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Katherine Stewart: The Racist, Fundamentalist Roots of the Attack on Public Schools

By dianeravitch
July 31, 2017 //
25

Katherine Stewart, author of the book “The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children,” writes in the New York Times about the historical origins of attacks on democratic public schools.

When the DeVos crowd and rightwing think tanks refer to “government schools,” they are drawing their rhetoric from a dark and ugly history, tainted by racism, anti-Catholicism, and hatred of democracy itself.

Trump, DeVos, the religious right, and conservatives today promote “school choice” so children do not have to attend “government schools.” But where did this language come from?

She writes:

Before the Civil War, the South was largely free of public schools. That changed during Reconstruction, and when it did, a former Confederate Army chaplain and a leader of the Southern Presbyterian Church, Robert Lewis Dabney, was not happy about it. An avid defender of the biblical “righteousness” of slavery, Dabney railed against the new public schools. In the 1870s, he inveighed against the unrighteousness of taxing his “oppressed” white brethren to provide “pretended education to the brats of black paupers.” For Dabney, the root of the evil in “the Yankee theory of popular state education” was democratic government itself, which interfered with the liberty of the slaver South.

One of the first usages of the phrase “government schools” occurs in the work of an avid admirer of Dabney’s, the Presbyterian theologian A. A. Hodge. Less concerned with black paupers than with immigrant papist hordes, Hodge decided that the problem lay with public schools’ secular culture. In 1887, he published an influential essay painting “government schools” as “the most appalling enginery for the propagation of anti-Christian and atheistic unbelief, and of antisocial nihilistic ethics, individual, social and political, which this sin-rent world has ever seen.”

But it would be a mistake to see this strand of critique of “government schools” as a curiosity of America’s sectarian religious history. In fact, it was present at the creation of the modern conservative movement, when opponents of the New Deal welded free-market economics onto Bible-based hostility to the secular-democratic state. The key figure was an enterprising Congregationalist minister, James W. Fifield Jr., who resolved during the Depression to show that Christianity itself proved “big government” was the enemy of progress.

Drawing heavily on donations from oil, chemical and automotive tycoons, Fifield was a founder of a conservative free-market organization, Spiritual Mobilization, that brought together right-wing economists and conservative religious voices — created a template for conservative think tanks. Fifield published the work of midcentury libertarian thinkers Ludwig von Mises and his disciple Murray Rothbard and set about convincing America’s Protestant clergy that America was a Christian nation in which government must be kept from interfering with the expression of God’s will in market economics.

Someone who found great inspiration in Fifield’s work, and who contributed to his flagship publication, Faith and Freedom, was the Calvinist theologian Rousas J. Rushdoony. An admirer, too, of both Hodge and Dabney, Rushdoony began to advocate a return to “biblical” law in America, or “theonomy,” in which power would rest only on a spiritual aristocracy with a direct line to God — and a clear understanding of God’s libertarian economic vision.

Rushdoony took the attack on modern democratic government right to the schoolhouse door. His 1963 book, “The Messianic Character of American Education,” argued that the “government school” represented “primitivism” and “chaos.” Public education, he said, “basically trains women to be men” and “has leveled its guns at God and family.”

These were not merely abstract academic debates. The critique of “government schools” passed through a defining moment in the aftermath of the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954, when orders to desegregate schools in the South encountered heavy resistance from white Americans. Some districts shut down public schools altogether; others promoted private “segregation academies” for whites, often with religious programming, to be subsidized with tuition grants and voucher schemes. Dabney would surely have approved.

Religious fundamentalists and evangelicals today have picked up the use of the term “government schools.” DeVos funds the leading fundamentalist organizations that see the public schools as godless. Religious groups are suing in states like Indiana to allow religious activities within the public schools. Secularism is their enemy.

When these people talk about “government schools,” they want you to think of an alien force, and not an expression of democratic purpose. And when they say “freedom,” they mean freedom from democracy itself.

The advocates of “school choice” bask in this tradition. Recall that Reed Hastings, founder of Netflix, looked forward to the day when there were no more elected school boards. Advocates for private management of schools funded with public money–such as ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council)–hail mayoral control, state takeovers, and privatization, anything to undermine and destroy democratic control of public schools.

