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Bill Phillis: Betsy DeVos is Clueless about the Common Good

By dianeravitch
May 19, 2017 //
34

Bill Phillis read Betsy DeVos’s prepared remarks at the Brookings Institution and it occurred to him that she literally doesn’t know what she is talking about. Bill is a retired deputy superintendent of schools for the state of Ohio and he works tirelessly to protect public schools against Governor Kasich and the Ohio legislature’s love of privatization.

Betsy DeVos, speaking at the Brookings Institution, said that we must think about funding individual children, not institutions or buildings in order to serve the greater public good. That logic would suggest that each citizen should be provided a tax voucher to purchase personal security while police departments and other safety forces are being dismantled. Why not abandon the Brookings Institution and provide some kind of voucher to allow Brookings employees to be paid to freelance their services?

DeVos’ answer to every question is “more choice” outside the real public system at taxpayer’s expense. Her view of public common good seems jaded by her anti-public school craze for choice. It appears she does not understand that each state has a constitutional provision requiring public education as an institution. It is through the institution of the public common school that the public common good is nurtured.

People organize states and nations for the common good. Tax funds are collected for public goods and services, e.g. roads, public safety, national security, education, etc. The public funds do not belong to individual citizens as an incentive to select private choices. Public institutions provide for current and future citizens. Individual choices relate to the here and now-not to future long-term benefits to society.

Government must not be the servant of special interests. The very idea of a commonwealth-the people collectively-is antithetical to the use of public funds for private purposes.

Even non-government groups, such as parent-teacher organizations, come together to promote common purposes. Local PTAs or PTOs raise funds for agreed upon projects. They don’t assign the funds to individual members for each to promote a project of their choice.

There are those who believe that a few unelected leaders should determine what constitutes the public good for all other citizens. Possibly, that philosophy is embraced by DeVos.

DeVos and those of her ilk are absolutely wrong that school choice promotes the public common good. It is time for all citizens to become engaged in ensuring public resources are used exclusively for the common good.

William L. Phillis | Ohio Coalition for Equity & Adequacy of School Funding | 614.228.6540 | ohioeanda@sbcglobal.net| http://www.ohiocoalition.org

Categories Betsy DeVos, Democracy, School Choice

Illinois: An Urgent Message from Chicago Teachers

By dianeravitch
May 17, 2017 //
6

The Chicago Teachers Union called on public-spirited citizens across the state to urge the State Senate to vote for legislation on behalf of Chicago’s students, teachers, and public schools.

The end of the session in Springfield draws nigh. Please make calls to Springfield today & tomorrow for public education, teachers, (Chicago and the rest of the state too), and for progressive state revenue, 1-217-782-2000:

From the CTU:

“Since 2010, the Chicago Teachers Union has recognized that our path forward—while not easy—is clear. Our school communities must have a different governing structure, progressive revenue for a new funding formula and a stronger voice for educators in order to secure the schools Chicago children deserve.

“We are working to unwind harmful legislative actions that have created a second-tier school district, and resulted in declining revenue and corrupt governance. Over the past month, several CTU-backed bills have passed out committee and need your support to pass out of the House chamber.

“Once again, the bill to decommission the unelected and unaccountable Illinois State Charter School Commission—HB768 (Welch)—passed out of the House with a vote of 61-46. Call the Senate

“The majority of the members—63-54— of the Illinois House of Representatives agree that Chicago Teachers deserve their voice. The House advanced HB1253 (Tabares) to the Senate. The bill will restore the full collective bargaining rights of Chicago educators. In 1995, a Republican-controlled Illinois General Assembly along with a Republican governor enacted legislation that was designed to undermine collective bargaining rights for teachers only in the city of Chicago. This legislation contributed greatly to oversized classrooms; the loss of experienced teachers; the decline of Black and Latino teachers through runaway privatization. Call the Senate

“HB3720 (Harper) is a tax increment finance (TIF) reform bill that will bring true transparency to TIFs and provide funds for special education and trauma services in our schools. The bill passed the House with a veto proof majorityof 75-39. Call the Senate

“SB1719 (Senator Daniel Biss) is a bill that will establish a privilege tax on private equity and hedge funds. These millionaires and billionaires earn about $4.8 billion per year in under-taxed income. SB1719 will allow the state of Illinois to capture the revenue lost through this loophole and provide an estimated $500 million per year.

“From other teacher and grass roots groups:

“A) HB 3393 – Close Rauner’s Tax Loopholes – specifically the Carried Interest Loophole Call both the House and the Senate, Madigan has blocked this by placing it in the Rules Committee – so please call his office as well.

