Archives for category: Corporate Reformers
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Dr. Yohuru Williams: Everything I Need to Know about Corporate Reform I Learned in Kindergarten

By dianeravitch
March 15, 2014 //
11

Dr. Yohuru Williams teaches history at Fairfield University in Connecticut.

In this post, he condenses the lessons of the best-seller All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, reducing sixteen lessons to only six. They are on point and hilarious.

These are six rules to live by and to learn by. School would be a far better place for learning if everyone took Dr. Williams’ good advice.

Here are two of his rules:

 

  • Play fair. (Of course, this is impossible when the ultimate measure of a student’s success is reduced to how well they perform on standardized tests). Recent cheating scandals, involving some of the luminaries of Corporate Education Reform, illustrate the danger of a hyper-competitive model of education that substitutes standardization for innovation instead of more organic and battle-tested measures of student achievement.

 

· Don’t hit people. Or yell at people (Chris Christie), or make up facts (Stefan Pryor), or denigrate parents (Arne Duncan), or brag about taping the mouths of children shut (Michelle Rhee), or lie about test scores. Take your pick. But seriously, the crass manner in which the apostles of corporate education reform have “engaged” parents and teachers from Connecticut to California demonstrates how little respect they have for the communities or “children” whom they claim to value. See also: Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody.
Categories Arts Education, Childhood, Pre-K, K, Corporate Reformers, Humor, Rhee, Michelle

Parent Groups Blast Cuomo and New York Legislature

By dianeravitch
March 14, 2014 //
17

The New York State Senate legislation to protect charter schools is not limited in its reach to charters in New York City. According to the press release cited below, school districts across New York State will have to provide free facilities or public school space for charter schools that wish to open and will then have no jurisdiction over their own space. This is nothing but a brazen power grab by corporate charter operators.

NYC Parents Union

PRESS RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contacts:
Mona Davids (646) 872-7149
Noah Gotbaum (917) 658-3213
Leonie Haimson (917) 435-9329
Sam Pirozzolo (917) 533-3437

New York City Parent Leaders Statement On Governor Cuomo and The New York State Senate’s Agenda To Destroy Public Education

Our School Children Deserve Better Than Political Chicanery, Graft and Pay-to-Play Politics

The New York State Senate yesterday introduced a budget resolution filled with legislative bills seeking to destroy public education to benefit privately managed education corporations known as charter schools.  In it budget resolution, the Senate is requiring school districts to provide rent-free space to new charter schools or pay for private facilities out of the school districts budget.  It also includes increased funding for privately run charter schools, it strips the New York City Mayor and the Panel for Education Policy of their authority to approve or deny charter co-locations in public school buildings and gives charter schools decision-making authority over classroom space in buildings they are currently co-located in.  Outside of New York City, school boards will be required to pay for facilities costs for charter schools or co-locate them in their public school buildings.Governor Cuomo, Senator Dean Skelos and Senator Jeff Klein’s blatant attempt to destroy public education in exchange for contributions from the well moneyed charter lobby and hedge funders for their political careers is unconscionable.  The political chicanery and corruption in the “ed reform-political-complex” is unmatched in any democratic society throughout the world.
Shino Tanikawa, Manhattan Public School Parent and President of Community Education Council District 2* said:  “It is deeply disturbing to see such clear evidence of corruption in which charter operators with money dictate to Senators how they should be given everything they want while only serving a small proportion of students.  If this resolution passes, what little is left of our democratic process will be extinct and our schools – public and charters – will be run by charter operators and their minions in the state legislature.  And make no mistakes they do not have the interest of our children in their hearts.”Jacqueline Colson, Queens Public School Parent and Member of Community Education Council District 25* said:  “Our children are not pawns in this “Game of Charters”. The queen Eva Moskowitz has made her move and King Cuomo has fallen into checkmate by destroying public schools. We need to take a stand and change the game.”Noah E. Gotbaum, Manhattan Public School Parent, Vice President, Community Education Council District 3* said:  “Public school parents beware! This Senate Resolution steals control of our public schools from elected Mayors and school boards, and hands it to hedge fund managers and charter school lobbyists.  It would force cash-strapped school systems to hand over space and extra funding for the 3% in charters at the expense of the 97% in public schools.  And it would give charter corporations like Eva Moskowitz’s complete control over what happens in our public school buildings. This Bill has nothing to do with what’s best for New York States 2.5 million kids, and everything to do with what’s best for a few hundred high-rolling campaign contributors. It is shameful.”Leonie Haimson, Executive Director, Class Size Matters said:  “Thousands of public school students are put on waiting lists for Kindergarten each year, thousands more sit in trailers, and hundreds of thousands are sitting in overcrowded schools, yet this proposal would force NYC to give charter schools free space or pay for the construction of their schools  –over the rights of public school students.  Moreover, 5 out of the 7 provisions in the Senate proposal pertaining to charters would ONLY burden NYC with these obligations – and not the districts represented by the Republican Senators.  If Avella cannot get the Senate to give up this incredibly inequitable and damaging proposal, designed to force privatization of the NYC public school system because of the money and power of the hedge funders and billionaires that back the charter lobby, he should resign from the IDC”.