Remember this history. It matters.

Categories ALEC, Democracy, History, Racism, Religion

Rob Reich of Stanford: Big Philanthropy Empowers Plutocrats

By dianeravitch
July 25, 2017 //
39

Rob Reich,Director of the Center for Rthics in Society at Stanford University, warns that big money is using the guise of philanthropy to advance their personal agenda and bypass democratic institutions.

https://qz.com/1035084/philanthropists-dont-deserve-our-gratitude-says-a-stanford-ethicist/

“Exceptionally wealthy people aren’t a likeable demographic, but they have an easy way to boost personal appeal: Become an exceptionally wealthy philanthropist. When the rich use their money to support a good cause, we’re compelled to compliment their generosity and praise their selfless work.

“This is entirely the wrong response, according to Rob Reich, director of the Center for Ethics in Society at Stanford University.
Big philanthropy is, he says, “the odd encouragement of a plutocratic voice in a democratic society.” By offering philanthropists nothing but gratitude, we allow a huge amount of power to go unchecked.

“Philanthropy, if you define it as the deployment of private wealth for some public influence, is an exercise of power. In a democratic society, power deserves scrutiny,” he adds.

“A philanthropic foundation is a form of unaccountable power quite unlike any other organization in society. Government is at least somewhat beholden to voters, and private companies must contend with marketplace competition and the demands of shareholders.
But until the day that government services alleviate all human need, perhaps we should be willing to overlook the power dynamics of philanthropy—after all, surely charity in unchecked form is better than nothing?

“In extreme situations, such as a major disaster, Reich is supportive of donations from philanthropic organizations. But he’s strongly against private donors providing public goods on a longer-term basis, which he says contributes to a cycle whereby the state expects to provide less and philanthropists are relied on to pay for more and more. And a democratically elected government should be a far better provider of long-term services than wealthy individuals.”

That is precisely the reason that Bridge International Academies, the for-profit provider of low-cost schools in Africa is doing harm: it enables the state to do less and to shirk its responsibility to provide free, universal public education to all.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Democracy, Ethics

Jennifer Berkshire: The Public Rejects DeVos-ALEC Agenda

By dianeravitch
July 21, 2017 //
2

Jennifer Berkshire asks a crucial question: Just how far right can Betsy DeVos go before the public rises up to quash her extremist agenda?

Never in modern history has there been a more unpopular, more polarizing Cabinet member. She is unpopular because her goal of defunding public education and showering public funds on religious and private schools is unpopular.

To understand what DeVos wants, you need only look at what ALEC wants. Arizona tops the ALEC report card, because it is the Wild West of school choice. Whereas Massachusetts is usually considered the best state in the nation for education quality and excellent teachers, it ranks far behind Arizona on the ALEC report card, at #32. To ALEC and DeVos, Arizona is #1, despite its low graduation rate (25 points below that of Massachusetts), its teacher shortage, and its perennially underfunded public schools. You see, Arizona has more choice than Massachusetts, and choice is a far higher goal to ALEC and DeVos than school quality.

The DeVos-ALEC project (shared by the Koch brothers and others on the fringe right) is the destruction of not just public schools and unions, but of the middle class and the American Dream of social mobility.

“DeVos wasn’t listed among the ALEC headliners this year, a line-up heavy on conservative has-beens like Newt Gingrich, William J. Bennett and Jim DeMint. But among this crowd she’s regarded as a conquering heroine. That’s because the right-wing in Michigan just realized a decades-long dream and a top priority for the DeVos family: not only did they succeed in making Michigan, the cradle of industrial unionism, a right-to-work state, they also killed teacher pensions. New teachers in the Mitten state, where teacher salaries dropped for the last five years in a row, will now fund their own retirement. ALEC called the move a win for teachers and taxpayers, but didn’t mention the part where taxpayers will have to cough up at least $255 million to “fix” a problem that the anti-public school crowd largely created. Ending teacher pensions, one of the last remaining benefits the state’s once-powerful teachers unions could offer their members, will only hasten the unions’ demise. In the words of the old Mastercard commercial: “priceless.”

