The State Senate in New York loves charters. They produce generous contributions from financiers and Wall Street.
The State Senate is now holding hostage a deal to renew mayoral control unless Mayor De Blasio agrees to accept more charter schools. Don’t let them get away with it! More money for contractor schools that can choose their students and impose draconian discipline on children of color.
Contact your state senator if you live in New York. Now.
Mercedes Schneider comments on the happy convergence of Betsy DeVos and the notorious anti-government ALEC. Their pro-corporate, profiteering views converge.
In Her Element: US Ed Sec Betsy DeVos to be ALEC Guest Speaker
Schneider knows ALEC well, having written about it in the past. ALEC writes model legislation for states that want to get rid of public schools, teachers’ rights, unions, gun control, and any regulation that interferes with corporate profits.
To learn more about ALEC, go to ALEC Exposed.
The Network for Public Education invites you to contact your local PBS station to protest the one-sided three-hour special “School Inc.” The letter in the link tells you how to contact your PBS affiliate.
We urge two courses of action, for the sake of balance. Please request that they air my 10-minute response which was filmed by the NYC affiliate of PBS. Please urge them to show “Backpack Full of Cash,” made by award-winning Stone Lantern Productions; it tells the story of the corporate assault on public schools.
That is 70 minutes of time, certainly not equal time. PBS, in the interests of fairness, should identify and run three hours of documentaries that show an accurate picture of the accomplishments and challenges of public schools.
PBS is running a three-hour special that attacks public schools and celebrates privatization. “School Inc” claims that public schools are not “innovative,” but not one of its free-market examples are innovative in any way, other than that they are run by private corporations, many for profit. The narrator and creator of this series is the late Andrew Coulson, a libertarian who believed in free-market education.
I watched all three hours of the program twice, preparing for a 10-minute interview at WNET, the New York City affiliate of PBS. I learned that the three foundations that funded the program are libertarian supporters of vouchers. The program is pro-privatization propaganda. At no point does Coulson interview anyone who disagrees with him. He lauds the free-market reforms in Chile and Sweden, which reputable scholars have found wanting. Chile is one of the most segregated school systems in the world, and Sweden’s scores on international tests have fallen since the introduction of Choice and for-profit schooling.
This program leads the way in promoting the DeVos agenda of free-market education.
Please send your email. Be heard.
Michael Hynes is superintendent of the Patchogue-Medford public schools on Long Island in NewNew York.
He writes:
“Is hypernormalisation even a word? I didn’t believe so until recently. According to Wikipedia, (insert sarcasm), “The term … is taken from Alexei Yurchak’s 2006 book Everything was Forever, Until it was No More: The Last Soviet Generation, about the paradoxes of life in the Soviet Union, where the author explains, “Everyone knew the system was failing, but as no one could imagine any alternative to the status quo, politicians and citizens were resigned to maintaining a pretense of a functioning society. Over time, this delusion became a self-fulfilling prophecy and the “fakeness” was accepted by everyone as real”, an effect that Yurchak dubbed hypernormalisation.
“British filmmaker Adam Curtis took the concept beyond the Soviet reference, in his award-nominated documentary, HyperNormalisation,, about how governments, financiers, and technological gurus have given up on the complex “real world” and built a “fake world,” run by corporations and kept stable by politicians.
“Wow, sound familiar? This is precisely what is taking place in the United States at the present moment, most notably in my world of public education.
“The hypernormalisation of public education has been slowly creeping its way into our schools, becoming the official party line with the federal mandate of testing our children to death with No Child Left Behind in 2001. This legislation required that all grades 3-8 students are tested every year in English Language Arts and mathematics. The later incarnations of NCLB have only upped the testing ante, by making high test scores such a priority that a school’s very existence depends on making the mark.
“This means that what most of us consider “normal” is no longer normal. School days filled with reading, writing, math, science, social studies, playing outside, working out problems with friends, art, music, taking an occasional trip, are no longer “normal.”
“If we compared our public school experience from that of twenty-five years ago against the “new normal,” we witness children losing the ability to play in the classroom (where true learning takes place), the significant decline of recess and a loss of social and emotional experiences that all children benefit from.