Benita Rivera, Founder of The Mother’s Agenda New York (The MANY) said:  “Once again the politicians, pro-charter power brokers and paid lobbyists have shown their blatant disgust— not only for any semblance of democracy, but as regrettably, for the best interests of the overwhelming majority of children in our traditional public schools. I would say “Shame on Governor Cuomo and the Senate Majority!,” except that this shabby cohort of political careerists in Albany know no shame.

Rivera continued:  The very idea of co-locating different schools, with different educational philosophies and vastly different resources under one roof is an absurdity ill-conceived by Michael Bloomberg.  Was it not through brute force and big money spent wrangling either naive or ethically-devoid state politicians, that he was able to impose his will upon the public to divvy-up our children’s developmental learning and social-play places without parent, teacher and especially, voter consent?  After all this time and so much energy, it is disheartening that we appear to be right back at square one in the struggle; which all seems part of the master’s plan to deconstruct and destroy public education as we know it.”

Mona Davids, Bronx Public School Parent and President of the New York City Parents Unionsaid:  “Everybody laughs when we speak about the dysfunction in Albany.  We all shake our heads and shrug our shoulders when we hear of legislators arrested and convicted of corruption and accepting bribes from special interests.  We know that Governor Cuomo, Senator Dean Skelos and Senator Klein have received almost one-million dollars in contributions from the charter lobby that seeks to destroy public education.  Why aren’t they arrested and locked up for graft?  Charter schools are not public schools, they are non-profit education corporations governed by private boards.  Charter schools according to Eva Moskowitz are not accountable to the public or may be audited by the State Comptroller because they are not state units like public schools.  Siphoning money from public schools that serve all students, unlike charter schools, is clearly quid pro-quo for campaign contributions.  We call on the Attorney General to investigate the bribes sent to Governnor Cuomo, Senator Skelos and Senator Klein through the charter lobby’s many Political Action Committees and board members.

Davids continued:  We have overcrowded schools, students in trailers, schools with no libraries, no arts, no music and no physical education.  These schools serve the majority of New York State students.  Governor Cuomo, Senator Skelos and Senator Klein should be putting public schools first, not education corporations unaccountable to the public.”

Sam Pirozzolo, Staten Island Public School Parent, President of Community Education Council 31* said:  Almost since its inception, New York City public school parents have pointed out that Mayoral Control was out of control and the laws needed to be changed.  And for all of those years we thought our complaints were falling on deaf ears.  It now seems that Governor Cuomo and the State Legislature have finally heard our pleas, or have they?  Yesterday the NYS Senate introduced a bill that would effectively eliminate Mayoral Control, destroy the teachers union and create the largestreformatory school system in the world.  But were they actually listening to parents?  Heck no!  They are listening to the dollars of the powerful charter school lobby.  New York City public school parents have been walloped by two events yesterday.  First was the introduction of the legislation mentioned above and second was the victory given to Eva Moskowitz and her lucrative string of charter schools known as Succe$$ Academy Charter School$ when Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Thomas Breslin ruled state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli   did not have the authority to audit any New York charter because the schools are not technically “units of the state.” How is it possible that charter schools cannot be held accountable?  The NY City Council wants to see the books, they are concerned aboutcorruption.

