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Laura Chapman: Beware the Privatizers! New Names, Same Goal

By dianeravitch
November 26, 2016 //
57

I am not in the region but this Nevada initiative looks like it is spawning a lot of backscratching arrangements for consultants and evaluators

 

http://www.reviewjournal.com/news/education/state-board-examiners-oks-contract-research-firm-evaluate-success-school-reforms

 
When I poke around on local news reports, I see that “Opportunity 180” is focussed on charters for Clark Co Nevada. A trip to the “Opportunity 180” website shows that outfit is part of the national network of “Education Cities,” but with three “local” foundations supporting the charter initiative.

 
Surprise. Surprise. Surprise. There is the Broad Foundation, not exactly local. If you want to see where else this intended capture of public schools is being engineered, go to the Education Cities Website http://education-cities.org/who-we-are/

 
There you will find the 31 “city-based organizations” in 24 cities where nonprofit organizations seek control of public schools. For Las Vegas, Nevada, 180 Opportunity is listed. The bottom line, evident in the funds for 180 from the Broad Foundation, is that this is a national movement.

 
Education Cities are cities where unelected nonprofits, foundations, and civic groups are organized for the purposes of controlling the governance of public education, substituting their judgment for policies and practices forwarded by professionals in education, elected school boards, and citizens whose tax dollars are invested in public schools.

 
The national work of Education Cites is supported by the Broad Foundation, The Walton Family Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, and Michael and Susan Dell Foundation. http://education-cities.org/who-we-are/our-contributors/.

 

Here are the cities and the local groups that want the power to govern your schools.

 

Arizona, Phoenix, New Schools for Phoenix
California, Los Angeles—Great Public Schools Now
California, Oakland—Educate 78 & Great Oakland Public Schools Leadership Center & Rogers Family Foundation
California, Richmond—Chamberlin Family Foundation
California, San Jose—Innovate Public Schools
Colorado, Denver—Gates Family Foundation Donnell-Kay Foundation
District of Columbia— Education Forward DC & CityBridge Foundation
Delaware, Wilmington—Rodel Foundation of Delaware
Illinois, Chicago—New Schools for Chicago, Chicago Public Education Fund
Indiana, Indianapolis—The Mind Trust
Louisiana, Baton Rouge—New Schools for Baton Rouge
Louisiana, New Orleans—New Schools for New Orleans
Massachusetts, Boston—Boston Schools Fund & Empower Schools
Michigan, Detroit—Excellent Schools Detroit & The Skillman Foundation
Minnesota Minneapolis—Minnesota Comeback
Missouri Kansas City—Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation
Nevada Las Vegas—Opportunity 180
New York, Rochester—E3 Rochester
Ohio, Cincinnati—Accelerate Great Schools
Pennsylvania, Philadelphia—Philadelphia School Partnership
Rhode Island, Providence—Rhode Island Mayoral Academies
Tennessee Memphis—Hyde Family Foundations
Tennessee, Nashville—Project Renaissance
Wisconsin, Milwaukee—Schools That Can Milwaukee

 
This is an example of philanthrogovernance by stealth, except for customer friendly branding of initiatives including words such as forward, accelerate, great, new, innovate, empower, now, and so on.

 
Be aware that United Way organizations are being co-opted as providers of choice for any wrap-around services needed in this new and privatized “ecosystem” of schooling.

Categories Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Reform

Jersey Jazzman: What Can We Learn About Betsy DeVos from Her Husband’s Charter School

By dianeravitch
November 26, 2016 //
5

Betsy DeVos likes to point with pride to her husband’s charter school. See, she implies, I know what I am talking about. My husband started a charter school called the West Michigan Aviation Academy, located at the Gerald Ford Airport in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where the DeVos family lives.

 

Jersey Jazzman found that there is another side to the story. 

 

Dick DeVos’s charter school has one of the lowest shares of special education students in its county.

 

Understand that Betsy DeVos is absolutely fine with this. In her opinion, we would be better off segregating children who “struggle” from those who do not….

 

Dick DeVos’s charter school enrolls relatively few Limited English Proficient students….

 

We can debate whether it’s a good idea to isolate many of these students from the rest of the community. But we all have to agree — unless we’re totally ignorant of the realities of school finance — that schools serving more students with special needs must have more resources. One would think, therefore, that a school like WMAA, with its relatively small special education and LEP populations, wouldn’t be spending nearly as much as the other high schools in the area.

