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AOC Did Not Disappoint

By dianeravitch
March 20, 2019 //
79

 

Last Saturday, I attended a forum on public schools organized by Jackson Heights Parents for Public Schools. Thanks to the appearance of superstar Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes, the event drew some of the city’s leading education stars, such as State Senator Robert Jackson, who has been leading the fight for increased state funding for the city’s public schools for many years. There were other elected officials and representatives of advocacy groups, including Carol Burris of the Network for Public Education and Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters. There were also eloquent advocates for bilingual education, a popular issue in this largely Hispanic neighborhood.

AOC is the member of Congress for Jackson Heights. She was there to listen and learn.

I arrived about an hour early with my son-in-Law and grandson. We went to the nearby heavily trafficked Roosevelt Avenue but quickly realized that there was nowhere to get a slice of pizza, our usual fast food, but many places to buy tacos. My 12-year-old grandson showed off his excellent Spanish, while Grandma could barely remember her high school Spanish. What was most striking about Roosevelt Avenue was that it was thoroughly representative of the new multicultural America that frightens Trump. Side by side are Spanish, Asian, and Arabic shops, peaceably coexisting. I suddenly thought of Reagan in Berlin, standing in front of the Berlin Wall, saying, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” I wanted to say, “Mr. Trump, come to Roosevelt Avenue in the borough where you were born and see the new America.”

Before the event started, I had about ten quiet minutes with AOC. She is warm, comfortable in her skin, somewhat taken aback by her sudden fame, and unpretentious. When I walked in, she jumped up and hugged me as though we were old friends. Or her grandmother.

When the event got underway, the mood in the room was one of unity and purpose. The 400 or so who crowded into the meeting hall were there to support public schools.

There were cheers for more funding, smaller class sizes, less emphasis on testing, and more bilingual education.

Liza Featherstone and Jessica Blatt offer a good summary of the meeting here. 

There was much talk about the importance of parents taking action by opting out of state tests. NYC has one of the lowest opt-out rates in the state, in some part because parents are warned that they won’t be admitted to the middle school or high school of their choice without test scores. It was a bit jarring to hear AOC say that she was treatedin the Yorktown schools as in need of remedial education because she was Hispanic, not mainstream, but, she said, “a-high-stakes standardized Test” revealed she was in the 99th percentile. No one stopped to point out that she could not be referring to any high-stakes test used for accountability purposes because they don’t rank by percentile. They classify students as 1, 2, 3, or 4. Her teacher must have given her a no-stakes individual test that produces a percentile ranking for diagnostic purposes. Well, she can’t know everything about everything. None of us do.

The only controversy occurred during the Q and A session.

Someone asked AOC what she thought about Mayor deBlasio’s interest in changing the entrance exams for admission to the city’s most select high schools. Almost on cue, a group of protesters stood up and held signs saying that any effort to change the entrance exams would be “anti-Asian bias.” It was a tense few moments, and AOC wisely responded that the issue was one that dividedpeople who should be in the same camp, fighting for better schools, and that the issue was the inevitable consequence of a “scarcity mentality.” Why aren’t there good high schoolsfor everyone?

Several members of the panel told their stories. One was Jessica Ramos, the newly elected State Senator, who said she passed the single high-stakes exam that is the sole requirement for the top high schools but chose a local high school and received an excellent education. Ramos was very impressive. A parent, Kemala Karmen, said that her own child likely could have passed the exams but choseto go to a nonselective high school, is being well educated there, and has been accepted by good colleges.

All in all, it was a very satisfying day. The enthusiasm for local public schools was very strong. The eagerness to join together to make them better was palpable. All of the electeds turned out and spoke up, pledging to support public schools.

The people of Jackson Heights felt happy that they have so many top-notch elected officials working for them.

This is democracy at work.

 

 

 

Categories Democracy, Hope

Peter Greene on the Tragedy of Lorain, Ohio, and the War to Stamp Out Local Control and Democracy

By dianeravitch
February 23, 2019 //
50

Who knew that Republicans hate local control of public schools? Who knew that the root cause of low test scores was the input of parents and teachers?

Peter Greene tells a story in this post that should be required reading for every course in education and for every state legislator. It is an unbearably sad story, and if it doesn’t make you angry, you aren’t paying attention.

http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2019/02/oh-lorain-hb-70-and-reformy-attack.html

Greene began his teaching career in Lorain, Ohio. At the end of his year, he and many other teachers were laid off and he moved on to teach in Pennsylvania, where he enjoyed a career that spanned nearly four decades. He remembers Lorain as a factory town, a functioning, multi-ethnic district with three high schools, seven middle schools, and many elementary schools. It was a strong union town, where most people worked in steel mills or auto plants.

Lorain was hit hard by deindustrialization. It was a small city that lost jobs and population.

