Archives for category: Corporate Reformers
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Nancy Flanagan: Who Is Goliath in the Education Debates?

By dianeravitch
January 29, 2020 //
25

Nancy Flanagan, retired teacher of music for 31 years in the public schools of Michigan, is also a respected blogger. Her blog, Teacher in a Strange Land, has long been a source of wisdom and reality. She writes with the authority acquired from her years in the classroom.

In this post, she writes a wonderful review of my new book SLAYING GOLIATH. Better yet, she sets it in the perspective of a decade-long debate in which the billionaires, allied with the power of the federal government, portrayed themselves as the Davids, fighting those all-powerful teachers’ unions and their members, who were the real Goliaths (said Goliath).

Is this a picture of David, slingshot in hand? The Waltons ($150 billion), the Koch brothers ($120 billion—now divided in half since the death of David Koch), billionaires Eli Broad, Betsy DeVos, Philip Anschutz, Michael Bloomberg, John Arnold, Bill Gates, on and on. The 1% is armed not with an axe or a spear but with the power of federal law, imposed by state governments.

Not only is the 1% the Goliath of the story, they are the Status Quo. Don’t believe them when they claim they are fighting the Status Quo. Nonsense. They own it. No social movement was ever created by the rich and powerful. Genuine social movements rebel against the rich and powerful. They emanate from the millions who were left behind and excluded.

Flanagan writes in her review:

Diane Ravitch’s book—Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools—arrived at my house two days ago. Like all of her other volumes, this one is already highlighted, underlined and sticky-noted to a fare-thee-well. (Apologies to school librarians everywhere.)

Ravitch’s books are like that—they’re full of juicy, provocative information and the author tells it like she sees it. When she changes her mind, she tells you that, as well. Like The Death and Life of the Great American School System (2010) and Reign of Error (2013), Goliath is time-sensitive, including the most recent teacher strikes, elections and civic rebellions, and what they accomplished. Ravitch takes the temperature of the current education zeitgeist and finds reason for hope.

What’s happening to public education in America?

Ravitch is perhaps our keenest observer, and when it comes to strong, substantiated opinions, she doesn’t hold back. Absorbing a Ravitch book gives the reader a summation of facts, players and events that put disparate events and opinion into a comprehensive framework, a detailed portrait of right now.  Think of Death and Life as a warning, Reign of Error as blistering critique–and Goliath as we’re mad as hell and not going to take it anymore…

In short, it’s a really good book. It would be invaluable to anyone who wants a rundown on how education policy has morphed, over the past two and a half decades, from a locally controlled, state-influenced institution subject to incremental,  community-driven change–to a thoroughly commercialized venture heavily influenced by would-be ‘innovators’ and a federal power-grab.

Ravitch has done us all a favor by tracing the dark roots and substantial financial support for chipping away at neighborhood schools and public education. As always, follow the money…

Ravitch provides plenty of information and examples of how the real Davids in this fight, the Resistors, are making headway, on dozens of fronts. She is unsparing in her criticism of those who would damage or destroy public education for private profit. This has not gone down well with those who have invested in reforms and trendy disruptions.

There are not many people—Disruptors, if you will—who have empowered school privatization and are now willing to admit that their ROI yields are unimpressive and propped up by shaky data. Especially since those who have been educating kids, doing the work all along—teachers and school leaders—could have told them what will and will not make a difference.  Resistors have studied school improvement, up close and personal, for more than a century. It can be done, but it won’t involve destruction. Just more hard work.

Diane Ravitch has re-framed the argument and provided evidence that the great ship of public education may be turning around. That is a great gift. Thank you.

Thank you, Nancy Flanagan. It means a lot to me to know that the real experts, the educators who spent their careers as teachers, find my book valuable. It helps me ignore the slings and arrows of pundits and Goliath’s minions.

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Privatization, Resistance, Testing

The Ex-Labor Leader Who Now Fights Teachers’ Unions

By dianeravitch
January 28, 2020 //
43

Andy Stern was once a powerful labor leader as head of the SEIU (Service Employees International Union). Since stepping down, however, he has turned against the movement he once led and is an outspoken foe of teachers’ unions. He even joined the board of the Broad Foundation, which is anti-union and anti-public school. I don’t know Stern, but I have seen one article that describes his change of views.

Stern developed a reputation as a business-friendly union leader, known for striking deals with companies that were often seen as too weak by many in the labor movement. Under the guise of modernization and growth, Stern seemed to lose his connection to the grassroots, radical, people-powered aspects of the union world. In 2010, The Nation quoted one union leader as saying, “Andy Stern leaves pretty much without a friend in the labor movement.”

