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Florida: Jeb’s Corporate Raiders Attack Public Schools Again

By dianeravitch
April 17, 2017 //
11

Florida has more than 600 charter schools. They open and close like day-lilies. Many operate for profit. The charter industry cannot rest so long as a public school remains undisturbed by the forces of disruption and greed.

A new law has been proposed law to open more opportunities for the industry. It is cynically named “Schools of Hope.” But hope is for the entrepreneurs, not the children.

The Florida House of Representatives passed the law two days ago on a party-line vote. One Democrat called the legislation “Most Children Left Behind”

Behind the new law stands Betsy DeVos’s mentor, Jeb Bush. Jeb will push privatization so long as there remains a public school in Florida, regardless of results.

This letter came from Fund Education Now, a parent group.

Homepage

Status: HB 5105 “Charter School Turnaround Heist/Schools of Hope” passed in the House along strict party lines. No companion in Senate except Sen. Bean’s SB776, which is scheduled to be heard for the first time in committee on Monday, 4/17/17. Please take the time to read and understand the dangerous lie behind HB 5105 and why the Senate must stop it.

Take action now: Urge the Senate to reject Charter ”Schools of Hope” Turnaround language – No on SB776, block inclusion in Budget & “Train Bill”

Politics behind HB 5105:

Thirteen people filled out testimony cards in the House to speak on “Schools of Hope”/HB 5105; the sole proponent was a lobbyist from Jeb’s Foundation for Florida’s Future
Florida legislators chronically move cut scores while ignoring the more important measure of actual learning gains, a practice that deliberately throws schools in and out of A, B, C, D, or F status every year.

Case in point: the controversial “proficiency” language found in HB 773 which, if passed, alters the FSA cut scores again causing the pass rate to fall from 54% to somewhere between 27% and 39%, rapidly increasing the number of “D” and “F” schools, clearly benefiting “Schools of Hope.”

By allowing a “Schools of Hope” to open anywhere in a 5 mile radius from a “D” or “F” public school, legislators are ensuring that entire districts, even affluent areas, will qualify, triggering rapid charter growth.
Codifies a longstanding resentment that for-profit charter developers feel toward public school districts that charters aren’t being allowed to replicate fast enough.

Laws are passed every session to increase unmitigated charter growth.

Right now districts have multiple statutory options to aid in transforming a D or F school, only one of which is the transfer to a for-profit charter operator. Charter lobbyists and folks such as HB 5105 sponsor Manny Diaz, complain that districts don’t pick this option enough.

HB 5105 sweetens the charter pot by forcing districts to select the “transfer to for-profit charter operator” option and eliminating the district managed option entirely.

Send your letters now: Tell the Senate to reject the “Schools of Hope”/Charter Schools Turnaround Heist!

“Schools of Hope” do not ensure success for struggling students:

Students exiting their so-called “D/F” school become part of a large diaspora will be impossible to track to review outcomes, making it unlikely that the success or failure of “Schools of Hope” will ever be known.

The 77,000 students who currently attend D/F-graded public schools (2% of Florida’s 2.75 million public school students) are under zero obligation to attend the “School of Hope” situated within 5 miles of their current school.

“Schools of Hope” are under no obligation to provide transportation

Students who attend their so-called D/F school will be dispersed into the community, free to use the Opportunity Scholarships, Corporate Tax Credit/Private School Vouchers or the state’s liberal open enrollment policy that crosses all districts as well as the “School of Hope.”

Once the for profit charter “School of Hope” accepts the student(s) from the so-called D/F school, which could be as few as 1, they are free to host a lottery for the rest of the community

All the rhetoric about saving kids from so-called “failure factories” is a ruse. Under the “Schools of Hope,” nothing is guaranteed except the exponential growth of charter schools and the deliberate defunding of public district schools.

Triggers multiple ways for districts to lose schools and students, giving voters and parents no voice:

Gives for-profit charter developers access to a $200 million capital slush fund if they are willing to open a so-called “school of hope” within a five mile radius of any “D” or “F” public school, which opens entire districts to charter development.

Immediate transfer of D and F public schools into private, for-profit hands. Districts already have multiple statutory options to aid in transforming a D or F school, only one of which is the transfer to a for-profit charter operator.

