Archives for category: Corporate Reformers
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Leonie Haimson: Two Bad Policies Converge in NYC

By dianeravitch
August 5, 2017 //
25

Leonie Haimson writes here about the disastrous legacy that Joel Klein and Michael Bloomberg left to the New York City public schools.

https://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/2017/08/fair-student-funding-atr-system-two-bad.html?m=1

One is called the Absent Teacher Reserve, wa pool of teachers who had been left jobless because their school closed or they were awaiting disciplinary proceedings. Now hundreds of teachers are in the lowly ATR pool, where they are treated disdainfully regardless of the reason they are unassigned.

The other policy is Fair Student Funding, which Leonie explains in her post.

The ATR pool costs the city more than $150 million per year. The Department of Education says it will assign these teachers to schools even if the principal doesn’t want them (most are experienced and thus expensive).

Arthur Goldstein thrashes the website Chalkbeat for demonizing ATT teachers. Klein used to use the very existence of the ATR pool to denounce tenure, seniority, and the union.

http://nyceducator.com/2017/08/reformy-chalkbeat-deems-paying-teachers.html?m=1

He attributes Chalkbeat’s coverage of ATR’s to their funding by Walton and other anti-teacher foundations.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Klein, Joel, New York City, Teachers and Teaching

Ann Cronin: Thank You, NAACP, For Telling the Truth About the Harm Done by Charters

By dianeravitch
August 5, 2017 //
5

Ann Cronin, a retired teacher of English in Connecticut, writes about what charters were supposed to be and how they have failed to fulfill their original promise. Nowhere have they been more disappointing than in Connecticut, where the harsh “no excuses” model prevails. The charters in the Nutmeg State have won generous state funding, thanks to the campaign contributions to Democratic Governor Malloy by hedge fund managers and the OxyContin billionaire Sackler Family.

Cronin thanks the NAACP for speaking truth to power.

She writes:

“An English teacher friend of mine was a finalist for Connecticut Teacher of the Year in the mid 90’s. As one of the culminating steps in the selection process, the four finalists were assigned a topic little was known about at the time. They were instructed to research it and present their findings to an audience.

“The topic was charter schools.There were no charter schools in Connecticut at the time. My friend concluded that the worth of charter schools would depend on the answers to two questions:

“1) Will the innovations created at charter schools inform and improve the public schools that the vast majority of children and adolescents in the U.S. attend?

“2) Will charter schools be held accountable to address student needs as traditional public schools are required to do?

“Fast forward to 2017: We now have had charter schools in Connecticut for 21 years. The answers to my friend’s two questions came from the NAACP.”

The answer to number 1: NO.

The answer to number 2: Not yet.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Connecticut, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization

Los Angeles: The Unprecedented Flood of Campaign Cash That Elected a Pro-Charter Majority to the School Board

By dianeravitch
August 5, 2017 //
20

Howard Blume in the Los Angeles Times describes the flood of campaign cash that managed to sink School Board President Steve Zimmer and another candidate and put a pro-charter majority in charge of the school board.

The billionaires pulled out all the stops to gain control of the board. Now the president of the LAUSD board is Ref Rodriguez, who launched a charter chain in LAUSD. Contrary to my first report, Rodriguez stepped down from the board of his charter chain (PUC). But his sympathies are clear.

A last-minute splurge of donations from billionaire Eli Broad and businessman Bill Bloomfield swept the pro-charter candidates to victory. More than $15 million was spent by both sides, the most ever spent on a school board election in American history.

Netflix founder Reed Hastings alone spent more than $7 million. The Waltons added a few shekels.

The billionaires strike again, intent on destroying public education and democracy, and opening even more privately managed, privately owned and nonunion charters.

Categories Billionaires, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Los Angeles, Privatization

Nonprofit Quarterly: Some Very Expensive Lessons for Billionaire School Reformers

By dianeravitch
August 4, 2017 //
34

I have found a sensible person writing about school “reform.” His name is Martin Levine and he writes for the Nonprofit Quarterly. Thus far, everything he has written shows a depth of common sense and wisdom that is utterly lacking among the “reformers,” especially the billionaire reformers. He must have gone to public school, unlike those user-wealthy philanthropists who have decided that they can remake American education to fit their own ideology (though never to provide urban kids the same quality of education that the philanthropists enjoyed as children). I see from his bio that he is a graduate of City College of New York, a public institution of higher education, so he is certainly a public school graduate.

