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Mercedes Schneider: Salesman David Osborne On the Road Selling Defective Model of School Reform

By dianeravitch
November 28, 2017 //
27

Mercedes Schneider heard about the book promotion tour of one David Osborne. Osborne is late to the party. He has written a book claiming that New Orleans is the shiny new model for school reform. Way back during the Clinton administration, Osborne achieved a modicum of fame for his book Reinventing Government, which proposed that government agencies should compete with private businesses. The competition, he argued, would produce public benefits and make government more efficient. Vice President Al Gore invited Osborne to work with him to introduce his ideas into the federal government. I’m not sure where that project went, but charter schools certainly fit the paradigm. The Clinton administration got behind the idea and set the pattern of federal support for the experiment.

Well, we have had charter schools for 25 years. They are no longer an experiment. They are not a bright, shiny innovation. Indeed, it is difficult to think of any innovation produced by charter schools, other than getting rid of unionized teachers. It is odd to see an author pop up with an idea that has been tried for 25 years and claim that he is on to something fresh.

Even stranger is that Osborne points to New Orleans as the epitome of reform, the cutting edge that offers hope to schools everywhere. Where has he been hiding these past few years?

Schneider notes that the all-charter Recovery School District that Osborne admires has yet to crack an ACT score of 17, which is very low indeed. Osborne doesn’t mention this. He seems to have stopped learning anything about New Orleans about five years ago.

As Schneider shows in another post, The Myth of the New Orleans Miracle has collapsed.

“For a full decade following Hurricane Katrina (2005-2015), those pushing state takeover and the resulting conversion of all state-run New Orleans schools into charters have been quick to promote the marvels of their miracle.

“Twelve years later, in 2017, not so much, unless cornered for a sound byte.

“Market-based school choicers have increasingly less to work with regarding the NOLA Charter Miracle sales pitch. Consider the 2016-17 district performance scores. Those New Orleans state-takeover (now) charter schools are no longer separated from the Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB), so now those “failing schools” that the state supposedly miracle-whipped are now part of a single district (let’s call it NOLA), with one single district performance score resulting in one single district letter grade– and that single performance score and resulting letter grade really took a dive in 2016-17, from 85 B (sort of) to 70.9 C.”

If you look at her tables, based on stated sources, the Recovery School District in Baton Rouge is graded F.

Does David Osborne know this?

He seems remarkably uninformed.

Kind of like a journalist claiming that using leeches to bleed patients is an important discovery.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Failure, New Orleans, Privatization

Gary Rubinstein: Louisiana and the Hoax of Growing AP Performance

By dianeravitch
November 28, 2017 //
7

As Gary Rubinstein writes, Louisiana is one of the most “reformed” states in the nation. It’s superintendent John White is a TFA alum and a graduate of the unaccredited Broad Superintendents Academy. It has an all-charter city. It has vouchers. It received a Race to the Top grant. What could possibly go wrong?

Rubinstein writes here about a seeming paradox: Every year, Louisiana State Superintendent John zwhite boasts about an astounding increase in the proportion of students passing AP exams. Yet, Louisiana has pretty awful performance on the AP exams.

Paradox solved!

Louisiana moved from fourth worst to third worst in the nation on AP performance. It was recently overtaken by North Dakota.

Read his post and ask yourself why anyone would boast about such low performance. Is that what they teach at the Broad Academy?

Categories Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Louisiana, New Orleans, Privatization, Race to the Top

Jennifer Berkshire: How Education Reform Ate the Democratic Party

By dianeravitch
November 27, 2017 //
93

This is one of the best pieces I have read about the pernicious effects of “education reform” on the the Democratic Party. I have consistently argued that the Democrats triangulated so far during the Clinton administration that they blurred the distinct lines between the parties, then ended up supporting the Republican policies of testing, accountability, and choice, which previously they abhorred.

Jennifer Berkshire here fills in the details with her sharp eye and wit. So thoroughly have Democrats joined with Republicans in demonizing teachers and unions, that there is hardly a dime’s worth of difference between them on education issues. Things have gotten so bad that one Democrat espousing privatization recently co,pare the teachers unions to Alabama governor George Wallace, blocking children as they try to escape public schools to enter charter nirvana.