Pirozzolo continued:  So what does this mean for hardworking tax paying New York City public school parents?  It means that we have been side stepped, overruled and ignored once again.  The path has been cleared to give choice to only a select few while the remaining neighborhood schools become filled with the outcasts of charter school children who couldn’t “make the grade” and are being returned into an already struggling public school system which has now been assured a straight and direct path to failure.  If anyone believes that the legislature would never allow for such a bill to be passed, I have two words for you, Tier 6.”

We call on parents throughout New York City and New York State to use their power and not vote for Governor Cuomo, Senator Skelos, Senator Klein and any other state legislator that seeks to deny our children of a high quality public education by putting privately run charter schools before our democratic public schools.We urge parents to:
  1. Call their New York State Senator and demand that the proposals benefiting charter schools at the expense of public education be removed.
  2. Call Assemblyman Sheldon Silver and their New York State Assembly Members to thank them for putting all New York State students first by supporting public schools.
  3. Call Governor Cuomo, demand he comply with the Campaign for Fiscal Equity ruling and properly fund our public schools.
New York State Senate phone number:  (518) 455-2800
New York State Assembly phone number:  (518) 455-4100
Governor Andrew Cuomo’s phone number:  (518) 474-8390
###
* for identification purposes only
Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Cuomo, Andrew, Education Industry, Education Reform, New York

Charter School Magnate Wants to End Local School Boards: Democracy is the Problem

By dianeravitch
March 14, 2014 //
92

Reed Hastings, the founder and CEO of Netflix, is a major player in the corporate reform movement.

He is on the board of various charter schools and charter chains, including Rocketship and KIPP.

The organization fighting the proliferation of Rocketship charters forwarded his address to the California Charter School Association:

Watch the 2 minute synopsis video.

Get the story and the full keynote.

The long-term goal is to replace most locally elected school boards with charters, all operated by independent boards, all competing for higher test scores.

And the longer term goal is to replace our present system of democratically-controlled schools by a system of privately-managed charters.

Underlying this plan is the assumption that the main problem in American education is democracy, since school boards are elected.

Other corporate reformers prefer mayoral control or governor control, whereby a single chief executive can override objections to open charters at will.

ALEC has pushed the idea of a state charter panel, appointed by the governor (and sometimes the legislature), whose decisions override local control.

The problem with school boards is that the local populace can replace them by vote.

In other words, as Chubb and Moe argued 25 years ago in their book advocating for vouchers, Politics, Markets, and Schools, markets are better than democracy.

No high-performing nation in the world has handed its schools over to private management; instead, they have a strong and equitable public school system, with a respected teaching profession and a well-prepared staff.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Privatization, Resistance

Julian Vasquez Heilig: How Billionaires Co-Opt Minorities to Promote Corporate Reform

By dianeravitch
March 14, 2014 //
14

Half a century ago, as the civil rights movement grew in strength and intensity, “school choice” was understood to e a synonym for segregation. Leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., fought for a democratic and equitable public school system. But, oh, how times have changed. Now there are organizations led by African Americans who want vouchers and charters to escape the public schools. No matter that such schools promote segregation. These 21st century leaders want school choice.

Why?

Julian Vasquez Heilig explains here how billionaires have co-opted minority groups to join their campaign to fight unions, fight teachers, and demand privatization.

The answer will not surprise you.

”

“Under the mantra of civil rights, billionaires such as Eli Broad, Bill Gates and the Koch Brothers and the powerful corporate-funded lobby group the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) are using venture philanthropy and the political process to press for school reforms in the United States.

“The ongoing Vergara law case in California in which nine students are suing the state over teacher tenure laws, is backed by Student Matters, a non-profit that has received donations from the Broad Foundation and the Walton Foundation, run by the Walton family that founded supermarket chain Wal-Mart.

“The driver behind the case is a campaign to loosen labour rules in order to make it easier to fire “bad” teachers, under the argument that their presence discriminates against disadvantaged children. Opponents of the case argue that it is a blatant attempt to change the conversation from the realities of California’s divestment in education — the state is 46th in the nation in spending per student in 2010-11, and 50th in the number of students per teacher.