He writes:

In 2016, my wife and I made a cross country trip. I’d not been back to Lorain (no reason to– I’d made no lasting relationships in my year, mostly because I ate, slept and drank my job), even though its a mere three hours away. The rows of factories are now rubble. My half-a-house apartment is now in a row of boarded-up empty buildings. The strip mall where I bought  albums, my first luxury purchase with my own teacher-pay money is empty. My old high school is a vacant lot. Lorain’s population is now around 63,000, a loss of about a quarter of their population from the mid-70s.

The drop started quickly and continued relentlessly for years. The school district adjusted. The three high schools became two, then one. But the local economy was shrinking so severely that by 2013, the school district was the second-largest employer in town,  behind the hospital. By the 2010s, reportedly 90% of the student population was free and reduced lunch (the standard proxy for measuring poverty).

Lawmakers in Ohio responded to the collapse of Lorain’s economy by declaring that its faltering schools were in “academic distress.” Its test scores were not good enough.

In 2007, Ohio created a new piece of turnaround legislation. The law created an academic distress commission, appointed by the state superintendent, the president of the school board, and the mayor of the city. ADC’s were responsible for coming up with a plan. They could fire and hire administrators and create a budget for the district. Lorain fell under the control of an ADC in 2013, but despite the employment of snazzy consultants, things didn’t seem to be improving. Some scores had started to creep up, but then changes in the state test– and how harshly it would be assessed– destroyed any forward momentum the district had developed.

It was several decades of tough challenges in the community and in the schools– and then, in 2015, that state of Ohio stepped in again to make things even worse.

The state passed a harsh and punitive bill called HB 70, which allowed the state to take over the district and install a tsar. Somehow the legislators imagined that the reason for low test scores was that local citizens had some say over what happened to their schools. Democracy was the problem.

Ohio’s old law called for an academic distress commission, appointed by the state superintendent, the president of the school board, and the mayor of the city. ADC’s were responsible for coming up with a plan. They could fire and hire administrators and create a budget for the district. Under HB 70, that changed dramatically. HB 70 is a corporate reformster’s dream law.

Under the new law, the ADC was required to appoint a CEO to run the district. The list of “include but not limited to” duties of the CEO runs to seventeen items, and they include:

Replacing administration and central office staff
Assigning employees to schools
Allocating teacher class loads and class sizes
Job descriptions for employees
Setting the school calendar
Setting the district budget
Setting grade “configuration”
Determining the school curriculum
Selecting instructional materials and assessments
Making reductions in staff
Establishing employee compensation

The law is nuts; it establishes the CEO as an unchecked tsar of the district with all the powers of both the superintendent and the school board. The only job requirement under the law is “high-level management experience in the public or private sector.” So he could be an education amateur. 

The state took over Lorain and Youngstown, then East Cleveland.

What happened next in Lorain was eye-popping. It was the Corporate Reformers’ dream come true: All authority vested in one person who was thoroughly immersed in Reformy organizations and philosophy and jargon:

Immediately, there were questions. The duly-elected, but now essentially powerless (except for one thing, and we’ll come back to that later) school board demanded information about the search process, conducted by Chicago-based Atlantic Research Partners with little-to-no transparency. ARP was co-founded by Joseph Wise, after he was fired from the superintendent post in Duval County, Florida for “serious conduct” deemed “injurious” which included “not communicating or acting in good faith with board members during budget discussions.” Wise also owns Acceleration Academies.

Of the five finalists, ARP had connections to four. One of the four was connected by virtue of attending the National Superintendents Academy, another property that Wise bought up. The National Superintendents Academy was previously known as SUPES Academy– a name you may remember from the massive scandal involving Barbara Byrd-Bennett and her federal indictment for bribery in Chicago. The twisty background is laid out here, but it underlines another aspect of the reformster world– multiple connections and always failing upward.

The National Superintendents Academy graduate was David Hardy, Jr., and his resume is loaded with reform credentials.

Hardy grew up in West Chester PA, the son of a teacher. He studied business at Colgate, but says an internship changed his mind about that. After graduating from Colgate with a BS in Economics and a secondary concentration in education and English, Hardy headed out for– what else– a Teach for America gig in Miami-Dade schools teaching reading and writing to 6th and 7th graders. After two years of that, he became the Miami-Dade Madison Middle School Language Arts Chair, where he took credit for raising the school’s grade from F to C. He ran a TFA summer institute, worked as a curriculum support specialist, and then went to work for Achievement First as a Dean of Students, consulted for the Children First Network, and then became the founding principal of Achievement First East New York Middle School. Then Chris Cerf tagged him to become the executive director of one of the seven Regional Achievement Centers in Camden responsible for the turnaround of thirty schools. Then chief of academic supports in Philly, then Deputy Superintendent of Academics in St. Louis Public Schools (where they have problems of their own)– his longest time in a single job, at a whopping four years. Hardy graduated from Colgate in 2003.

