I posted earlier about Mayor Michael Nutter of Philadelphia, who said he could not see the difference between public, private and religious schools.
A teacher asks:
I wonder where these politicians are getting their education from. Did they miss class on the days when the Constitution and First Amendment were discussed?
Education Week has an article by the always well-informed Alyson Klein that speculates about Romney’s possible choice for Secretary of Education.
The possibilities include:
Jeb Bush, former Florida governor, who shaped the Romney agenda for privatization of the nation’s schools;
Tom Luna, the state superintendent in Idaho who is known for his allegiance to online corporations and his efforts to increase class size;
Joel Klein, the former chancellor of NYC, now selling technology for Rupert Murdoch, another supporter of privatization and opponent of unions, seniority and tenure;
Michelle Rhee, leader of a national campaign to remove all tenure, seniority and collective bargaining fromt teachers;
Chris Cerf, acting commission in New Jersey, who is leading Chris Christie’s push to privatize public schools in that state;
Here is the big surprise:
Arne Duncan, who is seen by Republicans as compatible with Romney’s agenda and, as the article, says, eager to stay on.
There are other names, but it is interesting to realize that at least four of the six listed here are allegedly, nominally Democrats.
Three charter schools want to open in St. John’s County in Florida, which is the state’s highest ranking county.
Some of the state legislators, including one of the state senate’s most avid supporters of charters, are surprised. They thought that charters were supposed to rescue students in failing schools, but St. John’s County is known for its excellent public schools.
If approved, the charters will siphon almost $13 million out of the public school budget, requiring at least 200 teacher layoffs. School officials are alarmed. The excellent public schools of St. John’s County won’t be quite so excellent in the future. This is the kind of competition that Jeb Bush put into place, which he wants to replicate across the nation.
Two of the charters would be run by a for-profit charter chain that is already collecting $158 million in revenues from South Florida charters, which includes an annual profit to the firm of $9 million. It’s a very good business indeed.
A reader who runs a charter school wrote a week or so ago and insisted that charters are not deregulated; he asked for examples of state laws and regulations that charters are not required to meet. Here are some that apply in Florida, according to this article:
Joanne Yatvin is an experienced teacher, principal, superintendent, literacy expert, author, and former president of the National Council of Teachers of English. She wrote the following post for this blog:
Since we are deep into the era of school reform, I’d like to offer my own plan for reforming America’s schools. Although I am not an official expert in the eyes of the federal Department of Education or the National Governors Association, I have better credentials* than most of the people so recognized, plus a lot of experience running successful public schools.
If I had to propose a simple solution, I’d say let’s follow Finland all the way. All their schools are free and public; school lunches are also free; there are no national tests; free pre-schools; regular schooling beginning at age seven; and teaching is a highly respected profession. Unfortunately, however, not all those things would work in America because Finland has a much lower poverty rate than we do, a homogeneous population, and a language that is much easier to read than English.
So, I will get more complicated, but never so much as the various reform ideas being proposed or implemented now.
5. No for-profit school may call itself a charter school or receive public funds.
6. Authorize at least thirty-three per cent of charter schools as magnet schools focusing on specialization in a particular field, such as science, the arts, or vocational training.
8. Allow each school faculty to select its own principal and administrative support team. In addition, each school would allow parent observations in classrooms and encourage parent involvement in special projects.
As I wrote my specifications for education reform, many exceptions, fine points, and dangers occurred to me, but adding them in would have made the structure too complicated and too susceptible to other problems. In the end, I decided that I would have to have faith in the good intentions and good sense of all the parties involved and leave the whole system open to change. Of one thing I am certain: the system I am proposing would be more flexible, democratic, and sensible than the top-down one we have now with all its misinterpretation of student needs and capabilities, scapegoating of teachers, and preferences for profiteering in materials publishing, consulting, and charter school operation.
——Joanne Yatvin
Imagine that this new manager–with unprecedented power to determine the future of the district–has worked as a consultant to the big charter school in the district.
Imagine that the district pays one-third of its budget to that same charter school.
Imagine that the very wealthy owner of the charter school collects $16 million a year in “management fees” from the charter school budget.
Imagine that this same businessman who owns the charter and collects $16 million a year is also the single biggest contributor to the governor.