“B) HB 1774 This is for the Elected School Board for Chicago – we must move this bill but Madigan stopped it in the House and put it into the Rules Committee – Call the House and Madigan to get this moving.

“C) HB 3567 Cap the expansion of charters in financially strapped school districts – yahoo! Madigan has blocked this one as well so please call the House and Madigan.”

Virus-free. http://www.avg.com

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Chicago, Democracy, Unions

Peter Dreier: Who Are the Corporate Plutocrats Trying to Defeat Steve Zimmer in Los Angeles?

By dianeravitch
May 14, 2017 //
1

Peter Dreier, professor of political science at Occidental College in Los Angeles, warns that a cabal of billionaires are trying to defeat Steve Zimmer in order to take control of the public schools and privatize them. The vote on May 16 is in the national spotlight.

Can a handful of billionaires buy control of the nation’s second largest school district?

Before naming names, Dreier writes:

Some of America’s most powerful corporate plutocrats want to take over the Los Angeles school system but Steve Zimmer, a former teacher and feisty school board member, is in their way. So they’ve hired Nick Melvoin to get rid of him. No, he’s not a hired assassin like the kind on “The Sopranos.” He’s a lawyer who the billionaires picked to defeat Zimmer.

The so-called “Independent” campaign for Melvoin — funded by big oil, big tobacco, Walmart, Enron, and other out-of-town corporations and billionaires — has included astonishingly ugly, deceptive, and false attack ads against Zimmer.

This morning (Friday) the Los Angeles Times reported that “Outside spending for Melvoin (and against Zimmer) has surpassed $4.65 million.” Why? Because he doesn’t agree with the corporatization of our public schools. Some of their donations have gone directly to Melvoin’s campaign, but much of it has been funneled through a corporate front group called the California Charter School Association.

To try to hoodwink voters, the billionaires invented another front group with the same initials as the well-respected Parent Teacher Association, but they are very different organizations. They called it the “Parent Teacher Alliance.” Pretty clever, huh? But this is not the real PTA, which does not get involved with elections. In fact, the real PTA has demanded that this special interest PAC change their name and called the billionaires’ campaign Zimmer “misleading,” “deceptive practices,” and “false advertising.”

These out-of-town billionaire-funded groups can pay for everything from phone-banks, to mailers, to television ads. Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez described the billionaires’ campaign to defeat Zimmer, which includes sending mails filled with outrageous lies about Zimmer, as “gutter politics.”

As a result, the race for the District 4 seat — which stretches from the Westside to the West San Fernando Valley — is ground zero in the battle over the corporate take-over of public education. The outcome of next Tuesday’s (May 16) election has national implications in terms of the billionaires’ battle to reconstruct public education in the corporate mold.

The contest between Melvoin and Zimmer is simple. Who should run our schools? Who knows what’s best for students? Out-of-town billionaires or parents, teachers, and community residents?

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democracy, Los Angeles, Privatization

Brave New World: What Links Trump, Brexit, Robert Mercer, Rupert Murdoch, and Steve Bannon?

By dianeravitch
May 13, 2017 //
28

This is an article in The Guardian that I will not attempt to summarize. What I will Di is urge you to read it. It is about money, power, and a coordinated attack on democracy. It is about data mining psychological warfare financed by a billionaire and used to win elections. It is about the use of technology to subvert democracy and empower a new, far-right elite.

Categories Data and Data Mining, Democracy, Technology

Rev. Barber Plans to Lead National Movement

By dianeravitch
May 11, 2017 //
15

The inspirational leader Rev. William Barber 11 is stepping down from his post as chair of the North Carolina NAACP to launch a national movement.

http://nypost.com/2017/05/11/naacp-leader-who-led-north-carolina-protest-movement-to-step-down/

His strong voice for moral strength, equal rights, dignity, courage in the face of adversity, and love is needed more than ever today.

Categories Civil Rights, Democracy, Equity, Freedom, Justice

Wendy Lecker: The War on Public Schools and the Public Good

By dianeravitch
May 10, 2017 //
5

Like Jan Resseger, Wendy Lecker paid tribute to the political philosopher Benjamin Barber. She acknowledged his work on behalf of democracy and the public good, which is currently under attack by a bipartisan coalition of corporate reformers.

She writes:

Political theorist Benjamin Barber, who died April 24, wrote about the importance of education as a public good. “Education not only speaks to the public, it is the means by which a public is forged.”

As he noted, education transforms individuals into responsible community members, first in their classrooms and ultimately in our democracy. Local school districts are also the basic units of democratic government.　

