Gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon released her education plan, which would add funding to reduce class sizes and fully fund schools. Her slogan: “Schools, Not Jails.”
Cuomo spokespeople blasted her for being a front for “parent advocacy groups,”as if that were a bad thing. It’s not.
Cuomo’s education policies are controlled by hedge fund managers, billionaires, and Wall Street advocacy groups. That is a very bad thing.
The Washington Post published a long story about Laurene Powell Jobs. She is of course the widow of Steve Jobs and has a net worth of $20 billion or so. The article is probably behind a paywall, though I’m not sure.
To say it is an admiring portrait would be an understatement. It is the story of St. Laurene. She went to public school in New Jersey. School saved her life. Her children went to public school. Yet one of her first hires for her Emerson Collective was Arne Duncan. She was probably impressed because he was Secretary of Education but those of us who have followed his career wonder what she saw in him other than a title. His Race to the Top was one of the worst federal programs ever to be imposed on the nation’s schools. It was a massive failure, a waste of billions of federal and state dollars. It was NCLB 2.0, and its major legacy is privatization, standardization, teacher shortages, underinvestment in teachers and schools, and demoralization.
Here are a few quotes from this hagiography.
Laurene Powell Jobs — like the inventors and disrupters who were all around her — was thinking big. It was 2004, and she was an East Coast transplant — sprung from a cage in West Milford, N.J., as her musical idol Bruce Springsteen might put it — acclimating to the audacious sense of possibility suffusing the laboratories, garages and office parks of Silicon Valley. She could often be found at a desk in a rented office in Palo Alto, Calif., working a phone and an Apple computer. There, her own creation was beginning to take shape. It would involve philanthropy … technology … social change — she was charting the destination as she made the journey. She eventually named the project Emerson Collective after Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of her favorite writers. In time it would become perhaps the most influential product of Silicon Valley that you’ve never heard of.
Yet at first, growth was slow. The work took a back seat to raising her three children and managing the care of her husband, Steve Jobs, as he battled the cancer that killed him in 2011 at age 56, followed by a period of working through family grief. She inherited his fortune, now worth something like $20 billion, and became the sixth-richest woman on the planet. By 2014, Emerson Collective was up to 10 employees. “For the first few years I worked here, there would be people who would say, ‘Who?’ ” says the eighth hire, Anne Marie Burgoyne, director of grants. “ ‘Is there someone in the Valley who’s famous whose last name is Emerson?’ That seemed like a fair question. The Valley is a place of reputation, so it’s logical to ask whose last name is Emerson. Nobody knew who we were.”
Powell Jobs, now 54, wanted it that way, and she wished she could stay out of the spotlight. She wrote a short essay on the sublimity of anonymous giving that she handed out to employees. One of her staff recently gave it to me to read but not to quote: Her policy on anonymity is anonymous. She was frequently seen but not heard — seated with Michelle Obama during the State of the Union address in 2012, vacationing with former D.C. mayor Adrian Fenty, whom she dated a few years ago after he moved to California. When she did speak, she seemed most comfortable having wonkishly impersonal conversations at forums with, say, a Stanford entrepreneurship professor on the subject of “Injecting Innovation Into Intractable Systems,” or with musician Will.I.Am on “Art, Activism and Impact.”
All the while, she tended to Emerson Collective, quietly assembling a kind of Justice League of practical progressives: Arne Duncan, education secretary in the Obama administration, came on board to tackle gun violence in Chicago. Russlynn Ali, assistant education secretary for civil rights in the Obama administration, co-founded Emerson’s affiliate for education reform, the XQ Institute, where none other than storied urban fashion entrepreneur Marc Ecko has landed as chief creative and strategy officer. (“I feel like everything I’ve done up until this moment was for this reason,” the former T-shirt designer for Spike Lee and Chuck D told me.) Andy Karsner, assistant energy secretary for renewable energy in the George W. Bush administration, runs environmental programs. Jennifer Palmieri, communications director for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, consults on communications strategy. Dan Tangherlini, head of the General Services Administration under Obama (and D.C. city administrator under Fenty) is the chief financial officer. Peter Lattman, former deputy business editor of the New York Times, oversees media investments and grants. Marshall Fitz, former vice president of immigration policy at the Center for American Progress, runs immigration reform efforts.