“In a new book that examines the work of ALEC and other corporate lobbies in all fifty states (“The One Percent Solution: How Corporations Are Remaking America One State at a Time“), economist Gordon Lafer argues that the singular fixation upon crushing teachers unions is about much more than mere money. In virtually every community, schools represent the largest employer, providing something that is increasingly underheard of these days: decent wages, good benefits and the prospect of a retirement that doesn’t involve collecting cans. The presence of these large employers—schools, public universities, hospitals—raises the expectations of the public about what’s possible, Lafer argues. “ALEC’s vision of the future is actually really bleak,” Lafer told me recently. “That’s why so much of their legislative focus is on limiting what people are entitled to, especially in education.” The relentless effort to rid the world of teachers pensions, says Lafer, is also about lowering the expectations of everyone else.

“ALEC’s agenda for remaking public education in all 50 states can be distilled down to a single word: unpopular. Actually, make that two words: extremely unpopular. There is no constituency for blowing up the schools, swelling class sizes, replacing teachers with tablets and lowering the standards of who can teach. There is no real constituency for shifting money away from public schools to private religious institutions, which is why ALEC-backed voucher programs in states like Wisconsin and Indiana mostly benefit students who’ve never attended public schools. The key to enacting a deeply unpopular agenda, as any ALEC-ster worth her salt can attest, is to keep the public as far away from it as possible, which is why DeVos’ hat tip to local control in her speech was so laughable. The states where ALEC has come closest to realizing its dream of defunding schools, shifting public monies into private coffers and crushing teacher unions are also the ones where efforts to preempt local democracy and shrink the voting franchise are in full flower.”

Berkshire doesn’t let Democrats off the hook. Party leaders have been enablers of the attacks on public schools (think Arne Duncan, Andrew Cuomo, Dannell Malloy, Rahm Emanuel, Cory Booker). Berkshire writes:

“The irony is, of course, that the school privatization experiment that’s well underway in Denver has been the work largely of “progressive” education reformers, Democrats for Education Reform chief among them. The local teachers union is weak and getting weaker, not because of DeVos and the right wing but because of anti-union Democrats. DeVos isn’t a fan of the Denver model—charter choice, in her view, is a weak substitute for the real deal: publicly funded vouchers for private religious schools. Her visit to Denver shone a spotlight on ALEC’s extreme education agenda. Now it’s up to Democrats who’ve embraced school privatization themselves to explain how they’re different.”

Charters were on the ballot last November in Massachusetts, where the public rejected their expansion by a resounding margin of 62-38%.

Vouchers have been put on state ballots many times. The public has never supported them. DeVos and her husband sponsored a voucher referendum in Michigan in 2000, and it was overwhelmingly defeated, by a vote of 69-31%. The most powerful antidote to the DeVos privatization project is the vote. Like the Wicked Witch in the Wizard of Oz, who melted, her libertarian dream dissolves when tested at the ballot box.

Parents and educators in Arizona are gathering signatures to throw water on their legislature’s efforts to expand vouchers. They need to collect 120,000 signatures to do so (the legal requirement is 75,000, but organizers know that they must have far more than the minimum to withstand legal challenges.)

DeVos and ALEC threaten our democracy, and the only tool that can beat them is the method of democracy: the vote.

If you don’t like what DeVos wants to do to your schools, get active. Join the Network for Public Education. Join your state and local citizens’ groups (NPE can connect you). Practice the arts of democracy to save democracy. Participate. Vote.

Categories ALEC, Betsy DeVos, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Privatization

A Sign Once Sold in Gift Shop of the Holocaust Musem

By dianeravitch
July 12, 2017 //
17

museum

Sound familiar?

Read it again.

Think about it.

Which side are you on?

Snopes says the poster was once available in the gift shop of the Holocaust Museum.