Along the way he picked up a Masters degrees in education administration, plus a masters and doctorate from Columbia in urban education leadership. And he was selected as a Future Chief by Chiefs for Change. And he’s connected to the Pahara Institute, which is connected to Aspen.

You can read Peter’s description of the big plans of Hardy and the TFA team he brought to Lorain. It will sound familiar to you from the experiences of so many other cities.

Peter concludes:

I didn’t set out to do a hatchet job on David Hardy and his administration, and it would be wrong to ignore the fact that he does have some support in the city. Some residents see the opposition to Hardy as racist, and at least one school board member has said that upon reflection, she supports the embattled CEO. It’s a contentious mess. When the state took over, some folks were pushed out of positions of power, and it’s reasonable to assume that they would not have been impressed if Jesus Christ Himself had taken over the district.

Certain phrases keep coming up in connection with Hardy, like “in over his head.” He can talk a good game (watch this interview from his St. Louis days), but if leading in a city system like Lorain requires relationship-building, Hardy is coming up short. The latest bombshell is not only a slap in the face to staff, but was handled about as poorly as it possibly could have been.

But it’s important to ask if HB 70 set David Hardy up for failure.

It’s a bad law. It was slipped past the legislature as an amendment in a late-night smoke-filled room arrangement that guaranteed that it would not be publicly discussed. And it is most certainly a full-on assault on public education in the state.

Youngstown, Lorain and now East Cleveland have one thing in common– they are among the poorest school districts in the state. As such, it’s unsurprising that they would have low scores on the Big Standardized Test and therefor low grades for their schools. HB 70 targeted poor communities, and it didn’t target them for help. It targeted them to be taken over, dismantled, and handed off to charter operators. The Lorain I knew has taken such a beating over the years, and HB 70 is the legislative equivalent of taking a beaten puppy and saying, “Look, dammit– fetch now or I am going to give your food to a prettier dog.”

Lorain needs help and healing. It does not need to have its teachers beaten down, its parents kept in the dark, its community held at arms length, its elected officials stripped of power. There is no special mystery to why Lorain’s schools are struggling, but HB 70 doesn’t address any of the root issues of a struggling local economy and a loss of resources. It is a law that punishes poverty rather than trying to ameliorate it.

I am trying to imagine what kind of high-quality leadership would make it possible to sell, “Hi! I’m from the state and I’ve been appointed to strip you of local power and chop your community schools up for someone else’s investment opportunity. Also, all the bad things that are happening are your fault, because your town sucks.” No, David Hardy isn’t very good at his job– but who could be good at the job that HB 70 has created? How do you lead well when HB 70 is fundamentally a punishing act of disrespect toward a local district?

HB 70 sets a district up for every bad corporate reform idea in the book. Test Scores! Visionary CEO! Transformation! Disruption! Spank teachers! Test scores! Strip local control! Expectations!  Test Scores! Kids first (but not really)! A smart person with marketworld skills from outside will be so much better than career educators! The state knows more about fixing schools than anyone! Also, test scores!

When gubernatorial candidate Dennis Kucinich visited Lorain last year, he suggested suing the state over HB 70, but that process is already under way. Youngstown has been leading the charge, and Lorain parents have gotten involved— at least on the petition level. The law was challenged in court almost immediately, initially decided in favor of the state, and worked up to the state supreme court which agreed to hear it last October. It also creates some unique issues– Youngstown’s school CEO would not allow the Youngstown board to spend money on the appeal. Lorain teachers filed a “friend of the court” brief as a party directly affected by the outcome, and several districts ands the Ohio School Boards Association have joined the suit.

Meanwhile, new Ohio governor Mike DeWine is sympathetic to some of the issues involved:

“One of the concerns, one of the things that we have seen in Youngstown, Lorain, is the obvious loss of local control, and we’re seeing some of the dynamics that result from the loss of local control. We are a very local government state,” DeWine said. “We like it that way, most of us do. Most of us think that problems get solved locally, so I’ve got some people working on this and we are working with some legislators on this, actually, but I really can’t go into any more details at this point.”

So there is at least some small bit of hope for Lorain and Youngstown and East Cleveland and every other poor Ohio community that was going to fall under HB 70 sooner or later. But if HB 70 ever goes away, those communities will still be facing all the problems they were facing before the state stepped in to help plus all the wreckage left by HB 70. The future is not going to be all rainbows and unicorns any time soon.

And the bitter irony in all of this is that, by many accounts, Lorain was climbing when the state stepped in. We’ll never know how they would have done if the state had just left them alone.