Then, last year, Powell Jobs unleashed a series of dramatic moves across a three-dimensional chessboard of American culture. In July, Emerson Collective purchased a majority stake in the Atlantic, a 161-year-old pillar of the journalistic establishment. In September, an arm of the collective and Hollywood’s Entertainment Industry Foundation co-opted the four major networks in prime time to simultaneously present an hour of live television, featuring dozens of celebrities inviting the nation to reconceive high school. Over the following weeks, the collective partnered with the French artist JR to create two monumental pieces of guerrilla art on either side of the U.S.-Mexico border that went viral on social media as satirical critiques of the border wall. In October, she bought the second-largest stake — about 20 percent — in the estimated $2.5 billion holding company that owns the NBA’s Wizards, the NHL’s Capitals, Capital One Arena and several other sports ventures.
The pace continued this year. In February, Golden State Warriors star Kevin Durant announced he was committing $10 million to help create a Washington-area branch of a program that Powell Jobs had co-founded, which supports students to and through college in nine cities. In March, Emerson Collective helped bring director Alejandro Iñárritu’s shattering virtual-reality installation “Carne y Arena” — an immersive experience that simulates what it’s like for an immigrant to cross the border — to an abandoned church in Northeast Washington.
She had our attention now — but what was she doing? Emerson Collective did not appear to conform to traditional models of philanthropy. Its worldview seemed more or less clear — center-left politics with a dash of techie libertarianism — but its grand plan was unstated while its methods of spurring social change implied that simply funding good works is no longer enough. The engine Powell Jobs had designed was equal parts think tank, foundation, venture capital fund, media baron, arts patron and activist hive. Certainly, it was an original creation — and potentially a powerful one. “I’d like us to be a place where great leaders want to come and try to do difficult things,” Powell Jobs told me recently. “I think we bring a lot more to the table than money. … If you want to just be a check writer, you’d run out of money and not solve anything.”
Of course, she plans to reinvent the high school, possibly the entire American school system that gave her a life.
“Her father was a Marine Corps pilot who was killed in an airborne collision when she was 3. Her mother was left with four children under the age of 6 and not much money. She scrambled for ways to make ends meet, setting an example of “work ethic and commitment to focusing on what you need to do to be successful or, in her case, to survive,” Laurene’s older brother Brad told me. Laurene and her three brothers — two older, one younger — always had jobs. The local paper route was passed down from one sibling to the next. There was no money for the family to travel, so Laurene collected stamps of countries she would like to visit someday. (Their mother later married a school guidance counselor, and Powell Jobs has a younger sister and three stepsiblings from that marriage.) “
“School was the thing that really worked for me,” she says. “I did well in school, and so it was a nice, positive, rewarding cycle for me to want to spend as much time there and to excel.” Fewer than half the students at her high school went on to college, according to Powell Jobs, but she and her brothers were determined. With student loans, multiple jobs, work-study and a small family commitment, she paid for enrollment in the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied economics, political science and French. “I know it in my core that, without that, I never would have had the opportunities that I have in my life,” she says. Education would become Emerson Collective’s seminal issue. “For the students who I work with, I understand that school is their way out,” she says. “It’s really their portal to anything larger than what they see around them. That was true for me.”
She went to the University of Pennsylvania, then worked at Goldman Sachs, then on to Stanford Graduate School to learn to be an entrepreneur. But there she had the good fortune to meet Steve Jobs, who was giving a lecture, and the rest is history. After his death, she set up the Emerson Collective, named for Ralph Waldo Emerson.
