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Jeff Bezos Loves Charters and Privatization

By dianeravitch
January 4, 2017 //
24

Who is Jeff Bezos? Jeff Bezos founded Amazon. He is a billionaire. He loves charters and privatization of schools. In 2013, he bought The Washington Post, which had been a bastion of liberal thought under the ownership of the Graham family.

 

Bezos did not introduce charter-love and teacher-bashing to the Washington Post. While the news staff always played it straight, the Post editorial board was madly in love with Michelle Rhee during her stormy tenure. In their eyes, Rhee could do no wrong. She was their Joan of Arc. Even now, after a decade of Rhee-Henderson control, the Post still worships Rhee, as this article by editorial page editor Fred Hiatt showed.

 

When Bezos bought the Post in 2013, investigative journalist Lee Fang revealed in The Nation that Bezos is a generous supporter of school privatization.

 

Lee Fang wrote:

 

“There’s one area where Bezos has been hyper-active, but it is largely unknown to the general public: education reform. A look at the Bezos Family Foundation, which was founded by Jackie and Mike Bezos but is financed primarily by Jeff Bezos, reveals a fairly aggressive effort in recent years to press forward with a neoliberal education agenda:

 

• The Bezos Foundation has donated to Education Reform Now, a nonprofit organization that funds attack advertisements against teachers’ unions and other advocacy efforts to promote test-based evaluations of teachers. Education Reform Now also sponsors Democrats for Education Reform.

 

• The Bezos Foundation provided $500,000 to NBC Universal to sponsor the Education Nation, a media series devoted to debating high-stakes testing, charter schools and other education reforms.

 

• The Bezos Foundation provided over $100,000 worth of Amazon stock to the League of Education Voters Foundation to help pass the education reform in Washington State. Last year, the group helped pass I-1240, a ballot measure that created a charter school system in Washington State. In many states, charter schools open the door for privatization by inviting for-profit charter management companies to take over public schools that are ostensibly run by nonprofits.

 

Other education philanthropy supported by the Bezos Foundation include KIPP, Teach for America and many individual charter schools, including privately funded math and science programs across the country.”

 

Lee Fang says there is one good result of Bezos taking over the Post. It used to be controlled by for-profit Kaplan University and avoided negative coverage of the sham industry.

 

He wrote:

 

“For now, the change in ownership will probably only benefit the Post’s education coverage, given the newspaper’s long relationship with Kaplan, which helped prop up the paper’s finances for years while the Post either largely ignored the issue of for-profit colleges or sent its executives to Capitol Hill to lobby against better oversight of the industry.

 

“Part of the ugly history of the Post is its reliance on a predatory for-profit college called Kaplan University. Though Washington Post blogger Lydia DePillis seemed to whitewash this relationship yesterday by referring to Kaplan as only a “lucrative test prep business,” in reality, Kaplan University was one of worst for-profit colleges in the country.”

 

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, District of Columbia, Education Industry, Privatization, Rhee, Michelle, School Choice

Owen Davis: How Pearson Made a Killing from the US Testing Mania

By dianeravitch
January 3, 2017 //
17

Journalist Owen Davis explains in this article how the giant British education publisher Pearson made a killing as American politicians went gaga for standardized testing.

it is important to bear in mind that annual standardized testing is neither necessary nor customary. No other nation requires every child in grades 3-8 to take standardized tests every year. The US didn’t do it either until after the passage of No Child Left Behind in 2001. NCLB was a bonanza for Pearson and other testing companies. They beefed up their lobbying operations to make sure that the testing industry was well protected in DC and in state capitols. One of the architects of NCLB, Sandy Kress, went home to Dallas and became a well-paid lobbyist for Pearson.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Pearson, Race to the Top, Standardized Testing, Testing

Gary Rubinstein: Is the Tennessee ASD Falling Apart?