I came to really like Lorain in my brief time there. If things had worked out differently, I would have been glad to stay in that big little town. It deserved better than to be used and discarded by industry; its solid blue collar citizens deserved better as well. And they deserve better treatment by the state than to be thrown under a reform-driven bus that gives them exactly all the wrong things, everything but the support, assistance and resources that they need. This is corporate ed reform at its worst, disenfranchising citizens, trashing communities, and not even coming close to delivering what it promised as an excuse for the power grab.

I’ve kept up with Lorain, watching them in the news over the years ever since I left town right ahead of the industrial collapse. I’ll keep watching the news, hoping for good news from that beautiful little big city on the lake.

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Democracy, Education Industry, Education Reform, Ohio, Privatization

Bill and Melinda Gates: Ignore the Critics, We Know Best

By dianeravitch
February 17, 2019 //
114

 

Bill and Melinda Gates ignore critics of their philanthropic efforts to change society as they wish. They even host weekly meetings with other billionaires, like Mark Zuckerberg and Charles Koch, to share ideas about redesigning the world.

In an article in Forbes, Gates defended his record and blamed me for the failure of the Common Core standards, which happened because I used the phrase “billionaire boys club” in my 2010 book “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Resting and Choice Are Undermining Education.” Actually, the book scarcely mentioned Common Core, Which was not yet complete when the book went to press but it specifically criticized the hubris of Gates, Walton, and Broad for foisting their half-baked ideas on American public education, even though they are unelected and unaccountable.. I pointed out that they threw their weight around merely because they are billionaires, and I referred to them as the Billionaires Boys Club.

Yes, they do undermine democracy. The truth hurts.

It is gratifying to know that my pen is able to get his attention. I regret that he has refused to meet with me over the past decade. I have some good ideas for him. But he doesn’t listen.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Democracy, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Koch Brothers, Philanthropy

MIchael Hiltzik: Time to Tax the Billionaires

By dianeravitch
February 4, 2019 //
22

 

Michael Hiltzik, columnist for the Los Angeles Times, writes that America is tiring of its selfish, greedy billionaires.

The billionaires are upset that Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez-Cortez wants to raise taxes on incomes over $10 million a year and that Elizabeth Warren is proposing a wealth tax for the fabulously wealthy. How terrifying!

Bit Anericans are not frightened by these proposals. Billionaires are.

https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-billionaires-20190201-story.html

What do you think about a man who spent $100 million on a 305-foot yacht, who already owns a 220-foot yacht? That’s Daniel Snyder, owner of the NFL Redskins.

”At the same moment, hedge fund owner Ken Griffin was disclosed as the buyer of the most expensive home in America, a $238-million Manhattan penthouse. According to Bloomberg, he already owns two floors of the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Chicago ($30 million), a Miami Beach penthouse ($60 million), another Chicago penthouse ($58.75 million) and another apartment in Manhattan ($40 million).”

How many homes does one man need?

Hiltzik writes:

Our emerging political debate over taxing the rich seems to be getting bogged down in details — how high a tax rate, should we tax income or wealth, etc., etc. But this fixation on nuts and bolts is obscuring what may be the most important aspect of the discussion: America is becoming fed up with its billionaires.

That sentiment is long overdue. It has begun to surface in the suggestion by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that the top marginal rate on high incomes shift back to what it was in the 1950s or 1960s, and in Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s proposal for a wealth taxon those with high net worth.

Since the Reagan administration, the political establishment has strived to convince Americans that extreme wealth in the hands of a small number of plutocrats is good for everyone. We’ve had the “trickle-down” theory, the rechristening of the wealthy as “job creators” and their categorization invariably as “self-made.” We’ve been told, via the simplistic Laffer Curve, that if you raise the tax rate you get less revenue.

There are three main subtexts of these arguments, all of which show up in the email in-box whenever I write about wealth and taxation. First: The extreme wealth of the few creates wealth all along the income scale, for the masses. Second: It’s immoral — confiscatory — to soak the rich via taxation, at least above a certain level that never seems to be precisely defined. And third: If we torment the wealthy with taxes, they’ll pack up their wealth and leave us, whether for some more accommodating nation on Earth or some Ayn Randian paradise.

Experience has shown us that the first argument is simply untrue — extreme wealth begets only more inequality. The second argument begs the question of where reasonable taxation turns into confiscation, although the level of taxation of high incomes today is nowhere near as high as it was in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, when economic gains were shared much more equally with the working class. As for the third, Warren’s answers to capital flight include stepping up IRS enforcement resources, which have been eviscerated by political agents of the wealthy, and imposing an “exit tax” on any plutocrat renouncing his or her U.S. citizenship to evade U.S. taxes.

Why are billionaires beginning to be treated so skeptically?