“She set up the collective as a limited liability company rather than a foundation, not unlike the three-year-old Chan Zuckerberg Initiative established by Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg. This gives flexibility to do more than just make grants to nonprofit groups. “When philanthropists are engaged in the type of system change that Laurene is,” Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, a venture philanthropy expert at Stanford and a friend of Powell Jobs’s, told me later, “you have to be as nimble as possible because ecosystems are constantly shifting, stakeholders are developing new positions on particular issues, political contexts change, economic forces evolve.” Emerson invests in private companies, Powell Jobs said, not because the goal is to make money but because Silicon Valley has shown her that “amazing entrepreneurs who … are 100 percent aligned with our mission” can find solutions that might not occur to a nonprofit. Emerson is also able to back advocacy groups, launch its own activist campaigns and contribute to political organizations. It has given $2.6 million at the federal level since 2013, primarily to Emerge America, dedicated to recruiting Democratic women candidates, and to Priorities USA, a Democratic super PAC. Powell Jobs herself is a registered independent and has made about $4 million in federal campaign contributions since 1997, mainly to Democratic candidates and organizations in line with issues of concern to Emerson.
“The LLC structure also means Emerson need not disclose details of its assets and spending. “The majority of her philanthropy, no one knows about,” Arrillaga-Andreessen said. However, a tax filing Powell Jobs signed last fall offers a clue to the scale, showing that a related entity called the Emerson Collective Foundation began 2017 with $1.2 billion available, largely from Disney stocks and bonds, a fruit of Steve Jobs’s sale of Pixar to Disney in 2006.
“ For the crew Powell Jobs has assembled, being tapped to join the collective was like being called to a mission. In early 2016, shortly after he had left the Obama administration, Arne Duncan mentioned to Powell Jobs his idea for a novel experiment to confront the gun carnage in his home town of Chicago. “I said that I can’t guarantee you that I’ll be successful — I may fail,” Duncan recalled to me. “She said basically, ‘I want to take on some of society’s most intractable problems for the next 25 years and then pass the torch to someone else. So why don’t I support you in that work?’ … I think she was actually attracted to the level of difficulty.””
Another passion is immigration reform. Who did she hire to make a documentary? Davis Guggenheim. Unmentioned in the article is his turkey, “Waiting for Superman.”
“In 2013 Powell Jobs commissioned documentarian Davis Guggenheim (“An Inconvenient Truth,” “He Named Me Malala”) to make a film called “The Dream Is Now” about dreamers hoping to build lives in this country. She wanted it done in a matter of months to have a timely influence on the political debate. It was typical of Emerson Collective’s approach to issues. Alongside the usual tools of polling and policy advocacy, it will create, say, an “immigration innovation incubator” to foster tech solutions, and it will enlist artists and storytellers to appeal to the public on alternative channels.
“She was very involved in helping us pick who we should follow, how we should frame the issue,” Guggenheim told me. “We talk a lot about changing hearts and minds, about engaging people and telling stories that break through. … She is very focused on how do we tell stories that can change hearts and minds.” Immigration is perhaps the most partisan fight into which she is pushing a stack of her billions of chips, on behalf of those who see the issue the way she does. On the other side is a countervailing apparatus of funders, thinkers and advocates pushing for tighter borders, fewer legal immigrants and more deportations. Since she entered the fray in 2001, her opponents have won nearly every battle in Washington, so she is turning her tactics away from the capital. “We’re looking for ways to activate people around the country, so that they can understand what’s at stake,” she says. “So that they can start building a chorus that Congress can’t ignore.