Snopes says:

The list was originally created by Laurence Britt in 2003, for an article published by Free Inquiry magazine (a publication for secular humanist commentary and analysis). While subsequent postings of the list often attribute it to “Dr. Laurence Britt,” the author said that he was not actually a doctor (nor did he claim to be). Britt himself said that he could be more accurately described as an amateur historian

It quotes this note about the poster:

Laurence W. Britt wrote about the common signs of fascism in April 2003, after researching seven fascists regimes. Those were Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany, Benito Mussolini’s Italy, Francisco Franco’s Spain, Antontio de Oliveira Salazar’s Portual, George Papadopoulos’s Greece, August Pinochet’s Chile, Mohamed Suharto’s Indonesia. These signs resonate with the political and economic direction of the United states under Bush/Cheney. Get involved in reversing this anti-democratic direction while you still can!

Categories Democracy, Evil, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Religion, Separation of church and state

A Republican Staffer Who Blew the Whistle on the Cult Worship of the Rich

By dianeravitch
July 10, 2017 //
26

As you know, I was for many years involved in the rightwing corporate reform made cement. As I realized that the real end game was not to “reform” public schools but to privatize them, I became a skeptic. Then as I saw that all of their strategies were failing, I jumped ship. I am often asked why I changed my mind, and I try to explain that I realized that the reform movement was a hoax, with no evidence to support its strategies.

It turns out that I was not alone.

Mike Lofgren was a top-level staffer for Republicans in Congress.

From Wikipedia: “From 1995 to 2004, he was budget analyst for national security on the majority staff of the House Budget Committee. From 2005 until his retirement in 2011, Lofgren was the chief analyst for military spending on the Senate Budget Committee.”

After his retirement, he wrote books and articles about the weakness and corruption of both parties when campaign contributors dangled big money.

“In September 2011, Lofgren published an essay entitled Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult on the website Truthout. In it he explains why he retired when he did, writing that he was “appalled at the headlong rush of Republicans to embrace policies that are deeply damaging to this country’s future; and contemptuous of the feckless, craven incompetence of Democrats in their half-hearted attempts to stop them.” He charged that both major American political parties are “rotten captives to corporate loot,” but that while Democrats are merely weak and out of touch, the Republican Party is “becoming more like an apocalyptic cult.” He particularly described Republicans as caring exclusively about their rich donors; being psychologically predisposed toward war; and pandering to the anti-intellectual, science-hostile, religious fundamentalist fringe. Lofgren wrote that the Tea Party is “filled with lunatics” and that lawmakers used the “routine” vote to raise the debt limit—which Congress has done 87 times since the end of World War II—to create “an entirely artificial fiscal crisis.”[3] The essay received widespread media attention because of Lofgren’s status as a long-term, respected Republican civil servant. Truthout reported the piece received “over a million views.”[4][5][6][7][8]

Lofgren called the reaction to his essay “bewildering,” saying he wrote it not to settle scores, but because he felt he had a uniquely privileged view of the machinery of government which Americans deserved to know about. He added that he’d had “a good career” and no personal problems on Capitol Hill.[9]

In 2012, Lofgren published the book The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless and the Middle Class Got Shafted, receiving a starred review from Booklist, which described the book as a “pungent, penetrating insider polemic.”[10] The Washington Post called it “forceful, hard-hitting and seductive.”[11] “I wrote the book,” he said in a 2012 bookstore appearance, “because I am a concerned citizen.”[12]”

Check his Wikipedia entries for links to his writings.

This is an article he wrote in 2012 called “The Revolt of the Rich.”

Here is a brief excerpt:

“Being in the country but not of it is what gives the contemporary American super-rich their quality of being abstracted and clueless. Perhaps that explains why Mitt Romney’s regular-guy anecdotes always seem a bit strained. I discussed this with a radio host who recounted a story about Robert Rubin, former secretary of the Treasury as well as an executive at Goldman Sachs and CitiGroup. Rubin was being chauffeured through Manhattan to reach some event whose attendees consisted of the Great and the Good such as himself. Along the way he encountered a traffic jam, and on arriving to his event—late—he complained to a city functionary with the power to look into it. “Where was the jam?” asked the functionary. Rubin, who had lived most of his life in Manhattan, a place of east-west numbered streets and north-south avenues, couldn’t tell him. The super-rich who determine our political arrangements apparently inhabit another, more refined dimension.