She writes:

“To begin to chronicle the origin of the Democrats’ war on their own—the public school teachers and their unions that provide the troops and the dough in each new campaign cycle to elect the Democrats—is to enter murky territory. The Clintons were early adopters; tough talk against Arkansas’s teachers, then among the poorest paid in the country, was a centerpiece of Bill’s second stint as Governor of Arkansas. As Hillary biographer Carl Bernstein recounts, the Arkansas State Teachers Association became the villain that cemented the couple’s hold on the Governor’s mansion—the center of their Dick Morris-inspired “permanent campaign.” The civil rights language in which the Democratic anti-union brigade cloaks itself today was then nowhere to be heard, however. And little wonder: Civil rights groups fiercely opposed the most controversial feature of the Clintons’ reform agenda—competency tests for teachers—on the grounds that Black teachers, many of whom had attended financially starved Black colleges, would disproportionately bear their brunt.

“Hillary made the cause her personal crusade in 1983, trotting out anecdote after anecdote about teachers she’d heard about who couldn’t add or read. The reform package passed, cementing Bill’s reputation as a new breed of Democratic governor, one who wasn’t afraid to take on entrenched interests in order to tackle tough problems. “Anytime you’re going to turn an institution upside down, there’s going to be a good guy and a bad guy,” recalls Clinton campaign manager Richard Herget. “The Clintons painted themselves as the good guys. The bad guys were the schoolteachers.”

“By the early 1980s, there was already a word for turning public institutions upside down: neoliberalism. Before it degenerated into a flabby insult, neoliberal referred to a self-identified brand of Democrat, ready to break with the tired of dogmas of the past. “The solutions of the thirties will not solve the problems of the eighties,” wrote Randall Rothenberg in his breathless 1984 paean to this new breed, whom he called simply The Neoliberals. His list of luminaries included the likes of Paul Tsongas, Bill Bradley, Gary Hart and Al Gore (for the record, Gore eschewed the neoliberal label in favor of something he liked to call “neopopulism”). In Rothenberg’s telling, the ascendancy of the neoliberals represented an economic repositioning of the Democratic Party that had begun during the economic crises of the 1970s. The era of big, affirmative government demanding action—desegregate those schools, clean up those polluted rivers, enforce those civil rights and labor laws—was over. It was time for fresh neo-ideas.

“Redistribution and government intervention were out; investment and public-private partnerships were the way to go. Neoliberal man (there are no women included in Rothenberg’s account) was also convinced that he had found the answer to the nation’s economic malaise: education, or as he was apt to put it, investment in human capital. “Education equals growth is a neoliberal equation,” writes Rothenberg.

“But this new cult of education wasn’t grounded in John Dewey’s vision of education-as-democracy, or in the recent civil-rights battles to extend the promise of public education to excluded African-American communities. No, these bold, results-oriented thinkers understood that in order to fuel economic growth, schools had to be retooled and aligned in concert with the needs of employers. The workers of the future would be prepared to compete nimbly in the knowledge-based post-industrial society of the present, For the stragglers still trapped in older, industrial-age models of enterprise and labor, re-training—another staple of the neoliberal vision—would set them on the path to greater prosperity….

“Today’s Democratic school reformers—a team heavy on billionaires, pols on the move, and paid advocates for whatever stripe of fix is being sold—depict their distaste for regulation, their zeal for free market solutions as au courant thinking. They rarely acknowledge their neoliberal antecedents. The self-described radical pragmatists at the Progressive Policy Institute, for instance, got their start as Bill Clinton’s policy shop, branded as the intellectual home for New Democrats. Before its current push for charter schools, PPI flogged welfare reform. In fact, David Osborne, the man so fond of likening teacher unions to arch segregationists in the south, served as Al Gore’s point person for “reinventing government.” Today the model for Osborne’s vision for reinventing public education is post-Katrina New Orleans—where 7,500 mostly Black school employees were fired en route to creating the nation’s first nearly all-charter-school-system, wiping out a pillar of the city’s Black middle class in the process.”

Read the article.

It brilliantly describes how Democrats attacked their own base, embraced Republican ideas, and merged their thinking with that of Republicans. A sure-fire recipe for disaster, since Republicans are so much better at being Republicans than Democrats are. You can’t win by destroying your base.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democrats, Democrats for Education Reform, Deregulation, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Republicans, School Choice, Teachers, Unions

The Working Notes for My Speech at Oberlin Conference on the State of American Democracy

By dianeravitch
November 19, 2017 //
19

Some readers have asked for a copy of the speech that was so beautifully illustrated by the graphic posted earlier today.