 

One would be wrong….

 

Dick DeVos’s charter school spends more on salaries for all employees per pupil than almost every other high school in its county. Hmm… well, Betsy DeVos says she wants to pay “good” teachers more. Maybe all that extra money is going into instructional salaries…

 

Or not….

 

Despite its high spending on total salaries, Dick DeVos’s charter school spending on instructional salaries is fairly typical. Which leads me to wonder: where is all that extra money going?

 

It is not going to pay highly experienced teachers. Like other charter schools in Michigan, DeVos’s charter school has a large proportion of inexperienced teachers.

 

Teachers gain the most in effectiveness over the first few years of their careers; yet nearly half of the teachers at Dick DeVos’s charter school have less than three years of experience. 

 

The takeaway:

 

High spending schools, enrolling proportionally fewer students with special needs, taught by inexperienced teachers. That’s Betsy DeVos’s vision for American education — just ask her husband.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, English Language Learners, Funding, Privatization, Special Education, Teachers

Yes, Betsy DeVos Can Privatize Large Numbers of Public Schools, with the Help of Red States

By dianeravitch
November 26, 2016 //
50

Kevin Carey of the New America Foundation wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times, attempting to assuage fears that Betsy DeVos would privatize American schools. If she tries to promote privatization, she is likely to face “disappointment and frustration,” as Carey put it. He believes that the decentralization of American public education will prevent her from imposing privatization. I disagree with Carey, because we have seen state after state, district after district, where “reformers” have passed legislation for charters and vouchers, intended to undermine public schools without the consent of the governed. Massachusetts and Georgia, the only states that voted on whether to have more charters, decisively voted NO. The point of Carey’s article seems to be to persuade readers that charters are swell and vouchers will never happen, that DeVos can’t change much, so relax, privatization is not a threat. Can’t happen. Won’t happen. Trust me.

 

The New America Foundation, Carey’s employer, has received nearly $10 million from the Gates Foundation since 2009. Not surprisingly, it regularly defends charter schools and the Common Core standards. It  has even urged colleges to adopt the standards now.

 

 

Carey previously worked at Education Sector and Education Trust, both Gates-funded and charter-friendly. He tells us that “charter schools are public schools, open to all, accountable in varying degrees to public authorities, and usually run by nonprofit organizations.” Savvy readers of this blog know that charter schools declare that they are private organizations whenever they are sued or when their teachers try to form a union, but they are “public” when it is time to collect government money. They choose their students. They exclude children with severe disabilities and English-language-learners. They kick out troublesome students. In many states, charters are deregulated, unsupervised, and non-accountable. Carey has written favorably about the for-profit Alt-School chain of technology-based private schools (which would be eligible for Trump’s vouchers). Carey joined Eli Broad and every national “reform” group (including TFA, 50CAN, DFER, etc.) to endorse the Obama administration’s plan for “reforming” teacher education. After the 2008 election, he called on Democrats to embrace such “progressive” reforms as charter schools and test-based accountability.*

 

Carey says not to worry about DeVos’ passion for privatization because most states won’t be able to afford the cost of a universal voucher system. Trump says he will free up $20 billion from existing federal programs, but expects states to chip in another $110 billion. That won’t happen, Carey says, because “states don’t have that kind of money lying around.” Local school districts will resist the diversion of their property taxes. And besides, Betsy DeVos’ state laboratory of free-market reform–Michigan–is hardly a success. 80% of the charters there operate for profit, and Detroit is still a mess, despite a Wild West of charters and competition. Nor have vouchers proved to be a success.

 

Larded throughout the article is subtle praise for charters. He points out that expansion of charters was voted down in Massachusetts “despite strong evidence that the state’s well-supervised charters produce superior results for low-income and minority schoolchildren.” No mention of the reason that liberal Massachusetts rejected charters: the districts with charters did not want to sacrifice their public schools to the growth of charters, and the districts without charters wanted to protect their public schools. Organized groups of parents rang doorbells and told their friends and neighbors to support their public schools. The defenders of public education were outspent 2-1 by out-of-state billionaires like the Waltons and Michael Bloomberg, but they defeated the charter question by a vote of 62-38%.