“To some degree the rich have always secluded themselves from the gaze of the common herd; their habit for centuries has been to send their offspring to private schools. But now this habit is exacerbated by the plutocracy’s palpable animosity towards public education and public educators, as Michael Bloomberg has demonstrated. To the extent public education “reform” is popular among billionaires and their tax-exempt foundations, one suspects it is as a lever to divert the more than $500 billion dollars in annual federal, state, and local education funding into private hands—meaning themselves and their friends. What Halliburton did for U.S. Army logistics, school privatizers will do for public education. A century ago, at least we got some attractive public libraries out of Andrew Carnegie. Noblesse oblige like Carnegie’s is presently lacking among our seceding plutocracy.

“In both world wars, even a Harvard man or a New York socialite might know the weight of an army pack. Now the military is for suckers from the laboring classes whose subprime mortgages you just sliced into CDOs and sold to gullible investors in order to buy your second Bentley or rustle up the cash to get Rod Stewart to perform at your birthday party. The sentiment among the super-rich towards the rest of America is often one of contempt rather than noblesse….

“Since the first ziggurats rose in ancient Babylonia, the so-called forces of order, stability, and tradition have feared a revolt from below. Beginning with Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre after the French Revolution, a whole genre of political writings—some classical liberal, some conservative, some reactionary—has propounded this theme. The title of Ortega y Gasset’s most famous work, The Revolt of the Masses, tells us something about the mental atmosphere of this literature.

“But in globalized postmodern America, what if this whole vision about where order, stability, and a tolerable framework for governance come from, and who threatens those values, is inverted? What if Christopher Lasch came closer to the truth in The Revolt of the Elites, wherein he wrote, “In our time, the chief threat seems to come from those at the top of the social hierarchy, not the masses”? Lasch held that the elites—by which he meant not just the super-wealthy but also their managerial coat holders and professional apologists—were undermining the country’s promise as a constitutional republic with their prehensile greed, their asocial cultural values, and their absence of civic responsibility.

“Lasch wrote that in 1995. Now, almost two decades later, the super-rich have achieved escape velocity from the gravitational pull of the very society they rule over. They have seceded from America.

“Mike Lofgren served 16 years on the Republican staff of the House and Senate Budget Committees. He has just published The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted.”

Categories Billionaires, Democracy

Ed Berger: The Stealth Coup to Destroy the American Dream

By dianeravitch
July 10, 2017 //
8

Ed Berger, a retired teacher who lives in Arizona and is active in the struggle to save public schools, has written a powerful post about the billionaire-funded movement to destroy our democracy.

It begins like this. I urge you to read it all:

“Within the core of our freedoms, lie the avenues powerful individuals use to take away the rights of citizens and the controls of government designed and evolved to serve all. Americans are now aware of the reality that subversive forces have made excessive headway in destroying our rights.

“What has been allowed is the incursion of an Oligarchy: The few exploiting the many. We are witnessing the theft of human rights through the infiltration of what were meant to be representative systems within a constitutionally defined government.

“My first introduction to those who want absolute power was through studies of The Robber Barons in America in the 19th Century, and then in the 20th Century, the way Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin took total control of their countries. I learned of an American, Fred Koch, who became wealthy via Russian and German contracts and worked with Stalin and then Hitler as WWII began. He was convinced that absolute dictators were necessary to create strong nations. He came home to change the U.S government into a mechanism which would allow him to acquire power and wealth by any means. His tenets were: Destroy public education. Destroy any kind of worker representation. Control the prison system. Destroy the democratic process by distancing or removing undesirable citizen involvement in decision-making. End government interference in the rights of individuals like himself to create his own empire.