Michigan professor Marina Whitman recently noted that the essence of a public good is that it is non-excludable; i.e. all can partake, and non-rivalrous; i.e. giving one person the good does not diminish its availability to another.　

Some school reforms strengthen education as a public good; such as school finance reform, which seeks to ensure that all children have adequate educational resources.　
Unfortunately, the reforms pushed in the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations attack education as a public good. For example, choice — charters and vouchers — is a favorite policy of all three administrations. Choice operates on the excludable premise of “saving a few.”

In operation, choice makes education rivalrous. As a New York appellate court observed, diverting funds from public schools to charters ‘benefit a select few at the expense of the ‘common schools, wherein all the children of this State may be educated….’”　

Across this country, public money is diverted from public schools to charters with no consideration of need, quality or the impact on the majority of public school students. The result is invariably the creation of exclusive schools, out of the reach of voter oversight, at the expense of public schools that serve everyone.　

Charter advocates claimed charters would be superior without the constraints faced by local districts. However, after more than 20 years, charters are no better than public schools.

Moreover, they leave public schools without resources to serve the most vulnerable and communities disenfranchised by unelected school boards. 　
As Barber predicted, “What begins as an assault on bureaucratic rigidity becomes an assault on government and all things public … (destroying) a people’s right to govern themselves publicly … (and) to establish the conditions for the development of public citizens.” Reforms that gut public education attack democracy.

You will enjoy reading the full article, which appeared in the Stamford Advocate. Lecker goes into detail about the ways that charter schools are draining resources from public schools and causing fiscal distress to schools that accept all students.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democracy, Education Industry, Funding, Inequity, Injustice

Jan Resseger: A Tribute to Benjamin Barber, Philosopher of Democracy and the Common Good

By dianeravitch
May 10, 2017 //
17

Benjamin Barber was a political philosopher whose passion was the strengthening of civil society and democratic institutions. He died April 24.

Jan Resseger wrote a beautiful tribute to him, on the importance of public education and the danger of privatization. Her citations from his works are eloquent and powerful. Jan doesn’t mention that Barber criticized me in his 1992 book, which she quotes; I can tell you frankly, looking back, that he was on the right side of the culture wars of that era twenty-five years ago.

She writes, quoting his works:

“It is the peculiar toxicity of privatization ideology that it rationalizes corrosive private choosing as a surrogate for the public good. It enthuses about consumers as the new citizens who can do more with their dollars and euros and yen than they ever did with their votes. It associates the privileged market sector with liberty as private choice while it condemns democratic government as coercive.” (Consumed, p. 143)

“We are seduced into thinking that the right to choose from a menu is the essence of liberty, but with respect to relevant outcomes the real power, and hence the real freedom, is in the determination of what is on the menu. The powerful are those who set the agenda, not those who choose from the alternatives it offers. We select menu items privately, but we can assure meaningful menu choices only through public decision-making.” (Consumed, p. 139)

“Through vouchers we are able as individuals, through private choosing, to shape institutions and policies that are useful to our own interests but corrupting to the public goods that give private choosing its meaning. I want a school system where my kid gets the very best; you want a school system where your kid is not slowed down by those less gifted or less adequately prepared; she wants a school system where children whose ‘disadvantaged backgrounds’ (often kids of color) won’t stand in the way of her daughter’s learning; he (a person of color) wants a school system where he has the maximum choice to move his kid out of ‘failing schools’ and into successful ones. What do we get? The incomplete satisfaction of those private wants through a fragmented system in which individuals secede from the public realm, undermining the public system to which we can subscribe in common. Of course no one really wants a country defined by deep educational injustice and the surrender of a public and civic pedagogy whose absence will ultimately impact even our own private choices… Yet aggregating our private choices as educational consumers in fact yields an inegalitarian and highly segmented society in which the least advantaged are further disadvantaged as the wealthy retreat ever further from the public sector. As citizens, we would never consciously select such an outcome, but in practice what is good for ‘me,’ the educational consumer, turns out to be a disaster for ‘us’ as citizens and civic educators—and thus for me the denizen of an American commons (or what’s left of it)….” (Consumed, p. 132)