I didn’t have a speech. I made notes and used them as talking points, on which I elaborated. When some in the audience (composed of progressives) insisted that charter schools were saving lives, I should have pointed out that the single biggest funder of charters is the anti-Union Walton Family Foundation, which is known for low wages and resistance to workers’ rights. About 95% of charters are non-union. The best kind of social justice that could be done by the Waltons is to pay their one million employees $15 an hour and allow them to unionize, in the stores and the charters they fund.

Here are my talking points.

“War on public sector.

“Take any public sector activity and google it with the word “privatization.”
Police, firefighters, prisons,hospitals, libraries, parks, schools—and what we once thought of as public is either privatized or under threat of privatization.

“Powerful movement—some driven by profit, some by libertarian ideology—seeks to shrink the public sector and monetize it.

“My area of specialization is education.

“There is today a full court press to privatize public education.

“How many in this room went to public schools?

“The fundamental purpose of public schools is to develop citizens, to sustain our democracy. To prepare young people to assume the duties of citizenship, to vote wisely, to understand issues, and to sit on juries.

“Our current obsession with standardized testing has corrupted the purpose of schooling. Clinton, Bush, Obama. We are now locked into a marketization approach to education: Testing, Accountability, competition, Choice. This is market-driven education, with winners and losers.

“The Bush program: NCLB. The same children were left behind.
THE Obama program: Race to the Top. Same as NCLB. Where is the top? Education is not a race.

“Test scores are fundamentally a reflection of family income and education. They are now cynically used by rightwing politicians to declare schools to be failures and set them up for privatization.

“Public education is one of the foundation elements of our democracy.
The movement to privatize public schools is a threat to democracy.

“Education Policy today is decided not by deliberation and debate but by big money.

“The Queen of Dark Money in education is now Secretary of Education.

“Betsy DeVos sees education as a Consumer good, not a civic responsibility
She has Compared choosing a school to choosing an Uber or choosing which food truck to buy lunch from. These are trivial choices, consumer choices. They are not public goods.
She really doesn’t understand the role of the public school in a community, as part of our democracy

“Dark Money, major philanthropies, and Wall Street billionaires have collaborated in attacking democratic control of schools. They have encouraged State takeovers, Charters, Vouchers. Private management. Mayoral control.

“Goals:

“School Choice, which promotes segregation by race and social class
Get rid of unions
Attacks on teaching profession.

“Venture philanthropies back Privatization: Gates, Broad, Walton, Arnold Foundation, Fisher Foundation, the Helmsley Foundation, the Wasserman Foundation, the Bloomberg Foundation, Dell Foundation, Jonathan Sackler, many more

“Dark Money funneled to state and local elections— by such groups as: Education Reform Now, Stand for Children, Families for Excellent Schools, Democrats for Education Reform, the Koch brothers, the DeVos family, the Walton family. All have the same goal: Privatization.

“Half the states now have vouchers for private schools, enacted by the legislature, despite the fact that vouchers have always been defeated in state referenda.

“Betsy DeVos paid for a voucher referendum in Michigan in 2000. It was defeated overwhelmingly. So Michigan went for unbridled Choice with charter schools, no district lines. 80% of the charters in Michigan operate for profit, more than any other state. Michigan’s standing on national tests dropped from the middle of the pack, to the bottom, between 2003 and 2013. Detroit is overrun with charters yet it continues to be the lowest scoring district in the nation.

“Milwaukee has public schools, charters, and vouchers, and all three sectors are low performing.

“Demand for vouchers is actually very low: Indiana, only 3% use them, less in Louisiana. Only 6% in charters. Yet every dollar for vouchers and charters is taken away from the schools that educate the great majority of children.

“Katherine Stewart in the current American Prospect: “Proselytizers and Profiteers.” Religious extremists in the voucher movement made “useful idiots of the charter movement.” Community public schools replaced by Corporate charter chains. Some of the biggest charter chains are owned and run by evangelicals and fundamentalists.

“The real Dark Money wants vouchers, religious schools, homeschooling, charters, anything but public schools.

“DeVos, American Federation for Children
Koch brothers, Americans for Prosperity (Libre Initiative) (AZ referendum)
ALEC— model legislation for charters, vouchers, ending certification, breaking unions.

“Public schools struggle where there is high poverty.

“Income inequality is the scourge of our society.

“Privatizing public schools won’t solve poverty.