“Koch’s ideology was embedded in the goals of the John Birch Society, founded in the late 50s by Fred and ten others. It was one of many organizations spawned or infiltrated by Koch. Be aware of subversive groups founded by Koch and his sons and other powerful billionaires. Groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) which writes legislation supporting Koch’s political and economic agendas. Know the goals of think tank groups established and funded to carry out Fred’s vision, these include: The Freedom School, the CATO Institute, and Americans For Prosperity among others. Be aware of how Foundations and not-for-profit tax avoidance mechanisms allowed the billionaires to finance their think thanks and other subversive organizations.

“The Koch machine gained the support of other libertarian arch conservatives. Richard Mellon Scaife, Harry and Lynda Bradley, John M. Olin, the Coors brewing family, and the DeVos family, to name some of the big supporters recruited by the Fred Koch and his sons David and Charles. All had acquired vast fortunes from activities that exploited citizens and nature. All were against any type of government that limited their rip, rape, and run business philosophies.

“In the last few years, add the names Bezos, Broad, Cohen, Singer, Schwarzman, Adelson, Hendricks, Mercer, and perhaps the worst of the lot, the Waltons. The Koch ideology also appeals to radical splinter groups of the Christian conservative right which is obsessed with the takeover of the US Government and the dismantling of the government. Understanding this unholy marriage explains why so many Tea Party extremists support Koch and the coup.”

Categories ALEC, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Dark Money, Democracy, Inequality, Injustice, Privatization, Walton Foundation

Indianapolis: As School Board Plans to Close Public Schools, Interlopers Arrive to Open New Charters

By dianeravitch
July 9, 2017 //
19

I wrote a few posts last week (see here and here) about the devastation of public schools in Indianapolis by corporate reformers. Their short term goal is to close public schools and replace them with privately managed charters. In the meanwhile, they are eliminating the neighborhood high school concept and requiring students to choose a high school based on its programs, not its proximity to home. They are preparing young people to be consumers and busting up any sense of community. The long term goal is the death of public education in Indianapolis.

The major movers of corporate reform in Indianapolis are the Mind Trust, which leads the privatization movement, abetted by Stand for Children, which brings in big bucks to buy elections for the corporate reform plan.

Remember, this is Mike Pence’s state, where rightwing extremists run the state.

Now comes another addition to the reform firmament of community disruption.

“A pair of Chicagoans are moving to Indianapolis in the next few weeks, and they are bringing with them a sense of urgency that defines the best of what you can find in many schools and classrooms. It’s an urgency that is critical for so many children who face immense challenges and the risk of lost potential.

“Deeply concerned about children locked in poverty, Jacob Allen and Marie Dandie founded a nonprofit after-school program in Chicago four years ago. They built pilotED around the concepts of civic engagement and a belief in the broader benefits of helping students develop a pride and belief in themselves. They peppered the curriculum with lessons centered on the lives and neighborhoods of the students they served.”

Allen and Dandie say their hallmark is “urgency.” Apparently no teachers or principals in Indianapolis public schools have that sense of urgency that this pair will bring with them to Indianapolis.

Not surprisingly, the two are TFA alums. They were recently recognized by a Forbes on its “30 Under 30” list in education. If they are under 30, how long have they been educators? How long did they stick with the school they started in Chicago?

Disruption is the hallmark of the Mind ztrust. It just got a gift of $7 million from the Lily Endowment to keep on with its plans for more disruption and innovation. Its goal is privatization of public education in Indianapolis. The Mind Trust is an affront to democracy.

Categories Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Indianapolis, Privatization

Nancy Bailey: Celebrate This Day By Celebrating Our Public Schools, a Mainstay of Democracy

By dianeravitch
July 4, 2017 //
11

Nancy Bailey dedicates her post to the late, beloved Joan Kramer.

“On this 4th of July, when we celebrate America’s freedoms, it’s a perfect time to discuss our free public schools, and where we are with them when it comes to school reform. It’s important to understand that our public schools have a new threat, as I will explain below.

“Public schools, with all their faults, are the only truly democratic institution we own “together” as a country. Our public schools open their doors to all children.

“Teachers take on the challenge of working with the oppressed, the poor, immigrants, and even those with the most severe disabilities. Collectively, such care of our children will lead to the greater good of our country and the world.