 

Carey exemplifies the new line of “reformers”: charters run by private corporations and private boards are “public” but vouchers are a bad idea. The problem with this logic is that once you start down the road of school choice, it is hard to know when or how to stop. The Obama administration’s advocacy for charter schools greased the wheels for vouchers, some form of which now exist in about half the states.

 

Yes, we do have to worry about DeVos and Trump’s privatization agenda. If the state is a deep red state, with a Republican governor and a Tea Party legislature, like Indiana and many more, the state may grab whatever the feds offer and supply vouchers to anyone who wants them to use for any purpose, including home schooling and low-quality religious schools. DeVos may open the floodgates to unregulated, for-profit charters, allowing anyone to open a charter who wants to, regardless of their experience or qualifications (like Florida, Michigan, and Nevada). School choice does not have a record of success; charters get mixed results, at best, and vouchers have a record of failure. Even when they produce higher graduation rates, they simultaneously have astonishingly high attrition rates.

 

Join with the Network for Public Education to fight the DeVos nomination. Democrats, Republicans, and independents must stand together in opposition to this raid on public money. Separation of church and state is part of our heritage as Americans. Public schools that enroll all children–not just those they want–are part of our democracy.

 

When the federal government turns against public education, as the Trump administration promises to do, that is unprecedented. We don’t need to be soothed and promised that its threats to public education are not real. They are real. They build on the opening to school choice created by the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, the Walton Foundation and the think tanks that they have underwritten as part of their “policy advocacy.”

 

Parents and educators and concerned citizens must mobilize to oppose the Trump privatization agenda.

 

*I had my own unfortunate brush with Carey in 2011; I didn’t realize he was a key player in the “reform” movement, and I agreed to an interview. He published a mean-spirited screed about me, taking pot shots at my scholarly works and claiming that I changed my philosophy of education because Joel Klein did not give my partner a job. At the time, I was closeted, and Carey managed to “out” me. My partner already had a high-level job at the Board of Education when Klein arrived and was not in need of a job. So long as she worked at the Board, I was constrained from criticizing Klein or Bloomberg, whose policies of disruption did little to improve education. Once she retired, I was free to write and speak my mind. Yes, they helped me to see the deep flaws of corporate reform, of putting non-educators in charge of schools, of intimidating experienced educators, of trying to run schools like a business, of making test scores the basis for all decisions, but not for the reason Carey and Klein asserted.

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, For-Profit, Funding, Privatization, Vouchers

SATIRE! Betsy DeVos, Education Reformer and Charter Champion, Should be Secretary of Education

By dianeravitch
November 21, 2016 //
67

Betsy DeVos is a billionaire school reformer in Michigan. She funds charter schools and voucher schools not only in Michigan but across the nation. A few years back, her American Federation for Children gave its annual award to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker for crushing the unions in his state and to D.C. Chancellor Michelle Rhee for advancing the school-choice views of AFC.

I endorse Betsy DeVos.

[SATIRE ALERT!]

 

I don’t agree with any of her ideas about school reform, but I think it would be refreshing to hear candid advocacy for privatizing and eliminating public schools instead of privatizers pretending that they want to “improve public schools.” They don’t. The privatization movement should be unmasked as the rightwing, anti-public school movement that it is.

I oppose privatization. I oppose turning public schools over to private corporations. I oppose for-profit schooling. I oppose schools run by for-profit management. I oppose vouchers.

I support community-based, democratically controlled public schools, staffed by certified and well-prepared teachers.

I believe that most parents like their public schools and don’t want them to be privatized. We saw clear evidence of that sentiment in Massachusetts and Georgia, where voters resoundingly rejected efforts to private public funding for public schools.

I endorse DeVos not because I want her ideas to prevail but because I want them exposed to the clear light of day and rejected because they are wrong for democracy, wrong for children, and wrong for education.

Learn more about DeVos here.

It would be refreshing to see privatization in its honest clothes, not disguised as a “civil rights” movement (led by billionaires and Wall Street and hedge funders). Honesty is the best policy.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Michigan, Privatization, Rhee, Michelle, School Choice, Vouchers, Walker, Scott

Peter Greene: “Reformers” Lose Their Progressive Facade

By dianeravitch
November 21, 2016 //
16

Peter Greene notes the terrible pickle that the “reformers” are in. They were trying so hard to prove their bona fides as leaders of the “civil rights movement of our time,” trying so hard to claim that they really were pushing school choice “for the kids,” trying so hard to call themselves progressives…and Donald Trump, the arch reactionary, has embraced their cause. The hedge fund managers, the billionaires, and the corporate titans pushed charters and school choice, and Donald Trump wants charters and school choice too! He goes a step further, and he wants vouchers too.