“What these organisations and other others such as the the Koch brothers, Bradley Foundation, Heritage Foundation, Students First and Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education – all supposedly supporters of school reform – have as a common denominator is a vision of a profit-based market approach to education.

“School vouchers are one of the primary education reform policy approaches pressed by the billionaires and the business lobby. Voucher programs, which provide public funding for students to attend private schools, have become more popular in the US in the past several decades.”

He adds:

“….these special interests are supporting vouchers and other neoliberal reforms contrary to the interests of students of colour. In doing so they will shift the US education system to maximise corporate profits, while limiting democratic control of public schools.

“These same billionaire “reformers” have co-opted the equity discourse by offering a carrot to minority groups. This can sometimes be in the form of millions of dollars as in the case of the Black Alliance for Educational Options and Parents for Educational Freedom in North Carolina. But all this hides the inequity that profit-based approaches to education foment.”

Categories Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration, Vouchers, Walton Foundation

My Interview with Salon about Education Reform Today

By dianeravitch
March 13, 2014 //
9

This is a wide-ranging interview with Salon that started as a discussion of the Network for Public Education, then went on to discuss budget cuts, high-stakes testing, Common Core, Race to the Top, privatization, and much more.

Categories Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Chicago, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Testing, U.S. Department of Education, U.S. education, Unions

A Great New Blogger Disagrees with Corporate Reform–and with Me Too

By dianeravitch
March 13, 2014 //
39

This new blogger dissects Gerald Graff’s defense of the Common Core standards,and his second post says that I can learn a lot from Saul Alinsky.

The writer is a former high school teacher, who taught for many years in the Chicago public s hools.

Among other trenchant comments, he writes about Graff:

“Graff reduces education reform to a set of standards, but he’s not alone in doing so. He’s in good (loathsome?) company. In fact, he can now join the ranks of a long list of so-called education reformers, including our own Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, for whom the idea of actually teaching in our most difficult schools seems absurd. (His claim to his current post rests on the fact that his mother was a teacher.) This brings to mind a quip that made the rounds during the last CPS teacher strike: Those who can, teach. Those who can’t, pass laws (or write essays) about teaching.

“Of course, such a stance begs the question: How might Graff (or Gates or Duncan) feel if a group of folks, say a handful of successful people from outside their institution were to hijack their department or business or institution and tell them how they aught to run things? To take this a step further, why not apply the same logic that Graff deploys in his response to Ravitch to his own English department at UIC? According to Graff, in his own courses at UIC he sees evidence that the American education system has done little for “the great majority of students who are essentially confused about how to do academic work, about how to analyze a text and summarize its argument, or about how to make an argument of one’s own.” Then why doesn’t he simply compel his colleagues to raise their standards? Why doesn’t he just raise his own standards, for that matter?”

And in his advice to me, he knows I despise the “reformers'” efforts to disrupt the schools to impose their ideological and commercial agenda. So he writes:

“When it comes to creative disruption in our schools, though, I disagree with Ravitch. I understand that there’s a place and a time for stability in school; I understand that teachers and students need a space where they can think for themselves about their lives and decide what to learn and what to do. But now is not the time to dutifully follow the mandates in order to preserve some sense of stability and calm. It’s precisely because of the current instability in our schools that we have an opportunity to turn the tables on these reformers. By creating more disruptions, more chaos, and more upheaval, we can reset the reform agenda.

“And, this is the lesson of Alinsky. He reminds us that disorganizing communities can be a powerful tool; it’s exactly what so-called reformers like Arne Duncan, David Coleman, Michelle Rhee, and Joel Kline have been doing to teachers across the country. These people are disorganizing our schools and communities. They are running actions against us in order to make us feel powerless and disorganized. And, what’s worse, it isn’t just another empty exercise: this is real. They’re trying to change education forever. They want to hijack and narrow the curriculum. They want to give away public education to private corporations. They want to debase and deskill the profession of teaching. And, they want to reduce education to a test score.

“We can change this. Now is the time to organize and occupy our schools in order to disrupt and destabilize current reform efforts. We can go on the offensive—one grounded in creative disruptions that we design and produce. We can construct our own chaos and upheaval in ways that compel education reformers to stop what they’re doing and start listening to the people most affected by their decisions. And, as Diane Nash reminds us, we can opt out; we can refuse to participate in our own oppression.