One reason surely is the evidence that extreme wealth has a corrosive effect on the economy. Wealth inequality places immense resources in the hands of people unable to spend it productively, and keeps it out of the hands of those who would put it to use instantly, whether on staples or creature comforts that should be within the reach of everyone living in the richest country on earth.

Multimillionaires and billionaires love to describe themselves as “self-made,” but the truth is that every fortune is the product of other people’s labor — the minimum-wage workers overseas who assemble Michael Dell’s computers or the low-wage baristas in Howard Schultz’s Starbuck stores, or the taxpayers who fund the roads, bridges and airports that help keep their businesses profitable….

The issue of how many billions are too many billions has been placed in high relief by the presidential campaign of Schultz, the ultimate billionaire vanity project. Schultz condemns calls for higher marginal tax rates on the wealthy and, typically for his species, portrays himself as a man who has gotten where he is today by taking advantage of America as the land of opportunity — so what’s keeping you layabouts from doing the same. But he also mentions, in passing, that he grew up in federally subsidized housing in New York. So someone, somehow, gave him a leg up using tax revenue.

It’s proper to question why people like Schultz and Dell feel so strongly about a marginally higher tax on their marginal income.

People like Schultz “live what is, for almost all practical purposes, a post-scarcity existence,” Paul Campos observes aptly at the Lawyers, Guns & Money blog. “If you have three billion dollars, then you can buy almost anything without even bothering to consider what it costs, since what it costs is, to you, practically indistinguishable from ‘nothing.’ Given that everything is for you already basically free, why would you even care if your tax bill goes up? Especially given that you live in a society in which, despite what is by a historical standards an almost inconceivable amount of total social wealth, lots of people still have to worry about getting enough to eat, not freezing to death in the next polar vortex, etc?”

Categories Billionaires, Democracy, Education Reform

Mercedes Schneider: Reflecting on MAGA on Martin Luther King, Jr., Day

By dianeravitch
January 21, 2019 //
20

Mercedes Schneider ponders the meaning of Make America Great Again. MAGA.

What does Trump mean by “great?”

What does he mean by “again?”

She thinks she knows.

It’s a loaded phrase. It causes trouble because people understand what it means.

“And cause trouble, it does, because those “good old days” tend to be days in which life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were chiefly available to whites– and particularly white males– with varying degrees of economic and social exclusion/oppression for women and people of color.”

That America—the era of white supremacy—is gone forever. It’s time to acknowledge and embrace a new and better America.

Categories Accountability, Civil Rights, Democracy, Education Reform, Equity

Advice to the New York State Legislature About Mayoral Control of the City’s Schools

By dianeravitch
January 20, 2019 //
11

The Legislature is preparing to renew and extend mayoral control of the New York City public schools. Before it does so, it should consider some important and necessary changes.

I have studied the governance of the New York City Public Schools for many years. My first book, published in 1974, was a history of the city’s schools. (The Great School Wars.)

I support mayoral appointment of board members with checks and balances. At present, there are no checks or balances, and no meaningful role whatever for parents and communities.

For most of the 20th century, the mayor appointed the board members. The board selected the Superintendent of Schools, who reported to the board. To prevent the Mayor from filling the board with cronies, the candidates for the central board were vetted by a screening committee comprised of leaders from recognized civic groups. The Mayor made sure to have a balance of appointees from different boroughs who reflected the people of the city.

Every district had a functioning local board to respond to parent concerns. The local boards were representative of their districts and were usually appointed by the Central Board after consultation with local leaders.

Today, the New York City Board of Education lacks any checks or balances. It has been reduced to a city agency, completely subservient to the will of the Mayor. The Mayor, not the central board, selects the “chancellor.” The chancellor serves at the pleasure of the Mayor, not the central board. The central board does whatever the Mayor tells them to do. He can fire them if they don’t follow his orders. Local school councils are powerless and ignored.

As the Legislature reviews the renewal of mayoral control, I hope it will restore checks and balances.

The so-called “panel on educational policy,” which doesn’t even exist as such in the law, should be restored as the Board of Education of the City of New York. Its members should be selected by the Mayor from a list of people reviewed by an independent panel of civic leaders.

The Board, not the Mayor, should appoint the Superintendent of Schools, who should be an educator, not a business person. The Superintendent should serve at the pleasure of the Board, not the Mayor.

Public policy over the schools should be reviewed and vetted in public, not behind closed doors in City Hall.

The Mayor should retain his control of the overall budget, which is vast power, but the details should be left to the Board and the Superintendent.

Local boards in every district should be appointed by local leaders, with the approval of the Central Board. Elections of local boards have been tried but failed to garner a decent turnout and are easily captured by politicians and special interests

There is no perfect way to organize a system that enrolls over one million children. Every organization has faults. But the least perfect way is to turn the school system over to the Mayor, with zero checks or balances, and no input whatever from parents or communities. The Mayor should not be a dictator of education policy, free to do whatever pleases him.