” Her strategy on education policy has been similarly novel. The long list of storytellers in acting and song who participated in last fall’s prime-time education reform special — from Tom Hanks and Viola Davis to Lin-Manuel Miranda and Andra Day — did a good job of selling Emerson’s approach to reimagining high school. The XQ Institute, Emerson’s independent education arm, has pledged $115 million to 18 schools across the country pursuing their own innovative approaches, including Washington Leadership Academy, a tech-focused public charter in the District. Without prescribing exact models, the group wants schools to focus on the competence a student achieves in a given subject more than the number of hours she sits in that class. There’s an emphasis on knowledge relevant to employers of the future.“
Immigration reform is a terrific issue for LPJ. She should definitely put her eggs in that basket, but someone should explain that you can’t fix our insane policy at the grassroots, but only in Washington.
The article says the first check she ever wrote to a charity was to the Southern Poverty Law Center for $20, when she was in high school. I hope she writes lots more checks to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Their work is important. They help people. They don’t toy with their lives and institutions.
Here is Jan Resseger’s take on Laurene’s plans:
Laurene Powell Jobs’ Glitzy Projects versus School Reform that Is Basic and Essential
The charter billionaires pulled out all the stops to push their candidate Antonio Villaraigosa into the governor’s runoff last week, and lost.
Charter school supporters are deciding where to direct their considerable resources after pouring money into the California governor primary to support a longtime ally who failed to move on to November’s election.
The fallout may signal future uncertainty for the school choice movement in a state with some of the most robust charter school laws in the United States.
The front-runner for governor, Democrat Gavin Newsom, could hamper or threaten the progress of charters — privately run schools that use public money and have divided parents and politicians. He has mostly emphasized his support of traditional public schools and called for more charter school accountability.
Newsom’s campaign said it would seek to temporarily halt charter school openings to consider transparency issues but that “successful” charters would thrive under his leadership. In the June 5 race, he beat out former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a key ally of the California Charter Schools Association.
The powerful organization and its big-name donors, including Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Walmart heir Alice Walton, gave nearly $23 million to support Villaraigosa, who finished behind Newsom and Republican businessman John Cox.
Now, the group said it’s working on a new strategy that could include supporting Newsom or Cox, despite the Republican’s endorsement from President Donald Trump. The heavily blue state is helping lead a national resistance to his administration. The charter Advocates are in a tight spot after running attack ads against both candidates who advanced to the general election.
So look who is standing on principle! The billionaires will either try to buy the friendship of Newsom, with a handsome cash prize, or they will throw in their lot with Trump-loving Cox.
What do they believe in?
Reed Hastings is a tech entrepreneur, a billionaire, and founder of Netflix. He is determined to replace public schools with charter schools. He served for a time as president of the state board of education in California. He has donated millions of dollars to the California Charter Schools Association. He was a founder of Rocketship, the charter that places poor kids in front of computers for hours each day and hires TFA to teach them in large classes, but skips the arts. He funds campaigns of charter champions like Nick Melvoin. He recently funded Antonio Villaraigosa for Governor and Marshall Tuck for State Superintendent of Instruction, both of them are part of the charter cabal.
He famously declared his opposition to the very existence of elected school boards.
Why does Reed Hastings hate public schools? Read the linked article and see if you can answer these questions.
Is it because he loves disruption? Does he hate democracy? Does he think schools are akin to tech start ups?
What do you think?
Governor Andrew Cuomo has never been a friend to public schools or to public school teachers.
He pushed for the harsh and ineffectual test-based teacher evaluations that everyone now acknowledges have failed.
He was the primary driver of state legislation benefitting non-union charter schools.
Why? Because his biggest campaign funders are hedge fund managers who believe in privatization and want to destroy teachers’ unions.
Now, Cuomo is counting on support from unions and public school teachers in his bid for a third term.
They should ask themselves whether he deserves their support.
This article was written in 2014:
It was a frigid February day in Albany, and leaders of New York City’s charter school movement were anxious. They had gone to the capital to court lawmakers, but despite a boisterous showing by parents, there seemed to be little clarity about the future of their schools.
Then, as they were preparing to head home, an intermediary called with a message: Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo wanted to meet.