Loss of public assets nearly $1 billion per year

Bill takes away district right to manage its own school

Establishes system of “Success” Charter schools that could be designated an independent district with its own taxing authority

Eliminates District managed option
Compresses the time-frame for schools that receive a D or F grade to be handed over to for-profit charter operator

Removes options from school boards for turn-around solutions

Picture of loss:

115 public district schools could be handed over immediately to corporate charter developers

450 additional public schools vulnerable to this charter school heist

77,000 students in those 115 public district schools under immediate takeover threat means the transfer of $555 million dollars to for profit charters per year based on UFTE of $7,420.58.

$200 million capital slush fund per year offered to for-profit charter chains willing to open a so-called “school of hope” within a five mile radius of any D or F public school.

For-profit Charter Chains not interested in struggling students:

Florida charters have demonstrated a chronic disinterest in this population.

Legislators are consumed with labeling children and schools with D or F, but unwilling to walk through the doors to see the remarkable work being done despite chronic underfunding

Charter Chains and legislators disregard the fact that struggling D or F schools face the deep effects of generational poverty that requires greater investment and support not “failure” labels and ridicule.

Charter chains know that struggling students cost more and are “not attractive” to a ‘for-profit” model

Legislators ignore District Success:

A prime example of this is Orange County’s successful Evans High Community School, which is a collaborative effort between the district, UCF and other agencies.

This level of student investment – at least $1M more per year per school – is something no for-profit corporation is willing to justify to its board

Florida has a history of constantly moving cut scores while ignoring the more important measure of actual learning gains, a practice that deliberately throws schools in and out of A, B, C, D, or F status every year.

“Schools of Hope” is based on a lie:

Florida’s A-F Accountability/school grades are based on a false premise since school grades almost always reflect zip code status

Florida’s constantly moving cut scores vs. the more important measure of actual learning gains throws schools in and out of A, B, C, D, or F status every year rendering the grades meaningless

Alters statute to include both D and F schools, exponentially driving up the numbers of schools available for take over

Florida Charter Schools have not lived up to their promises

State has spent $760 million on the building and operation of charter schools since 2000.

Majority of state funding for the construction and renovation of schools goes to charter schools.

U.S. Department of Education found no evidence to support the claims that charter schools ‘save children from “failing schools.”

Research shows that restarting a former public school as a charter school had no significant impact on math or reading test scores, high graduation or college enrollment

In 2016, Florida charter schools closures were the highest in the nation

HB 5105 “Schools of Hope” enticements offered to for-profit charter chains:

Gives for profit operators a $200 million slush fund,

Provides for-profit charter developers with a state tax-payer sponsored revolving loan program

Transfers federal funds meant for district schools to private entities

Forces districts to turn over public school buildings AND requires the school district to maintain them.

Exempts for-profit charter developers from school building codes, taxes, fees and assessments and state procurement laws.

Exempts for-profit charter developers from the current charter law and requirements that they close if they fail.

Exempts for-profit charter developers from the class size limits in our constitution.

Exempts for-profit charter developers from teacher certification requirements

Rescinds district-managed option for turning around struggling schools

Stretching the truth – calling Charter Chains “public”

Parents at Charter Schools have little recourse and must address complaints to a corporate school board whose members may not even live in the state.

For-profit Charter schools are run by corporate operators, are allowed to profit from publicly bonded real estate deals and are governed by separate school boards – all enriched by public dollars.

The 501c3 front door provides cover for a private, exceptionally lucrative for-profit back door charter operators that are exempt from transparency because they are private corporations

Legislators benefit from charter school growth. HB 5105 sponsor, Rep. Diaz, earns his living working for the unaccredited Doral College, which is owned by mega charter school developer Academica, the group that just won the state’s first district charter school takeover located in Jefferson County, The ink isn’t dry on the deal to serve 600 students and already Academica is petitioning the Florida Legislature for an additional $5 Million.

Categories Bush, Jeb, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Florida, For-Profit

Gary Rubinstein: “College or Die”

By dianeravitch
April 17, 2017 //
10

Gary Rubinstein has become a master at unmasking “miracle” claims, you know, the schools where 100% of the students in a poor neighborhood (formerly served by a public school) graduate or 100% go to college or some equally implausible miracle. None of these claims ever turn out to be true. Gary explains again and again that the “miracle” is made possible by attrition of the kids who were not on track to graduate.