Peter Greene calls the current state of affairs the “Faux Progressive Polka.”

Their dilemma is laid bare: Real progressives support public schools, not school choice. School choice was the battle cry of the segregationists in the 1950s and 1960s, and today school choice is promoting greater resegregation and at the same time, defunding public schools that serve all children. The voters in Massachusetts saw through the facade. The NAACP saw through it too.

Now Trump’s embrace makes it harder for the Wall Street crowd and the billionaires to pretend to be progressives. They aren’t and they never were.

To understand Greene’s argument, you must first read Rick Hess’s post-election article, in which he claimed that education is so far to the left that it can’t begin to understand the right. He had an audacious analysis of what he calls the split among Democrats about education:

Hess writes:

One of the reasons that right-left differences get ignored is that people in and around education think they have the whole spectrum covered: there is, after all, the fierce conflict between the “reform” camp and the union-establishment. What usually gets missed, however, is that for the past decade, this clash has primarily existed between two wings of the Democratic Party. The “reformers” have mostly been passionate, Great Society liberals who believe in closing “achievement gaps” and pursuing “equity” via charter schooling, teacher evaluation, the Common Core, and test-based accountability. And their opponents have been the Democratic Party’s more traditional, New Deal wing.

Greene writes:

If reformsters are Great Society Liberals, I am the Queen of Rumania. He is not the Queen of Rumania.

Some of us, like Greene and me, have called out the “reform” movement as a mighty hoax, a pretense of liberalism powered by billionaires, financiers, and rightwing think tanks. The same phony lingo about “closing achievement gaps” and “equity” has been used by rightwing governors, as they replace public schools with charter schools and vouchers. Ideologically, it is hard to decipher the “sides,” but one thing I can say with certainty is that the effort to privatize public education and eliminate teacher unions is not a project of Great Society liberals.

Greene continues:

But now everybody has to confront a grim reality– Donald J. Trump thinks charters and choice are awesome and the Common Core sucks (though he doesn’t really understand it). What’s a DFER to do? On the one hand, they are trying to look like Democrats. On the other hand, they agree with every dot and tittle of Trump’s likely ed policy.

There are any number of explanations– Trump has no actual convictions on any political scale, the backers for various policies have shifted, blah blah blah. I think the most likely explanation is that privatization was never a progressive idea, ever, but when faux progressives were controlling the political conversation, it behooved people in search of power and support to put on their own progressive masks.

So what’s the play now? Stop pretending to be progressives and throw in their lot with the Trumpians (who are themselves only pretending to be conservatives)?

But modern charter schools, the testing industry, the data mining of America– none of that was ever governed by a political ideology as much as it’s guided by a deep love of money. In this, as in many other areas, Trump has if nothing else ripped the pretense off a lot of high-flung baloney. Trump is about power and profit, and power and profit are all the motivation you need to come up with a program of privatizing, monetizing, and digitizing US education. You can add some political philosophizing after the fact, but it’s really beside the point.

Modern corporate reform is congealed around neither right nr left; it’s heart beats to the neo-liberal rhythm which means we shall have social programs (yay, liberals!) that are contracted out to the free market (yay, conservatives!) But neo-liberalism serves righties far better than it serves lefties. They get their money, but privatized programs have yet to show real quality.

And then there’s the dark underbelly of modern reform, particularly charter choice programs that remove democratic process from non-wealthy non-white neighborhoods, giving our lesser what we think is best for them and, in the case of No Excuses schools, the kind of tight domination and control that Those People need. This view of Those People is also not incompatible with Trumpism.

We can play the left-right game all day. Schools tend to attract people who are oriented toward helping and uplifting other people, so the school world should skew left. But schools are also old, hidebound institutions that rely heavily on tradition and stability– so, conservative. But that left-right dichotomy is not the problem reformsters face.