“Only after we create enough disruption can we (students, teachers, parents, and community members) then demand the right to develop our own standards: ones that best address the needs, desires and aspirations of our communities, rather than the desires and aspirations of corporations and private foundations. Only then can we create stable schools that foster creativity and innovation, rather than conformity and obedience. Only then can we create schools that take as their starting point that building great schools and communities are reciprocal projects, not separate ones.”

Categories Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry

United Opt Out Will Meet in Denver March 28-30: Join Them!

By dianeravitch
March 12, 2014 //
10

If you want to learn about the growing movement to opt students out of mandated state and federal testing, go to this meeting in Denver.

Parents, scholars, and educators will convene in one of the nation’s most test-driven, test-obsessed cities and states, where the fate of teachers, principals, and schools depends on standardized test scores, a law foolishly enacted without any evidence at all in 2010. Test scores in Colorado counts for 50% of educator evaluations due to SB191, one of the worst laws in the nation (though by no means unique). In typical “deform” style, the law promises that it will produce “great teachers and great schools” by firing educators whose students don’t get ever higher test scores.

Where is the evidence? Read this summary of the research by Professor Edward Haertel, emeritus, from Stanford University, in an address to the Educational Testing Service. Please note that he concludes that “value-added measures” (the rise or fall of test scores) should not count for a set percentage of any teacher’s evaluation because they are too inaccurate and unstable.

He is measured and polite.

Another way to describe test-based accountability is “junk science.”

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Teacher Evaluations, Testing

Robert Shepherd: Here is FUD in Education

By dianeravitch
March 11, 2014 //
68

In an earlier post today, I described the use of FUD (fear, uncertainty,and doubt) to destroy public confidence in public education and thus pave the way for privatization. The vendors of FUD say our education system, which made this country great, is failing; that it is obsolete; that we are losing the global race. It is a massive hoax, a fraud, a lie. They want to frighten the public and open the door to privatization and profiteering.

Robert Shepherd shows how FUD works in the marketing of Common Core, which was created to address our allegedly failing schools. Just remember: our schools are NOT failing. Our society is failing to address the real crisis of our time, which is that nearly one-quarter of our children live in poverty, and many are racially segregated as well. The Commin Core won’t change those scandalous realities.

Shepherd, an experienced curriculum developer, writes:

“And be these juggling fiends no more believed,
That palter with us in a double sense

–William Shakespeare, Macbeth

According to the amusing Wikipedia article on the subject, agnotology is the intentional cultural production of ignorance. It’s what advertisers and the leaders of oligarchical states do. They manufacture ignorance in order to further their goals. When it became clear to the cigarette companies that their product was extremely dangerous to people’s health, they started running ads that read “9 out of 10 doctors agree, there’s not a cough in a carload.” That’s agnotology.

One of the primary means by which the agnotologist works is equivocation. Equivocation is a kind of lying that SOUNDS as though it might be true. To see agnotological equivocation brought to the level of a high art, you need but look no further than the webpage from the Common Core State Standards Organization (the CCSSO) that describes the “myths” surrounding the Common Core. Each “myth” described on the Common Core page and in other Education Deform propaganda is, in fact, the unspun truth. In other words, the Education Deformers are highly accomplished agnotologists. A few examples will illustrate their technique:

“The Common Core State Standards were developed by teachers”

means that teachers had almost nothing to do with them, that a few teachers were selected to rubber stamp work done by amateurs from outside the profession who were hired with money from plutocrats and given the task of hacking those standards together based on the lowest-common-denominator groupthink of the state standards that preceded them.

“The standards were freely adopted by the states”

means that the USDOE gave the states no choice but to adopt them or suffer severe penalties that would come from not getting NCLB waivers. The “State” in “Common Core State Standards” is, quite simply, a lie. The standards were not developed by states but by a PRIVATELY HELD pair of organizations that hold a copyright on them.