“This “new normal” is teach less and test more. And because of the high stakes attached to these tests, schools are forced to focus on academic outcomes at the expense of a child’s social and emotional growth.
“Under this hypernormalized model, teachers now rank and sort children based on a proficiency model instead of how much growth each individual child may show.
“So don’t celebrate too soon New York parents, educators and policy makers. Just because the Board of Regents recently trimmed time off of the 3-8 English Language Arts and mathematics state tests from six days to four, the “new normal” hasn’t budged.
“As long as the stakes attached to the tests remain as high as they are, then our schools will remain driven by only two outcomes: ELA and mathematics state test scores instead of attaining what’s most important: enlightening the whole child to maximize their true talents and potential.
“I recognize that the obstacles in achieving a new healthy normal are huge, as our politicians at the state and federal level, along with so-called reformers and business opportunists who have been reaping tremendous financial profits from this system, continue to praise and fund a high stakes test-driven school model.
“But make no mistake: this “new normal” is taking an unacceptable toll on our children; focusing on the whole child, regardless of scores, is what desperately needs to become our new normal.”
Michael J. Hynes, Ed.D.
Superintendent of Schools
Patchogue-Medford Schools
241 South Ocean Ave.
Patchogue, NY 11772
@PMSchoolsSupe or @Mikehynes5
Wayne Gersen explains here why billionaires are willing to spend millions of dollars to privatize public schools and to keep their taxes low.
Education is the most expensive item in every state’s budget. Teachers are the most expensive component in the budget of public schools. Reduce the number of teachers, reduce costs, get rid of senior teachers, and no new taxes.
The trick for the billionaires is to fool voters who earn $50,000 a year into believing cutting taxes is good for them, and that they share common ground with the billionaires.
Billionaires don’t care about public schools, don’t worry about class sizes, don’t care if kids are taught by machines, because their children don’t go to public schools.
Clever. Mean. Duplicitous.
Peter Greene read Betsy DeVos’s speech to the big privatization conference in D.C. and he figured out the DeVos doctrine.
Remember the song from “Oklahoma,” about “the farmers and the ranchers can be friends?” Well, DeVos assured her allies in the privatization movement that voucher-lovers and charter-lovers are on the same team. They both want the money that now goes to public schools!
Greene writes:
“The rise of Betsy DeVos opened up some schisms in the education reformster world, including, notably, voucher fans versus charter fans. Charter fans have been distrustful, even openly resistant to DeVos and whatever agenda she is drifting toward. Charter schools and voucher schools are natural competitors, with vouchers having a distinct edge with the private religious school market. But I think it may be more important that they compete in different ways.
“To grossly oversimplify, the charter model is to attach itself to the public school system, coopting the public system’s financial systems but redirecting public monies to private schools. The voucher model is to keep the public funding from ever entering the public system at all. Charters want to slip the money out of the bank, but vouchers want to grab the armored cars delivering it. Charters flirt with the lottery winner so he’ll buy them a nice dinner, and vouchers mug him before he ever gets to the restaurant. Charters fake their family ties so they can wrangle an invite to Thanksgiving
“So it represents a significant shift that DeVos has delivered a speech loaded with a giant olive branch to charter supporters…
“DeVos holds up Florida as an example of robust choice and its awesome results. Including Pitbull’s school. Florida, land charter scam artists and blatantly racist school policy and slavish devotion to the Big Standardized Test and public schools deliberately gutted in order to make choice look good. Florida is the DeVosian model. It may not do much for actual education, but at least people are free to make money.
“The final chorus of this hymn to privatization is to declare that “education is not a zero-sum game.” But of course as currently conceived, it is exactly that. Among the issues that DeVos doesn’t address is the costliness of running multiple parallel school systems with the same (often inadequate) funds you previously used to run a single system. As long as every taxpayer dollar spent to send a student to a private charter or voucher school is a dollar taken away from the public system, then a zero-sum game is exactly what we have.
“The DeVos Doctrine presented here includes several of her emerging greatest hits, such as the idea that parents choosing a school is a pure exercise of democracy. It is not. There is nothing democratic about requiring the taxpaying public to foot the bill for your personal private choice.”