To their surprise, Mr. Cuomo offered them 45 minutes of his time, in a private conference room. He told them he shared their concern about Mayor Bill de Blasio’s ambivalence toward charter schools and offered to help, according to a person who attended but did not want to be identified as having compromised the privacy of the meeting.
In the days that followed, the governor’s interest seemed to intensify. He instructed charter advocates to organize a large rally in Albany, the person said. The advocates delivered, bringing thousands of parents and students, many of them black, Hispanic, and from low-income communities, to the capital in early March, and eclipsing a pivotal rally for Mr. de Blasio taking place at virtually the same time.
As the governor worked to solidify support in Albany, his efforts were amplified by an aggressive public relations and lobbying effort financed by a group of charter school backers from the worlds of hedge funds and Wall Street, some of whom have also poured substantial sums into Mr. Cuomo’s campaign (he is up for re-election this fall). The push included a campaign-style advertising blitz that cost more than $5 million and attacked Mr. de Blasio for denying space to three charter schools.
Charter school leaders had built a formidable political operation over the course of a decade, hiring top-flight lobbyists and consultants. They had an ally in former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, but Mr. de Blasio promised a sea change, saying that he would charge rent to charter schools that had large financial backing, and that he would temporarily forbid new schools from using public space.
In public, the mayor largely ignored the outcry. At his prekindergarten rally, before a smaller crowd at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany, Mr. de Blasio spoke about the value of early education. Not far away, a much larger crowd of charter school supporters was gathered on the steps of the State Capitol. In an act that his aides later said was spontaneous, Mr. Cuomo joined the mass of parents and students.
“You are not alone,” he told the roaring crowd. “We will save charter schools.”
The move to protect charter schools had begun months before, when it became clear that Mr. de Blasio was favored to win the mayoral race. Charter school leaders were in a panic; a memo circulated over the summer by one pro-charter group, Democrats for Education Reform, had identified Mr. de Blasio as the candidate least friendly to their cause.
Charter schools — privately run, but with taxpayers paying the tuition — have become popular nationwide among Democratic and Republican leaders, as well as with tens of thousands of low-income parents who submit to kindergarten lotteries every year. They are also popular among Wall Street leaders who see charter schools, which often do not have unions to bargain with and have relative freedom from regulation, as a successful alternative to traditional public schools. But many Democrats, including the mayor, have sought to slow their spread, contending that they are taking dollars and space from other public schools. Pro-charter advocacy groups, including Families for Excellent Schools, StudentsFirstNY and the New York City Charter School Center, met regularly to plot strategy. Increasingly, they turned to state officials.
A lot was riding on the debate for Mr. Cuomo. A number of his largest financial backers, some of the biggest names on Wall Street, also happened to be staunch supporters of charter schools. According to campaign finance records, Mr. Cuomo’s re-election campaign has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from charter school supporters, including William A. Ackman, Carl C. Icahn, Bruce Kovner and Daniel Nir.
Kenneth G. Langone, a founder of Home Depot who sits on a prominent charter school board, gave $50,000 to Mr. Cuomo’s campaign last year. He said that when the governor asked him to lead a group of Republicans supporting his re-election, he agreed because of Mr. Cuomo’s support for charter schools.
“Every time I am with the governor, I talk to him about charter schools,” Mr. Langone said in an interview. “He gets it.”
It was not until late February, shortly before the rally on the steps of the Capitol, that a full-fledged battle broke out.
Mr. de Blasio, reviewing plans for school space, had decided to deny it to three schools run by Success Academy Charter Schools, a high-performing network founded by Eva S. Moskowitz, a former city councilwoman. While he allowed the vast majority of charter schools to continue using public space, many supporters of Ms. Moskowitz’s schools were outraged.
Daniel S. Loeb, the founder of the hedge fund Third Point and the chairman of Success Academy’s board, began leaning on Wall Street executives for donations. Later this month, he will host a fund-raiser for Success Academy at Cipriani in Midtown Manhattan; tickets run as high as $100,000 a table.
