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Tom Ultican: Who Should Be the Next Leader of California Schools? A Banker or a Social Worker?

By dianeravitch
October 28, 2018 //
12

Tom Ultican, retired teacher of physics and advanced mathematics in California, here describes the billionaires and bad policies behind Marshall Tuck’s campaign for State Superintendent of Public Instruction.

He sees the Tuck campaign as a new front in the “Destroy Public Education Movement,” which he has written about extensively.

Here are some of the Big Money contributors to Tuck’s campaign:

The Waltons control Walmart and have been spending heavily to privatize public schools for more than three decades.

Bill Bloomfield is a rich guy from LA who has also poured $7,000,000 into independent expenditures for Tuck.

The Rogers family is the main local force behind the privatization of Oakland’s school system.

Doris Fisher founded The Gap with her husband Don. They have spent extensively promoting charter schools and were the first significant benefactors for the KIPP franchise.

Eli Broad is the only person to found two fortune 500 companies. He announced plans to charterize half of Los Angeles’s schools and published a guide for closing public schools.

John Scully was the former CEO of Apple and consistently supports school privatization.

David Horowitz is a Republican activist who gained notoriety for his anti-affirmative action campaign.

Arthur Rock is Silicon Valley royalty who spends lavishly to support school privatization.

Peter Chernin was COO of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. He is also a movie producer of some note.

Reed Hastings is possibly the most dedicated destroy public education billionaire. He sat on the board of the California Charter Schools Association for many years.

Richard Riordan is the billionaire former Mayor of Los Angeles who spends millions on public school privatization.

John Arnold is the ex-Enron executive who did not go to jail. He and Reed Hastings have each invested $100 million in a new national school privatizing organization called The City Fund.

Jonathan Sackler is the heir to the billionaire inventors of Oxycontin. Besides selling addictive drugs, Jonathan invests in the privatization of America’s schools.

Les Biller is a former CEO of Wells Fargo bank. He and his wife have a foundation in Seattle, Washington where they give heavily to charter schools.

Julian Robertson Jr. is a hedge fund manager in Chicago who thinks California really needs Marshal Tuck.

Stacy Schusterman is an energy industry heir from Tulsa, Oklahoma. She has been particularly active in California school board elections.

Michael Bloomberg is the billionaire former New York mayor who spawned Joel Klein, Eva Moskowitz and Michelle Rhee. He spends heavily on California school board elections.

The big money is not in direct contributions like those listed above. It is in the money for independent expenditure committees that do not have contribution limits. For example, the Ed Voice for the Kids Pac has already reported spending over $13,000,000 in support of Tuck (Id 1243091). There are many more of these PACs spending money to elect Tuck such as Education Reform Now Advocacy for Tuck and Charter Public Schools Political Action Committee.

Ultican contrasts the two candidates:

Tony Thurmond was born in Monterey, California. His father was stationed at the Fort Ord Army base. Tony’s father abandoned his family of four children. Thurmond’s Panamanian immigrant mother became a school teacher and moved the family to San Jose.

Tragedy struck six-years-old Tony when his mother died of cancer. Tony and a brother moved to Philadelphia where they were raised by a cousin.

After graduating from high school in Philadelphia, Tony matriculated to Temple University where he was elected student body president and received a BA in psychology. He attended graduate school at Bryn Mawr earning a dual masters in Law and Social Policy and Social work.

The most disgusting statement in the San Diego Union editorial read, “In his interview with us, Assemblyman Tony Thurmond, D-Richmond, who finished second to Tuck in the June primary, seemed just as affable but not nearly as ambitious as Tuck.” In case that was too subtle; Tony is a black man.

After rising above his traumatic childhood and becoming educated, Tony married and returned to California in 1998. For the 20 years preceding his election to the California State Assembly, Thurmond served in various positions at non-profit social service agencies. Tony says it was his public school education that helped him become at 20-year social worker and serve on a school board, a city council and now the California State Assembly.

Tony has two daughters in public school.

Marshall Tuck received an MBA from Harvard University in 2000 and a BA in Political Science from University of California Los Angeles in 1995. He grew up in the San Francisco Bay area and has a wife and son.

He spent some time as a consultant at Mitt Romney’s Bain & Co. He was an investment analyst at the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone. He moved to Los Angeles to work at Salomon Brothers as an investment banker focused on both mergers and acquisitions. After a brief stint in sales for a Software company, in 2002, Tuck was hired by Green Dot Charter Schools as Chief Operating Officer.