Valerie Strauss contacted PBS to ask why the public TV Network ran a one-sided three-hour documentary that lambastes public schools and celebrates vouchers, charters, and for-profit schools.
PBS gave its response.
It likes to air diverse views (clearly without fact-checking).
It pays no attention to where the money comes from, even it is dark money funneled through Donors Trust, which bundles contributions from the Koch brothers and DeVos foundations.
Since PBS welcomes diverse views, be sure to contact your local public television station and urge them to run my rebuttal, which aired on WNET, the NYC PBS station.
Since PBS likes diverse views, urge them to air “Backpack Full of Cash,” produced by award-winning Stone Lantern Films, who’s four-part series, “School,” was aired on PBS in 2000. “Backpack” demonstrates the vicious corporate assault on public schools and the harm done to children by the privatization movement.
Don’t agonize, organize.
I wish that everyone who sees the PBS program “School Inc.”–which airs nationally this month–knew who was funding this error-ridden attack on public education.
Please watch my 10-minute interview with New York City’s PBS affiliate, WNET, where I gave a concise response to this meretricious three-hour program. It airs locally, not nationally.
Public education today faces an existential crisis. Over the past two decades, the movement to transfer public money to private organizations has expanded rapidly. The George W. Bush administration first wrote into federal law the proposal that privately managed charter schools were a remedy for low-scoring public schools, even though no such evidence existed. The Obama administration provided hundreds of millions each year to charter schools, under the control of private boards. Now, the Trump administration, under the leadership of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, wants to expand privatization to include vouchers, virtual schools, cyberschools, homeschooling, and every other possible alternative to public education. DeVos has said that public education is a “dead end,” and that “government sucks.”
DeVos’s agenda finds a ready audience in the majority of states now controlled by Republican governors and legislatures. Most states already have some form of voucher program that allow students to use public money to enroll in private and religious schools, even when their own state constitution prohibits it. The Republicans have skirted their own constitutions by asserting that the public money goes to the family, not the private or religious school. The longstanding tradition of separating church and state in K-12 education is crumbling. And Betsy DeVos can testify with a straight face that she will enforce federal law to “schools that receive federal funding,” because voucher schools allegedly do not receive the money, just the family that chooses religious schools.
Advocates of the privatization movement like DeVos claim that nonpublic schools will “save poor children from failing public schools,” but independent researchers have recently concurred that vouchers actually have had a negative effect on students in the District of Columbia, Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio. Charters, at best, have a mixed record, and many are known for excluding children with disabilities and English language learners and for pushing out students who are troublesome.
This is a time when honest, nonpartisan reporting is needed to inform the American public.
But this month the Public Broadcasting System is broadcasting a “documentary” that tells a one-sided story, the story that Betsy DeVos herself would tell, based on the work of free-market advocate Andrew Coulson. Author of “Market Education,” Coulson narrates “School, Inc., “ a three-hour program, which airs this month nationwide in three weekly broadcasts on PBS.
Uninformed viewers who see this very slickly produced program will learn about the glories of unregulated schooling, for-profit schools, teachers selling their lessons to students on the Internet. They will learn about the “success” of the free market in schooling in Chile, Sweden, and New Orleans. They will hear about the miraculous charter schools across America, and how public school officials selfishly refuse to encourage the transfer of public funds to private institutions. They will see a glowing portrait of South Korea, where students compete to get the highest possible scores on a college entry test that will define the rest of their lives and where families gladly pay for afterschool tutoring programs and online lessons to boost test scores. They will hear that the free market is more innovative than public schools.
What they will not see or hear is the other side of the story. They will not hear scholars discuss the high levels of social segregation in Chile, nor will they learn that the students protesting the free-market schools in the streets are not all “Communists,” as Coulson suggests. They will not hear from scholars who blame Sweden’s choice system for the collapse of its international test scores. They will not see any reference to Finland, which far outperforms any other European nation on international tests yet has neither vouchers nor charter schools. They may not notice the absence of any students in wheelchairs or any other evidence of students with disabilities in the highly regarded KIPP charter schools. They will not learn that the acclaimed American Indian Model Charter Schools in Oakland does not enroll any American Indians, but has a student body that is 60% Asian American in a city where that group is 12.8% of the student population. Nor will they see any evidence of greater innovation in voucher schools or charter schools than in properly funded public schools.