“This book admits no dichotomy between democracy and excellence, for the true democratic premise encompasses excellence: the acquired virtues and skills necessary to living freely, living democratically, and living well. It assumes that every human being, given half a chance, is capable of the self-government that is his or her natural right, and thus capable of acquiring the judgment, foresight, and knowledge that self-government demands. Not everyone can master string physics or string quartets, but everyone can master the conduct of his or her own life. Everyone can become a free and self-governing adult… Education need not begin with equally adept students, because education is itself the equalizer. Equality is achieved not by handicapping the swiftest, but by assuring the less advantaged a comparable opportunity. ‘Comparable’ here does not mean identical… Schooling is what allows math washouts to appreciate the contributions of math whizzes—and may one day help persuade them to allocate tax revenues for basic scientific research… The fundamental assumption of democratic life is not that we are all automatically capable of living both freely and responsibly, but that we are all potentially susceptible to education for freedom and responsibility. Democracy is less the enabler of education than education is the enabler of democracy.” (An Aristocracy of Everyone, pp. 13-14)

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Democracy, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, School Choice

Carol Burris: Three Problems with School Choice That Advocates Won’t Talk About

By dianeravitch
May 4, 2017 //
19

Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, wrote an analysis of the major problems with school choice that advocates refuse to address.

She begins by writing that privatized school choice directly threatens public education:

Privatized school choice is the public financing of private alternatives to public schools. Examples include charters run by corporate boards, private schools funded by vouchers, online learning charters and publicly subsidized home schooling. Then there are the disguised voucher plans such as Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, or ESAs, which give taxpayer money on debit cards to parents with little oversight as to how it is spent.

Privatized school choice, in its various forms, has been rapidly gaining ground in many of our states. The thinly veiled agenda of privatized choice is the destruction of public schools, which Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and her allies refer to as “government schools.”

What the privatizers never talk about is that every dollar that goes to school choice is taken away from public schools. To adjust for the loss of revenue, public schools have to lay off teachers and close down programs. So the great majority of students are injured so a few can attend a charter or use a voucher.

Voucher programs almost always begin small–targeted at poor children, or children with disabilities, or foster children, or military children–but then expand to apply to all students. Sometimes the privatizers admit that they are pursuing a camel’s nose-under-the-tent strategy, but usually they claim to want “only this small program.”

Unaccountable, unsupervised privately-managed schools waste taxpayers’ dollars with bloated administrative salaries and overhead. In these conditions, without public oversight, fraud and corruption go undetected, and when a whistleblower complains, we learn that hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars were squandered or stolen.

She writes:

When we turn our backs on our public schools, we turn our backs on our most profound American values. We are not embracing conservatism; we are embracing consumerism. It is as simple and sad as that.

I would put it somewhat differently. I would say that the privatizers’ goal is not only to destroy public education but to encourage us to think as consumers, not as citizens. As citizens, we support public services that are for everyone, even if we don’t use those services. Thus, childless people pay taxes for public schools, even though they don’t use them, as do people whose children are grown. But consumers take care of themselves only. In the future, if this movement for privatization prevails, taxpayers may well reject bond issues because they don’t want to pay taxes for private choices. If we think only of ourselves, we lose the sense of civic responsibility that a democracy requires in order to protect and serve the interests of all its citizens.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Citizenship, Democracy, Deregulation, Fraud, Privatization, School Choice

Russ Walsh: School Choice and the Faustian Bargain

By dianeravitch
April 23, 2017 //
25

In the wake of Betsy and Randi’s visit together to a public school in Ohio, Russ Walsh reflects on how school choice affects democracy. Every dollar that goes to a charter or voucher is taken away from public schools like those they visited. “Choice” means budget cuts to the public school, and it means that public dollars go to privately controlled schools.


“While the school that DeVos and Weingarten visited is in a heavily Republican district in Ohio, the voters there are no fans of school choice. As one voter put it, vouchers are “like theft.” “It’s saying we passed a levy to go to our school district, and it’s going somewhere else.” Exactly. School choice is theft of our tax dollars and theft of our democracy.

Choice sounds so democratic, so quintessentially American that voucher and charter school champions keep using the term to hoodwink people into thinking that choice in schooling is a good thing. I suggest that those of us who oppose vouchers and charter schools call school choice what it is in the eyes of that Ohio voter, tax theft. The government collects our taxes in order to provide essential services to all of us. There is no choice involved, we all must pay taxes (unless, apparently, we are hugely wealthy). Those essential services include providing for a military, promoting research on health and welfare, providing for police and fire protection, and funding public schools. When money is diverted from the support of the public schools, it amounts to, as the Ohio voter said, theft. Or maybe another way to say it is “taxation without representation”, since voters have no voice and no oversight of how tax money is spent in schools that receive money through vouchers or charters.

