Mike Klonsky writes a post with one of the best titled ever.
He tries to figure out why reformers don’t care about class size. They say there’s no evidence for smaller classes. Well, there is plenty of evidence, but they brush it aside.
It turns they don’t care about evidence. They are not data-driven. They want to take your funding and your schools. They want to save money, but not to spend it on smaller classes.
In this post, EduShyster interviews Andre Perry. In 2013, he became Founding Dean of Urban Education at Davenport University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Before that, he was a leader in the charter school movement in Néw Orleans. As I read this interview, I heard echoes of my own thinking from about a decade ago. I didn’t care who was sponsoring the schools so long as they were good schools. By 2009, I realized that it did matter, because many charters were skimming the best students and needed resources from the poorest districts, this left the public schools, which enroll most children, even worse off than they were before. We will see how Dr. Perry’s rethinking evolves.
Here are Jennifer Berkshire’s first questions:
“EduShyster: You were involved in the education reform experiment in New Orleans from its inception. But you’ve become increasingly critical of the direction reform has taken. Why?
“Andre Perry: The goal of education has to be build the capacity of local residents. It has to be—and I’m talking about from top to bottom. Our goal is not to improve a school in spite of the community. Our goal is to improve a community using schools. And it’s not just to give students the skills to get a job—that’s one small part. It’s to make sure they have sustainable communities to live in. You’re not going to fire your way to improving community. You have to do the hard work of building capacity and training people and becoming a member of the community. That’s how you do it. That wasn’t happening and it’s not happening. In addition, and this is where I am clearly biased, New Orleans is 60% Black. If we don’t have Black leaders in the mix, we’re just reinforcing a power structure that helped cause the situation we were in.
“EduShyster: Was there anything specific that caused you to start to question what was happening in New Orleans?
“Perry: I became very critical because I saw a script that folks had to follow. There was a clear bias against New Orleanians, some of which was predicated on race, some on folks’ affiliation with the prior system. But there was a clear bias. Around 2008 and 2009, I sat on some of the charter authorizing committees. I would see Black and local charter applications just passed on, and I would see white applications that had clearly been written by someone else, and yet the odds were stacked for their acceptance. I remember in the beginning, it was really about quality and making sure we found new voices. Then it became about *scaling up.* There was a big transition, and I said *whoa—that is not the move.* The goal is to bring in different voices and new, innovative perspectives. It’s not to give the same people more schools. I didn’t get into reform for that. I got in it to build the capacity of local residents.
“EduShyster: People should also know that you’re very critical of the critics of education reform in New Orleans. I’ve heard you use words like *crass,* *silly,* and *camp-ish* to describe some of the anti-reform arguments. And can we acknowledge that merely typing those words makes my fingers hurt?
“Perry: I’m very critical of the anti-reform narrative because it lacks any form of nuance. These labels—sometimes I don’t even want to say them out loud—and if I hear the word neo-liberal again… There are no complicated scenarios posed; it’s completely ideological. Let’s be real. We have to be very pragmatic about change. There’s no one way to bring about change. It typically comes from young people who aren’t wedded to any particular brand, and it will come from a commitment to making sure that the lives and outcomes of those communities are improved by any means. That’s what’s frustrating to me on the anti-reform side. Black people have never had the luxury to do things one way. We need good schools across the board—public, charter, private—and delivery systems that really speak to our existence. This idea that we can’t have multiple players in the same space is ridiculous. But when you’re in these settings where the rhetoric is so intense, you completely miss that there is good work happening in the charter space, or good *reformed* work happening in the traditional space. And what you also don’t see is how privilege and class are pervasive in all of these systems.”
I know I am missing something. Nuance is important but too much nuance, and you get rolled by those who know exactly what they want and go for it.
Stephen Dyer describes the latest move by the corporate reform crowd in Ohio. In typical “reformer” fashion, their idea of a solution to school problems is to eliminate democracy, local control, the voice of the people. The law he refers to is similar to the “emergency manager” law in Michigan, which gives one person total control of struggling school districts. It is similar to New Jersey’s state-appointed superintendent, who ignores any input from those who live in the community. It is similar to ALEC model legislation, which encourages states to remove local control so that privately-managed charter schools may be imposed, regardless of local opposition. The so-called reformers have a problem with democracy.