Autocracy is wrong. The Mayor is not an educational expert. It is his or her responsibility to make sure that the members of the board are people of great integrity and that the budget is adequate to the needs of the children.

But the Board should not be his solely owned property, to do with as he wishes. The Board should choose its executive and that executive should answer to the Board, not the Mayor.

Yes, renew Mayoral Control, but renew Democracy too.

Diane Ravitch

Categories Democracy, New York City

Georgia: Free Showing of “Backpack Full of Cash”

By dianeravitch
January 18, 2019 //
3

Are you aware that PRIVATIZATION for PROFIT is well underway in schools, city governments, transportation, etc. in Georgia? People are being elected to office with these ends in mind, are financed by for-profit entities and are soft selling decisions to authorize this movement…

Are you aware of the dire effects of allowing the proliferation of this movement to continue to grow in capacity?

THIS IS NOT JUST ABOUT SCHOOLS…

JOIN US FOR A FREE SCREENING

This feature-length documentary is a free screening and open to the public. No children please as space is limited.

When

Wednesday, January 30, 2019
7:00 pm – Film Screening
8:30 pm – Q&A Discussion

Where

Porter Sanford Performing Arts & Community Center
3181 Rainbow Drive
Decatur, GA 30034

Join the Georgia Federation of Teachers, JEEPAC and the NAACP DeKalb Chapter for a screening of Backpack Full of Cash.
This documentary narrated by Matt Damon, a Cambridge, MA public school graduate, takes an urgently-needed look at how charter schools, vouchers and the privatization movement are threatening the nation’s public schools. In the wake of the 2016 presidential elections and the appointment of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, as well as the installation of a pro-charter majority of the Atlanta Public School Board, BACKPACK is timelier than ever. Filmed in Philadelphia, New Orleans, Nashville and other cities, BACKPACK takes viewers through the tumultuous 2013-14 school year, exposing the world of corporate-driven education “reform” where public education — starved of resources — hangs in the balance. Backpack puts a human face on complex social, racial and civic issues confronting educators, students, families, and our communities. Backpack serves as a tool to show how other communities are fighting back against an effort to privatize public education.

The documentary also showcases a model for improving schools – a well-resourced public school system in Union City, New Jersey, where poor kids are getting a high quality education without charters or vouchers. BACKPACK FULL OF CASH makes the case for public education as a basic civil right.

The film features genuine heroes like the principals, teachers, activists, parents and most hearteningly, students who are fighting for their education. Former Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch, writer David Kirp and policy expert Linda Darling Hammond are among the national thought leaders who provide analysis in the film.

This feature-length documentary is a free event and open to the public.

Categories Democracy, Education Reform, Georgia

Picketing with UTLA: A Great and Inspiring Morning

By dianeravitch
January 17, 2019 //
18

I had a very exciting morning with teachers, parents and students who were picketing outside Alexander Hamilton High School in Los Angeles.

Teachers and parents walked in front of the majestic exterior building, on the sidewalk where cars could see them. Several people held up signs saying “Honk if you support teachers,” and there was a cacaphony of honking horns as cars and trucks passed by.

As the minutes passed, the crowd grew to be hundreds of people, and they chanted “Hey, hey, Ho, Ho, Austin Beutner’s got to go!” And many other inspiring lines about supporting teachers and public schools.

The UTLA understands exactly what’s going on. Its President Alex Caputo-Pearl and his members understand that the billionaires bought the school board so they could expand the non-union charter presence. Charters now enroll 20% of the district’s children.

A day earlier, the UTLA held a mass rally in front of the California Charter Schools Association, the billionaire-funded lobbyists intent on destroying public schools in the state while prohibiting any accountability for charter schools and fighting any limits on charter school growth.

The billionaire-bought LAUSD has starved the public schools, which helps the charters.

The picketing stopped for short speeches. Parents, teachers, a celebrity (Rock Star Stevie Van Zandt) spoke. So did students, both of whom are seniors at Hamilton. One young man said, “We get it. They are targeting black and brown communities. They are trying to destroy our schools by denying us the education we need and deserve. They are dividing our district into haves and have-nots.” Another senior asked the audience to imagine what it was like to be in classes with nearly 50 students, where there were not enough chairs or desks. She said she took a chemistry class and sat on the floor all year because there was no other place to sit. She couldn’t get into an AP class because there were not enough chairs or desks.

The national media says the strike is about trachers’ pay but they are wrong. No one mentioned salaries except a parent speaker. The really important issues are class size, lack of money for full-time nurses in every school, lack of money for librarians and counselors, lack of money for the arts.

When I had my few minutes to speak, I pointed out that California is probably the richest state in the nation, but the latest federal data show that it spends less than the national average on its schools. California spends about the same, on a per-pupil basis, as Louisiana and South Carolina.