By dianeravitch
January 3, 2017 //
10

Gary Rubenstein has been following the evolution of Tennessee’s Achievement School District, one of the biggest corporate reform programs in the nation. It started with great fanfare in 2011, using Race to the Top funding. The plan was to take control of the state’s lowest performing schools and turn them over to charters. The founders promised to vault these schools from the bottom 5% in the state to the Top 20% in five years. It hasn’t happened. Now big-name charter chains are bailing out.

 

“By making such a grand proclamation of what they were going to accomplish, the ASD invited a lot of scrutiny. After a few years there was a Vanderbilt analysis that said that students in the ASD were not making very much progress. In November 2014, Green Dot abandoned their plans to take over a high school. This started a parade of high profile charter operators leaving or reducing their stake in the ASD. In March 2015 a bizarre thing happened. YES prep, the charter chain that Chris Barbic started, at the last minute abandoned their plans to open a school in the ASD. In October 2016 Gestalt Charter Schools announced that they will stop running their two schools which included Humes, one of the original six ASD schools. Their other school, Klondike Elementary School, will actually close next year because of this, the first ASD school to be shut down. And most recently, just a few weeks ago, the gold standard of charter schools, KIPP Charter Schools, announced that they will pull out of KIPP Memphis Collegiate Schools. Watching the ASD unravel does make me look quite prophetic when I predicted this in my open letter to Chris Barbic back in 2012.

 

“One thing that was good about the ASD experiment was that these charter schools were taking over existing schools so that they would truly have the ‘same kids’ that they always claim to have when they compare themselves to the nearby ‘failing’ schools. In this way the ASD made it more difficult for these charter schools to do as many of the tricks they do elsewhere to choose the students who will raise their test scores. The fact that all these high profile charters are turning around and fleeing the ASD just shows what a fraud these charter chains are when they are stripped of the smoke and mirrors that they have used to build their influence and fame.”

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, Tennessee

Will Indiana’s Choice Program be the Model for the Trump-DeVos Plan?

By dianeravitch
January 3, 2017 //
20

http://www.journalgazette.net/food/the-dish/Indiana-s-vouchers-wow-GOP-16999984

 

Mike Pence is a devout believer in school choice and privatization of public funds. The Indiana state constitution specifically prohibits spending public funds in religious schools but the state courts ruled that the public money went to families, not to the religious schools that actually received the money. Now Indiana is a national model for the privatization movement, although the public was never asked to vote on this dramatic abandonment of public schools.

 

Indiana lawmakers originally promoted the state’s school voucher program as a way to make good on America’s promise of equal opportunity, offering children from poor and lower-middle-class families an escape from public schools that failed to meet their needs.

 

But five years after the program was established, more than half of the state’s voucher recipients have never attended Indiana public schools, meaning that taxpayers are now covering private and religious school tuition for children whose parents had previously footed that bill. Many vouchers also are going to wealthier families, those earning up to $90,000 for a household of four.

 

The voucher program, one of the nation’s largest and fastest-growing, serves more than 32,000 children and provides an early glimpse of what education policy could look like in Donald Trump’s presidency.

 

Trump has signaled that he intends to pour billions of federal dollars into efforts to expand vouchers and charter schools nationwide. Betsy DeVos, his nominee for education secretary, played an important role in lobbying for the establishment of Indiana’s voucher program in 2011. And Vice President-elect Mike Pence led the charge as the state’s governor to loosen eligibility requirements and greatly expand the program’s reach.

 

Most recipients are not leaving the state’s worst schools: Just 3 percent of new recipients of vouchers in 2015 qualified for them because they lived in the attendance area of F-rated public schools. And while private school enrollment grew by 12,000 students over the past five years, the number of voucher recipients grew by 29,000, according to state data, meaning that taxpayer money is potentially helping thousands of families pay for a choice they were already making.

 

Most recipients qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, according to state data, but a growing proportion – now 31 percent – do not.

 

Opponents argue that vouchers are not reaching the children most in need of better schools. They also assert that voucher programs violate the constitutional separation of church and state by funneling public dollars into religious schools, including those that teach creationism instead of the theory of evolution.