The governor and his staff worked with Republicans in the State Senate and others to come up with a package of protections for charter schools in the city. He was already said to be displeased with Mr. de Blasio for rejecting his compromise offer on prekindergarten funding.
Mr. Cuomo did not mention charter schools in his State of the State address, but now, with Mr. de Blasio under assault and charter advocates behind him, he pushed for a sweeping deal.
The proposed legislation included provisions to reverse Mr. de Blasio’s decisions on school space, and it required the city to provide public classrooms to new and expanding charter schools or contribute to the cost of renting private buildings. It also suggested increasing per-pupil funding for charter schools and allowing them to operate prekindergarten programs.
Education psychologist Gerald Coles reports that Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg plan to fund neurological research to find out why poor children’s brains aren’t working well enough to produce higher test scores.
Coles writes:
“Why are many poor children not learning and succeeding in school? For billionaire Bill Gates, who funded the start-up of the failed Common Core Curriculum Standards, and has been bankrolling the failing charter schools movement, and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, it’s time to look for another answer, this one at the neurological level. Poor children’s malfunctioning brains, particularly their brains’ “executive functioning”–that is, the brain’s working memory, cognitive flexibility, and inhibitory control–must be the reason why their academic performance isn’t better.
“Proposing to fund research on the issue, the billionaires reason that not only can executive malfunctioning cause substantial classroom learning problems and school failure, it also can adversely affect socio-economic status, physical health, drug problems, and criminal convictions in adulthood. Consequently, if teachers of poor students know how to improve executive function, their students will do well academically and reap future “real-world benefits.” For Gates, who is always looking for “the next big thing,” this can be it in education.
“Most people looking at this reasoning would likely think, “If executive functioning is poorer in poor children, why not eliminate the apparent cause of the deficiency, i.e., poverty?” Not so for the billionaires. For them, the “adverse life situations” of poor students are the can’t-be-changed-givens. Neither can instructional conditions that cost more money provide an answer. For example, considerable research on small class size teaching has demonstrated its substantially positive academic benefits, especially for poor children, from grammar school through high school and college. Gates claims to know about this instructional reform, but money-minded as he is, he insists these findings amount to nothing more than a “belief” whose worst impact has been to drive “school budget increases for more than 50 years.”
“Cash–rather, the lack of it–that’s the issue: “You can’t fund reforms without money and there is no more money,” he insists. Of course, nowhere in Gates’ rebuke of excessive school spending does he mention corporate tax dodging of state income taxes, which robs schools of billions of dollars. Microsoft, for example, in which Gates continues to play a prominent role as “founder and technology advisor” on the company’s Board of Directors would provide almost $29.6 billion in taxes that could fund schools were its billions stashed offshore repatriated.
“In a detailed example of Microsoft’s calculated tax scheming and dodging that would provide material for a good classroom geography lesson, Seattle Times reporter, Matt Day, outlined one of the transcontinental routes taken by a dollar spent for a Microsoft product in Seattle. Immediately after the purchase, the dollar takes a short trip to Microsoft’s company headquarters in nearby Redmond, Washington, after which it moves to a Microsoft sales subsidiary in Nevada. Following a brief rest, the dollar breathlessly zigzags from one offshore tax haven to another, finally arriving in sunny Bermuda where it joins $108 billion of Microsoft’s other dollars. Zuckerberg’s Facebook has similarly kept its earnings away from U.S. school budgets.”
A letter from a friend in the Bay Area about the California Gubernatorial primary, won handily by Gavin Newsom, with Republican John Cox coming in second.
In the California governor’s primary, pro-“reform” Democratic former L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa got knocked out despite millions in pro-charter money from billionaires poured into Villaraigosa’s campaign (via a California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) PAC. In the runoff, Democratic Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom will face Republican (endorsed by Trump) businessman John Cox, in a state where Republicans are heavily outnumbered.