In 2007, Los Angeles Mayor Anthony Villaraigosa had been rebuffed in his efforts to take control of Los Angeles Unified School District. He did convince a few donors to underwrite the takeover of a small number of schools in areas which had suffered years of poor standardized test results. They created a non-profit called Partnership for LA and Villaraigosa tapped Marshall Tuck to lead the Partnership.

Tuck had by then become the CEO of Green Dot. The year he left for the Partnership, Green Dot schools posted nine of the fifty lowest SAT scores among Los Angeles schools.

Tuck was extremely unpopular at the Partnership. The Sacramento Bee reported, “Teachers passed a vote of no confidence at nine of the schools at the end of the first year, leading to independent mediation.” An online education news paper in Los Angeles, School Matters, reported, “Many of us hoped that when right-wing business banker Marshall Tuck was ignominiously forced to step down as the ‘CEO’ of the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools (PLAS), that we might have heard the last of Tuck altogether.”

Tuck’s authoritarianism and lack of education background has led to serial failures, however, those forces trying to privatize California’s public schools find his style to their liking.

In 2014, when Tuck lost the most expensive SPI race in California’s history, his allies were there to take care of him. Even though he has no training as an educator, he was made Educator-in-Residence at the New Teacher Center (NTC). Bill Gates has granted NTC $26,305,252 since 2009.

This Contest is Very Important If You Value American Democracy

Marshall Tuck is the representative of the Destroy Public Education billionaires who are spending massive amounts of money to get him elected. It is widely understood that elected school boards are the soil from which American democratic government rejuvenates itself. Dark “DPE” forces are undermining democracy in this country by destroying the people’s 200-years-old public education system. They must be stopped.

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Dark Money, Education Industry, Funding, Privatization

Jan Resseger: Reporting on the State of Privatization of Our Public Schools, Part 3

By dianeravitch
October 27, 2018 //
8

This is Jan Resseger’s third report on her experience at the Network for Public Education annual conference in Indianapolis last weekend. In this post, she reports on what she learned by attending a panel about the NPE-Schott Foundation study of state support for public schools vs. privatization of public schools.

One of the most fascinating workshops at the conference explored the complexity of researching the groundbreaking, June 2018 report, Grading the States: A Report Card on Our Nation’s Commitment to Public Schools, and the importance of the report, the first comprehensive effort to track and compare the growth of privatization and the characteristics of state vouchers and charters. The report, a collaboration of the Network for Public Education and the Schott Foundation for Public Education, defines its purpose: “States are rated on the extent to which they have instituted policies and practices that lead toward fewer democratic opportunities and more privatization, as well as the guardrails they have (or have not) put into place to protect the rights of students, communities and taxpayers. This is not an assessment of the overall quality of the public education system in the state—rather it is an analysis of the laws that support privatized alternatives to public schools.” (emphasis in the original)

The primary assumption of a report about the privatization of education but whose title incorporates these words, “a report card on our nation’s commitment to public schools,” is that the growth of several privatized education sectors at public expense—charter schools, vouchers, tuition tax credits and education savings accounts—reflects diminishing commitment to the inclusive mission of public education. Sure enough, the report confirms that assumption, most clearly in the diversion of tax funds away from public schools: “Vouchers and charters do not decrease education costs, but instead divert tax dollars ordinarily directed to public schools thus limiting the capacity of public schools to educate the remaining students.”

Last weekend’s workshop featured three speakers: the Executive Director of the Network for Public Education (NPE), Dr. Carol Burris, who was one of the report’s researchers; Tanya Clay House, the report’s primary author and researcher—also an attorney and consultant who has previously served as a Deputy Assistant Secretary in the U.S. Department of Education, the Director of Public Policy for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and the Public Policy Director at People for the American Way; and Derek Black, an attorney and professor of school finance law at the University of South Carolina…

As a participant in last weekend’s workshop, I was fascinated, as Burris and Clay House described the difficulties they faced as they tried to collect the most basic data about what is now nearly 20 years of expanding school privatization. The two women told of one data set they had assumed the report would cover only to be forced to omit that issue from the report because the the records had not been kept by enough states to make it possible to draw any comprehensive or meaningful conclusion. What became clear to me as I listened is that the promoters of school privatization trusted their own ideological belief that the marketplace would provide its own accountability. They assumed that as parents voted with their feet, parents themselves would identify high quality schools and seek them out; then schools of poor quality would not be marketable. Of course we know from research in Chicago and New Orleans and elsewhere that parents choose schools for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with school quality—a site near home or work, the presence of a childcare or after-school program, the reputation of the football team, the advertising on the side of the bus, the incentive of the gift of a computer upon enrollment. Several years ago, Margaret Raymond, a fellow at the pro-market Hoover Institution and director of the Stanford Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), shocked listeners at the Cleveland City Club by announcing that it has become pretty clear that markets don’t work in what she calls the education sector: “This is one of the big insights for me because I actually am a kind of pro-market kind of girl, but the marketplace doesn’t seem to work in a choice environment for education… I’ve studied competitive markets for much of my career… Education is the only industry/sector where the market mechanism just doesn’t work… I think it’s not helpful to expect parents to be the agents of quality assurance throughout the state.”