The law was passed by the Ohio Senate, 18-14, with five Republicans voting against it. For the past five years, Youngstown has been run by an “Academic Distress Commission.” The Governor has decided the way to “fix” the schools is to have one uber-Meister, in charge of all. In other words, the politicians are just enacting hunches. We know where this one will go: charters and vouchers.
Stephen Dyer writes:
I’m not given to hyperbole. I’m not one of these guys who tells you that something is the “Death of Democracy”, or that education reform efforts are trying to completely privatize the public education system. I really try to be level headed when analyzing various education policies, no matter how out there they may be.
But when I received an amendment to House Bill 70 — the plan to fix Youngstown City Schools — I was absolutely stunned. It is, without a doubt, a direct attack on Democracy. Why some feel the best way to fix a school system is to create a dictatorship, I have no idea. Democracy’s biggest problem is what has always been Democracy’s biggest problem — we keep electing people who think that the best way to fix a school system is to give absolute power to one person … and other crazy stuff.
According to the amendment, which I’ve posted here, Youngstown (and any other district that’s in “academic distress,” but for the moment only Youngstown) would be taken over by a “Chief Executive Officer” who would have “complete operational, managerial, and instructional control” of the district.
That’s right. All those elected officials the people of Youngstown bothered putting into office? Forget them. Because, apparently, the problem with the elected board is they’re not making decisions fast enough? I really don’t get this.
Anyway, the amendment would allow this CEO to make all decisions. In fact, throughout the amendment, the CEO would be given “sole” authority to reconstitute buildings, put any whackadoodle in charge there, decide which schools get which resources, which schools get turned into charters, etc….
And there would be zero input from the public. That’s right. He (or she) could just do this because they felt like it. Total dictatorship.
And here’s the thing. Only when the district gets an overall C grade on the state report card will the district even start to get out of this academic distress thing. So, essentially, we are creating a city-wide, more or less permanent dictatorship in Youngstown.
Why do I say this is permanent? Because all the grades on the state report card are based on test scores, which are nearly perfectly correlated with a district’s poverty rate. So Youngstown, with its nearly 100% poverty rate has almost zero chance of ever getting out from under this dictator’s thumb.
The “reformers” don’t buy the idea of democracy, you know, of the people, by the people, for the people. The urgency of the situation, they believe, requires a single decider to impose his or her will. You have an inkling of what they will do: eliminate public schools and replace them with charters. Perhaps friends of the Governor will get the contract; or a for-profit corporation. The CEO doesn’t need local approval for anything he or she imposes. Stephen is correct in his terminology. That’s dictatorship. The people of Ohio should not stand for it, not matter what ALEC wants.
Film-maker Brian Malone has just completed a major documentary about the corporate raid on public education. Get a copy and host a viewing for your friends.
Anthony Cody reviewed the film here and says it is an eye-opening expose of the big money that is trying to privatize public education.
Cody writes:
A new documentary will be released in community-based screenings across the country on August 14th. This film could provide a powerful boost to local efforts to organize resistance to the corporate takeover of public schools. It is called Education Inc, and it tells the tale all too familiar to many of us – that of the drive to privatize one of the few public institutions left in our withering democracy.
If you are frustrated by what you see happening in your local schools, if your school board is beset by billionaire-sponsored candidates, and charter schools are starving neighborhood schools of funding, this film might give you a much needed rallying point. The film’s creator is making it available for community showings, and is building for a one-day national release on August 14. A film showings can provide a focal point that brings people together and inspires further actions…..
But first, a bit of background on this story. I met Brian Malone a couple of years ago, when some parent activists brought me to Douglas County, Colorado, to talk about what was happening with corporate education reform. It was just a week or two prior to a major election that pitted those who supported public schools against a pro-privatization slate backed by ALEC and big money from outside of the area. There was all sorts of skullduggery in this election. The District used taxpayer funds to commission a pseudo-academic “white paper” by the head of the American Enterprise Institute, Rick Hess. His paper, and accompanying blog post, described Douglas County as “the most interesting district in America,” because it was a wealthy district experimenting with school choice. This paper was released in the middle of the campaign, and put a rosy glow on the candidates who supported this approach. It came out later that the school district paid Hess and his co-author $30,000 for their praise.