He recently discovered a charter school in Indianapolis whose motto is “College or Die.”

The principal of this school just was put in charge of charter schools in Memphis.

Watch Gary analyze the data from the school in Indianapolis. How many went to college? How many “died”?

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Hoax, Indianapolis, Memphis, Privatization

Washington State: Where Billionaires Get Richer, and Schools Get Shafted

By dianeravitch
April 17, 2017 //
31

This is an astonishing article about the battle for fair funding of public education in Washington State, where billionaires pay a lower tax rate than working stiffs. The article appeared almost two years ago, but it remains relevant today.

“Despite its image as the cutting-edge land of Microsoft, Boeing, Amazon, Starbucks, and many other corporate icons, the state ranks near last place nationally in education categories such as per-pupil funding, class size, and college attendance.”

A valiant lawyer, Thomas Ahearne, took on the case more than a decade ago and found Stephanie McCleary, a mother with two young children, who was willing to step up and be the public face of the struggle. The state’s courts have ruled in favor of McCleary, but the legislature has failed to raise taxes on the wealthiest or to come up with a plan to fund the schools equitably.

Bill Gates, the most famous billionaire in Washington State, has exerted his energy to push through charter schools, not to fund all schools better. As compared to tax reform, charter schools are a bargain.

“Washington has long cited a paucity of tax revenues for such failings. Yet, at the same time, it gives away more money in corporate tax breaks than any other state aside from New York, which has nearly three times the population. It is the result of what some call a “war between the states” to lure companies with treasury-draining giveaways — a trend so strong that this state’s governor likened it in an interview to corporate “extortion.” politicians would rather give corporate tax breaks than fund the schools in their district. They forget that good public schools attract corporate talent.

Here is a major reason that Washington state is not funding its schools: tax breaks for corporations that threaten to leave the state. Boeing threatened to leave, and the governor and legislature gave Boeing a deal in 2013 that “provided Boeing with $8.7 billion in tax breaks through 2040, the largest ever granted to any company by a state. The deal was meant to ensure that Boeing built its new 777X plane in Washington. In recent months, however, Boeing has transferred 3,500 jobs to other states and plans for at least 2,000 more to be moved, reviving concerns about the tax deal.”

Washington is a blue state with a Democratic Governor, Jay Inslee, but it must take care not to offend the billionaires.

“The billions for Boeing were given as the state struggled with the broader issue of tax inequities. Washington has the nation’s most unequal tax structure, according to a report by the nonpartisan Institute on Taxation & Economic Policy. The state’s poorest 20 percent of residents pay 16.8 percent of their income in state and local taxes, while the wealthiest 1 percent pays just 2.4 percent.

“We have the most regressive tax system in the United States by a long shot,” Inslee said. That “has exacerbated income inequality, [and] it has been much more difficult to find a source that would adequately fund education,,,.”

“The state’s agricultural, timber, and mining industries paid even less than high-tech – a combined $14.6 million. And the aerospace industry, which includes Boeing, paid $72 million in the Business and Occupation Tax.”

How can a state fund education when its richest industries pay meager taxes?

Almost three years ago, the state’s highest court fined the state $100,000 per day for every day it does not adopt an acceptable plan. The money is accruing in a bank account, and the state has failed to comply.

Meanwhile the billionaires of Washington state enjoy their low taxes, complaining about the public schools, and plugging for a handful of charter schools. This allows them to call themselves “reformers” while they profit from the underfunding of the state’s public schools.

Categories Billionaires, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, Washington State

Valerie Strauss: Why Does California Allow Charters to Open Where They are Not Needed?

By dianeravitch
April 14, 2017 //
5

Valerie Strauss read the report prepared by Gordon Lafer for “In the Public Interest” about California’s lavish spending on facilities for charters where they are not needed. She reported here.

She writes:

The report says that “nearly 450 charter schools have opened in places that already had enough classroom space for all students — and this overproduction of schools was made possible by generous public support, including $111 million in rent, lease, or mortgage payments picked up by taxpayers, $135 million in general obligation bonds, and $425 million in private investments subsidized with tax credits or tax exemptions.” These amounts are based on only a portion of the state’s charter schools for which data was available, so the true funding amounts given to charters in communities that don’t need more classrooms “is almost twice as great.”