What they face is a unique and striking dilemma. Under Trump, they can have every policy they ever wanted, save Common Core. But they can only have the policies bare and stripped of any pretense. DFER and Jeanne Allen’s Center for Education Reform can have almost everything they want, but they can only have it in a Trump-tied bow. They can only have their policies by admitting that their policies are not progressive at all (and by admitting they’re totally okay with Trumpian awfulness as long as they get choice and charters). They can only oppose Herr Trump by disowning their own policies. Or they can dance around in a faux progressive polka, doing their best to respond to the music they never asked for, but which is everything they want. For grifters like She Who Will Not Be Named (formerly of DC schools) this is just a practical problem of angling for success; for sincere reformsters (yes, I believe such things exist), it’s a real moral dilemma.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Trump, Vouchers

Karen Wolfe: The Next Election for the LAUSD Will Be a Showdown Over Privatization

By dianeravitch
November 20, 2016 //
5

Karen Wolfe, a public school parent and blogger in Los Angeles, reports on the upcoming battle royal for control of the school board.

The charter ndustry is planning a raid on the school board, and their candidates can expect to be showered with money from billionaires who want to privatize more of the public schools. As karen points out, most of the donors will be able to hide their names until the primary is over, so voters won’t know which billionaires have decided to buy their public schools.

Steve Zimmer, president of the school board, will be challenged by a parent organizer for the California Charter School Association, the mother lode of privatization. Zimmer started his career as a TFA teacher, but stayed in the classroom for 17 years. The billionaires raised nearly $5 million to beat him last time he ran, but he prevailed.

Carl Petersen, a staunch friend of public schools, is running for a seat.

In another board race, the queen of corporate reform, Monica Garcia, is being challenged by teacher Lisa Alva. This will be an interesting contest because Lisa Alva started her career on the reform team but fell off the bench when she happened to participate in a conference call in 2013 that disillusioned her.

There is another candidate, Nick Melvoin, with sterling reformer credentials. He has raised $161,000. Garcia has raised $132,000. Zimmer has raised $29,000. So far. The billionaires and PACs haven’t weighed in yet. They will. The LAUSD is a big prize. The second largest district in the nation. Nearly a quarter of the students in the district attend charter schools. Billionaire Eli Broad wants half the kids in charters. He is persistent.

Will the people of Los Angeles allow the billionaires to take control of their public schools?

The primary election will be held on March 7, 2016 and the general on May 16.

We will watch this election closely as it develops.

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

Jeff Bryant: Education Victories We Can Celebrate

By dianeravitch
November 14, 2016 //
10

Jeff Bryant, a wise observer of politics and education, offers solace at a time when supporters of public education fear the ascendancy of a Republican President and Congress devoted to privatization of schools.

He reviews the electoral victories for public schools.

Chief among them, of course, were the overwhelming defeat of charter school measures in Massachusetts and Georgia.

Another victory occurred in Washington State, where Bill Gates spent $500,000 into an effort to unseat Supreme Court justices who ruled that charter schools are not public schools. The Justice who wrote that decision, Barbara Madsen, was re-elected with 64% of the vote. Two other incumbents were re-elected.

Montana Governor Steve Bullock, a strong supporter of public schools, was re-elected, running against an advocate of school choice.

California voters passed measures to assure school funding.

One other piece of good news–and these days, any piece of good news is welcome–is that Maine voters narrowly agreed to raise taxes by 3% on upper-income taxpayers, to increase education funding.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Georgia, Maine, Massachusetts, Montana, Politics, Supporting public schools

California Charter Industry Spends BigTime on Elections to Cement Its Power

By dianeravitch
November 12, 2016 //
9

Investigative reporter Bill Raden of Capitol & Main exposes the political machinations of the billionaire-funded charter industry, which wants more kids, more schools, more market share. Enough is never enough.

Expenditures by charter school lobbying groups was near $24 million, pumped into 35 legislative races. The charter industry wants to buy influence to protect its market share.

Raden writes:

California’s “school choice” movement has always benefited from generous subsidies by a narrow spectrum of big-spending entrepreneurs, many of whom are billionaires. Their wealth has helped give the state the highest number of charter schools in the U.S., even as their election largess has left it with the nation’s most expensive school board elections.

Capital & Main’s analysis of the latest campaign-finance records for the five largest charter school IECs reveals that those same personal fortunes are at the center of the charters’ apparent attempt to buy some Sacramento political insurance against a growing resistance among both lawmakers and the public to the industry’s unbridled expansion in the state.
The amount spent by charter IECs represents about $40 for each of California’s 581,100 charter school students, and a 300 percent jump from 2014 charter election spending — about 570 percent over 2012.