That’s shocking.

The good news today, aspesker said, was that a poll conducted by Loyola Marymount, reported that the strike has the support of 80% of the public.

Even if the national media misses the point, the people of LA understand that teachers are striking for their children and for future generations. They are fighting billionaires like Eli Broad, Reed Hastings, the Waltons, the Koch brothers, and other billionaires, for the survival of public education.

The whole world is watching.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Democracy, Education Industry, Education Reform, Los Angeles, Parents, Privatization, Resistance, Students, Union

FDR: His “Economic Bill of Rights”

By dianeravitch
January 11, 2019 //
67

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered his State of the Union address on January 11, 1944.

Seventy-five years ago today.

He included what was then called the “Economic Bill of Rights.”

It’s good to remember a time long ago when we had a national leader with a vision of a just and fair society, a vision that we remain very far from achieving. It’s good to remember a time when we had a national leader who was intelligent and articulate, surrounded by others who cared deeply about social and economic progress. It’s good to remember a time long ago when America meant something other than rampant individualism, greed, me-first, me-only, competition, and gun violence. It’s good to remember when America was motivated by ideals of the common good and the just and decent society. That was the America of my childhood. I miss it. I hope it can be recaptured.

FDR said:

It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of an American standard of living higher than ever before known. We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth—is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.

This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.

As our nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.

We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.”[3] People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station, race, or creed.

Among these are:

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;

The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;

The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

The right of every family to a decent home;

The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;

The right to a good education.

All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.

America’s own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for all our citizens. For unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in the world.

Categories Civil Rights, Democracy, Education Reform, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Health, History, Hope, Jobs, Justice

Does This Man Deserve an Annual Income of $786 Million?

By dianeravitch
January 10, 2019 //
54

After Nancy Pelosi was re-elected Speaker of the House, she gave a gracious speech in which she quoted Justice Louis Brandeis. She said, quoting him:

“‘As Justice Brandeis said, ‘We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both’”

This article was written by an economist at George Mason University (whose Economics Department was heavily influenced by gifts from the Koch brothers, who are low-tax libertarians). I suspect the Koch brothers would hate the views expressed here. Economist Steven Pearlstein addresses the issue raised by Pelosi:

The $786 million question: Does Steve Schwarzman — or anyone — deserve to make that much?

Last year, Stephen Schwarzman took home $786.5 million from the Blackstone Group, a leading private-equity firm that he co-founded and has run for more than 30 years. That sum included his salary, bonus and incentive fees totaling $125 million, plus more than $650 million Blackstone paid out as dividends associated with the sizable holding of Blackstone stock he retains as a founder and longtime executive. It was a big payday, to be sure, but not out of line with previous years, when Schwarzman’s Blackstone income ranged from $425 million to $734 million. Nor is it out of line with increases in wealth earned by a number of other billionaire financiers and company founders.

The question is: Do they deserve such extraordinary sums?

Schwarzman declined an invitation to talk through that question. But it’s a fair guess that as a staunch defender of free markets, he considers his take a proper reward for his talent, hard work, ingenuity and willingness to take risk over many years. In the past, he has criticized those who blame the wealthy for stagnant middle-class incomes and rising inequality. And when the Obama administration proposed a change in tax law that would have reduced his income, an outraged (and later apologetic) Schwarzman likened it to Adolf Hitler’s invasion of Poland.

In the theoretical models favored by economists, what Schwarzman or anyone else earns in the marketplace is thought to reflect how much we add to economic output — in the language of economics, our “marginal productivity.”

“My own reading of the evidence is that most of the very wealthy get that way by making substantial economic contribution,” Harvard economist Greg Mankiw wrote in a much remarked-upon essay a few years back that was titled “Defending the One Percent.”

Indeed, if we still had an economy of independent, self-sufficient farmers and artisans, Mankiw’s mental model might be the correct one. Someone could point to a bushel of tomatoes or a hand-knit sweater and credibly make the claim, “I produced that. It is the fruit of my labor, so what I earn from it in the competitive marketplace is my property, my just desert.”

But in a modern economy, creating products and services is a team sport, with individuals constantly interacting with other individuals and firms in complex arrangements that make it much more difficult to determine each person’s contribution to overall economic output. There are differences in market power between firms, and differences of individual power within firms, both of which have a significant effect on exactly who earns what.

One of the reasons Blackstone is so successful, for example, is that as one of the biggest private-equity firms, it gets a first look at most of the best investment opportunities. Everyone who works at, or invests with, Blackstone benefits from that kind of market power. And within Blackstone, Schwarzman has the “sole discretion” in setting the bonuses for top executives, according to its annual proxy filings.