It should be readily apparent that corporate education reformers are anti-democracy. In city after city around the country democratically elected school boards have been replaced by boards appointed by the mayor or governor. In Philadelphia, an appointed board has been in place for nearly two decades and the deterioration of the schools has continued unabated. In Detroit, in Betsy DeVos’ home state, the state took over the schools and has systematically led them into chaos. And let us remember that DeVos has spent millions to get legislation passed in Michigan that limits any kind of oversight for voucher and charter schools. So quite literally these schools are stealing public funds with no accountability as to how they spend it…

When parents send their children to charter schools or voucher schools, they are looking for a better opportunity for their children. We can all understand the appeal of that. What parents may not realize is that they have entered into a Faustian bargain. In order to get this shiny new toy of a voucher, they must give up their voice in their child’s education. No elected school board, no independent audit, no budget vote, no say in school policies.

In this drama, Betsy DeVos plays a willing Mephistopheles, offering choice, but getting you to sign away your voice. Without a voice, there is no democracy.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Gayle Green: Corporate School Reform and the Cynical Manipulation of the English Language

By dianeravitch
April 11, 2017 //
22

Gayle Green is a professor of English at Scripps College. She is writing a book about the corporate reform in higher education.

In this article, she describes how corporate reformers have taken guidance from Orwell’s “1984” in their deliberate distortion of language to mask reality.

She writes:

“In this post-truth age that’s done away with facts, George Orwell’s 1984 has soared to the top of the charts. But in the world of public education, it’s been 1984 for quite some time. And we didn’t even need the clumsy apparatus of a totalitarian dictatorship to bring it about. All we needed was some slick PR and smiley corporate faces and a media ready to spit back the buzzwords they’d been fed – failing public schools, no excuses, accountability, choice, access for every child, closing the achievement gap – repeating them so often that they passed for truth.”

In the current dystopian world of public education, the new Secretary of Education is the leading enemy of the nation’s public schools.

DeVos should be no surprise. She is the culmination of nearly two decades of creeping privatization.

“But DeVos should come as no surprise: she is the culmination of the way things have long been headed. No Child Left Behind, signed into law in January 2002, brought to us by George W. Bush and the moneyed interests he represented, arrived in clouds of rhetoric about “access” and “civil rights.” It announced itself as “an act to close the achievement gap with accountability, choice, flexibility, so that no child is left behind.” But this was never about reform or access or leveling the playing field: it was about opening up public education as a market, siphoning off tax dollars to charters and for-profit vendors, shifting public funds from a system that had public oversight and control to private interests. Education was a rich, untapped market with billions of federal dollars there for the taking. Schools, panicked at having their survival based on standardized test scores, invested heavily in testing technology. Multinational testing corporations, publishing companies, ed-tech ventures rushed in with their wares: software for administering tests, test preps, pre-tests, post-tests, tests scoring, lesson plans, teaching modules, assessment devices; entire new industries sprang into being….

“It’s been quite a feat, transforming teachers, who were once our friends and allies, to the enemy. A real sleight of hand, getting the public to trust those altruistic billionaires over those greedy, opportunistic teachers. Trust a billionaire to have the public’s interest at heart – that spin worked so well it landed us with Trump. But in the world of 1984, two plus two equals five: “Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by [the Party’s] philosophy.”

Put kids in front of computers, increase screen time, increase class size – and call it personalized. Depersonalized might be a better word – or perhaps personalised, for Pearsons, the multibillion-dollar transnational corporation that’s siphoned off untold billions of federal money. When teachers protested that students from disadvantaged backgrounds tend not to test well, having not had the benefit of tutors and test-prep programs, GWB said they were making “excuses,” showing “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” Yet it’s painfully clear that using test scores to determine the survival of schools only further disadvantages the disadvantaged, and, far from leveling the playing field, tilts it even more. “No excuses” became a mantra of corporate reformers, an excuse for shutting down public schools and moving in with charters, an excuse to ignore poverty and blame teachers for conditions that make teaching impossible – conditions assured by inequities that billionaire reformers have themselves brought about.”

Hundreds of schools have been closed. Thousands of teachers drummed out of their profession. Philadelphia’s Rescue Plan devastated the public schools. Arne Duncan’s Renaissance 2010 came and went with more public schools closed, more children sent to privately managed charter schools. “Choice, choice, choice,” the corporate reformers say, but neglect to mention that the schools make the choices, not the families. The one choice that is off the table is the neighborhood school.

“The confounding of language at its most basic level reduces us to a state of civic catatonia: we can’t think about these issues, let alone discuss them or act against them, when they’ve been so obfuscated, when words have been so twisted.”

The deliberate distortion of language has enabled a corporate coup, the selling out of public education to billionaires and entrepreneurs.

This is an article you can send to your friends who want a short summary of one of the biggest scam of our lifetimes.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers, Democracy, Education Industry, Fraud, Hoax, Privatization, School Choice, Testing
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