“The new standards will unleash powerful market forces to encourage innovation”

means that the national standards will create markets at a scale at which only monopolistic providers of unimaginative educational materials can compete. It means the Walmartization, the Microsofting of U.S. education. It also means that in due time the CCSSO and the National Governor’s Association, or NGA, will start using the legal system to control the market for educational materials by deciding what materials will and will not receive its OK to claim alignment with its PRIVATELY HELD standards.

“The states are free to adapt the standards as they see fit”

means that the states can’t change them at all, that the most states can do is to add a few, but very few, standards to the CC$$ bullet list. The number of standards added can be no more than 15 percent of the total, and otherwise, the standards must be adopted without change (and without any mechanisms for change in the future other than the whim of the private organization that created the standards to begin with).

“The plutocrats have no seat at the table where educational policy is made” (Arne Duncan)

means that a small group of plutocrats paid for and directed the creation of the standards, the revised FERPA regulations, the new VAM systems, and the USDE technology blueprint. It also means that those same plutocrats are providing a lot of the money that is going into the development and marketing of the new national online bubble tests. It means that education policy is being made based on what serves the financial interests of the plutocrats. It means that the current deforms are the plutocrats’ business plan.

“The standards are not a curriculum”

means, in math, that they are a curriculum outline and in ELA that a) they dramatically narrow the possibilities for curricula and b) contain a great many items that clearly do specify curricula

“The standards don’t tell you how to teach” or “The standards do not specify pedagogical approaches

means that some pedagogical approaches are required in order for the standards, as worded, to be met and that MOST APPROACHES that might be conceived by independent teachers, scholars, researchers, and curriculum developers are precluded.

“The new national tests introduce breakthroughs in question types in order to test high-order thinking”

means that some minor online variants of fill-in-the-blank, matching, ordering, and other stock bubble test questions types have been introduced. So, for example, instead of filling in a blank, the student clicks on and moves an item to a blank.

“US schools are falling behind on international tests, thus making the standards and new national assessments necessary,”

means that US schools appear to be performing poorly if one does not correct for the socioeconomic status of the kids taking the test. If one does correct for SES, US schools and students lead the world.

“The Secretary of Education is the chief officer of the national public school system”
means that he is the fellow whom the oligarchs have put in charge of dismantling that system and replacing it with online and brick-and-mortar charters, voucher systems, and private schools run by well-connected profiteers.

“We’ve seen great improvements due to the accountability system put in place by NCLB”

means that scores have been almost flat and that the more than a decade of standards-and-testing that was supposed to “Leave no child behind” hasn’t worked at all to change overall outcomes or to put a dent in the achievement gap.

Poverty is not destiny”

means that the powers that be are going to ignore poverty and use the whips of VAM and testing instead.

So, agnotology, and, in particular, agnotology via equivocation, has become the PRIMARY MEANS OF GOVERNANCE of our K-12 educational system. In other words, our national education policies are, cynically, being formulated and enforced via LIES and, in particular, via means of that variety of LYING known as EQUIVOCATION.

And the leaders (LIARS) doing this governance are counting on having made the public so ignorant, via such equivocation, that it will not oppose their complete circumvention of democratic processes.

They are counting on the fact that their plutocrats, the guys with the checkbooks, can buy all the PR that is needed to keep the people in ignorance.

That’s how things work in a banana republic. The plutocrats purchase the political muscle to carry out their plans. In time, that muscle, the leaders/liars don’t even try to hide the fact that they are lying. They do it completely shamelessly. In fact, being able to lie shamelessly without having anyone call you out on it is a sign of enormous power, and to such people, to quote Kissinger’s infamous line, “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”

Categories Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Scandals Fraud and Hoaxes

Who is the #1 Enemy of Public Education?

By dianeravitch
March 11, 2014 //
29

Bill Phillis, the leader of the Ohio Coalition for Education & Adequacy is a tireless crusader for equitable funding of public schools. He is a retired after serving as assistant state superintendent of schools.

He writes:

Public education enemy #1

The Gates, Walton Family and Broad Foundations have federated with the U. S. Department of Education to eliminate the public common school system. The Obama administration’s point man, Arne Duncan, is spearheading an assault on public education that is unprecedented in American history. He is attempting to override the education provisions of every state Constitution. All states have one or more constitutional provisions that establish and maintain a public common school system.