The third presenter in the NPE workshop was Derek Black, a civil rights attorney and school finance professor who explored what he believes is the overall significance of the Grading the States report. I was unable to capture verbatim Derek Black’s comments at the workshop, but in a blog post when the Grading the States report was published in June, Black made the same points in eloquent detail: “The report is, in many respects, the one I have been waiting for. It fills in key facts that have been missing from the public debate and will help move it in a more positive direction. In my forthcoming article, Preferencing Educational Choice: The Constitutional Limits, I also attempt to reframe the analysis of charter schools and vouchers, arguing that there are a handful of categorical ways in which states have actually created statutory preferences for charters and vouchers in relation to traditional public schools. I explain why a statutory preference for these choice programs contradicts states’ constitutional obligations in regard to education… My research, however, analyzes the issues from a relatively high level of abstraction, highlighting problematic examples in particular states and districts and synthesizing constitutional principles from various states. This new report drills down into the facts in a way I have never seen before. It systematically examines charter and voucher laws in each state with a standardized methodology aimed at identifying the extent to which each state’s laws represent a de-commitment to public education.”

Black continues: “Each year, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS) releases a report detailing charter school laws, with the frame of reference being the extent to which states have laws that promote the expansion of charters. The report normatively assumes that charter schools are good and state laws that overly restrict them are bad… Because there hasn’t been any systemic response to NAPCS’s reports, it has been able to skew the conversation. This new report brings balance.”

When the Grading the States report was released in June, this blog summarized its conclusions. Needless to say, I came home from last weekend’s conference in Indianapolis and explored the report in more depth. Here is what jumps out at me as an Ohio citizen this fall, after I’ve been watching the fallout across Ohio all year since the state’s final closure of the giant online charter school, the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, after it ripped off Ohio taxpayers and students for 17 years. The report examines charter schools. Forty-four states and the District of Columbia have passed laws to permit charter schools. Of those 38, including my state, earned F grades. The report explains they are “states that embrace for-profit charter management, weak accountability and other factors that make their charter schools less accountable to the public.” “Twenty-eight of these states and the District of Columbia fail to require the same teacher certification as traditional public schools… Thirty-eight of the states and the District of Columbia have no required transparency provisions regulating the spending and funding by the charter school’s educational service providers… Of the 44 states and the District of Columbia with charter school laws, students with disabilities are particularly disadvantaged in 39 states and the District of Columbia, which do not clearly establish the provision of services. Twenty-two states do not require that the charter school return its taxpayer purchased assets and/or property back to the public if the charter school shuts down or fails.” The details on the various voucher programs are equally alarming.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Network for Public Education, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

William J Gumbert: What Taxpayers in Texas Should Know About Privatization

By dianeravitch
October 27, 2018 //
17

This is an important collection of data about the funding of public schools and charter schools in Texas. Do you think that taxpayers know that they are funding two separate school systems, one governed by elected, accountable school boards and the other governed by private, self-selected, unaccountable school boards? Do you think that the public knows that district public schools outperform charter schools?

What Local Taxpayers Should Know About the State's $20 Billion Privatization Experiment (October 2018)tax2tax3tax4tax5tax6tax7tax8tax9tax10tax11tax12

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Funding, Privatization, Texas

This Is an Acronym You Should Remember: FUD

By dianeravitch
October 26, 2018 //
10

I was wracking my brain trying to remember an acronym that is a basic tactic of negative public relations.

I knew I had written about it but could not think of how ro find it. Finally I googled my name and “propaganda,” and this article popped up.

The acronym is FUD. It has been used in the public relations field to discredit a competitor. It is a central tactic in the game plan to undermine public education.

It is in the dictionary.

What you need to know about FUD:

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/diane-ravitch/public-education_b_4941678.html

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization

Jackie Goldberg: LAUSD Must Reduce Class Sizes Now!

By dianeravitch
October 24, 2018 //
10

Jackie Goldberg is one of the premier advocates for children and public education in California and, indeed, the nation. She was a classroom teacher for 17 years, a member of the Los Angeles school board, and a member of the Legislature, rising to chair of the State Assembly Education Committee. She is a legendary figure to supporters of children and public schools.