This money was just the tip of a much bigger iceberg that threatens to sink public education in communities across the country.
Brian Malone writes:
“Friday, August 14th, 2015
“American public education is in controversy. As public schools across the country struggle for funding, complicated by the impact of poverty and politics, some question the future and effectiveness of public schools in the U.S.
“For free-market reformers, private investors and large education corporations, this controversy spells opportunity in turning public schools over to private interests. Education, Inc. examines the free-market and for-profit interests that have been quietly and systematically privatizing America’s public education system under the banner of “school choice.”
“Education, Inc. is told through the eyes of parent and filmmaker Brian Malone, as he travels cross-country in search of the answers and sources behind the privatizing of American public education, and what it means for his kids. With striking footage from school protests, raucous school board meetings and interviews with some of the most well known educators in the country, Malone zooms out to paint a clear picture of profit and politics that’s sweeping across the nation, right under our noses.
“Education Inc.
National Grass Roots Screening
Friday, August 14th, 2015
“Be part of the national movement to open up the conversation of outside money behind education reform.
“Host your own house party. Rent out a community center. Show the movie and then have an open and honest conversation about school reform and all of the dark money behind it.
“Get your DVD here!”
Brian Malone
Malone Media Group
Teacher Andy Goldstein greets the new superintendent of Palm Beach County with a brief lecture about the evils of high-stakes testing.
In Palm Beach County and in Florida, he says, the basic ideology is “Testing is teaching.”
Watch the video, where he explains that the purpose of all this testing is to label schools as failures so they can be privatized and turned into profit centers.
He predicts:
“At this rate, I can imagine the day in the not-too-distant future when my daughter comes home and tells my wife and I, ‘I want to be a standardized test-taker when I grow up.’ And my wife and I would beam at her and say ‘Oh, we’re so proud of our little data point. You’re gonna make some rich plutocrat so happy.’”
Bob Braun reported it first, and Jersey Jazzman tells the rest of the story: The hot rumor in New Jersey is that Cami Anderson will resign as the state-appointed Superintendent of the Newark Public Schools and be replaced by Chris Cerf, who most recently worked for Joel Klein at Rupert Murdoch’s Amplify and before that was State Superintendent for New Jersey (who appointed Cami Anderson). It is a tight little circle.
Why would Cerf leave Murdoch’s Amplify? Murdoch’s $1 billion investment earned only $15 million in the first quarter. Amplify is cutting costs and laying off employees, and apparently Cerf lost his chair in the game of musical chairs.
Bob Braun writes:
Rumors of her impending resignation have been echoing throughout the school system for the last few weeks–sparked primarily by her apparent decision to empty her office. Employees at 2 Cedar Street have said her office has been empty for days. Cerf’s departure from Amplify Insight fed the rumors.
Still, there has been no confirmation from Trenton and the last word from Gov. Chris Christie on the subject of Newark is that he is not “changing my opinion.”
In the last few days, Anderson also has caved in on significant decisions–to make both East Side High School and Weequahic High School, both iconic institutions in the city, so-called “turnaround” schools.
The sources who reported Anderson’s resignation and Cerf’s appointment say they expect a formal announcement Monday or Tuesday. The Newark school board is expected to meet Tuesday night at a regular monthly meeting. Anderson has not attended a public session of the board since January, 2014.
No one can say for sure if this will happen, if Cami will resign, if Cerf will be appointed, or if it will make any difference in the state’s determination to charterize the entire district.
Newark matters for the nation because it has been under state control for 20 years. Privatizers latched on it as a source of fun and profit. Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million gift disappeared into the pockets of consultants and entrepreneurs. Cory Booker ascended to the Senate.
Newark is a symbol of the corporate reformers’ belief that school districts in urban areas are different: They cannot govern themselves; they must be controlled by the mayor, the governor, an emergency manager, or handed over to entrepreneurs.