In California, traditional school systems can’t build new schools if enrollment demands it because of the way the state decides when it will give state bond funds to build a new school. According to the report, it does this by comparing existing classroom space with the student population projected over the next five years. Charter schools don’t have such a requirement.

They don’t need the permission of the local school district to open a charter. If they are turned down, they can appeal to the county school board. If they are turned down again, they appeal to the state board, which rubber-stamps almost every charter application with out regard to need.

The rationale of the charter industry is the same as that of Betsy DeVos: choice is an end in itself. It doesn’t matter if the charters offer better education; it doesn’t matter if they don’t get better test scores. All that matters is choice. DeVos agrees. So does Donald Trump. Choice, choice, choice, whether needed or not, whatever it costs.

Categories Betsy DeVos, California, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization

Connecticut: Charter-Loving Dem Governor Malloy Will Not Seek Re-Election

By dianeravitch
April 13, 2017 //
4

Jonathan Pelto reports that Connecticut Governor Malloy will not run for a third term.

He has spent his time in office promoting the charter school agenda and undermining public schools, the teaching profession, and higher education, which are major drivers of Connecticut’s economy.

Connecticut teachers and parents: Get involved and find a candidate who supports public education. Get active or get overlooked.

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

Betsy DeVos Withdraws Protections for Students from Predatory Loan Agencies

By dianeravitch
April 13, 2017 //
16

In an inexplicable move, Secretary of Education DeVos canceled rules–some of which date back to the first Bush administration–to set standards for student loan agencies.

This benefits the industry that fattens on student loans, but it will harm students.

The New York Times editorial board asks “Whose Side is Betsy DeVos on?” I think we know.

“Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is inexplicably backing away from rules that are meant to prevent federal student loan borrowers from being fleeced by companies the government pays to collect the loans and to guide people through the repayment process.

“On Tuesday, she withdrew a sound Obama administration policy that required the Education Department to take into account the past conduct of loan servicing companies before awarding them lucrative contracts — and to include consumer protections in those contracts as well.

“The department is doing the loan industry’s bidding at a time when student debt has crippled a generation financially and the country’s largest loan servicing company, Navient, is facing several lawsuits accusing it of putting its own interest before that of the borrowers it is supposed to help.

“A suit brought by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau claims that Navient saved itself money by steering borrowers into costly repayment strategies that added billions in interest to their balances. But as Stacy Cowley and Jessica Silver-Greenberg reported in The Times on Monday, states’ lawsuits are especially damning with respect to Sallie Mae — the company that spun off Navient in 2014.

“The Illinois and Washington attorneys general argue that Sallie Mae engaged in predatory lending, saddling people with private subprime loans that the company knew in advance were likely to fail because borrowers would not be able to repay them. The two attorneys general — part of an investigative coalition of 29 states — argue that borrowers deserve to have these tainted private loans forgiven.

“The scenario outlined in the court documents bears a frightening resemblance to the subprime mortgage crisis of a decade ago — when mortgage companies caused millions of borrowers to lose their homes by steering them into risky, high-cost mortgages they could never hope to repay.

“The Illinois and Washington lawsuits argue that Sallie Mae used subprime private loans to build relationships with exploitative schools that then helped the company make more federal loans to their students. Those loans were the jackpot for the company, the lawsuit argues, because they were guaranteed by the government, which steps in to reimburse the lender when a borrower defaults.

“The defaulted private loans destroyed the financial lives of students. But they benefited the schools — which sometimes made deals with Sallie Mae to subsidize the losses — allowing them to comply with federal rules requiring that no more than 90 percent of a school’s revenue can come from federal financial aid. The case shows the dangers inherent in letting companies service federal and private loans simultaneously.”

Will it make America “great again” by impoverishing a generation of students?

I thought she was a Christian. What would Jesus do? Didn’t Jesus throw the money-lenders out of the Temple?

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Education Industry, For-Profit, Fraud, Higher Education, Student Financial Aid and Student Debt, Students

Who is the Walton Family Foundation Funding?

By dianeravitch
April 13, 2017 //
42

It is very instructive to scan the long list of organizations that are funded by the Walton Family Foundation. Some will surprise you. Some will not. Here is what we know about this foundation. The Walton Family (beneficiaries of Walmart) is the richest family in America. There are many billionaires in the family. Like Betsy DeVos, they don’t like public education. They don’t like regulation. They love the free market. They don’t like unions. Individual family members have spent millions on political campaigns to support charters and vouchers. The Foundation also supports charters and school choice.