 

Indiana’s program survived a legal challenge in 2013, when a judge ruled that the primary beneficiaries of the vouchers were families, not religious institutions.

 

Growing larger

 

The Indiana General Assembly first approved a limited voucher program in 2011, capping it at 7,500 students in the first year and restricting it to children who had attended public schools for at least a year.

 

“Public schools will get first shot at every child,” then-Gov. Mitch Daniels said at the time. “If the public school delivers and succeeds, no one will seek to exercise this choice.”

 

DeVos, who had lobbied for the program as chairwoman of the American Federation for Children, hailed its passage and proposed that other states follow Indiana’s lead. Two years later, Pence entered the governor’s office with a pledge to extend vouchers to more children.

 

“There’s nothing that ails our schools that can’t be fixed by giving parents more choices and teachers more freedom to teach,” Pence said during his inaugural address in 2013.

 

Within months, Indiana lawmakers eliminated the requirement that children attend public school before receiving vouchers and lifted the cap on the number of recipients. The income cutoff was raised, and more middle-class families became eligible.

 

When those changes took effect, an estimated 60 percent of all Indiana children were eligible for vouchers, and the number of recipients jumped from 9,000 to more than 19,000 in one year.

 

The proportion of children who had never previously attended Indiana public schools also rose quickly: By 2016, more than half of voucher recipients – 52 percent – had never been in the state’s public school system.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Indiana, Privatization, Vouchers

Elizabethtown, Kentucky, Opposes Charter Schools for All the Right Reasons

By dianeravitch
January 3, 2017 //
4

Kentucky is one of the few states that did not have any charter schools until the Republicans swept into power. Republicans have longed for school choice, because choice and competition are baked into free-market ideology. Besides, their neighboring state Tennessee has charter schools. They didn’t care that Kentucky’s students perform better than those of Tennessee on the National Assessment of Educational Performance. The Republicans in Kentucky want the same failed ideas as everyone else.

 

The school board of Elizabethtown, Kentucky, passed a resolution saying that they don’t want charter schools. They want to protect and improve their public schools, not destroy or privatize them. They don’t see the point of a dual school system.

 

In the resolution, the board expressed concerns about charter schools siphoning money from public schools, lacking similar transparency and accountability standards as public schools, and failing to help at-risk students.

 

“The Elizabethtown Independent Board of Education opposes any Charter School legislation that will establish a separate system of state-authorized public charter schools that are funded through a funding formula that unilaterally takes critically needed funds from the local school districts and redirects them to charter schools, thereby debilitating the significantly underfunded existing system of funding for public education for all Kentucky students,” the resolution states.

 

The board held a discussion on charter schools before unanimously passing the resolution.

 

“We know with very good confidence that charter schools will continue to defund what is already underfunded,” said Tony Kuklinski, a board member. “They will take taxpayer money, money from the people we represent, and put it into a private enterprise for personal gain with no substantial data to support a better education system than a public school system.”

 

Kuklinski added that once the charter schools fail or decide to close shop, children will return to public schools undereducated.

 

“We already have things in place where if we don’t meet certain requirements and standards that the state has implemented, there can be sanctions up to and including the state coming in and taking over a school district,” he said…

 

Kentucky is one of seven states that does not have charter school legislation. Other states without charter schools are Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont and West Virginia.

 

 

Hardin County Schools Board of Education Chairman Charlie Wise, who also opposes charter schools, said the district will discuss and consider writing a similar resolution next month once new board members have been sworn in.

 

Congratulations to the Elizabethtown school board, which is far wiser than the Kentucky legislature.