“Hopeful signs:

*Virginia election: pro-public schools, many of the winning candidates are teachers

*Douglas County, CO, rebuff to vouchers

*upcoming referendum in AZ on vouchers, which Koch brothers want to knock off the ballot

*In 20 State referenda, vouchers have lost every single time.

*support for charters dropped from 51% to 39% in the past year, among both Democrats and Republicans, largely in response to scandals, prosecutions, and also NAACP criticism of charters.

“The origin of school choice was in segregated states fighting the Brown decision.

“Betsy DeVos is such a polarizing figure that she reminds us of the importance of public schools.”

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Testing, Unions, Vouchers, Walton Foundation

What You Need to Know About “Educators for Excellence (E4E)”

By dianeravitch
November 18, 2017 //
7

Educators for Excellence occasionally pops up when the privatization movement is looking for “teachers” who will speak out against hard-earned rights of teaching professionals.

Two years ago, the Boston Teachers Union compiled research on E4E to warn their members about this AstroTurf group.

It was founded by two TFA teachers in New York City who are no longer teachers. It is funded by the reactionary anti-union Walton Family Foundation, the Rightwing William E. Simon Foundation, the anti-union Bodman Foundation, and the Arnold Foundation, which wants to eliminate pensions.

It favors merit pay based on test scores, teacher evaluation based on test scores, and opposes seniority.

BTU warned its members:

“Bottom line—Beware of E4E and its tactics

“E4E is getting funded to set up a chapter here in Boston. They tend to target early career teachers and try to build their membership through coffee hours, free lunches, raffles, and happy hours. Please help spread the word about E4E so that our members are aware of their tactics! If you see them in your school, please let us know.”

Categories Boston, Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers

Congratulations, Philadelphia! State Control Ends After Nearly Two Decades of Failed Privatization

By dianeravitch
November 17, 2017 //
1

Big news!

Today state control of the schools officially ends.

A concerted effort by parents and citizens of Philadelphia ended the city’s long and disastrous trial of state control. Paul Vallas, the Edison Project, charters, a steady stream of efforts to privatize the schools and hand control over to someone else. Meanwhile, the public schools were stripped bare, to the bone.

The state-controlled School Reform Commission voted to disband itself after 16 years of running the public schools into the ground. The city now reverts to mayoral control, and the parent groups won’t rest until the city has an elected board.

Congratulations, Philadelphia!

Time to return democracy to the cradle of our democracy.

From the Alliance on November 2:

“Members of the Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools celebrate the impending dissolution of the School Reform Commission. We thank Mayor Kenney and Council President Clarke for their leadership in bringing this state-imposed body to an end. State control of our schools has brought devastation to this city: precious funds have been diverted to non-public schools and over 30 neighborhood have seen their schools closed permanently.

“Since 2012, APPS members have attended every session of the SRC, including special meetings and Policy Committee meetings. We have spent those five years fighting and organizing against the reckless spending, lack of transparency and disregard for the public exhibited by the many iterations of the SRC. In 2014, APPS sued then-Chair Bill Green and the SRC in federal court for violating the public’s First Amendment rights when Green ordered the police to confiscate signs from members of the public—and won. The following year, we filed suit in Commonwealth Court to stop the SRC’s continual violations of the PA Sunshine Act. Our settlement resulted in significant changes in SRC policy, including posting the resolutions to be voted on two weeks before the meeting instead of only 72 hours, and allowing the public to speak on resolutions posted just before or during the meeting.

“We now have a unique opportunity to end the disenfranchisement of the people of Philadelphia. The stakeholders in our public school system—that is, every person who benefits from a thriving public school system—should have the same rights as those in every other district in the commonwealth to elect the officials who will be entrusted to represent them in matters of school governance.

“The dissolution of the SRC is not contingent on changing the City Charter. The Charter now provides for mayoral control, as it did before SRC. The Mayor can select an interim school board for a year, during which time the city should hold community forums, as it is presently doing for the Rebuild initiative, to hear from the people whose voices were shut out during the reign of the SRC about how best to create a truly representative body for the critical task of educating our children.

“Trading in one unelected, unaccountable board for another is not a progressive solution to the problems facing the district.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democracy, Education Industry, Education Reform, Philadelphia, Privatization, Vallas, Paul

Sarah Darer Littman: How the Billionaire Sacklers Finance Privatization of Public Schools

By dianeravitch
November 17, 2017 //
4

If you read the previous post, you know that the Sackler family became fabulously wealthy by developing, manufacturing, and marketing a painkiller called OxyContin, an opioid. You also know that there is an opioid crisis in the nation that kills 50,000 people a year.