Levine’s latest article ponders the failure of “reform” in Detroit. Poor Detroit has been a playground for the meddlesome and clueless rich. But Levine does not describe the collapse of the Education Achievement Authority or of Eli Broad’s failed interventions into Detroit education or DeVos’s endorsement of charters, both for-profit and nonprofit. That will wait for the next chronicler of Detroit’s fate.

Having the ability to invest billions is not enough to guarantee success. That’s one of the lessons a growing list of mega-donors and large foundations is learning from their efforts to transform and improve public education. In many cases, the initiatives they have launched have been more disruptive than effective. Missing from much of their work has been a recognition of the need to work with families and communities and a willingness to engage in the often-messy work of building success from the bottom up.

At the end of June, the multi-year, multimillion-dollar Excellent Schools Detroit announced it was quietly going out of business after seven years of trying to improve the schools of their home city. According to Bridge Michigan, “Excellent Schools Detroit began as a coalition to support the opening of good schools, the closure of underperformers and to grade the city’s traditional, charter and private schools to help inform parents…Excellent Schools Detroit received funding from numerous foundations, including Skillman, The Kresge Foundation, W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the McGregor Fund.”

He goes on to briefly touch on the Reverse Midas touch of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. Whatever they have touched in education has blown up. Unfortunately, they refuse to address the root causes of low performance. Until they do, they will continue to experience failure.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, Testing

Steven Singer: Pity the Corporate Reform Crybabies!

By dianeravitch
August 4, 2017 //
127

Steven Singer is sorry, really sorry for the self-proclaimed crybabies who call themselves reformers.

Their efforts to privatize public education were going well, they were under the radar, until Trump and DeVos came along and joined forces with them.

How could they continue to sell charters as a crusade for poor children when Trump and DeVos want the same?

How could they get away with the ridiculous assertion that turning public money over to private contractors was a matter of civil rights, when the most reactionary, anti-civil rights administration in generations shares their cause?

What’s next? Will they hold a joint press conference with DeVos and Jeff Sessions to denounce the NAACP for daring to demand that charters cease to operate for profit and meet minimal standards of financial and academic accountability?

It was bad enough when they took their cues from the Waltons, ALEC, and the Koch brothers. Now their champions are Trump and DeVos.

Sad.

Singer writes:

“It’s gotta’ be tough to be a corporate school reformer these days.

“Betsy DeVos is Education Secretary. Donald Trump is President. Their entire Koch Brothers-funded, ALEC-written agenda is national policy.

“But their stripes are showing – big time.

“The NAACP has turned against their school privatization schemes. The Journey for Justice Alliance is having none of it. The Movement for Black Lives is skeptical. Even their trusty neoliberal Democratic allies are seeking to put some distance between them.

“And it’s making them look… sad.

“You’d think they’d have much to celebrate. Their policies are right up there with voter disenfranchisement, the Muslim ban and building a wall.

“Charter schools – YES! Voucher schools – YES! Public schools – NO.

“High stakes testing is going gangbusters pushed by the federal government with little interference from the states.

“Common Core is in almost every school while the most state legislatures do about it is consider giving it a name change.

“And in every district serving students of color and the poor, budgets are being slashed to pieces to make room for another juicy tax cut for the rich.

“They’ve taken George W. Bush’s education vision – which neoliberal Barack Obama increased – and somehow found a way to double-triple down on it!

“They should be dancing in the streets. But somehow they just don’t feel like dancing.”

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Hoax, Privatization

Florida: The Wild West of the Privatization and Testing Industries

By dianeravitch
August 4, 2017 //
7

Steven J. Klees of the University of Maryland wrote this post. He is former president of the Comparative and International Education Society.

He writes:

This spring, the Florida legislature passed and this summer Governor Rick Scott signed House Bill 7069, a school reform promoted by organizations linked to the Koch Brothers and Betsy DeVos. Florida has been a poster child for conservative ideological education reform for some time. Going beyond even the federal No Child Left Behind – or as the critics call it, No Child Left Un-tested — reform of the elder Bush era, it became one of the most frequent testers of students in the nation. Basically, from February to May, students in Florida prepare for and take an endless array of tests. Florida instituted evaluation of teachers tied to student test scores years ago, motivating teachers to spend the whole year teaching to the test. On top of this testing regime, Florida has enacted many right-wing reforms: eliminating K-12 teacher tenure; grading schools A to F; and changing curricula to emphasize only what is tested, for example, eliminating recess.

