One, which puts some dollar amounts on what these unreported donors are giving. The report, which took a year of research, finds that the top 15 politically active nonprofits raised and spent more than $600 million on campaigns between 2010, when Citizens United boosted secret fundraising, and 2016.

“The secret giving is made possible by a regulatory loophole at the FEC. The groups, usually organized as 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations or 501(c)(6) business associations, don’t register as political committees with the commission. With the loophole, the FEC wants donor disclosure only when a donor earmarks the money for specific ads.

“The top four spenders identified by Issue One are the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the mainstream conservative Crossroads GPS, the Koch network’s Americans for Prosperity and the National Rifle Association. Issue One says that collectively, the four groups pumped at least $357 million into elections between 2010 and 2016.

“Opaque organizations are using contributions from opaque donors and secretly funding election campaigns and ads that are urging viewers to vote for or against candidates,” said Michael Beckel, research manager at Issue One. “And it remains very difficult to track back the true sources of dark money groups.”

“Meanwhile, Americans for Prosperity has launched AFP Action — a superPAC that will regularly report its donors to the FEC, sidestepping the disclosure controversy.”

Categories Billionaires, Dark Money, Education Industry
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