His post-SEIU years have only intensified this feeling. Stern has spent the past decade serving on corporate boards, touting the idea of a universal basic incomeas an economic solution superior to building labor power, and further ingratiating himself to corporate America as a sort of post-union ambassador to the Aspen Institute world. He also took a seat on the board of the Broad Foundation, a billionaire-funded group that pushed charter schools—raising eyebrows from teacher’s unions, who are often cast as the villain by wealthy reformers seeking to build alternatives to America’s public education system.

Of course, he is not the only labor leader who flipped to the other side. George Parker was president of the Washington, D.C., teachers union at the time when Michelle Rhee became chancellor and started her famous campaign to crack down on teachers. At the end of his term in 2011, he teamed up with Rhee and spoke out against the same issues he had once championed. He went to work for Rhee’s StudentsFirst and joined her campaign for charters, vouchers, merit pay, and test-based evaluation. Now he works with the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

Paul Toner was vice-president, then president of the Massachusetts Teachers Union from 2006 to 2014. After his term ended, he joined the “reform” movement, as a Pahara-Aspen Institute Fellow, a graduate of the Broad Academy,  and currently executive director of the Gates-funded Teach Plus, which is generally pro-testing and anti-union (its CEO is John B. King Jr. and its board includes DFER favorite, former Congressman George Miller). For criticism, see here and here.

In 2011, Sam Dillon of the New York Times called out TeachPlus for its role in pushing through policies in state legislatures that Gates favored, but unions did not. Dillon was one of the first journalists to realize that Gates was creating Astroturf groups to advance his agenda:

INDIANAPOLIS — A handful of outspoken teachers helped persuade state lawmakers this spring to eliminate seniority-based layoff policies. They testified before the legislature, wrote briefing papers and published an op-ed article in The Indianapolis Star.

They described themselves simply as local teachers who favored school reform — one sympathetic state representative, Mary Ann Sullivan, said, “They seemed like genuine, real people versus the teachers’ union lobbyists.” They were, but they were also recruits in a national organization, Teach Plus, financed significantly by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

For years, Bill Gates focused his education philanthropy on overhauling large schools and opening small ones. His new strategy is more ambitious: overhauling the nation’s education policies. To that end, the foundation is financing educators to pose alternatives to union orthodoxies on issues like the seniority system and the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers.

In some cases, Mr. Gates is creating entirely new advocacy groups. The foundation is also paying Harvard-trained data specialists to work inside school districts, not only to crunch numbers but also to change practices. It is bankrolling many of the Washington analysts who interpret education issues for journalists and giving grants to some media organizations.

Toner was succeeded at the Massachusetts Teachers Association by firebrand Barbara Madeloni, who led the successful fight to block a Walton-funded referendum in Massachusetts in 2016 to stop charter school expansion.

Just last year, Madeloni wrote an article about Toner’s switching sides. She writes that as soon as someone becomes a union president, he or she is offered the “soft handshake” by corporate and political leaders who want to woo them to the other side. She wrote:

As an elected leader of the largest union in Massachusetts, I found myself with many invitations to meet and cut deals with the very people whose policies the members opposed.

I wasn’t elected to get a better bad deal. I was elected to refuse their deals and reestablish the power of educators, students, and families.

Everyone has a right to change his or her mind. I did it myself. Still, I was not the leader of an organization; I was an individual who said, “I was wrong.” I admit that I don’t entirely understand how someone goes from being the president of a labor union to opposing the people they previously represented. 

 

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

Mercedes Schneider: SLAYING GOLIATH is “A Book About Us”

By dianeravitch
January 27, 2020 //
44

Mercedes Schneider is a high school teacher in Louisiana. She has been blogging since 2013 about the state and federal government’s determined efforts to force bad ideas on teachers like her. Too often, she writes, she has had to share bad news. But when she read SLAYING GOLIATH, she understood that she was part of a national movement to resist bad policies.

She writes:

It has been an uphill battle, and I know that my words, though informative, are also often overwhelming and disheartening for those who care about the community school and who seek an encouraging word.

I have had fellow supporters of American public education tell me they appreciate my work but wish I had some good news to share.

Well, then. Today is that day.

Education historian, Diane Ravitch, has published a book, Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools.

It is a book about parents, teachers, students, administrators, and other public school advocates across the nation whose grass roots efforts to engage in the fight save America’s schools have created a movement, a book that allows public school advocates the opportunity to step back and see a more complete picture of their combined efforts across cities, states, situations, and years.

It is a book about us.