Well, after a decade of this, parents began to revolt. Last year, a statewide survey highlighted two priorities for needed school reform: stop all this testing or at least cut way back – and restore recess for our children. PTAs mobilized behind these changes. The Florida State legislature began to respond by formulating the “Recess Bill” – intended to cut testing and restore recess. However, the ending point of this effort was very different than the starting point. Basically, the Recess Bill was hijacked by business – two businesses in particular – the testing industry and the charter school promotors. Testing in Florida is a half billion dollar a year business, and Pearson and other testing companies lobbied hard against cutting testing. Moreover, the budget for public education is $14bn a year, and charter advocates saw the bill as a way to capture a lot more of that money.

The result, passed in the last two hours of the the legislative session, with scarcely any discussion, was House Bill 7069. This terrifying school reform is being called “the death of public education” by its critics. The bill gives a sop to the protesting parents – it restores 20 minutes of daily recess in K-5. But it only eliminates two of the many tests that students are forced to take. It also allows school districts to opt out of evaluating teachers by their students’ test scores. However, this was just the superficial bow that tied up a major reform package that basically turns public education over to private companies to start charter schools.

There were several dimensions to this reform package. Any school in the state that received low or failing grades in the state rating system (Ds and Fs) would be closed and likely re-opened by a private corporate charter school company, the so-called “Schools of Hope.” These and other charter start-ups would be freed from most regulation and oversight by school districts. They would no longer have to test their students to see if they were doing as well as regular public schools. There would be no curriculum guidelines for charters, no need to hire certified teachers. Charter schools would even be exempt from the new recess requirement. For the first time, school districts had to share their money for capital expenditures with the charter schools.

Perhaps most astonishing is that many of the Florida Legislators who designed, promoted, and voted for this bill have strong ties to the charter school industry. Many of them or their families have become wealthy from running charter schools and, with the enactment of HB 7069, stand to make much more money. Yet there was no talk of conflicts of interest or violation of ethics laws. Contrary to Florida’s Sunshine laws, the final version of HB 7069 was put together by the Republican leadership in secret, in the last 3 days of the legislative session, turning a 7-page bill into a 278-page bill by tacking on the content of 55 other school reform bills that had been considered in the past. Analysts are still not sure what this now very complex reform will yield in practice.

There was a strong effort to get Governor Rick Scott to veto the bill as parents, teachers, school administrators, and the general public sent thousands of messages demanding a veto. But, in the final days, the charter school industry responded by giving charter school parents and students incentives, like discounts or extra credit, for sending in messages of support. The resultant legislation will be turning over a substantial segment of public education to unaccountable private sector, often for-profit, corporate managers. And this is what Betsy DeVos wants for the nation.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Parent Groups, Privatization, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Tenure, Testing

Jennifer Berkshire Interviews Nancy McLean on the Racist Origins of “School Choice”

By dianeravitch
August 1, 2017 //
30

In a new podcast, Jennifer Berkshire interviews Nancy McLean–author of the much-acclaimed book Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America–on the origins of school choice.

Here is an excerpt:

Jennifer Berkshire: There’s a fierce debate right now about the racist history of school vouchers. But as you chronicle in Democracy in Chains, the segregationist South was really the testing ground for conservative libertarian plans for privatizing what they called “government schools.”

Nancy MacLean: This was the moment, the crucible of the modern period in which these ultra free market property supremacist ideas got their first test, and it is in the situation of the most conservative whites’ reaction to Brown. What was interesting to me, in finding this story and seeing it through new eyes, is that Milton Friedman, I learned, had written his first manifesto for school vouchers in 1955 as the news was coming out of the south. That was after several years of reports on these arch segregationists, saying they were going to destroy public education and send kids off to private schools. Friedman wrote this piece, advocating school vouchers in that context. He and others who were part of this libertarian movement at the time, I was shocked to discover, really rallied in excitement over what was happening in the south. They were thrilled that southern state governments were talking about privatizing schools. They were applauding this massive resistance to the federal government and to the federal courts because they thought it would advance their agenda.

Berkshire: The economist James McGill Buchanan, who is the subject of your book, was the architect of a plan to privatize Virginia’s schools, including selling off its school buildings and even altering the constitution to eliminate the words “public education.” He was basically making the same argument that school choice proponents continue to make today, that public schools were a “monopoly.”