California’s primary is “top two” — regardless of party, the top two finishers face off in November if none gets 50%+ of the primary vote. It was generally expected early on that Democrats Villaraigosa and Newsom would face each other in the general election.
Partway through the campaign, pro-“reform” billionaires started pouring millions through the CCSA PAC into Villaraigosa’s campaign, making it look like suddenly he would have a fabulous, huge edge — but the more there were reports of pro-“reform” billionaire millions pouring in through the pro-charter PAC, the more Villaraigosa dropped in the polls, and the polls were accurate.
Newsom does not have a pro-“reform” history, though he’s highly debated in California and Bay Area Badass Teachers Facebook groups, and some people have pointed out that he has made comments praising TFA and he says he supports good charters. In this campaign, Newsom had a panel of education advisers that included two San Francisco leaders who are strongly anti-charter and are friends of mine; as well as anti-“reform” academic Julian Vasquez Heilig.
But the most fascinating thing is that the more pro-charter millions coming from the billionaires poured into the Villaraigosa campaign, the more he dropped in the polls — it was practically proportional. I don’t delude myself that the voting public dislikes “reform” or charters or even know what they are, but I suspect that there are negative connotations to millions from the billionaires, especially since some were out-of-state billionaires.
Imagine this absurd scenario: Five billionaires are pouring huge sums of money into the races for Governor of California and State Superintendent of Instruction. What is their main goal? More charter schools. More and more.
You would think the main goal of campaign funding would be the economy, or water, or health care,the environment. No, it is charter schools.
Open the link to see who they are.
And be sure to read the comments. One from Lisa Alva could be a post by itself.
It speaks volume about the ultimate goal of the privatizers.
Lisa Alva writes:
Based on my experience, I believe that the goal of this consortium is on-line learning for most California students, supported by expensive software and more expensive hardware that replaces unionized teachers where possible.
I was on the Board of Directors for Villaraigosa’s Partnership for Los Angeles Schools; I was in every meeting of this entity and heard their claims and concerns first-hand, I saw their methods in the planning and implementation phases, I heard their rationales and values. I saw and heard that data and results were the focus that kept money and participation among donors at an acceptable level. I did not ever, ever hear or see efforts to gather information from classroom-level staff; aside from image-building listening sessions, teacher experience was largely unimportant in making decisions or plans.
I worked at a PLAS high school from the inception of PLAS as a teacher and a coordinator. I saw that the so-called “graduation rate” of “80%” that Tuck and Tony V. are claiming was completely gamed using on-line “learning” in credit-recovery classes.
Nothing different was taking place in classrooms.
No students were held accountable for anything.
Students freely web-surfed, copied and pasted their way to diplomas despite the supervising teachers’ best efforts to enforce real learning. Teachers eventually revolted, resulting in tighter standards for enrollment in credit recovery classes, which diminished the “amazing results” significantly.
I saw very expensive executives burn through a revolving door of management, first in the pursuit of immediate impact, and then in pursuit of other employment. Two top executives responsible for the dramatic increase in graduation statistics lasted less than a year in the PLAS; they, like many other PLAS people, now work in San Diego or in private education-related enterprise.
The Tuck-Villaraigosa effort has nothing to do with creating whole, self-actualizing citizens who can handle the challenges of a 21st century workplace and lead happy, fulfilled lives. With John Deasy back in California and Eli Broad’s plan for charterizing California schools in full swing, the automization of public education seems to be a foregone conclusion.
THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT ARTICLE YOU WILL READ TODAY. SHARE IT WITH YOUR FRIENDS, YOUR SCHOOL BOARD, YOUR LOCAL MEDIA, YOUR ELECTEDS. TWEET IT. POST IT ON FACEBOOK.
In the states where teachers have engaged in walkouts and strikes, public education has been systematically starved of funding. Typically, corporate taxes have been cut so that funding for education has also been cut. The corporations benefit while the children and their teachers are put on a starvation diet.