As I turned the pages and read of so many advocates contributing individual moments of advocacy– writing, speaking, organizing, protesting, striking, lobbying, voting, running for office– I felt wonderfully encouraged to realize on a deeper level that I am not one of few but one of many contributing to a remarkable, undeniable, and powerful effort to combat an ed-reform effort chiefly fueled by a handful of billionaires.

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Hope, Privatization, Testing, Vouchers

Justin Parmenter: The Rightwing Assault on Public Schools in North Carolina

By dianeravitch
January 26, 2020 //
3

Justin Parmenter is a National Board Certified Teacher in North Carolina.

In this essay, he documents the decade-long effort by Republicans to destroy public education in North Carolina and demoralize teachers. 

He writes:

Out of all the states that have struggled to provide a quality public education over the past decade, perhaps none have seen as precipitous a decline as North Carolina. Once seen as a regional model of progressive education policy, a succession of unfortunate occurrences has severely damaged our public education system. Activists now fight against difficult odds for the change students need most.

Shift of Political Power to Republicans and Impact on North Carolina Education Policy

Like many states, North Carolina was hit hard by the Great Recession and saw funding cuts that greatly impacted our schools. However, the nightmare for our public schools began in earnest in November 2010 when the Republican Party won control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives (Mildwurf & Browder, 2010) in North Carolina’s state legislature. The following year, Republicans gerrymandered electoral districts (Ballotpedia, n.d.a) to ensure they’d be able to hold onto power for the next decade and then set their veto-proof majority to work passing regressive education policies with no opposition.

The policies included significant de-professionalization of the teaching profession in North Carolina through revoking career status protection (Public Schools First NC, 2017) for teachers, terminating advanced degree compensation (Kiley, 2013), and eliminating retiree health care benefits (Bonner, 2017). The GOP majority lifted the cap (Leslie, 2011) on charter schools, worsening economic and racial segregation across the state given that charters serve an increasingly white population (Nordstrom, 2018). The legislature directed a billion dollars (Wagner, 2019) over a decade to voucher programs, despite the fact that the the schools participating in the program were not required to report on student achievement (Public Schools First NC, 2019). Additionally, the legislature cut thousands of teacher assistants (Campbell & Bonner, 2015) and created a school report card system, in which school ratings were highly correlated with levels of poverty (Henkel, 2016). Finally, state legislators passed a K–3 reading initiative (North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, n.d.), which promised to improve results through increasing assessment volume and threatening our most vulnerable students with grade retention. And when K–3 reading achievement got worse, legislators added financial pay- for-performance incentives (Clark, 2016) based on questionable value-added data.
Many of these harmful initiatives were passed in budget bills rather than being moved through deliberative committee processes, eliminating the debate and public input so essential to the creation of effective policy. In addition to promoting a neoliberal education reform agenda, North Carolina’s lawmakers passed massive tax cuts favoring corporations and wealthy individuals, which have taken $3.6 billion in potential annual revenue (Sirota, 2019) off the table, all but ensuring schools will struggle for adequate resources for the foreseeable future.

In North Carolina’s 2016 general election, Republican Mark Johnson eked out a 1% victory (Ballotpedia, n.d.b) for the state superintendency—the first time in more than 100 years the office had been won by a Republican. State legislators immediately moved to transfer power away from newly elected Democratic Governor Roy Cooper and the State Board of Education and give Superintendent Johnson unprecedented control of North Carolina’s public school system (North Carolina General Assembly, 2016).

As State Superintendent, Johnson has been a disaster. Having only two years as a TFA teacher, he was over his head. His inept leadership outraged teachers and provoked mass walkouts.

Parmenter says that teacher activism is exhausting but worth it.

This year there is an election for state superintendent. The Network for Public Education has endorsed educator Jen Mangrum for the post. There is a chance to revive public education in North Carolina.

 

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Network for Public Education, North Carolina, Privatization, Teachers and Teaching, Vouchers

Tom Ultican Explains Corporate Education Reform and the Assault on Dallas Public Schools

By dianeravitch
January 26, 2020 //
13

 

This is a very engaging video interview of Tom Ultican, an expert on corporate education reform, explaining the federal takeover of public schools via No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. Ultican goes into detail about the corporate assault on public schools in the Dallas Independent School District. He names names, starting with the misguided superintendency of Mike Miles, a Broadie who managed to drive out large numbers of experienced teachers. He identifies the funders of corporate funders, both billionaires and the Dallas Chamber of Commerce.

He gives a concise analysis of the money behind the “portfolio model,” charters, and privatization in Texas and Dallas.