Coulson has a nifty way of dismissing the fact that the free market system of schooling was imposed by the dictator Augusto Pinochet. He says that Hitler liked the Hollywood movie “It Happened One Night” (with Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable); should we stop showing or watching the movie? Is that a fair comparison? Pinochet was directly responsible for the free market system of schooling, including for-profit private schools. Hitler neither produced nor directed “It Happened One Night.” Thus does Coulson refer to criticism (like Sweden’s collapsing scores on international tests) and dismiss them as irrelevant.
I watched the documentary twice, preparing to be interviewed by Channel 13, and was repelled by the partisan nature of the presentation. I googled the funders and discovered that the lead funder is the Rose Mary and Jack Anderson Foundation, a very conservative foundation that is a major contributor to the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, which advocates for vouchers. The Anderson Foundation is allied with Donors Trust, whose donors make contributions that cannot be traced to them. “Mother Jones” referred to this foundation as part of “the dark-money ATM of the conservative movement.” Other contributors to Donors Trust include the Koch brothers’ “Americans for Prosperity” and the Richard and Helen DeVos foundation.
The second major funder is the Prometheus Foundation. Its public filings with the IRS show that its largest grant ($2.5 million) went to the Ayn Rand Institute. The third listed funder of “School Inc.” is the Steve and Lana Hardy Foundation, which contributes to free-market libertarian think tanks.
In other words, this program is paid propaganda. It does not search for the truth. It does not present opposing points of view. It is an advertisement for the demolition of public education and for an unregulated free market in education. PBS might have aired a program that debates these issues, but “School Inc.” does not.
It is puzzling that PBS would accept millions of dollars for this lavish and one-sided production from a group of foundations with a singular devotion to the privatization of public services. The PBS decision to air this series is even stranger when you stop to consider that these kinds of anti-government political foundations are likely to advocate for the elimination of public funding for PBS. After all, in a free market of television, where there are so many choices available, why should the federal government pay for a television channel?
In this latest episode of the “Have You Heard” podcast, Jennifer Berkshire and education historian Jack Schneider interview Michigan professor Rebecca Jacobsen about the role of big money in school board elections. Jacobsen has studied this relatively new phenomenon and identified 96 super-rich individuals who have decided that buying local school boards is fun. Others would call it the corruption of democracy.
Here is an excerpt:
For Big Money Donors, School Boards Are the New ‘Must Buy’ Accessory
“Billionaires now buying local influence to push controversial school “reforms.”
“The recent school board election in Los Angeles drew close to $17 million in donations, much of it in the form of untraceable “dark money” from a familiar cast of enormously wealthy donors. In the latest episode of the Have You Heard podcast, co-hosts Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider talk to researcher Rebecca Jacobsen about what—and who—is behind this trend, and how the influence of huge donors threatens to drown out the voices of people who actually live in these communities. You can hear the entire episode here.
“Have You Heard: You’ve been looking into the influence of wealthy donors in school board elections in cities including Los Angeles, Denver, Indianapolis and New Orleans. What most surprised you about what you found?
“Jacobsen: I think I’m just constantly astounded at just how much is being spent. You opened with the recent LA election, and the LA Times reported that $144 was spent for every vote cast on the reform side, and then on the union side it was $81 for every vote received by the teacher union backed candidate. And I just think about how much money that is, you know I would have never dreamt that there would be a 15 million dollar school board election. And so I think that’s probably one of the things that I find most surprising.
“Have You Heard: Tell us a little about the donors who are suddenly so interested in school board elections.
“Jacobsen: In our research we’ve looked at all the different campaign contributions that were given, and exactly who was donating and how much. And we came up with a set of about 96 big national donors, and these are folks that some of us are familiar with, especially when we’re in the education reform world. They’ve often been very influential from a philanthropic perspective. Many of them have created their own education organizations or their education reform groups. These are folks like Reed Hastings of Netflix, who has been really active in sort of reforming education. Laurene Powell Jobs, who is the wife of the late Steve Jobs, who has created her own education reform initiative, Sheryl Sandberg, many of these people are involved in sort of the tech world, and so we see not only connections for regionally, these folks all sort of work and live in the same circles. But then we also see connections that they’re involved in the same charter boards or the same education reform organizations and boards. They often share affiliations beyond just the fact that they’re now donating to the same organizations. And what’s especially striking is that these connections just exploded over a relatively short period of time.
