Mercedes Schneider takes a close look at Arizona, known as the Wild West of charters.
What she finds is a state where the ethics laws are even laxer than those of her home state of Louisiana.
The charter sector in Arizona is unregulated, unsupervised, and has a firm lock on the taxpayers’ dollars.
Money rules.
This article by Helen Ladd of Duke University is absolutely “must” reading.
Ladd is a major economist of education.
The same article might be written for many states.
North Carolina was once renowned for its commitment to public education.
But now the legislature is starving the funding for public education: “Per-pupil spending on K-12 education in North Carolina is now 46th in the country, teacher salaries are 48th and the General Assembly has been cutting funding for our university and community college systems, once the envy of other states.”
Worse, the legislature seems determined to create a dual school system, one public, the other run by privately managed charters, vouchers, and for-profit vendors.
Here is the utterly predictable result:
“Proponents of this private vision push for reduced spending on traditional public schools, unfettered expansion of charter schools, transfer of school management to private firms that view education as a business opportunity, school vouchers that shift public funds to private schools and scholarships for private school tuitions financed by tax breaks to corporations and wealthy individuals.
“This private vision espoused by Republican leaders diverts attention from the public purposes of schooling and reduces accountability for the use of public funds. Perhaps most important, this anti-public education vision leaves little room for principles of social justice and the commitment to equal educational opportunity for all students.
“When education becomes primarily a private affair, benefits flow disproportionately to those with the most means to work the system to their advantage. The losers are typically disadvantaged children who end up in under-resourced traditional public schools with large concentrations of low-performing and challenging-to-educate students. The role of education as an engine of opportunity for every North Carolina child is downplayed in favor of greater benefits for those already advantaged.”
Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2013/04/10/2816261/the-perils-of-a-private-vision.html#storylink=cpy
As readers of this blog know, there is a healthy discussion about what to call those who now claim to be “reformers.”
In this post, Leo Casey of the Shanker Institute discusses whether there is any such thing as “corporate reform.” Larry Cuban says there is not.
Let’s review what I often refer to as “corporate reform.”
I call it “corporate reform” because the reformers want to use crude metrics to judge teachers and schools. They think that data are better measures of quality than professional judgment. On the basis of standardized test scores, they are happy to label schools as “failing” if their scores are low and happier still to close them for the same reason. The test scores are like a profit and loss statement. The corporate reformers speak about having a “portfolio” of schools, sort of like a stock portfolio, where you keep the winners and get rid of the losers.
When they manage school districts, they invent fancy corporate-sounding titles like “chief talent officer,” “chief knowledge officer,” “chief portfolio officer,” etc. to take the place of school titles like “superintendent” and “deputy superintendent.”
The face of the “reform” movement is Michelle Rhee. She works closely with such figures as Joel Klein and Jeb Bush, John Kasich in Ohio, Mitch Daniels (now ex-governor) in Indiana.
These so-called reformers advocate for private management of schools by charter organizations, whether nonprofit or for-profit.
Some (Jeb Bush, Michelle Rhee, Bobby Jindal, Scott Walker, Tony Bennett) but not all of them advocate for vouchers .
They say that our public school system is “broken,” “failing,” and “obsolete.” So to them, it makes perfect sense to replace them with private management.
They advocate for high-stakes testing.
They want teachers and principals to be evaluated to a significant degree by the test scores of students.
They applaud the closing of schools (cf. Rahm Emanuel).
They disdain local school boards, which might slow down the process of privatization of public funds.
They want to remove any due process rights from teachers, so they can be hired and fired at will.
They seek to cut teachers’ pensions and benefits.
They think that “great” teachers need only a few weeks of training. They like to put non-educators in charge of school districts and schools. After all, if someone can market toothpaste, they can also market automobiles or schools.
If you think there is no movement to undermine public education and the education profession, I don’t agree.
If someone has a better name than “corporate reform,” I am all ears.
This just arrived in my email. An advertisement for Pearson’s virtual charter business, Connections.
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A reader offers this comment about the education marketplace:
Better and cheaper aren’t even issues in the disruptive Educational marketing game. Only profit matters. Especially if you capture regulatory control, you can degrade quality to reduce cost, then mandate public funding to maximize profits. There’s no public sector, and no free market, to stop you.
I’ll quote again from Farrell:
“Christensen’s theory of innovation showed how “true revolutions occur, creating new markets and wreaking havoc within industries. Think: the PC, the MP3, the transistor radio.”
The wheel is still spinning on applications of internet and satellite “technology” in education. I’m a visionary and innovator myself, but in our classrooms, profit seekers are trying to freeze out wondrous real advances for their own advantage. Don’t confuse innovation with mean-minded little schemes to curtail and monetize other people’s inventions. The emperor is naked, and has no actual innovations to offer.
If you want to think more deeply than opportunistic market manipulation, here’s Anil Dash’s magnificent rumination on the internet, The Web We Lost:
http://dashes.com/anil/2012/12/the-web-we-lost.html
He also understands the wheels are still spinning, and proposes ways to bring the internet back into the commons, where (like public education) it belongs.