Categories Accountability, ALEC, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers, Dallas, Democracy, Education Reform, For-Profit, Fraud, Portfolio District, Privatization, Race to the Top, Teachers, Texas

Valerie Strauss Posts a Portrait of Nashville Leader Amy Frogge, from SLAYING GOLIATH

By dianeravitch
January 25, 2020 //
4

 

Valerie Strauss posted an excerpt from SLAYING GOLIATH about one of its heroes.

SLAYING GOLIATH contains many true stories of individuals and groups who took a stand to defend their schools against the assault of well-funded privatizers. Amy Frogge is a lawyer and a public school parent. She decided to run for the Metro Nashville school board. She had no agenda other than to do her part as a citizen. She was outspent 5-1, but she won. She quickly learned about the struggle for control of the future of the public schools.

 

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

Gayle Lakin Reviews SLAYING GOLIATH: Enough Is Enough!

By dianeravitch
January 23, 2020 //
5

Gayle Lakin reviews SLAYING GOLIATH at Norm Scott’s EdNotes Online. Lakin is an art teacher in Maryland. Norm Scott reminds us that he gets credit for coining the term “ed deform,” which he did during the era of Michael Bloomberg and Joel Klein in New York City.

Lakin begins:

No words can possibly convey the degree of spin, erroneous data and persistent support of outright fabrications that became “truths” under a relentless “ed reform” mantra; say it enough, spin it enough, publish it enough, work the system enough and it will become “true” enough. But “enough is enough”! Ravitch heroically and successfully wades through this complicated decades-long haze in her book, Slaying Goliath with her trademark attention to detail. She brings clarity as to how “ed reform” (she prefers “ed disrupters”) birthed charter schools with the intention of privatizing our national education system and how and why this “grand scheme” is currently and fortunately starting to burn out!

What might a reader’s first reaction be? There isn’t a rock big enough for “ed disrupters” to crawl under to escape the raw truths exposed in this book. Ravitch names people and companies (and there are many). She thoroughly explains the tactics of those ultra-wealthy hedge-fund managers, philanthropists, CEO’s, big businesses, politicians and the likes playing into and profiting by the “ed disruption” takeover of our national education system via a “Trojan horse” also known as the charter school (which is assuredly not a public school even though it receives public school funding). The current charter school concept is totally foreign to the original idea put forth by Al Shanker who originally intended for a charter school to be a public school within a public school to serve the needs of outlier learners. Ravitch details Shanker’s actual vision. Who would know better as he spoke to her directly about his vision which she describes in her book!

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Testing

Gene Glass and David Berliner Publish a Joint Essay-Review of SLAYING GOLIATH

By dianeravitch
January 23, 2020 //
38

The two most distinguished education researchers in the nation are Gene V. Glass and David C. Berliner, both of whom have held the highest positions in their profession and are universally admired for their careful research and long history of defending the highest standards in the research community.

Together they wrote an essay-review of my book SLAYING GOLIATH.

The review can also be accessed here.

They found the book to be fair-minded and unbiased. And they liked it a lot!

They did some genealogical research about me and my family.

They refer to this blog as “the most influential communications medium in the history of public education.”

They describe the book “as the efforts of a historian to find the facts and follow where they lead.”

They write “We sincerely thank Ravitch for her careful documentation of the greed, anti-democratic actions, and just plain stupidity displayed by so many of our nation’s leading political and business leaders who attempted to fix education….

“In the following, we provide a flavor of the book by brief examples from each chapter. We hope that this whets the appetite for a full reading by anyone concerned with the attacks on public education by those whom Ravitch calls the Goliaths. With her slingshot and stone, she joins a noble battle to preserve this uniquely American invention, which Horace Mann called the greatest invention of mankind….”

I think you will enjoy their insights, as when they indict Common Core as Bill Gates’ biggest folly, concluding that his love for standardization causes him to confuse schooling with DOS, the Microsoft operating system. They say that the “philanthro-capitalists” believe that schools should be run like businesses, like their own businesses. “They ignore the fact that the vast majority of businesses fail. They are incredulous when their schools fail.”

Glass and Berliner have written a valuable review (they are not entirely uncritical, as they still call me to account for the sins of my years on the other side).

I hope you will read it in its entirety.

I am immensely gratified to receive this careful and thoughtful review by two of the nation’s most respected scholars.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

Mercedes Schneider Compares the Money Behind EdPost and NPE

By dianeravitch
January 23, 2020 //
20

Apparently, Ed Deformers—themselves richly endowed with millions and millions from billionaires such as the Waltons, the Gates, Broad, Bloomberg, Koch, etc.—have descended to claiming that the Network for Public Education is funded by “Dark Money” and the big, bad teachers’ unions. Evidently they are troubled to have any dissent to their self-serving narrative that only privatization can “save” America’s children from the terrible public schools and teachers who have educated 90% of all Americans.