 

Here is hoping that your courage and resolve spreads to many other school districts across the state and that it wins bipartisan support from every citizen in every school district. Everything in your resolution is correct. Charter schools are under private management; they are NOT public schools. If you sue them for excluding your children with special needs, they will tell the judge that they are a private corporation, not a “state actor.” They will drain resources from your local public schools, because the legislature has no intention of replacing the money you lose when kids are lured away with false promises. If charters are opened in your district, your public schools will lose money, teachers, and programs. Stay the course. Don’t let the corporations or representatives from ALEC bully you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Kentucky, Privatization, Resistance

Education Lingo and How It is Used to Mislead the Public

By dianeravitch
January 2, 2017 //
50

Emma Brown has an informative article today in the Washington Post about education lingo and its misuses.

 

Advocates of vouchers call them “opportunity scholarships” or “education savings accounts” or something else, because the American public doesn’t like vouchers. There have been many referenda on vouchers, and they have been defeated every time. When Betsy DeVos and her husband Dick sponsored a referendum on vouchers in Michigan in 2000, it was rejected by 69-31%. The most recent referendum was in Florida in 2012, when Jeb Bush tried to pull the wool over the eyes of voters by calling his voucher amendment the “Religious Liberty Amendment,” hoping the public was dumb enough to be deceived, and it was defeated by 58-42%. Maybe had it been called “the Education Voucher Amendment,” it would have gone down by 70-30%.

 

Thus, privatizers use a different term: school choice.

 

“School choice” was long tainted because of its origins with segregationist white southerners.

 

Reform is now a tainted word as well because it is a cover for privatization.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

A Wake-Up Call for Fred Hiatt, Editorial Page Editor of the Washington Post

By dianeravitch
January 2, 2017 //
107

Fred Hiatt, editorial page editor of the Washington Post, wrote an uninformed opinion piece urging Trump to invite cities to become “laboratories of choice,” where every student could go to the school of his or her choice. He says this would be “the right kind of choice.” “Uninformed” is the polite term. I was tempted to say “absurd” or idiotic,” but decided to be polite.

 

He begins his article by reciting the specious claims of the right wingers that everyone exercises choice except the poor. I know these claims because I was part of three rightwing think tanks where they were repeated again and again. Some people choose parochial schools; some choose private schools; others choose safe suburbs and neighborhoods. Only the poor are “stuck” in “failing schools.”

 

The assumption behind these assertions is that choosing schools will improve education. But there is no evidence for this claim.

 

Here is some news for Mr. Hiatt.

 

We already have laboratories of choice. First, there is New Orleans, which has no public schools. The scores are up, but most of the charter schools continue to be low-performing, probably because they have the poor kids who were not accepted in the top-performing charters. The district as a whole is low-performing in relation to the state, which is one of the lowest-performing in the nation.

 

Then there is Milwaukee, which has had vouchers and charters for 25 years. Three sectors compete, and all are low-performing. How is that for a “laboratory of choice,” Mr. Hiatt?

 

Then there is Detroit, in Betsy DeVos’ home state of Michigan. Detroit is the lowest-performing urban district tested by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. It is overrun by charters, many of them operating for profit. Now there is another fine example of a failing “laboratory of choice.”

 

Mr. Hiatt, why don’t you take a look at other nations’ school system. The one that most people admire, Finland, has well-resourced schools, highly educated teachers, professional autonomy, a strong professional union, and excellent results. What it does not have is standardized testing, competition, or choice.

 

Please, Fred, read my last two books Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education and Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools. Read Samuel Abrams’ Education and the Commercial Mindset. Read Mercedes Schneider’s School Choice. Pay attention. Be informed before you write.

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Detroit, Education Industry, Milwaukee, New Orleans, Privatization, School Choice, Segregation, Vouchers

Alan Singer: How Hedge Funds Will Benefit from Privatization

By dianeravitch
January 2, 2017 //
19

 

 

Alan Singer reviews the ways that hedge funds will benefit by the privatization of public funding for public schools.

 

Consider Michigan, just one state:

 

Michigan, Betsy DeVos’ home state, has 1.5 million children attending public elementary and secondary schools and spends about $11,000 per student. If charter networks operated all of Michigan’s schools, we are talking about $16.5 billion. Now that is real money! The charter network could stash away profits of $5.5 billion just my having high teacher turnover.