More significantly, the amount anyone earns at Blackstone, or any other firm, is influenced by the rules, laws and norms that govern business behavior and market competition.
As someone who buys and sells companies, for example, Schwarzman has benefited handsomely from a uniquely American business environment in which companies are run with the single-minded focus of maximizing returns to shareholders and investors, rather than balancing the interests of all stakeholders.

The hotel companies and amusement parks that Blackstone has owned (Hilton, La Quinta, Motel 6, Six Flags, Busch Gardens) have benefited from a federal minimum wage that hasn’t budged in more than a decade, and labor laws that now make it almost impossible for workers to vote in a union at any company that is determined to stop them.

Over the past 30 years, the weakening of antitrust enforcement and regulations meant to protect consumers and investors have boosted the profits and increased the value of Blackstone-owned companies in the waste management, cable television, telephone, funeral and nursing home industries.

As a big investor in corporate debt, Blackstone also has benefited from bankruptcy rules that favor bondholders over workers, as it did in the restructuring of telecom firm Avaya in which $360 million in unfunded pension liabilities was effectively shifted to the government’s pension guarantee agency.
The extraordinarily low interest rates engineered by the Federal Reserve in recent years have boosted valuations for the many real estate investments that Blackstone has made, including its $37.7 billion purchase of Equity Office Properties at the top of the last real estate bubble. Low interest rates also have provided Blackstone with the financial headroom to shower its investors and executives with huge one-time dividends financed with debt.

Liberalized trade treaties have made it possible for Blackstone-owned firms such as Freescale Semiconductor and TRW Auto Parts to lower costs by moving work to low-wage countries overseas. The same treaties have also made it possible for Blackstone to attract more foreign investors, like the sovereign wealth funds of China and Saudi Arabia, while opening new investment opportunities for Blackstone abroad, such as Legoland and Versace.

Scharzman and his partners have benefited handsomely from the favorable tax treatment for “carried interest,” and the ability to defer taxes on profitable investments that are exchanged for new ones. And under the new law, their taxes will be lower, and returns higher, as a result of the new lower rates for corporations and partnerships. The repeal of the estate tax will also leave wealthy families with more money to invest in Blackstone funds.

The point here is not to quarrel with these policy choices (although there is much to quarrel with) or to suggest that Blackstone has benefited more than other firms (although that is probably the case). Rather, it is to illustrate that the amount that Schwarzman or anyone else earns in any year in the marketplace is determined in no small part by rules and norms that govern market competition.

Those rules and norms were not set in place by some all-knowing “invisible hand” — they were politically and socially determined. That is why wars have been fought over them, legislative battles have been waged over them and elections have been won and lost because of them. And it is why Blackstone and other companies spend lavishly on lobbying and electing friendly politicians who are in a position to shape them.

Under different sets of rules and norms, the market might have valued Schwarzman’s economic contribution last year at a measly $393 million — half of what he did receive, but surely still enough to persuade him to contribute his excellence.
Markets, in other words, are social constructs, and the idea that they generate a distribution of income based on a purely objective measure of individual economic contribution is a fiction, nothing more than free-market ideology. When it comes to the distribution of income, there is no “pure” market. Any distribution is, by its nature, “political,” reflecting changing social norms and the distribution of political power.

To point this out is not to suggest that I know of a more objective system for determining how income should distributed. Rather, it is to suggest that if we, as a society, decide that we find the current distribution of income unacceptable — if it offends our moral intuitions that a single financier earns as much in a year as 15,000 elementary school teachers — then it violates no great moral or economic principle to alter that distribution.

One way to make the distribution of income more equal would be to change some of the rules and norms that govern market competition.

Another would be to leave the rules and norms in place and alter the distribution after the market has delivered its judgment, through more progressive taxation and government spending.

The first has been called “predistribution,” the second redistribution, and there may be good economic and political reasons for favoring one or the other. But from a moral viewpoint, there is no meaningful distinction between the two. Both reflect the ways that societies determine the distribution of income based on subjective judgments of what is fair.
Defenders of free markets have long argued that shifting income away from those whom the market judges more talented and more productive would be to deny them their “just deserts.” But as a moral concept, just deserts is inadequate and incomplete.

For in determining whether any distribution of income is just, it is not enough to inquire whether someone has earned his income by playing by the rules. We must also look at the distribution of income and ask whether the rules themselves are fair and just.

Pearlstein is a business and economics columnist for The Washington Post and the Robison Professor of Public Affairs at George Mason University. He is also the author of “Can American Capitalism Survive? Why Greed is Not Good, Opportunity is Not Equal and Fairness Won’t Make Us Poor.”

Steven Pearlstein, a Washington Post economics columnist and the Robinson professor of public affairs at George Mason University, is the author of “Can American Capitalism Survive?”
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Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Democracy, Inequity
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