Mercedes Schneider performs a compare and contrast here, reviewing the tax filings of billionaire-funded “Education Post” with that of NPE. Of course, a fair comparison would have pitted NPE funding vs. not only “Education Post”, but also billionaire-funded The 74, The Center for Education Reform, Democrats for Education Reform, The City Fund, and the dozens of other front groups that have oodles of money but no members. (NPE has nearly 400,000 followers who pay no dues).

On one side is EdPost:

Started in 2014, Education Post is an ed-reform blog and the brainchild of California billionaire, Eli Broad. Right out of the starting gate, EdPost (actual nonprofit name, Results in Education Foundation) had $5.5M to play with in its first year.

EdPost’s first CEO, Peter Cunningham, was paid $1M for 2 1/2 years of blogging. Moreover, in his position as a founding member of EdPost’s board, Stewart was compensated a total of $422,925 for 40 hrs/wk across 30 months as “outreach and external affairs director.” (To dig into that EdPost history, click here and follow the links.)

Deutsch reviews NPE’s revenues and reports a cumulative total from 2016-2018 of: $659,300.

What a haul!

But oh, those salaries!

In 2016,

Diane Ravitch was president and was not compensated.

Carol Burris was executive director and is the only compensated person listed on the tax form; her total 2016 compensation was $41,108 (40 hrs/wk), most of which was spent working for NPE (33 hrs/wk), and the remainder, for NPE Action (7 hrs/wk).

(Point of fact: Burris actually works at least 60 hours per week.)

But wait! In 2018, Burris’s salary for her full-time job was $55,000 a year. What a scandal!

No one is in NPE for the money.

The most amazing fact about NPE is how much it has accomplished with one full-time staff member and minimal resources. See:

A state-by-state report on support for public schools;

Online learning: What Every Parent Should Know;

Charters and Consequences;

Billionaires hijacking public schools;

The real story in New Orleans;

Student privacy,

School privatization toolkit,

The waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal Charter Schools Program (here and here).

Whoa! That’s a lot of bang for the buck. One full-time employee, two part-time employees (Darcie Cimarusti and Marla Kilfoyle) and all that productivity!

Is ”EdPost,” with all their millions, jealous of NPE?

Or just sore because they have lost the war of ideas, now that their boasts have flopped and Betsy DeVos is the face of their billionaire-funded “movement”?

 

 

Categories Billionaires, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Funding, Network for Public Education, Networkfor Public Education Action Fund, Privatization

Nancy Bailey Reviews SLAYING GOLIATH!

By dianeravitch
January 22, 2020 //
6

Nancy Bailey, experienced classroom teachers, shares her thoughts about SLAYING GOLIATH in this post. 

Bailey commends the book for showing that the resistance has a history, and we should remember those who started it.

It returns to the start of standardized testing movement, highlighting one of the most famous resistors, Vermont blogger Susan Ohanian. Susan became one of the first voices, and, I will add, listeners, to teachers and parents on her blog. This was before blogs were popular.

She points to researchers David C. Berliner and Bruce J. Biddle and their signature book The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Frauds, and the Attack on America’s Public Schools: The Real Crisis in Education and Richard Rothstein’s The Way We Were?: The Myths and Realties of America’s Student Achievement. These and other signature books warned about the problematic signs of disruption to our public schools. They remain a relevant part of history today.

In Slaying Goliath we are taken back to the original Save Our Schools movement and shown how the spark was lit to form new groups like the Network for Public Education and the Badass Teachers Association.

Diane remembers United Opt Out founders Peggy Robertson, Tim Slekar, Morna McDermott, Shaun Johnson, Ceresta Smith, and Laurie Murphy. UOO spared many children from the humiliation of taking high-stakes tests designed to fail teachers, schools, and the students! These education leaders stood up to the oligarchs who foisted strident policy against children and their teachers, into their classrooms. Even though this movement has been, and continues to be, waylaid by nonstop assessment in competency-based education, it has sparked a nation of parents and educators who are better-informed and committed to saving their public schools.

Diane salutes the premiere bloggers who continue to move the equation against the disruptors.

We learn about dark money and failed reforms like Common Core. There’s much, much more.

The message I took away from this book is that in order to press on, we need to better understand where we’ve been, at what point we stand in history, and how we can, as Davids and good Americans, stand on the right side of future history for a public education system that serves children, not corporations. Our public schools must be great with opened doors for everyone.

Goliath has a history. Less well known is the history of the resistance. We must remember to thank those who came before us for speaking truth to power. We must not let the Disruptors falsify history, as they have falsified a myth about our public schools.

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Testing
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »