This is a stunning article. A real journalistic achievement.
It shows in remarkable detail how certain politicians and investors and entrepreneurs are working together to privatize public education and to generate huge profits for certain companies.
Read this.
This is a good one. Florida charter chain Charter USA is expanding into Indiana, where it will run three charter schools. It is a for-profit operator. The states where it operates don’t require it to spend any minimum on educating kids. So it has enough money left over in its profits to make political contributions. According to our friend Coach Sikes, Charter USA contributed to the political campaign of state superintendent Tony Bennett, who in turn will be real friendly in granting more charters so they will have more profits to contribute to more political campaigns. Florida taxpayers are subsidizing Indiana’s race for state superintendent.
Remember education reform? Oh, that.
Doing some research on for-profit virtual schools, I come across study after study about their poor performance, high attrition rates, and low graduation rates.
But then I discovered a document produced by Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellent Education and Bob Wise’s Alliance for Excellent Education. It is called “the Ten Elements of Digital Learning” and it is a rallying cry for deregulation and proliferation of every manner of virtual education, including for-profit virtual charters.
Among other recommendations, it says that teachers should not be certified, as that would hamper innovation and diminish quality. It claims that digital learning will transform education, close the achievement gaps, and narrow the income divide in American society. It promises the world, in short. Digital learning is the magic bullet, so it says.
It does not take note of the studies that say that digital schools underperform brick-and-mortar schools.
The report was funded by–no surprise–the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, and the Walton Foundation.
Maybe it is the Magna Carta of virtual schooling. But the gap between promise and reality is a giant canyon.
A faithful reader sent the following quotation from Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations:
Merchants and master manufacturers are, in this order, the two classes of people who commonly employ the largest capitals, and who by their wealth draw to themselves the greatest share of the public consideration. As during their whole lives they are engaged in plans and projects, they have frequently more acuteness of understanding than the greater part of country gentlemen. As their thoughts, however, are commonly exercised rather about the interest of their own particular branch of business, than about that of the society, their judgment, even when given with the greatest candour (which it has not been upon every occasion) is much more to be depended upon with regard to the former of those two objects than with regard to the latter. Their superiority over the country gentleman is not so much in their knowledge of the public interest, as in their having a better knowledge of their own interest than he has of his. It is by this superior knowledge of their own interest that they have frequently imposed upon his generosity, and persuaded him to give up both his own interest and that of the public, from a very simple but honest conviction that their interest, and not his, was the interest of the public. The interest of the dealers, however, in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public. To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers. To widen the market may frequently be agreeable enough to the interest of the public; but to narrow the competition must always be against it, and can serve only to enable the dealers, by raising their profits above what they naturally would be, to levy, for their own benefit, an absurd tax upon the rest of their fellow-citizens. The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.
A number of eons ago, I had a Twitter debate with Justin Hamilton, who is Arne Duncan’s press secretary. I forget how it started, but the tenor of the exchange went something like this.
I question whether education would be reformed by educators or entrepreneurs, and Justin, unbidden, sprang to the defense of entrepreneurs. Or maybe he said that teachers and entrepreneurs would both transform education. I narrowed my target and said I was complaining specifically about for-profit entrepreneurs, not people with an entrepreneurial spirit. Justin’s response as something along the lines of, well, you are an entrepreneur, you sell books and make speeches.
Happily, essayist Rachel Levy has saved me the trouble of explaining how shallow Justin’s response was. Her thoughts about intellectual work and business and entrepreneurialism bear reading. I recommend her essay to you, along with the thoughtful comments that follow.
I can’t be angry at Justin. He did write to ask me for a copy of my book, which I sent him gratis and autographed.
I just wish he had found it in his heart or head to say something negative about the unfortunate rise of for-profit schooling and privatization. He didn’t and he couldn’t. That says something about our government’s policies.
A story in the New York Times says that the e-corporations are salivating over the Common Core State Standards.
They foresee the opening up of a multi-billion industry, with more tests, more online resources, more stuff to sell to schools complying with the Common Core.
The standards are indeed a boon for the edu-biz entrepreneurs.
It turns out that Joanne Weiss, chief of staff to Secretary Arne Duncan, was right when she predicted that the standards would open up vast new markets. She wrote:
The development of common standards and shared assessments radically alters the market for innovation in curriculum development, professional development, and formative assessments. Previously, these markets operated on a state-by-state basis, and often on a district-by-district basis. But the adoption of common standards and shared assessments means that education entrepreneurs will enjoy national markets where the best products can be taken to scale.
I mean, truly, isn’t this why we actually have a federal Department of Education, to meet the needs of American industry and to open up public education as a prime marketplace where entrepreneurs can pursue new business opportunities and make money?
Remember that as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s vision when he signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965, authorizing the first major program of federal aid to schools? No? Well, how about when President Jimmy Carter pushed to create the Department in 1979-1980? Not then either? Hmm.
A reader suggests the real purpose of the Christie “school reform” plan. Or could it be to introduce private markets to public education, with profits for some, losses for others?
Chris Christie, like many Republicans, main goal is to break the teacher union; it has nothing to do with education. He has no real interest in helping underperforming schools or struggling students.
So here it is folks. Stephanie Simon of Reuters attended that private equity investors’ conference at an elite Manhattan setting and the boys are looking to make money from selling their stuff to the schools, running schools, teaching math, investing in new ventures of all kinds.
This is what many suspected but found hard to believe. The Wall Street crowd says this is their moment.
They see the steady advance of privatization and for-profit ventures and they love it.
They know that the purpose of the new academic standards is to create winners and losers, and they will invest in product to sell to both ends of the spectrum.
They will monetize the children, outsource the teaching, do anything that turns a buck.
Who will stop them?
We know Romney won’t. Will Obama?
A reader reports on the campaign contributions of a major charter school owner in Ohio.
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Lance Hill of New Orleans responded to blogger Mike Deshotels, who noted the double standard for charter schools and public schools. Public schools must meet standards, but voucher schools do not? Lance writes:
Mike, excellent post on the contradictions of the Louisiana accountability
plan.
This isn’t even a policy debate: it’s a debate on simple logic. Imagine a
hospital that graded doctors on mortality rates. If a hospital administrator
transferred all the critical care patients into the maternity ward, suddenly
the maternity ward doctors would go from an A grade to an F grade.
If a policy defies simple logic, there has to be some motive for it other
than its declared purpose. In this case, I believe the hidden agenda for
grading teachers and schools is to use it as a means to privatize schools
and control the labor force. The corporate reformers don’t care that a few
good schools and teachers lose out: it is acceptable collateral damage. I
predict that once control of public education is transferred to the private
sector, then meaningful assessment policies will be implemented. Indeed,
in the 2005 Gates-funded draconian “Tough Choices or Tough Times” report
which advocates “contract schools” and also advocates abolishing high-stakes
testing. It is implicit that this federally-imposed plan would only
possible if public education were privatized and controlled by state or
federal government.
Skills Commission member Anthony Carnevale’s dissent. This is the only
dissent I found on the net-amazing given some of the commission members.
It’s also a good short summary of the report’s recommendations:
http://bit.ly/QpJfMy
Skills Commission 2005 Report. A little-read report but a blueprint for what
is happening all around us:
http://bit.ly/ObCVCL
The proof that the “accountability” plans are, in truth, “power and control”
plans is that the Jindal/White voucher plan initially imposed no
accountability standards for voucher schools nor performance standards for
teachers. Why? Because the non-public schools are already in the private
sector. Vouchers were simply another way of undermining public schools so
the state could privatize them. What at first appeared to be a double
standard-regulation for public schools but not for non-public schools-now
makes perfect sense as a means to an end.
Lance Hill
Diane Ravitch's blog 