“Have You Heard: I’m guessing some people will hear this and think, ‘well we need some kind of influence to counter the power of the teachers union.’ But one of the surprising findings from your research is that unions are not as involved in these local elections as one might expect.
“Jacobsen: It has long been assumed that the teacher’s union was the most influential interest group in local elections, partially because they’re relatively small cost, they’re not held at a regular time, which enables these interest groups then to, for very little money and very little mobilization, have a particularly out sized influence. And that certainly has been the case, there’s no denying that, however I think that that just sort of universal assumption as truth needs to be challenged by what we’re seeing today. Because at least in the cities that we’ve looked at, union money has been significantly dwarfed by these large outside donors. And increasingly, not just direct donations, but we’re seeing dark money donations.
“So more and more political action committees are being set up, or independent expenditure committees is what they’re sometimes called in the school board world, where there can be sort of unlimited funds and you don’t actually even know where they’re coming from. Now unions have those as well, but there’s just an explosion of these different types of groups and it’s really hard to keep track of where the money’s even coming from.
“Have You Heard: You mention a couple of specific reasons why having wealthy donors try to influence school board races. Start with the part where it turns out that billionaires have different policy priorities than most of us.
“Jacobsen: Unfortunately it’s not so easy to just call up these very wealthy donors and poll them about their opinions on various policy issues. As one academic stated, their gatekeepers have gatekeepers. So this is a population that is very hard to study, and those that have gotten to it have found that they often have distinctly different views than those of us that are sort of more in the mainstream middle class America. And so the same is true in education. I think that right now we’re seeing a huge push for vouchers, a very particular type of education reform, and this is not something that I think we’re seeing overwhelming support from local communities. And I think that this is again where we see a mismatch between those that are very wealthy and those that are actually attending the public schools and using them on a regular basis.
“Have You Heard: The school board race in Los Angeles got a lot of attention, but as you found, the priorities of local voters often got short shrift versus the agenda of the donors you describe: which basically boiled down to charter schools, charter schools and more charter schools.
“Jacobsen: In LA we heard from a few candidates that were very concerned with adult education because of the large immigrant population in LA USD. And the role that adult education plays in supporting student learning. Not just adult learning, but then in turn student learning, and how they could not get that item on the agenda because they simply didn’t have the money to compete. There was no conversation to be had around that issue because they just didn’t have the ability to publicize it in the same way that those that were getting the large outside donations were able to do. We had one candidate who gave the example of getting a picture from a friend of theirs on a cell phone that showed seven mailers that had been received in one day alone, and this candidate was saying I can barely raise enough money to send out one mailer, let alone seven mailers in one day. So we are concerned that this outside money has the potential to really drown out particular voices and particular issues that might be really important to the local community, but aren’t necessarily seen or recognized by this larger national agenda.”
Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy charter chain, known for its harsh discipline and cherryocking students, won the Broad Prize for Charter Schools.
In the past year, the New York Times ran stories about a “got to go” list, identifying students who were supposed to be pushed out because of their behavior or test scores.
There was also a prominent page-one story about a leaked video showing a teacher at SA humiliating a first-grade child and ripping her paper up in front of the class.
According to the press release, former Secretary of Education John King, a member of the selection committee for Broad, lauded the choice and said that Success Academy proved it was possible to give high-quality to “every child.” He meant “every child” except those with disabilities, English language learners, nonconformists, and others who can’t or won’t produce high test scores.
“Success Academy is intentional about delivering quality instruction and offering well-rounded, hands-on learning experiences to every child,” said former Education Secretary John B. King Jr., who’s now president of the nonprofit, The Education Trust, and a member of the Broad Prize’s review board.
“These charter schools understand the benefit of a diverse educational community, with children of different socioeconomic status, race, and background all learning together,” he said.”