MacLean: Two students from the economics department at the University of Chicago, James McGill Buchanan, who is my focus, and a man named Warren Nutter, who was Milton Friedman’s first student, started pushing these voucher programs in the South and pushing them very opportunistically. They wanted to take away the requirement that there be public education in the constitution, which would then enable mass privatization. Friedman himself actually came down to University of North Carolina in 1957 to a conference designed to train these new arch free market economists, and he actually made schools the case in point, so he was really pushing for this in the South at the moment that it’s happening. Ten days after the court ruling, Buchanan and Nutter issue this report calling for, essentially using the tools of their discipline to argue that it would be fine for Virginia to privatize its schools and sell off these public resources to private providers. In other words, what they were doing is using this crisis to advance their what some people would call neo-liberal politics or ultra free market politics or breaking down the democratic state. There’s many ways of describing this, but whether they were or were not consciously racist or most motivated by racism, I don’t know, and it’s kind of almost not relevant. The thing is, they did not care at what they could tell would be the impact on black students of their pushing this agenda, and they capture that in saying, “Letting the chips fall where they may.”

Berkshire: Much of your book centers on Virginia at mid century, in the years leading up to and following the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education ruling. Yet the story you tell feels so relevant to today. You argue, for example, that what we’ve long viewed as a battle over segregation was also a fight over who pays for public education.

MacLean: Actually, what the white leaders always said is that black residents weren’t paying enough taxes to have better schools in this situation of segregation, which was, of course, a total source of frustration to the black parents, because they said, “How can we make bricks without straw? If you don’t give us education, how can we get better jobs in order to pay more taxes?” I just raise that, because the way that I look at Brown and the fight over schools in this book is a little different from what we’ve heard over the years, in that it draws attention to the public finance aspect of racial equality in the schools, and shows how even back in the time of the cases that led up to Brown vs Board of Education, these issues of taxes were always foremost. These white property holders, these very conservative white elites in Virginia, who suppressed the vote of all other citizens, really did not want to pay taxes to support the education of any but their own children. In that sense, I think it’s a really contemporary story. It has such echoes of what we’re hearing now.

Berkshire: I’m a devoted chronicler of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who is an heiress to the right-wing libertarian vision that your book is about. One of my great frustrations is that people decided early on that DeVos is a dimwit and so they don’t challenge her ideas, where they come from or how extreme they are.

MacLean: I have to say I think that intellectual condescension is the achilles heel of the left, particularly right now with the Trump administration and DeVos. There’s a sense that, “Oh, these people are stupid,” rather than, “No, these people are working with a completely different ethical system than the rest of us and a different philosophy, but it’s a coherent one and they are pursuing their goals with very strategic, calculating tools.” That’s also why the right is so focused on the teachers unions. It’s not because they are only concerned about the quality of education and think that teachers are blocking that. First of all, this is a cause that hated public education—what they would call government schools; they don’t even want to say public education—before there were teachers’ unions. We can go back and trace the lineage of that. Today, with so many industrial jobs destroyed or outsourced or automated, our main labor unions are teachers’ unions, and teachers’ unions are really important forces for defending liberal policy in general, things like social security and Medicare as well as defending public education. In targeting teachers’ unions, they’re really trying to take out their most important opponents to the plans, the kind of radical plans that they’re pushing through.

Berkshire: DeVos actually spoke to the conservative group ALEC a few weeks ago and she quoted Margaret Thatcher’s famous statement “there is no society” to make her case for a libertarian vision of education that consists of individual students and families vs schools and school systems. Universal free public education, paid for by tax dollars, is among our most “collectivist” enterprises when you think about it.

MacLean: They hate the idea of collectives they would call them, whether it’s labor union, civil rights, women’s groups, all these things they see as terrible, and any kind of government provision for people’s needs. Instead, they think that ultimately, each individual, and then they sneak in the family because of course no individual could live free of being raised by a mother and parents. In their dream society, every one of us is solely responsible for ourselves and our needs, whether it’s for education or it’s for retirement security or it’s for healthcare, just all these things, we should just do ourselves. They think it’s a terrible, coercive injustice that we together over the 20th century have looked to government to do these things and have called on and persuaded government to provide things like social security or Medicare, Medicaid, or college tuition support or any of these things.

Berkshire: Unlike some of the other causes that you just mention, the push to privatize public education has support among Democrats too. What do you make of this?

MacLean: Part of what’s happened with the Democrats that’s very sad I think is that once the spigots of corporate finance of elections opened and democrats are trying to stay competitive with republicans in this, they have gone overwhelmingly to the financial sector for contributions. There are so many hedge fund billionaires who are interested in transforming the education industry because it is such a vastly huge potential source of cash, right, that could go into new, private schools. There’s this whole education industry that’s developed, and a lot of democrats are really connected to that agenda. Corey Booker would be a case in point, and I’m sure you know about his work, but many other democrats. Obama and Arnie Duncan and all these other folks I think are destroying their party’s own base and capacity to fight back against this horrible, anti-democratic agenda by attacking public education and teacher’s unions as they have.