Most of the charters’ IE spending (88 percent) was directed by three committees that served as the 501(c)(4) political arms of industry lobbyists California Charter School Association (CCSA) and EdVoice, the charter school advocacy nonprofit founded by Netflix CEO Reed Hastings: CCSA’s California Charter Schools Association Advocates IE Committee, and the Parent Teacher Alliance (sponsored by the CCSA’s IEC); and the EdVoice Independent Expenditure Committee. (Neither EdVoice nor CCSA responded to requests to comment for this article.)

The remainder was distributed by the Govern for California Action Committee, a PAC controlled by anti-public-pension gadfly and neoliberal Democrat David Crane; and by Parents and Teachers for Student Success – StudentsFirst, the IEC of the national pro-charter group founded by Michelle Rhee.

“They’re investing heavily in maintaining a deregulated environment,” said United Teachers Los Angeles Secretary Daniel Barnhart before the election. “This really isn’t about kids. In their own words, they say it’s about market share.”
He may be right. Though the teachers union spent nearly $33 million on the election, the bulk of that (around $20 million) went to Proposition 55, the education-funding measure that aimed to benefit all California classrooms — both charter and public school students. The charter IECs spent solely on pro-charter legislative and school board candidates.

The unions spent money to support education, both for public schools and charter schools. The charter industry spent only to protect its future prospects for opening more charters and draining more resources from public schools.

Governor Jerry Brown is the ultimate protector of the charter industry. He vetoed a bill to block the educationally disastrous for-profit online charter industry. And he vetoed other bills to rein in charter abuses.

The industry may have become more aggressive this year because the public is growing wary of its promises, its scandals, and its propaganda. The ACLU issued a blistering report about charters in California, and the NAACP call for a moratorium on charters was a body blow to billionaires who think they are in the forefront of the civil rights movement. They are not.

This greedy, self-absorbed industry has overplayed its hand. The public is catching on. The billionaires will have to spend more to buy more legislative seats to stave off a public uprising against them.

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

Good News on a Gloomy Night: Question 2 in Massachusetts Fails Overwhelmingly

By dianeravitch
November 9, 2016 //
204

All the Presidential polls were wrong. Clinton appeared to be headed for a big victory until FBI Director James Comey informed Congress that he had discovered a new trove of emails. He decided there was no problem on the Sunday before the election. I can’t help but think that she was never able to revive the momentum after Comey’s intervention. And so we have a President-elect who has never held public office, has no governmental experience, has made statements that are racist, misogynist, andxenophobic. His party will control Congress. He will select at least one and possibly two or three Supreme Court justices.

On the subject of education, he has shown little interest. He held one press conference at a for-profit charter school in Ohio and promised $20 billion in federal funds for charters and vouchers, transferred from existing programs. He has shown no interest in public education.

But there is a piece of good news in the midst of a dark night for public education.

Voters in Massachusetts overwhelmingly defeated Question 2, by a margin of about 62%-38%. Question 2 would have permitted the addition of 12 charter schools every year into the indefinite future.

A vibrant coalition of parents, educators, and students withstood a barrage of dark money and won. They organized, mobilized, knocked on doors, rallied, and they won. More than 200 school committees passed resolutions against Question 2. None supported it.

The bottom line that unified opponents of the measure was that charters would drain funding from the public schools.

Proponents spent at least $22 million, most of it from out of state donors. Big givers were billionaires and hedge fund managers.

This was the first contest over charter schools in which the key issues became public: the billionaire funding from out of state; the deceptive advertising that flooded the airwaves; the opponents’ recognition that the charter movement was an assault on public schools, an effort to privatize them.

On a sad night for the nation, it is heartening to see that the people defended their public schools…and won.

Categories Billionaires, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Massachusetts, Privatization

Oakland: Charter Billionaires Attack School Board Member with Negative, Misleading Flyers

By dianeravitch
November 8, 2016 //
4

Dark money leads to dark actions.

The usual billionaires are funding a campaign to put pro-charter candidates on the Oakland school board.

Rather than openly debate the issues, they have attacked a school board member with negative ads and flyers.

Dark money is turning School Board races into ugly, partisan elections, not divided by party but by allegiance to either democratically controlled schools or privatization.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, California, Charter Schools
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