In 2015, the Walton Family Foundation spent $179 million on K-12 education grants. They are in the midst of a pledge to spend $1 billion to open more charters, and they have targeted certain cities for their beneficence (Atlanta, Boston, Camden, Denver, Houston, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Memphis, New Orleans, New York, Oakland, San Antonio and Washington, D.C.) Their goal is to undermine public education by creating a competitive marketplace of choices. They and DeVos are on the same page.

I suggest you scan the list to see which organizations have their hand out for funding from one of the nation’s most anti-public school, anti-union, rightwing foundations.

Here are a few of their grantees:

Black Alliance for Education Options (BAEO), run by Howard Fuller to spread the gospel of school choice: $2.78 million

Brookings Institution (no doubt, to buy the annual report that grades cities on school choice): $242,000

California Charter Schools Association: $5 million

Center for American Progress (theoretically a “centrist Democratic” think tank): $500,000

Charter Fund, Inc. (never heard of this one): $14 million

Chiefs for Change (Jeb Bush’s group): $500,000

College Board (to push Common Core?): $225,000

Colorado League of Charter Schools: $1,050,000

Editorial Projects in Education (Education Week): $70,000

Education Reform Now: $4.2 million

Education Trust, Inc. (supposed a “left-leaning advocacy group”): $359,000

Education Writers Association: $175,000

Educators for Excellence (anti-union teachers, usually from TFA): $925,000

Families for Excellent Schools (hedge fund managers who lobby for charter schools in New York City and Massachusetts): $6.4 million

Foundation for Excellence in Education (Jeb Bush’s organization): $3 million

High Tech High Graduate School of Education (this one stumped me; how can a high school run a graduate school of education?): $780,000

KIPP Foundation: $6.9 million

Leadership for Education Equity Foundation (this is TFA’s political organization that trains TFA to run for office): $5 million

Massachusetts Charter Public School Association (this funding preceded the referendum where the citizens of Massachusetts voted “no mas” to new charters): $850,000

National Public Radio: $1.1 million

National Urban League: $300,000

Pahara Institute: $832,000

Parent Revolution: $500,000

Relay Graduate School of Education (that pseudo-grad school with no professors, just charter teachers): $1 million

Schools That Can Milwaukee (Tough luck, the Working Families Party just swept the school board): $1.6 million

StudentsFirst Institute: $2.8 million

Teach for America (to supply scabs): $8 million

The New York Times: $350,000

Thomas B. Fordham Institute: $700,000

Urban Institute (supposedly an independent think tank in D.C.): $350,000

To be fair, in another part of the grants report, called Special Projects, the Walton Family Foundation donated $112,404 to the Bentonville Public Schools and $25,000 to the Bentonville Public Schools Foundation, in the town where the Waltons are located. Compare that to the $179 million for charters and choice, and you get the picture of what matters most.

Categories Billionaires, Black Alliance for Educational Options, Charter Schools, Chiefs for Change, Common Core, Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, KIPP Charter Schools, Massachusetts, Media, Privatization, School Choice, StudentsFirst, Teach for America, Walton Foundation

Maryland: Legislature Limits Hours of Testing, But Don’t Celebrate

By dianeravitch
April 12, 2017 //
11

Both houses of the Maryland legislature endorsed legislation to limit the hours of standardized testing in the schools.

But don’t celebrate.

The limit is 2% of instructional time.

That means that students in elementary and middle schools may be subjected to 24 hours of standardized testing! High school students may be tested for 26 hours!

How humane. A third grade student–eight or nine years old–compelled to spend 24 hours taking a standardized test.

Whatever happened to essays, book reports, research, projects, genuine exhibitions of mastery?

Why so many hours of standardized testing? Who benefits?

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Maryland, Testing

New Study: Why Teachers Created a New Genre: The “I Quit” Letters

By dianeravitch
April 12, 2017 //
34

There is a photograph circulating on Twitter of a teacher recruitment fair in Michigan, in a large room with many tables staffed and ready for recruits. But the room is empty. It is a sad picture, dramatizing the effect of the current policy atmosphere on the profession.