Categories Accountability, ALEC, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization

New York City: Leadership Academy in Trouble and in Doubt

By dianeravitch
July 31, 2017 //
42

The New York Post reported that New York City’s Comptroller Scott Stringer conducted an audit of grants to the New York City Leadership Academy and found no evidence that the city was getting what it paid for.

The city Department of Education has awarded contracts worth up to $101 million to the NYC Leadership Academy — but didn’t keep track of where the money went, a bombshell audit by City Comptroller Scott Stringer charges.

The Long Island City-based non-profit has collected $45.6 million from the contracts to coach “aspiring principals” and teachers. But the DOE failed to produce records to prove the $183-an-hour coaches did what they were paid for….

The contracts also require progress reports and meetings to monitor the vendor’s performance, but the auditors found none — raising the specter of “waste, fraud and abuse,” the report says.

“These failings point to a broken procurement system that allows the DOE to spend freely, devoid of oversight,” Stringer concludes. “Our principals deserve better than this.”

The DOE entered into three contracts with the academy since 2008, the first two under then-Mayor Bloomberg. The third, for payments up to $45 million from July 2014 to June 2019, was inked under Mayor de Blasio by Chancellor Carmen Farina’s chief operating officer. About $34.8 million available remains unspent.

Last month, de Blasio declared a “NYC Leadership Academy Day,” and declared the outfit “an important partner” in running city schools. Fariña praised the academy “for its tremendous work to prepare and support great school leaders.”

But the academy, founded in 2003, has also become notorious for graduating inept — and sometimes corrupt — principals with little teaching experience. Its “leadership coaches,” mostly retired principals, have also been hired in the mayor’s three-year-old Renewal program for struggling schools, which has shown meager academic gains.

The comptroller’s auditors reviewed $559,667 in DOE payments to the academy, including $394,007 for “leadership coaching.”

“Disregarding the safeguards in its own contracts and procurement rules,” the comptroller said, the DOE spent $385,612, or 98 percent of the coaching payments, without the required documentation.

This report is an indictment of mayor control, spanning both Bloomberg and de Blasio’s oversight, as well as the New York City Leadership Academy. Bloomberg and Klein announced the Leadership Academy with great fanfare as a way to fast-track “leaders” with a year of training. The original plan was intended to hire and train leaders from industry and aspiring principals from outside New York City, who would come into the school system and act as disruptors with fresh ideas. Neither of those approaches worked. Then, it became a way to jump from the role of teacher to principal while skipping the five-to-seven year apprenticeship of being an assistant principal. For a time, it was the latest new thing, like Tennessee’s Achievement School District, which has failed. It would be difficult to determine any benefit from the $101 million (actually much more, since Bloomberg raised $75 million for the LA’s first three years of operation).

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, New York City, Principals

Ann Cronin: Connecticut State Board of Education Rips Off Taxpayers and Children of Bridgeport

By dianeravitch
July 24, 2017 //
7

Ann Cronin taught English for many years in Connecticut, which has one of the most successful state school systems in the nation. However, Connecticut has several districts where people live in dire poverty. Under the administration of Governor Dannel Malloy, the answer to the children in these poor and under-resourced districts is privately managed charter schools– contractor schools. Malloy, needless to say, relies on hedge fund managers for campaign funding, and he is putty in their hands.

Cronin writes here that “Something is Rotten in the State of Connecticut.”

The State Board of Education just approved additional seats for Steve Perry’s Capitol Prep Harbor School, a charter school that drains resources from the Bridgeport public schools. Perry is the self-styled celebrity who once referred to teachers’ union members as “cockroaches” and on another occasion threatened a physical confrontation with critics.

Cronin writes:

“On July 19, 2017, the unelected, governor-appointed Connecticut State Board of Education approved 504 additional seats in state charter schools for next year, with 154 of those seats going to Capital Preparatory Harbor School in Bridgeport.

“GO FIGURE:

“Connecticut is in a budget crisis with every expense being monitored, yet new charter school seats, which cost the state $11,000 each, are being initiated. The cost will be more than $5.5 million.

“PLUS

“The new seats will cost the beleaguered and impoverished Bridgeport Public Schools money it cannot afford and will strip them of much needed resources. The Bridgeport Board of Education unanimously voted against the expansion plan because the cost of adding grades to Capital Prep Harbor School requires the Bridgeport Public Schools to pay additional costs for transportation and other services at an additional location.