“Local school boards, elected by the people, give all of us a voice as to how our schools are run. This is a democratic process threatened with extinction because of school privatization forces.

“If you don’t like what your public school is doing, you can go to the school board meeting and make your voice heard. If you don’t know how to help your public schools, you can sign up to be a volunteer.

“A public school not only reflects the community that surrounds it, it is an anchor to bring people together.

“Efforts for us to hold onto our public schools are in jeopardy today, and they have been in jeopardy for many years. Business has staked a claim on our public schools. There’s money to be made using our tax dollars.”

Categories Civil Rights, Democracy, Freedom, Privatization, Supporting public schools

Urgent Note to Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan: Hands Off Our Schools and Our Children!

By dianeravitch
June 30, 2017 //
70

Education Week reports on the plans of billionaires Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan to redesign American education. They have launched something called the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative–or CZI Initiative–to carry out their plan for “personalized learning”‘( I.e., “depersonalized learning”) to remake education into whatever they think in their limited experience is best. They have hired James Shelton–formerly of the Gates Foundation, formerly in charge of Arne Duncan’s failed SIG program (the School Improvement Grants part of Race to the Top, which federal evaluations found produced nothing of value).

What’s wrong with CZI? First, neither of its founders understands that public education is a democratic institution, in which parents and communities make decisions about their children’s education. It is not a start-up or a venture fund or an app. Did someone elect them to redesign American education without telling the public? What arrogance! Why don’t they pick a District and ask for permission to demonstrate their vision before they spend hundreds of millions to lobby for it?

Second, if they want to help children, why don’t they open a health clinic in proximity to every school that needs one? Dr. Chan is a pediatrician. Children’s health is something she knows about. Mark knows code. Children don’t need code. They need care.

Third, the article describes this as a “high-stakes venture,” but there are zero stakes for Chan and Zuckerberg. If they drop $5 billion, so what? Who will hold them accountable when they get bored and move on?

Why don’t they do what is needed, instead of foisting their half-baked ideas on the nation’s children?

And last, it is beyond obnoxious that they dare to call their tech-based approach “whole-child personalized learning,” which is an oxymoron. What part of “whole-child learning” happens on a computer?

Where are their plans to feed the hungry, heal the sick, create opportunities for play and imagination to run free?

Sad to say, this is a vainglorious and anti-democratic imposition of C and Z’s ideas on people who have nothing to say about it. The one-tenth of 1% toying with our children and our schools, for their enjoyment.

An excerpt from the Education Week article?:

“Pediatrician Priscilla Chan and Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg are gearing up to invest hundreds of millions of dollars a year in a new vision of “whole-child personalized learning,” with the aim of dramatically expanding the scope and scale of efforts to provide every student with a customized education.

“The emerging strategy represents a high-stakes effort to bridge longstanding divides between competing visions for improving the nation’s schools. Through their recently established Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the billionaire couple intends to support the development of software that might help teachers better recognize and respond to each student’s academic needs-while also supporting a holistic approach to nurturing children’s social, emotional, and physical development.

“The man charged with marrying those two philosophies is former Deputy U.S. Secretary of Education James H. Shelton, now the initiative’s president of education.

“We’ve got to dispel this notion that personalized learning is just about technology,” Shelton said in an exclusive interview with Education Week. “In fact, it is about understanding students, giving them agency, and letting them do work that is engaging and exciting.”

“To advance that vision, Shelton has at his disposal a massive fortune and a wide array of levers to pull.

“Chan and Zuckerberg created CZI as a vehicle for directing 99 percent of their Facebook shares-worth an estimated $45 billion-to causes related to education and science, through a combination of charitable giving and investment.

“The initiative is structured as a limited-liability corporation, rather than a traditional foundation. That means CZI will be able to make philanthropic donations, invest in for-profit companies, lobby for favored policies and legislation, and directly support candidates for elected office ­ ­-all with minimal public-reporting requirements.

“For now, Shelton said, CZI is “one of the best-resourced startups in the world, but still a startup,” with fewer than 20 people on its education team.