Back in the early 1990s, when the charter school idea first began to spread, there was a simple way of explaining the concept. The charter schools would be accountable for results. If they didn’t get the results, they would close. Period. The deal was called “accountability in exchange for results.” Advocates said it was impossible to close a public school that didn’t get results, but it would be easy to close a charter school.
This is not the way things are working out.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel recently announced the closing of 54 public schools in Chicago. Mayor Bloomberg has closed well over 100 public schools. Parents, students, and teachers have objected loudly, but they are routinely ignored.
As Karen Francisco reports in the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, it is not easy to close charter schools. One authorizer realizes they are failing to deliver results and withdraws sponsorship, and the charter schools goes shopping and finds another sponsor. These, she says, are “zombie schools.” They are failing but they will not die. They refuse accountability, but some other sponsor picks them up.
It turns out to be easy to close public schools; the mayors don’t care what poor black and Hispanic parents say. But it is hard to close charter schools because they have powerful political friends and campaign contributors.
The education industry won another battle in Florida, defeating solid opposition from every parent organization in the state.
The Florida House of Representatives passed a “parent trigger” bill, allowing unsuspecting parents to turn their public school over to one of the charter corporations that have–shall we say– undue influence in the legislature.
This is a big win for Jeb Bush, Michelle Rhee, and so-called Parent Revolution, funded by the Waltons, the Gates, the Broads. Parents like us. Regular folks.
The only consolation in this sordid affair is that parents are not stupid. The parent trigger was passed in California more than two years ago, and to date, only one school has swallowed the Kool-Aid. Desert Trails Elementary School was targeted by Parent Revolution, which sent in its paid organizers, gathered parent signatures, and after a series of court battles, won the right to hand their school over to a charter operator. But by the time the dust settled, only 53 parents out of a school with more than 600 children voted to choose a charter.
We will await to see the results of that famous victory. Walton, Gates, and Broad pumped millions into this effort to privatize public schools, and so far they have won only Desert Trails.
Wish someone had told them that a charter operator in that town lost his charter only a year earlier because of financial self-dealing.
Yesterday, I published a post about how critics were raising questions about Jeb Bush’s financial ties to certain corporations.
I linked to an article in the Tampa Tribune. However, the link was dead. The article had disappeared.
A reader found it. Not on the Tampa Tribune website but here, where it has been preserved for readers. A testament to a free society.
A reader sent these late-night reflections to me:
“I drifted off to sleep last night, the phrase “No Child Left Behind” kept ringing in my ears. It sounds so noble… No – Child – Left – Behind – surely that is good for our country. Yet, at the same time my eyes were closing, the disturbing aparthied maps that Jersey Jazzman posted were flashing before my eyes.
In the corners of my mind, memories of 1984, by George Orwell churn. Newspeak (the removal of negative terms from language) reappears today. “Newspeak is engineered to remove even the possibility of rebellious thoughts—the words by which such thoughts might be articulated have been eliminated from the language.”
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/1984/section11.rhtml
Samples: Newspeak Reform Dictionary and Guide to Phraseology:
“No Child Left Behind”
Phrase meaning: self-explanatory
Reality: Yes, there are many children left behind. Can we find them in these maps?
http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2013/03/school-closings-new-apartheid.html
“AchieveNJ”
Word meaning: Achieve – attain; realize; accomplish
Reality: “AchieveNJ doesn’t even make the attempt to correct SGPs for poverty!”
http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2013/03/nj-ed-commish-cerf-wrong-on-poverty.html
“Community Engagement”
Word meaning: Oh… forget about the real word meaning… what difference does this section make?
Reality: “DONT allow the opposition to frame the standards or the new tests negatively: In particular, get in front of any opposition that seeks to characterize the new standards and assessments as a “one-size-fits-all” approach…”
http://www.achieve.org/
“Education Reform Toolkit”
Reality: School Closure Guide by the Broad Foundation
“Privacy”
Reality: “States must collect, coordinate, and use K-12 and postsecondary data to track and improve the readiness of graduates to succeed in college and the workplace…follow students through K–12 into postsecondary AND THE WORKFORCE and establish feedback loops to the relevant stakeholders…” (emphasis mine)
http://www.achieve.org/P-20-data-systems
What would George Orwell have to say about this today?”
Recently, the Foundation for Educational Excellence (FEE), created by Jeb Bush, has come under fire for mixing its programming with the financial interests of its backers while serving as a vehicle for Bush’s 2016 presidential ambitions.
The Tampa Tribune ran a scathing article that pointed out problematic practices:
“Lobbyists are not allowed to finance perks like trips for state officials, but those at the Foundation for Excellence in Education get around that ban by being registered to another foundation run by Jeb Bush.
The foundation sponsors conferences where the top stars of the corporate reform movement appear to praise the virtues of vouchers, charters, and online learning. For example, last years’ summit in Washington, D.C.”
“….included “strategy sessions” on such topics as “Reaching more students with vouchers and tax-credit scholarships” and banquets with speeches by Bush, Condoleeza Rice and U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
Diane Ravitch's blog 