Who are the corporations and individuals behind the efforts to shrink funding for public schools and promote privatization?
It begins like this, then details a state-by-state list of corporations and billionaires backing the cycle of austerity and school privatization.
“The ongoing wave of teacher strikes across the US is changing the conversation about public education in this country. From West Virginia to Arizona, Kentucky to Oklahoma, Colorado to North Carolina, tens of thousands of teachers have taken to the streets and filled state capitals, garnering public support and racking up victories in some of the nation’s most hostile political terrain.
“Even though the teachers who have gone on strike are paid well below the national average, their demands have gone beyond better salary and benefits for themselves. They have also struck for their students’ needs – to improve classroom quality and to increase classroom resources. Teachers are calling for greater investment in children and the country’s public education system as a whole. They are also demanding that corporations, banks, and billionaires pay their fair share to invest in schools.
“The teachers’ strikes also represent a major pushback by public sector workers against the right-wing agenda of austerity and privatization. The austerity and privatization agenda for education goes something like this: impose big tax cuts for corporations and the .01% and then use declining tax revenue as a rationale to cut funding for state-funded services like public schools. Because they are underfunded, public schools cannot provide the quality education kids deserve. Then, the right wing criticizes public schools and teachers, saying there is a crisis in education. Finally, the right wing uses this as an opportunity to make changes to the education system that benefit them – including offering privatization as a solution that solves the crisis of underfunding.
“While this cycle has put students, parents, and teachers in crisis, many corporations, banks, and billionaires are driving and profiting from it. The key forces driving the austerity and privatization agenda are similar across all the states that have seen strikes:
“*Billionaire school privatizers. A small web of billionaires – dominated by the Koch brothers and their donor network, as well as the Waltons – have given millions to state politicians who will push their pro-austerity, pro-school privatization agenda. These billionaires lead a coordinated, nationwide movement to apply business principles to education, including: promoting CEO-like superintendents, who have business experience but little or no education experience; closing “failing” schools, just as companies close unprofitable stores or factories; aggressively cutting costs, such as by recruiting less experienced teachers; instituting a market-based system in which public schools compete with privately managed charter schools, religious schools, for-profit schools, and virtual schools; and making standardized test scores the ultimate measure of student success.”
Keep reading to learn about the interlocking web that includes the Koch brothers, the Mercers, the Waltons, the fossil fuel industry, their think tanks, and much more, all combined to shrink public schools and replace them with charters and vouchers.
By the way, rightwing billionaire Philip Anschutz of Colorado was the producer of the anti-teacher, anti-public education, pro-charter propaganda film “Waiting for Superman.”
According to James Shelton and Bob Hughes, respectively of the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiate and the Gates Foundation, they want to hear from you!
They don’t understand why there is such a big gap between research and practice. They don’t see why schools are improving so slowly despite their best efforts.
They write”:
Recent months have thrust some of the education sector’s resource strains into the national spotlight. Across the country, budget constraints in several states have highlighted the difficulty of educating today’s students in crumbling schools, and with decades-old instructional materials. Meanwhile, many educators are struggling to support students through the increasing pressures of poverty, a changing economy, and a demand for higher-level skills. Yet despite these challenges, the education sector spends less than a tenth of the average percentage on research and development across other U.S. industries.
So, get this, despite low teachers’ salaries, despite crumbling buildings, despite funding that has not reached 2008 levels, the real problem is that we are not spending enough on R&D.
Could you help them with some of your ideas?
Here is my idea: When you two multibillionaires come up with a plan to reinvent education, find a willing district to experiment on. Get the consent of the teachers. Listen to them before you start your Big Plan. Don’t impose it on the nation until you can demonstrate that you have tried your Big Plan in one place and worked out the bugs and determined that it helps kids and teachers. Until then, please don’t use the nation as your petri dish. Our children are not your guinea pigs.