She writes in the Los Angeles Times that the LAUSD board must act to reduce class sizes, which in some schools, exceed 40 students.

A few excerpts from her excellent article:


Today, classes of 45 students or more are not uncommon in most secondary schools. (This excludes kindergarten through third-grade classes, which receive state funding specifically for class-size reduction.).

If the district truly wants its students to learn more, it should get rid of Section 1.5 and immediately begin hiring 2,000 new teachers to meet the class-size goals that are already laid out in the current contract. [Section 1.5 is a waiver from a class-Size reduction agreement.]

This would cost $200 million more each year. That may sound like a lot, but the district has a minimum of $1.8 billion in reserve.

Opposition to class-size reduction comes from the top. When I chaired the Assembly Education Committee, lobbyists would often come in and argue that the cost of reducing class sizes in California’s public schools was simply too high.

When I asked these lobbyists where their own children attended school, many if not all of them would respond that they sent their children to private schools — some to schools where tuition could cost as much as $45,000 a year and classrooms would have as few as a dozen students.

In other words, although they paid considerable tuition rates for their own kids to benefit from small classes, they considered it perfectly acceptable for children who live in poverty — 80% of the LAUSD student population — to be relegated to the third-largest class sizes in America. Really?

There is also some quiet opposition coming from a few well placed charter-school advocates. Why? Because if the district were to reduce class sizes by hiring 2,000 additional teachers, it would need to provide 2,000 classrooms to those new teachers — classrooms that some charter-school advocates are eyeing for themselves.

The Board of Education at LAUSD needs to put its students first. Though it claims to do so at nearly every meeting and on seemingly all of its printed materials, its claims are often empty rhetoric.
Enter the Fray: First takes on the news of the minute from L.A. Times Opinion »
It is common sense that smaller classes make for better learning environments and higher grades and test scores. It’s also well documented.

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Class size, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Los Angeles

Pasi Sahlberg: GERM Is In Retreat

By dianeravitch
October 23, 2018 //
12

The great Finnish scholar Pasi Sahlberg coined the term GERM to represent the Global Education Reform Movement. GERM is the advance of markets, standardization, choice, and rankings, which began in England and the U.S. and spread to other nations. GERM is corporate education reform, and no one has been more effective at countering the virus on the international stage than Pasi.

His presentation and my own appear in the same session. His begins at 27 minutes into the tape. He posted his slides and visuals on Twitter @pasisahlberg.

Pasi, the author of Finnish Lessons and Finnish Lessons 2.0, gave a brilliant talk about the history, the advance, and the stunning setbacks for GERM.

It is a remarkable talk, which follows my presentation in the first session of the NPE Conference in Indianapolis on October 20.

Pasi is currently working in a major education research Institute in Australia. He reports that New Zealand has ditched its national standards and will soon drop national testing. Watch for Australia to follow suit.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), International, Privatization

The First Session of NPE: “I Bring Hope!”

By dianeravitch
October 23, 2018 //
3

Here is the video of the first session of the just-concluded annual conference of the Network for Public Education in Indianapolis.

You will hear opening remarks by our executive director Carol Burris. She introduces Phyllis Bush, who gives a witty summary of what has happened to Indiana and how she and her friends built one of the nation’s first activist organizations to oppose destructive “reforms.”

Phyllis introduces me, and I describe my new book, which is about the slow but sure collapse of corporate reform. I bring hope.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Network for Public Education, Networkfor Public Education Action Fund, Parent Groups, Privatization, Real Education, Research, Resistance

Jack Schneider: The Lies Reformers Tell About Public Schools

By dianeravitch
October 20, 2018 //
9

Jack Schneider is a historian of education at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. He is also co-host with Jennifer Berkshire of the podcast series called “Have You Heard?”

If you really want to know about the state of American education, Schneider proves, don’t ask Betsy DeVos or Arne Duncan. Ask a historian.

We have heard the laments since 1983 from the media and politicians and billionaires like Bill Gates and Laurene Powell Jobs.

As Schneider shows here, they are wrong.

He writes:

“So, how are America’s schools doing?

“In most cases, just fine. Better than ever.

“But America’s schools don’t merely reflect our nation’s material prosperity. They also reflect our moral poverty. Our schools are simultaneously an embrace and a refusal, revealing exactly who is included and who isn’t. Most of us can say our children are getting a great education. Yet whose children are “ours”? What do they look like? Where do they rest their heads at night?