“PLUS

“The expansion plan for Capital Prep Harbor School, approved by the State Board of Education in 2014, called for three grades to be added in 2017-2018, but Capital Prep Harbor School requested and was granted the expansion to six new grades, which increased the costs of services from Bridgeport Public Schools from $200,000 to $400,000 for 2017-2018.

“PLUS

“Capital Prep Harbor School does not serve the population of Bridgeport equitably. Based on the make-up of the community, nearly half of the students at Capital Prep Harbor should be Hispanic, but only 1/5 are, and Capital Prep Harbor has zero students who have English as their second language although there are ample children in Bridgeport who have English as their second language.

“PLUS

“Capital Prep Harbor School was approved by the State Board of Education in April 2014 as a school with its stated mission to serve the “diverse communities of Bridgeport and surrounding communities”. Capital Prep Harbor School has failed to implement that mission because of its small percentage of Hispanic students and its total lack of students with English as their second language.”

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

A MUST READ! Think National, Fight Local: The Story of Indianapolis and the DPE (Destroy Public Education) Movement

By dianeravitch
July 23, 2017 //
18

This very important post was written for this blog by Jim Scheurich on behalf of himself, Gayle Cosby, and Nathanial Williams, who are identified in the text. They are experienced in the school politics of Indianapolis, a city whose school system is being systematically dismantled and privatized. They have been active in the fight against what they call the DPE (Destroy Public Education) model in their city. Their experience and insights are extremely informative, especially their recognition that the DPE movement is not limited to Indianapolis; it has gone national. Indianapolis is only one of its targets. The business community, civic leaders, political leaders, DFER, the Mind Trust, and Stand for Children have joined together to Destroy Public Education. As they attack democratic institutions, they falsely claim that “it is all about the kids” and they claim they are advancing civil rights. Instead, it is about money and power and gentrification. As the paper points out, it used to be possible to run for the IPS school board with less than $5,000. Since the DPE crowd arrived, it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to try for a seat on the local school board. Consequently, the DPE crowd has bought control of IPS.

Think National, Fight Local:

Fighting a National Neoliberal “Destroy Public Education” Model at the Local Level

Jim Scheurich, Gayle Cosby, and Nathanial Williams
Indianapolis, Indiana, Community & University Activists

The three of us have been collaboratively fighting the national neoliberal “Destroy Public Education” (DPE) model in Indianapolis, Indiana, for several years (we dislike calling it a “reform” model given the generally positive connotations of that word that obscure the truth about these efforts).

Gayle was an Indianapolis Public School (IPS) school board member from 2012-2016. She was initially funded to win her board seat by the local DPE initiative in 2012, but she soon realized what they were up to and turned into a vocal critic, publically speaking and organizing against them. Also, she is now an Urban Education Studies (UES) second year doctoral student at Indiana University – Indianapolis (IUPUI). Nathanial “Nate” Williams is a long time Indianapolis activist, starting as a Black Student Union activist in his undergraduate years at the same university. He graduated with his doctorate from the same UES doctoral program in 2015 and became a professor at Knox College in Illinois, though still maintaining his activism in Indianapolis as much as possible. I, Jim Scheurich, am a professor who came to Indianapolis in 2012 to coordinate the UES program after having been an educational leadership professor at Texas A&M for eight years and at the University of Texas at Austin for twelve years.

The three of us began meeting to share data and information a couple of years ago. It became clear that the local DPE’s deceptive messaging needed to be publically critiqued. The two “non-profit” organizations doing most of the DPE work in our community are the Mind Trust, which works to incubate and fund new charter school ideas and to facilitate partnerships with the Indianapolis Public Schools (IPS), and Stand for Children, a national organization headquartered in Oregon and working to dupe parents into loving the “choice” model or, as we call it, the DPE model in 11 states. In order to share this critique with the community, we began doing public forums and using social media.

However, what we want to focus on here is the national “model” that is being applied in Indianapolis. While Nate and Gayle began to “see” this early on, our understanding of it has only gotten stronger. We now believe there are a range of tactics or elements implemented across all the cities where the DPE model is being applied. We are not saying there is one set of tactics or elements (organizations, policy, rhetoric, etc) that is being applied everywhere, overseen in some tightly controlled way by one “headquarters” entity. While such a dominant, controlling entity may exist, we do not know about it. Probably the closest to such an organization is the Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), located at the University of Washington, as they list 39 cities (though we believe there are more following mainly the same “model”) and their characteristics (http://www.crpe.org/research/portfolio/tools/snapshot) (you have to click on “View Network Overview” to see all 39.)