Sarah Darer Littman here explains how Jonathan Sackler has used his wealth to destroy and privatize public schools, replacing them with privately managed charter schools.

Littman, a journalist in Connecticut, write that Sackler:

“founded the charter school advocacy group ConnCan, progenitor of the nationwide group 50CAN, of which he is a director. He is on the Board of Directors of the Achievement First charter school network. Until recently, Sackler served on the board of the New Schools Venture Fund, which invests in charter schools and advocates for their expansion. He was also on the board of the pro-charter advocacy group Students for Education Reform.

“Through his personal charity, the Bouncer Foundation, Sackler donates to the abovementioned organizations, and an ecosystem of other charter school promoting entities, such as Families for Excellent Schools ($1,083,333 in 2014, $300,000 in 2015 according to the Foundation’s Form 990s) Northeast Charter School Network ($150,000 per year in 2013, 2014 and 2015) and $275,000 to Education Reform Now (2015) and $200,000 (2015) to the Partnership for Educational Justice, the group founded by Campbell Brown which uses “impact litigation” to go after teacher tenure laws. Earlier this year, the Partnership for Educational Justice joined 50CAN, which Sackler also funds ($300,000 in 2014 and 2015), giving him a leadership role in the controversial—and so far failing cause—of weakening worker protections for teachers via the courts.

“Just as Arthur Sackler founded the weekly Medical Tribune, to promote Purdue products to the medical professional who would prescribe them, Jon Sackler helps to fund the74million.org, the “nonpartisan” education news website founded by Campbell Brown. The site, which received startup funding from Betsy DeVos, decries the fact that “the education debate is dominated by misinformation and political spin,” yet is uniformly upbeat about charter schools while remarkably devoid of anything positive to say about district schools or teachers unions.”

Purdue Pharmaceuticals, the manufacturer of OxyContin, was masterful at marketing OxyContin. According to a critical GAO REPORT, IT handed out “lavish swag” for health care professionals.

The charter movement has adopted some of the same techniques.

“The description of “lavish swag” will sound familiar to anyone who has witnessed one of the no-expenses-spared charter school rallies that are a specialty of Sackler-funded organizations like Families for Excellent schools. Then there is the dizzying array of astroturf front groups all created for the purpose of demanding more charter schools. Just in Connecticut, we’ve had the Coalition for Every Child, A Better Connecticut, Fight for Fairness CT, Excel Bridgeport, and the Real Reform Now Network. All of these groups ostensibly claim to be fighting for better public schools for all children. In reality, they have been lobbying to promote charter schools, often running afoul of ethics laws in the process.

“Take Families for Excellent Schools, a “grassroots” group that claims to be about parent engagement, yet was founded by major Wall Street players. In Connecticut, the group failed to register its Coalition for Every Child as a lobbying entity and report a multimillion-dollar ad buy expenditure and the costs of a rally in New Haven.

“In Massachusetts, Families for Excellent Schools-Advocacy (FESA) recently had to cough up more than $425,000 to the Massachusetts general fund as part of a legal settlement with the Office of Campaign and Political Finance, the largest civil forfeiture in the agency’s 44-year history. Massachusetts officials concluded that FESA violated the campaign finance law by receiving contributions from individuals and then contributing those funds to the Great Schools Massachusetts Ballot Question Committee, which sought to lift the cap on the number of charter schools in the state, in a manner intended to disguise the true source of the money. As part of the settlement, the group was ordered to reveal the names of its secret donors. Jonathan Sackler was one of them.”

Why does Jonathan Sackler hate public schools?

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Connecticut, Corporate Reformers, Dark Money, Education Industry, Privatization

Dark Money Billionaires Lick Their Wounds after Defeat in Massachusetts and Look for New Targets

By dianeravitch
November 16, 2017 //
7

I was tempted to give an entire day to this post about the Dark Money group deceptively called Families for Excellent Schools.

The “families” are financiers, billionaires, and garden-variety multimillionaires. They enjoyed great success in New York, where they made an alliance with Governor Cuomo and launched a $6 Million TV buy to promote charter schools. Under pressure from Cuomo, the state legislature compelled the City of New York to provide free space to charter schools and to give Eva Moskowitz whatever she wanted.