“Reform rhetoric about the failures of America’s schools is both overheated and off the mark. Our schools haven’t failed. Most are as good as the schools anyplace else in the world. And in schools where that isn’t the case, the problem isn’t unions or bureaucracies or an absence of choice. The problem is us. The problem is the limit of our embrace.

“Perhaps, then, a reset is in order. Instead of telling a largely untrue story about a system in decline — a story that absolves us of any personal responsibility — we might begin telling a different story: about a system that works. It works to deliver a high-quality education to those we collectively embrace. And it works in a different way for those we have collectively refused. When a school fails, it is because we have failed.”

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform

John Merrow: What Have Our Test-Centric Policies Produced?

By dianeravitch
October 17, 2018 //
36

John Merrow hammers away at the folly of placing standardized testing at the center of all education.

The evidence of this folly, he says, is the latest ACT reports.

What can we learn from them?

Our seniors are not getting smarter as a result of the testing regime imposed on them.

“These seniors have had 12 or 13 years of test-centric education, and the kids coming up behind them have also endured what the ‘school reformers’ designed. How much more evidence do we need of the folly of “No Child Left Behind” and Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s “Race to the Top” before we take back our schools?

“People who have consistently been ‘half right’ have been in charge of public education for too long. Now some are changing their tune (“Perhaps we have been testing too much,” they say) and asking for another chance. Others, however, are doubling down, calling for more charter schools, vouchers and other aid for private schools, and more anti-union initiatives. I say a plague on both their houses.”

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

Andrea Gabor: When School Choice Means No Choice

By dianeravitch
October 13, 2018 //
32

Andrea Gabor is the author of the new book, “After the Education Wars,” a penetrating account of the mistakes of the reform movement.

She writes here about the wrong turns taken by charter enthusiasts. How did a movement intended to unleash grassroots energy turn into an industry dominated by national corporate chains?

“When Albert Shanker, the legendary teachers’ union leader, promoted the idea of charter schools 30 years ago, he was hoping to create flexibility from the constraints of education bureaucracies and union contracts so teachers and communities could experiment and innovate.

“In the years since the first charter-school law was passed in Minnesota, in 1991, the charter movement has strayed far from Shanker’s original vision. Instead of community-based, educator-driven innovation, charters have grown into an industry dominated by like-minded management organizations that sometimes control hundreds of schools — some nationwide.

“These charter organizations have proliferated with the help of deep-pocketed philanthropists and businesspeople who have sought to transform the public-education system so that both charters and traditional public schools operate like companies competing in an economic market. Schools survive by producing the greatest gains, usually measured by test scores. The rest lose students as families choose the highest-performing schools or have their charters revoked by state-designated organizations that authorize charters.

“Now the charter industry is reaching an inflection point. Business backers are pushing to expand charter schools at an unprecedented rate, doubling down on the idea that free markets are the best approach to improving K-12 education. At the same time, critics — some from within the charter movement — are shining a spotlight on the industry’s failures and distortions…

“That faith in markets isn’t supported by the evidence, however. Studies show that, on average, charter schools and traditional public schools produce similar results. But freedom from regulation is associated not with success but with especially high failure rates; charter-school performance tends to be weakest in states with the laxest rules for ensuring education quality.

“Paradoxically, deregulation has also tended to narrow choices rather than expand them. New Orleans, for example, which has turned most of its public schools over to charter organizations, is dominated by charter-school oligopolies that enforce uniform curriculum and disciplinary standards. Instead of fostering creative pedagogy, the charter industry has focused on producing high test scores, the key measure by which philanthropists determine which charter organizations to finance. Teachers are typically required to teach canned curricula and rarely last more than a few years, and students are often subjected to one-size-fits-all discipline policies…

“Education policies should protect children and their schools from the brutal realities of the market while leaving room for the kind of teacher- and community-led experimentation that the charter movement was originally meant to foster.”

Gabor is the Bloomberg chair of business journalism at Baruch College of the City University of New York. This article appeared at Bloomberg.com. Michael Bloomberg is a major supporter of charter schools nationally.

KIPP did not like Gabor’s article. But KIPP Is wrong, and Gabor is right. The original idea of charters was that each would be unique, and they would be teacher-led to try out new ideas. Neither Shanker nor the other charter originator Ray Budde ever imagined corporate charter chains with cookie-cutter “no excuses” policies. KIPP is the Walmart of charter schools, which may explain why the rightwing, anti-union Walton Family Foundation showers millions on them.

Categories Accountability, Bloomberg, Michael, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Discipline, Education Industry, KIPP Charter Schools, Privatization, Walton Foundation
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