The point to remember with all of the “model” tactics or elements is that they all converge on destroying traditional public education and privatizing and profitizing public education, and they often do so in a way that local people do not fully comprehend because of the slick marketing and messaging. Indeed, their public relations efforts are usually good to excellent, which commonly includes the appropriation of civil rights and community-oriented language.

Here, then, is our initial list of the “model” tactics or elements with some brief discussion on each, particularly in reference to Indianapolis. But one effort we really need is for activist researchers, community or university based, to send us your data from as many cities as possible. We need local community and university researchers to collaborate in developing the data from each individual city, and then we will synthesize all that data to further define and verify our contention that there is a national model, however decentralized in application. We will return to this point after our list.

1. Increasing integration of traditional public schools and charter schools, but with a favoring of charter schools. Here in Indianapolis, there is a step by step effort to enhance charters and dismantle the traditional district. Charters often get cozy deals from the school district that benefit them with dollars, busing, support, and students, while traditional schools serving the same student populations are squeezed financially and closed. Also, there has been the development of measures to have charters created by the district, which, in Indianapolis, are called “innovation” schools (we will cover this further below).

2. Usually a single funding conduit to which national and local wealthy, white individuals and organizations can contribute for the local DPE initiatives. This is especially useful for huge increases in the funding provided for school board elections. This conduit usually has a 501c4 to hide the sources and expenditures of the funds. Stand for Children plays that role here, as well as in Nashville, where they got a hand slap for violating local election laws (http://www.tennessean.com/story/news/education/2016/09/28/stand-children-charter-candidates-face-massive-fines/91239098/). In addition, Stand for Children is meeting some resistance in Denver and Chicago school board elections. Also, according to grassroots and university activists, the Skillman Foundation is playing a similar role in Detroit.

3. Local and national wealthy, white, conservative collaboration. Collaboration between local white, wealthy conservative power elite and national white, wealthy conservative (sometimes rightwing) power elite. Here in Indianapolis, this includes Chamber of Commerce, Board of Realtors, and Lilly. Nationally, it often includes Gates, Dell, the Koch brothers, the DeVos family, the Bradley Foundation, the Friedman Foundation, the Heritage Foundation, and the Walton family, or billionaire oligarchs as some would suggest.

4. Huge infusion of new dollars into school board elections. A huge increase in dollars is devoted to getting DPE-supported candidates elected to the school board, most of which flows through the single funding conduit discussed above. This increase in funding is phenomenal in Indianapolis. Before DPE became operational in Indianapolis, a local citizen could win a school board election with ~$5,000. Starting in 2012, Stand for Children was spending literally hundreds of thousands per candidate for each election and has spent over $1.5 million for all their candidates over the past three elections. As a result, Stand for Children has funded the campaigns of six of the seven current IPS board members, and it shows in their voting records.

5. Development of a network of local organizations or affiliates that all collaborate closely on the same local agenda. In Indianapolis, these include Stand for Children, Democrats for Education Reform (a cover for so-called members of the Democratic Party to support DPE; in 8 cities), Teach for America, Teach Plus, local charter schools, the Indianapolis Mayor’s office, the Chamber of Commerce, etc. The network will create some new organizations for a specific purpose, and then that organization, having served its purpose, will disappear. For example, Democrats for Education Reform operated in Indiana until the first wave of DPE candidates were elected in 2012. It then mysteriously ceased to exist, after contributing thousands of dollars to candidates. While the Mind Trust does have a diagram of its partners on its website, most local people do not know that a whole range of organizations are closely collaborating on the same agenda.

6. Teach for America (and all other instant-teacher-certification programs) and Teach Plus are integral parts of the DPE “model” agenda almost everywhere, whether they bear the same organizational name or work under a different name. These types of organizations provide new (typically short term), low salary teachers, especially for charters and especially to bust teacher unions and undermine university-based teacher preparation programs. Teach Plus is an organization that began in Boston and was incubated by the Indianapolis-based Mind Trust. It works by taking new teachers and paying them a stipend to research educational issues (of the pro-DPE variety) and teaching them to lobby at the statehouse for those issues. Together, they have funding support from the same funding sources as DPE initiatives nationally.