At the annual conference of the Network for Public Education, Jitu Brown of Journey for Justice called this neocolonialism. In her book Charter Schools, Race and Urban Space: Where the Market Meets Grassroots Resistance, Kristen Buras describes the process of privatization thus: First the state (controlled by the white majority) underfunds the majority-black district; political leaders condemn the district as failed and corrupt; then the state determines that it must take charge of the district (in this case, New Orleans); the state changes the rules for declaring “crisis” and “failure,” and turns large numbers of public schools into charter schools, run by white entrepreneurs; the white leadership hires black spokesmen to celebrate the success of privatization; as control shifts from the black majority in the district to white entrepreneurs and privatizers in the state capitol, hundreds of millions of dollars flow freely to the new charter schools to prove that privatization works. With control of the state department of education, the corporate reformers own the data, and no one has independent data to challenge their claims. And that is what Jitu Brown calls “neocolonialism.”
This teacher blogger has compiled a list of some of the most recent charter school scandals. It is not an exhaustive list; the scandals just keep coming. [For a more exhaustive summary, go to “charter school scandals,” a website maintained by Oakland, California, parent activist Sharon Higgins (with no subsidy from corporations,foundations, unions or anyone else.)
This teacher blogger memorably writes:
As I see it, “corporate” is to “education” as “cigarette manufacturer” is to “public health and well-being.
And then on to recent scandals, like charter schools inflating enrollment to pad their payments by the state.
He finds:
In other words, with stunning regularity, corporate education boiled down to one simple word. And that word was: Greed.
Why is anyone really surprised?
Many of us have written, for example, about the giant cesspool that is the for-profit college industry. It’s a great gig, after all, when five top executives of Corinthian College can pull down $22 million in salary over a two-year stretch—at the same time saddling students with high-interest loans—providing low-quality course offerings—and finally going bankrupt this spring.
How about the five top executives at K-12, Inc., a for-profit chain of elementary and secondary online schools? They divvied up a cool $35.4 million in salaries and bonuses in 2013 and 2014.
For fun, put that in kid-centric terms.
Those five individuals took home enough cash to hire 354 teachers (at $50,000 each), for two years to actually work with kids in grades K-12.
Greed is good, isn’t that right?
Then there are corporations like Pearson, which spend millions lobbying politicians to keep high-stakes testing required. It’s all about the kids.
The scandals keep on coming:
Go ahead, Google away yourself. You’ll find endless examples to tickle your fancy. But let’s end with perhaps the biggest scam of all. Let’s hear it for the University of Phoenix, a money-making juggernaut, a company so successful at piling up $$$$ it was able to pay the Arizona Cardinals of the NFL $154.5 million for naming rights to their stadium! Good advertising? Sure! Too bad the school had to pay a fine of $67.5 million, plus $11 million in legal fees, for defrauding students!
Too bad a U. S. Senate investigation showed the school spent a mere $892 per pupil each year to actually educate students.
Hey, not to worry! Company founder John G. Sperling raked in $263.5 million in a little less than a decade in salary, bonuses and stock sales. And his son, Peter, did better still: $574.3 million.
It’s a new world, with surprising ways to make a profit by running schools.
Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor, is one of the few high-level policy thinkers who have noticed the attacks on public education. His concern is mainly with the rip-offs in for-profit institutions of higher education, which impoverish students and saddle them with debt.
But he does know that teachers are being scapegoated.
“Reich: Undoubtedly. Teachers have been scapegoated by those who don’t want to invest more in education. Who don’t want change. Who are personally happy with the status quo but feel that because the public is so unhappy with education, it’s easiest to scapegoat teachers. The fact of the matter is teachers are underpaid relative to other professions. The law of supply and demand in terms of wages is not repealed at the doors of our school houses. We are paying investment bankers and Wall Street traders, the people who are in charge of our financial capital, hundreds of thousands of dollars a year — many of them millions of dollars a year, a few a billion dollars or more. Yet we are paying teachers who are in charge of our human capital, arguably more important than our financial capital, a very tiny fraction of what Wall Streeters are paid.”
That’s good but he hasn’t yet figured out that these millionaires and billionaires are financing the privatization of public education, starting in urban districts and deeming themselves civil rights activists. Some for fun. Some for profit. Some because they believe the free market solves all problems.
Paul Karrer teaches fifth grade in a high-needs school in Castroville, California. He writes for California newspapers, trying to bring a realistic perspective to education debates.
In this article, he calls out “reformers” for believing in magic and silver bullets.
He writes:
“Education reform (education deform) is doing kids, the profession, and the country short-term and long-term harm. Ed Reform Inc. “believes” in short fixes, silver bullets, the power of personal cult persuasion, mantras, and now the twin goddesses of all – technology and data.