Please note that the empty job fair was held in Michigan. That is Betsy DeVos’s home state. Apparently in her dream school of the future, computers will replace teachers. That has long been the gospel of Jeb Bush. If you harass teachers enough, they will go away and everyone can go digital.

A new study was just released by two professors at Michigan State University analyzing what they call a new genre: the teacher resignation letter.

I have posted many resignation letters on this site. They are usually anguished, sometimes angry, always sorrowful. They come from people who had a calling to teach, but could not stand the demands on them by administrators nor the frequency of high-stakes testing. Working in a climate that requires compliance and subservience, one that expects you to abandon your professional ethics, is not appealing for most professionals.

I have posted many such letters. The one that got the most overwhelming response was written by North Carolina teacher Kris Neilsen. It was published October 27, 2012, and received 165,000 views. Nearly 900 people commented on it. It went worldwide.

Here is the report on the teacher resignation letter as a genre:

In a trio of studies, Michigan State University education expert Alyssa Hadley Dunn and colleagues examined the relatively new phenomenon of teachers posting their resignation letters online. Their findings, which come as many teachers are signing next year’s contracts, suggest educators at all grade and experience levels are frustrated and disheartened by a nationwide focus on standardized tests, scripted curriculum and punitive teacher-evaluation systems.

Teacher turnover costs more than $2.2 billion in the U.S. each year and has been shown to decrease student achievement in the form of reading and math test scores.

“The reasons teachers are leaving the profession has little to do with the reasons most frequently touted by education reformers, such as pay or student behavior,” said Dunn, assistant professor of teacher education. “Rather, teachers are leaving largely because oppressive policies and practices are affecting their working conditions and beliefs about themselves and education.”

Consider, for example, the open resignation letter of Boston elementary school teacher Suzi Sluyter, which was posted on a Washington Post blog:

“In this disturbing era of testing and data collection in the public schools,” she wrote in part, “I have seen my career transformed into a job that no longer fits my understanding of how children learn and what a teacher ought to do in a classroom to build a healthy, safe, developmentally appropriate environment for learning for each of our children.”

Sluyter, who had taught for more than 25 years, concluded the missive: “I did not feel I was leaving my job. I felt then and feel now that my job left me. It is with deep love and a broken heart that I write this letter.”

Such feelings of abandonment were common in the resignation letters, the researchers said in one of the studies. That paper, published in the April issue of the journal Linguistics and Education, is titled “With regret: The genre of teachers’ public resignation letters.” Dunn’s co-authors were Jennifer VanDerHeide, MSU assistant professor of teacher education, and MSU doctoral student Matthew Deroo.

Another study indicates that by posting their resignation letters online, educators are gaining a voice in the public sphere they didn’t have before. That paper, which will appear in the May issue of the journal Teaching and Teacher Education, was co-authored by MSU doctoral students Scott Farver, Amy Guenther and Lindsay Wexler.

“All of the teachers’ resignation letters and their later interviews [with researchers] attested to the lack of voice and agency that teachers felt in policymaking and implementation,” the study says.

Dunn said administrators must allow teachers to engage in the development of curriculum and educational policies so they do not feel like they have no choice but to resign (and then publicly declare it) in order to get their voices heard.

The third study, forthcoming in Teachers College Record, suggests the public resignation letters combat the “teacher blame game” and the prevalent narrative of the “bad” teacher. These are common claims – whereby teachers are blamed for school and societal failures – used by conservative education reformers to advance accountability measures to evaluate teachers, Dunn said.

But the resignation letters, rather than painting educators as disinterested and lazy, illustrate their intense emotion. “The letters are filled with emotion, with regret, and with an overarching personal and professional commitment to the best needs of the children,” the study says.

Ultimately, Dunn said, policymakers should heed teachers’ testimonies and support a move away from efforts to “marketize, capitalize, incentivize and privatize public education, in order to do what is best for children, not for the bottom line.”

“In the absence of such moves, teachers’ working conditions, and thus students’ learning conditions, are likely to remain in jeopardy.”

Here’s the paper to which the Michigan State article refers:
(accessible for free if you qualify in certain categories, or if you
pony up $35 if you don’t):

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0898589817300487

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Privatization, Teacher Shortage, Teachers and Teaching, Testing

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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