Then, Families for Excellent Schools opened shop in Massachusetts, where they launched a multimillion dollar campaign to increase the number of charter schools.

Parents, teachers, the teachers unions, Rural and suburban communities turned against charter schools. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren joined the opponents of charter schools. Before the vote, the backers of Question 2 were revealed in the media (though not all of their names), and the referendum to expand the charter sector went down to a crashing defeat.

After the election, things went bad for FES.

“This September, the Massachusetts Office of Campaign and Political Finance fined Families for Excellent Schools a comparatively nominal $426,500. But it also forced the charter group to reveal its donors — a who’s who of Massachusetts’ top financiers, many of whom are allies of Gov. Charlie Baker — after it had promised them anonymity.”

In addition to the fine, FES was banned from the Bay State for four years.

One of the big donors to FES was the rightwing, anti-union Walton Family, which gave FES more than $13 Million between 2014 and 2026. The chairman of the Massachusetts Board of Education gave FES nearly $500,000.

Now FES is trying to redefine itself.

Here is a suggestion: support the public schools that enroll nearly 90% of children. Open health clinics in and near schools. Invest in prenatal care for poor women. Lobby for higher taxes for the 1%.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers, Dark Money, Democracy, Education Industry, Hoax, Massachusetts, New York City, Privatization

Florida: Lawsuit Challenges Constitutionality of Disastrous HB 7069

By dianeravitch
November 15, 2017 //
5

Nine school boards have filed suit in Florida Supreme Court, asking the court to block HB 1069, passed by the legislature in May.

The law is a giveaway to charter schools and covers a hodgepodge of subjects, all intended to cripple public education.

“The school boards late Monday filed a constitutional challenge at the Supreme Court to the bill, which has become known in the education world by the shorthand HB 7069. The 274-page bill, spearheaded by House Speaker Richard Corcoran, dealt with a wide range of issues, including controversial subjects such as charter schools and teacher bonuses.

“The challenge contends the law violates part of the Florida Constitution that requires legislation to deal with single subjects. It alleges HB 7069 is a “prototypical example of logrolled legislation” — legislation that puts together a patchwork of issues.

“School districts also have filed two lawsuits challenging HB 7069 in Leon County circuit court. But the new case filed directly to the Supreme Court involves different legal grounds and contends that immediate action is needed to block the law from moving forward.

“Waiting for a trial court determination and its subsequent appellate review will allow irreversible damage to the function of the public education system to occur throughout the state of Florida,” the lawsuit said.

“Plaintiffs named in the case are the school boards of Alachua, Bay, Broward, Hamilton, Lee, Polk, St. Lucie, Volusia and Wakulla counties.

“In arguing the Supreme Court should take up the case, the school boards are seeking what is known as a “writ of quo warranto” finding that the Legislature violated the Constitution because of the single-subject issue. They also are seeking what are known as “writs of mandamus” that, in part, would direct Education Commissioner Pam Stewart to stop carrying out the law and direct Secretary of State Ken Detzner to expunge the law from official records.”

Read more about the legislation here.

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

Puerto Rico: Privatizers See Fertile Ground to Turn the Island Schools Over to Charter Operators

By dianeravitch
November 12, 2017 //
23

The charter industry has its eyes on the schools of Puerto Rico, which were devastated by Hurricane Maria.

This is the time for disaster capitalism.

The Island was in fiscal distress before the hurricane.

“Efforts are underway in Puerto Rico to reform the island’s education system, with post-Katrina New Orleans—the only city in the country to have a school system that is entirely composed of charter schools—as a point of reference. But teachers and local residents are fighting back with a guerrilla campaign to reopen the public schools themselves.

“There are currently no charter schools in Puerto Rico. But the Intercept’s Aida Chavez wrote, “Last month, Puerto Rico’s Public-Partnership Authority director spoke optimistically about leveraging federal money with companies interested in privatizing public infrastructure.” As NPQ and others have noted repeatedly, this response is part of the crisis capital playbook known as Shock Doctrine.

“Puerto Rico has been in an economic depression for over a decade and its schools were struggling before Hurricane Maria. Between 2006 and 2016, 700,000 students left the island. Earlier this year, Puerto Rico closed 200 schools as part of its austerity effort.

“Further, 90 percent of the island’s public-school students were low income before the hurricane. Last year, fewer than half of the island’s students scored proficient in Spanish, math, English, or science. The graduation rate is at 75 percent.”

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization
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