7. Innovations Schools. So-called “Innovation” schools are being set up across the country. For us here in Indianapolis, this is a way to set up charters within the school district. The school board signs a contract with an organization to run a charter within the district. That organization then has its own board, which has oversight over all aspects of the school. The Indianapolis School Board no longer has any control over the school, except for being able to get out of the contract if performance requirements are not met. In addition, that school can pay any charter management organization or its own organization whatever it wants. Thus, this within the district charter school is no longer under the control of the district and is now a source of profit for the “non-profit” organization, typically seen in the form of over-inflated CEO salaries at the top of the charter organization. Provocatively, the state legislation that made this possible comes from ALEC (the right wing American Legislative Exchange Council that has led the takeover of state government by the right wing with funding from the Koch Brothers and other billionaire oligarchs). ALEC calls this “The Innovation Schools and School Districts Act.” (https://www.alec.org/model-policy/the-innovation-schools-and-school-districts-act/). This is a good example of an initiative that looks local, but was actually created nationally.

8. Unified enrollment. This is a CRPE term (https://www.crpe.org/research/unified-enrollment). What it basically means is an online system through which parents can choose among both charters and district traditional schools. This sounds parent and student oriented, but it further cements charters and traditional schools into one so-called “choice” system, allows for manipulation of the racial and class make up of schools to serve gentrification, and often devolves into parents bidding for seats in the “best” schools. (We could offer more critique of this system, but no space for that here.) In Indianapolis, we do not have a fully developed one, but we are on our way with Enroll Indy. We believe this idea originated in New Orleans’ all charter district, where it is called EnrollNOLA. Los Angeles is considering it, but fighting over whether to include or exclude charter schools (http://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-essential-education-updates-southern-unified-enrollment-1494347803-htmlstory.html). Other cities that have or are considering this are Baltimore, Camden, Chicago, Cleveland, Denver, Detroit, Hartford, Memphis, New York City, Neward, Oakland, Philadelphia, Portland, Rochester, San Antonio, and Washington, DC—a regular roll call of DPE cities (http://iipsc.org/projects/).

9. Support for gentrification. Though many of the organizations involved in DPE vehemently state that one of their primary aims is integrated schools and equitable opportunities for all students, this is simply not the case. Indianapolis (and many other cities) are in various stages of gentrification of the inner city core. Population migration combined with school choice and, in some cases, unified enrollment (though not fully implemented here yet) has resulted in significant and intended racial isolation of white students in the district. Locally this is evidenced by the Indianapolis Mayor’s Office Neighborhoods of Educational Opportunity (or, NEO) plan, which is an educational reform (DPE) plan developed in hopes of raising the tax base in the inner city of Indianapolis (see: http://oei.indy.gov/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/NEO-Executive-Summary-04-22-13-draft.pdf). In the case of IPS, this gentrification, a la school choice, has left us with “highly desirable” magnet schools where a majority of the students are white. This conflation of “white” and “high performing” or “highly desirable” has led to further segregation of our public school students.

10. Business as best model for schooling. In Indianapolis, the Mind Trust and Stand for Children persistently claim that a business model is the best model for how to do schooling. However, particularly over the past decade or two, we now have extensive research in the U.S. and across the world as to the characteristics of schools that serve all children well, but there is no education research we know of that supports a business model as the best model for high quality schooling that serves all students well.

In your city, you may have some of the same elements of the DPE and some different than the ones in Indianapolis. Our point is that there is a kind of national menu of elements and tactics that local DPE initiatives are utilizing, and local folks do not usually know this. Indeed, our experience is that most local folks do not even know that the same kinds of neoliberal DPE efforts are being used in other cities.

Accordingly, we think it is critical that local people understand the national nature of what is occurring. We also think it is critical that those of us paying attention to the national level are communicating about this national menu of elements. Locally, one of the messages we are trying to communicate is that what we are fighting is a national “model,” not a locally derived one, as is typically communicated to the local community. This is especially important because our local DPE effort, led by the Mind Trust-Stand for Children Network, deceptively tries to portray itself as a local community effort dedicated to the local community.

To further our efforts to fight this anti-democratic, anti-community local-national effort to privatize and profitize public schools, we are asking other local communities to check this menu list of tactics and elements we have offered. Let us know which ones we have named that you have and which ones you have that we have not listed. If folks will do this, we can build a national data base that can be shared. Just send us the numbers for the ones you have, like you might have in your city #’s 1, 2, 4, 6, and 10, and then tell us a little about ones you have that we do not have listed here. Please send all such communications to Jim Scheurich at jscheuri@iupui.edu.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democrats for Education Reform, Education Industry, Indianapolis, Privatization, Stand for Children
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