 

But that’s not the only way the hedge fund charter networks and private schools will make money. Inexperienced teachers need scripted lessons, staff development, and supervision, so the hedge fund schools can outsource these activities to subsidiary companies. They can also buy books, tests, supplies, computer software and hardware, and guidance services from their own companies and award maintenance contracts to themselves.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization

Thomas Ultican on the Education Issues for 2017

By dianeravitch
December 31, 2016 //
9

Thomas Ultican left the private sector to teach high school physics and mathematics.

 

In this post, he surveys the wreckage of education “reform” policies and the damage they have inflicted on schools and teachers, students and communities.

 

Trump, he recognizes, is prepared to double down on failures.

 

The issue for all of us is to identify the strategies that will enable us to survive what lies ahead.

 

He concludes on a hopeful note:

 

With the coming of Trump and Betsy Devos, everything I read leads me to believe that the federal government will continue and accelerate the failed Bush/Obama education policies. However, it will be out in the open because there are no fake progressives in this group to hide behind. Americans of all stripes do not want their public education system parceled out and sold. Most conservative like most liberals believe in public education. They do not want their schools taken over by faceless corporations and distant bureaucracies.

 

A national consensus on the need to protect America’s truly great public education system is probable.

 

Education profiteers will over-reach in 2017 and we will make significant strides toward winning back local control of our schools.

 

Let’s agree that the best way to awaken the public is to call the privatization and profit movement out and name it. Name it. Say that they are stealing what belongs to all of us. They are not “reformers,” they are vandals.

 

That is the fight ahead.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, Vouchers

Help Re-Elect Steve Zimmer to LA School Board

By dianeravitch
December 31, 2016 //
34

I am sending $200 to Steve Zimmer, president of the board of the Los Angeles Unified School District. Each time Steve runs for election, the billionaires target him for defeat. So far, despite the millions spent by the billionaires, Steve has prevailed. Steve started as TFA, but became a career teacher. He ran for the school board after 17 years in the classroom.

 

Please send whatever you can afford.

 

 

“Dear Diane,

 

I am running for re-election to the School Board on March 7th, and we are facing an important campaign deadline. We will formally launch our campaign and website early in 2017. But I wanted to reach out to you now as we approach this critical funding deadline on December 31st at midnight. I need your support like I’ve never needed it before.

 

As you know, we have made important progress in LAUSD over the past eight years. We weathered the worst budget crisis ever to face this district, made real and measurable improvement in key indicators of student outcomes, dramatically expanded equal access to arts education, and most critically, raised graduation rates to the highest level in the history of our public school system.

 

LAUSD is simply a better school district today than it was eight years ago.

 

But I know there is much, much more to be done, including expanding our reforms to all our schools and fighting for adequacy in public education funding. I need your help to continue this important work – I hope I can count on your support for my campaign. I need your donation today.

 

I face a difficult challenge this election, one more daunting than four years ago. In an effort to gain control of the School Board, the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) together with a few Corporate Reform Mega-Investors has recruited three wealthy candidates to oppose me in this election. They will have limitless funding to promote a very different agenda for public education, including creating a false narrative about crisis and failure in our public schools that belies all our progress and insults the efforts of our amazing teachers, school leaders, and families.

 

I need you to help me tell the true story of what can happen when we work together for our kids. Please take a few minutes to contribute to our campaign before the deadline on December 31st. Here is a link to follow for credit card donations before December 31st.

 

Thank you for supporting public education in Los Angeles. Together, we will keep building the positive momentum for our kids and their schools.
All my best,

 

Steve

 

Paid for by Steve Zimmer for School Board 2017 FPPC ID #1384608, 249 E. Ocean Blvd., Ste 685, Long Beach, CA 90802. Additional information is available at ethics.lacity.org.
PO Box 27164
Los Angeles, CA 90027
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Categories Billionaires, California, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Los Angeles
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