“More than half of all children in United States now live in poverty (Washington Post/UNICEF). As someone who has taught in a financially-socially challenged district for many years I can attest to the overwhelming negative influences of poverty. They are both direct and indirect. What is now normal in many communities was not the norm too long ago. The influences are single parent families, multiple families living under one roof, incarcerated family members, under-employment, no employment, no history of employment, poor language skills, the culture of poverty, early birthing, poor neonatal care, high percentages of children with unbelievable disabilities, addictions, and GANGS, globalization, and the death of low-level jobs due to technology.
“These variables cannot be pooh-poohed. Absurd belief in words like GRIT and EVIDENCE and TESTING – currently trending by Ed Reform — simply cannot overcome the long list of negatives. But Ed Reform claims they do….
“I believe a needs formula is required in schools of poverty. We need to save those desperate kids. If a classroom has X amount of special ed kids, X amount of incarcerated relatives, scores X on reading or math, has more than X amount of people residing in one house (or room), more than X amount of kids on Section 8 housing, more than X amount of kids in Title 1 programs — it should trigger an automatic cut in class size. There should be no more than 15 kids in such a class. Free pre-school needs to be mandatory. Wrap-around social services (nurses, shrinks, dentists, COUNSELORS, librarians, parent training, parental language classes) have to kick in. And kids need the classic, realistic school philosophy of teach THE WHOLE STUDENT….
“Ed Reform’s solution is curriculum. Common Core will change it all, they declare. The curriculum is not the problem. But that is where the financial feed trough is these days. And even the biggest promoter of Common Core, Bill Gates himself, said, “It will take 10 – 15 years to see if this is successful.”
“How nice,” I say.
“And in the meantime Ed Reform gets to close public schools (Chicago, Louisiana) defraud the public with for-profit institutions (Corinthian/Heald), pay their owners huge obscene salaries, and they destroy public education with a thousand strokes.
“Funny thing about the Ed Reform group – they espouse so much in favor of big business, profits, monetizing, reducing costs. Except for their very own rock core belief in supply and demand.
“Supply and demand doesn’t pertain to teachers? Teachers apparently are supposed to work for a pittance. But if they are to be the solution, they need to be paid much better so as to attract more candidates to the field. But Ed Reform chokes there.
“Smaller class size is the beginning of a real solution. Put the money where it will do KIDS the most good.
“Oh yes, and have your kids opt out of testing — especially next year when it counts.”
Matthew Pulver, writing at Salon.com, describes Jeb Bush’s dangerous belief in privatization and free markets in education.
It is not so much a belief as an ideology, one that is impervious to evidence. The many studies showing thAt privately managed charters do not get higher test scores than public schools do not register with Jeb. The numbers of charters that open with grand promises and soon lose their doors with big debts does not affect his belief system. He is a zealot for school choice, period.
Not even the failure of the charter school he founded in Liberty City, a poor black neighborhood, dampens his passion for charters and vouchers.
Writes Pulver:
“There’s nothing else as large in all of society. Not the military—nothing—is bigger.”
“That’s how Randy Best, Jeb Bush’s business partner, sees public education, as an untapped market where untold billions are to be made when kids and their families become educational customers. Touting his impressive assault on public education while Florida governor in yesterday’s announcement of his 2016 candidacy, Bush may become the loudest proponent yet of turning public education into a for-profit enterprise.
“Before getting into Bush’s record and financial interests in for-profit education, a full understanding of the dystopian horrors of for-profit, privatized education is necessary. Bush offers it with a handful of Milton Friedman-esque catchwords and focus-grouped slogans, and it may be that the proposals sound innocuous and vaguely innovative until the slightest scrutiny is applied to the ideas — at which point, it’s difficult to imagine much worse than public education turned into a for-profit market. Because the most basic and collectively understood truisms about markets, when applied to children, take on a horrifying character.”
It should be noted that Bush’s partner, Randy Best, was one of the biggest beneficiaries of Reading First, the ill-fated program enacted as part of NCLB but eventually discontinued because of sweetheart deals and conflicts of interest. Best, an entrepreneur, not an educator, created a commercial reading company (Voyager Learning), which he later sold for $360 million. Best admits that he can’t read, that he is acutely dyslexic. But he knows how to make money.