“In the near future, though, he expects the initiative to give out “hundreds of millions of dollars per year” for education-related causes. Such a figure would place the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative among the highest-giving education-focused philanthropies in the country.

“Within five years, Shelton said in the June 22 interview, CZI’s work should have helped launch a “meaningful number” of schools and learning environments “where kids are performing dramatically better, and feel more engaged, and teachers feel more engaged in the work that they’re doing.”

“Chan, 32, and Zuckerberg, 33, also have embraced the idea of a long horizon for the initiative’s work, saying their support for personalized learning will extend over decades.

“From the outset, however, the couple’s attempt to engineer big changes in the U.S. education system faces significant obstacles.

“Personalized learning” was an amorphous concept even before this new attempt to integrate it with equally hard-to-define “whole child” strategies. It remains unclear how Chan, Zuckerberg, and Shelton intend to balance the organization’s support for research and development with their desire to quickly bring to scale new products and approaches, many of which have limited or no evidence to support their effectiveness.

“And CZI won’t commit to publicly disclosing all of its financial and political activity or to making the source code for its software open and accessible to the larger education community. That stance has stirred complaints about a lack of transparency.”

Categories Billionaires, Childhood, Creativity, Democracy, Disruption, Technology

The Corporate Raid on Public Schools in Indianapolis: School Board Election Corrupted by Dark Money

By dianeravitch
June 28, 2017 //
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At the recent school board meeting of Indianapolis Public Schools, Professor Jim Scheurich of Indiana University-Purdue University in Indianapolis got up to speak. The story he tells is similar to what happened in Denver, where Stand for Children, DFER, and other conduits for anonymous donors bought every seat on the elected school board, swamping the opposition with cash they could not match.

This was his testimony:

“My name is Dr. Jim Scheurich.

“I have been a professor of education for 25 years, first at the University of Texas at Austin and then at Texas A&M University and now at IUPUI.

“Throughout those 25 years, I have studied school success in urban districts, even winning a couple of major national awards as a scholar.

“Based on having studied some of the best urban districts in the country, I would have to say that the IPS school board and administration are among the lowest quality I have seen.

“This conclusion is particularly evident in the many negative issues that have arisen in the school closing processes and decisions.

“What I want to address about these negative issues is how we came to have this particular school board that follows an agenda that consistently disregards what the community wants, like closing legacy high schools.

“Up until 2010, an ordinary citizen of Indianapolis could win a school board seat for $3-5,000.
Starting in 2012, Stand for Children and the Mind Trust provided over $50,000 each for their candidates. Over the last 3 elections, Stand for Children and the Mind Trust have provided around $1.5 million to elect all but one school board member, Elizabeth Gore.

“This means that six of the seven board members became board members through the purchase of our local democracy. This means they owe their allegiance to the agenda of Stand for Children and the Mind Trust and NOT to the Indianapolis community.

“It seems to me that the big money election of these six board members is certainly anti-community and anti-democracy.

“But this is not the end of this scary story.

“The $1.5 million spent on the last three elections flowed through Stand for Children that used a tax designation, 501c4, to hide the source of that money and the ways they spend it.

“Why would Stand for Children and the Mind Trust try to hide the sources and spending of all of this money if they are as community oriented as they say they are?

“What they don’t want you to know is that much of this big money is coming from wealthy individuals and organizations from all around the country.

“Because then you might ask why do wealthy folks who may never set foot in Indianapolis want to buy our school board?

“You also might ask why the same wealthy folks from around the country are doing exactly the same agenda in 35 other urban centers.

“Why are wealthy folks from around the country purchasing so many urban school boards? Why are these 35 purchased school boards following the same agenda, like closing legacy high schools and supporting the opening of charter high schools?

“We in Indianapolis do not want to follow some national agenda created by wealthy individuals and organizations from outside Indianapolis.

“Instead we want to follow an agenda that is Indianapolis centered and focuses on the voices and needs of ordinary Indianapolis people of all races and incomes.

“And, thus, what we don’t need is any closing of our legacy high schools.”

Categories Billionaires, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Education Industry, Fraud, Indianapolis, Privatization, Stand for Children
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