It is mindboggling and unconscionable that this federal administration is deferring to the corporate, for-profit agenda to destroy the premier promoter of the public good-the public common school system.

Policies coming out of Washington D.C., and in many state capitols, are demoralizing teachers, undermining the traditional role and governance of boards of education, de-professionalizing the teaching profession, re-segregating American communities and reducing the traditional dynamic of learning to a testing obsession.

Many chief state school officers in recent years are moles of the privatizers or lack the conviction to fight for the public common school system. Hence, state legislatures and governors, in many cases, receive no resistance to their privatization agenda.

Often local public school personnel, including boards of education, feel helpless to stem the tide of public school bashing and the privatization movement.

Enough is enough. It is past time to hold all state officials accountable for their support of policies that lead to the privatization of public education.

Ohioans and the citizens of the nation, when mobilized, can uproot the anti-public education agenda of America’s oligarchs and their plutocratic political allies.

William Phillis
Ohio E & A

Ohio E & A | 100 S. 3rd Street | Columbus | OH | 43215

Categories Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Duncan, Arne, Obama, Ohio, Privatization, Race to the Top

Understanding the Propaganda Campaign Against Public Education

By dianeravitch
March 11, 2014 //
48

A few years ago, when I was blogging at Education Week with Deborah Meier, a reader introduced the term FUD. I had never heard of it. It is a marketing technique used in business and politics to harm your competition. The term and its history can be found on Wikipedia. FUD stands for Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. The reader said that those who were trying to create a market-based system to replace public education were using FUD to undermine public confidence in public education. They were selling the false narrative that our public schools are obsolete and failing.

This insight inspired me to write “Reign of Error,” to show that the “reform” narrative is a fraud. Test scores on NAEP are at their highest point in history for white students, black students, Hispanic students, and Asian students. Graduation rates are the highest in history for these groups. The dropout rate is at an historic low point.

Why the FUD campaign against one of our nation’s most treasured democratic institutions? It helps the competition. It makes people so desperate tat they will seek out unproven alternatives. It makes the public gullible when they hear phony claims about miracle schools, where everyone graduates and everyone gets high test scores, and everyone goes to a four-year college. No such school exists. The “miracle school” usually has a high suspension rate, a high expulsion rate, a high attrition rate, and such schools usually do not replace the kids they somehow got rid of. Some “miracle schools” have never graduated anyone because they have only elementary schools, but that doesn’t stop the claims and boasting.

It turns out that there is actually a scholar studying the phenomenon of the “the cultural production of ignorance.”

He hasn’t looked at the attack on public schools, but his work shows how propaganda may be skillfully deployed to confuse and mislead the public. Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times writes about the work of Robert Proctor of Stanford University:

“Robert Proctor doesn’t think ignorance is bliss. He thinks that what you don’t know can hurt you. And that there’s more ignorance around than there used to be, and that its purveyors have gotten much better at filling our heads with nonsense.
Proctor, a professor of the history of science at Stanford, is one of the world’s leading experts in agnotology, a neologism signifying the study of the cultural production of ignorance. It’s a rich field, especially today when whole industries devote themselves to sowing public misinformation and doubt about their products and activities.

“The tobacco industry was a pioneer at this. Its goal was to erode public acceptance of the scientifically proven links between smoking and disease: In the words of an internal 1969 memo legal opponents extracted from Brown & Williamson’s files, “Doubt is our product.” Big Tobacco’s method should not be to debunk the evidence, the memo’s author wrote, but to establish a “controversy.”

“When this sort of manipulation of information is done for profit, or to confound the development of beneficial public policy, it becomes a threat to health and to democratic society. Big Tobacco’s program has been carefully studied by the sugar industry, which has become a major target of public health advocates.”

FUD was pioneered decades ago. Now public education is the target, and privatizing it is the goal. I hope Professor Proctor turns his attention to this issue, where a well-funded propaganda campaign seeks to spread enough doubt to destroy an essential Dmocratic institution.

There is no evidence from any other nation that replacing a public system with a privatized choice system produces anything but social, economic, and racial segregation.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hiltzik-20140307,0,1622098.column#ixzz2vU1s5OXR

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry
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