What, you can’t imagine such a thing could happen?
Neither could I.
It’s too improbable, too outrageous.
Why the national press would be all over this story, wouldn’t they?
Imagine that.
You may have been naive enough to think that charter schools are multiplying because some people want better education for American children.
You may have thought they were expanding to give more choices to children trapped in bad public schools.
You may have wondered why they continue to proliferate when so many studies agree that they don’t get better results than the public schools.
But if you thought those things, you were on the wrong track.
There are other reasons that charters are growing by leaps and bounds.
They make money for investors!
They are a great investment opportunity!
Both links refer to the same interview on CNBC with the head of a real estate investment trust who explains why charters are a sure thing.
Follow the money.
I read Romney’s education agenda carefully.
It’s pro-privatization.
It repeats the myth of “failing” public schools.
There is not a good word in it for public education.
Romney is avid for charter schools and vouchers.
Here is the analysis of his agenda that I wrote for the New York Review of Books.
Someone tweeted me a few days ago and asked “what’s wrong with privatization?”
I didn’t have time or space to respond in 140 characters, but fortunately someone else has done it for me.
Let me be clear. I believe in the value and strength of the private sector. Long ago, I traveled in the Soviet Union and in China, and I developed a deep respect for the efficiency of the private sector in supplying goods to markets for consumers.
But I believe that a healthy and decent society has a strong private sector to provide goods and services (contractors, plumbers, electricians, repairs, etc.), and a healthy public sector to provide essential public services, like public education, roads, postal service, parks, beaches, transportation, government, police, military, fire fighting, libraries, and healthcare for those who can’t afford to buy it in the private sector. I may be forgetting other essential public services, but you get the point, I hope.
Privatization of public services is not in the public interest. The services are inevitably more expensive to the consumer and the taxpayer, who must now pay profits as well as the cost of the services. And the services are not more efficient; they are even less efficient because there is less money available to pay for the same service. And as the enclosed article shows, there is actually an incentive for failure. Privatized schools want public schools to fail so they can get more customers. Privatized prisons want more criminals for them to house.
We need a healthy private sector and a healthy public sector.
Unfortunately, there is a movement to privatize public education. Big money is going to fund political candidates in both parties who are committed to privatization.
The privatized schools–whether voucher or charter–do not outperform our public schools.
We must resist the current well-funded effort to privatize our public schools.
David Reber is a teacher in Kansas who happens to be a terrific writer.
His articles are always insightful.
This one is about the relentless advertising campaign in Kansas of the online giant K12.
As the privatization movement gathers steam, as equity investors launch their latest scheme to extract profits from the public schools, we will be bombarded by even more appeals to go digital. Of course, we are all going digital. But there is no good reason to home school children who don’t need to be home schooled. Virtual academies get terrible results for children. This has been documented by the National Education Policy Center and in exposes in the NY Times and the Washington Post.
Home schooling by computer may be right for some, but it is not right for most students. Don’t buy their con job.
This reader offers a succinct summary of the reformers’ game plan. He might have added additional elements: a) budget cuts to disable public schools; and b) laws that remove accountability and transparency with privately managed charters; c) evaluating teachers on a bell curve, so that half will always be “below average,” thus creating a “crisis”; d) demanding 100% perfection, 100% proficiency and saying that anything less proves failure.
You can see it played out in state after state, especially in those with Republican governors, and in the pronouncements of the U.S. Department of Education, and it is fully developed in the Romney education agenda. They think that that private management of public education is the wave of the future, preferably it is generates profits for investors, and they are doing their best to make it happen:
First, the reformers have yet another scapegoat [to blame] for poverty. Now it’s the schools that are at fault, not the destruction of our social safety net, not the elimination of worker protections, not the imposition of fair taxation that enables the government to maintain our national infrastructure, and certainly not the actions of the 1% to extract all of the wealth of the U.S. economy for themselves alone. We don’t need to fix the failed and irrational policies of the past thirty years. No! We just have to reform the schools with for-profit charters, voucher plans and virtual “distance learning” that just happens to divert more tax money to … wait for it … the 1%!
And of course, never mind how all of these reforms are failures. By the time the public is fully aware of that fact, it will be too late to change and we’ll be on to the next scapegoat.
Second, this is just another impossible goal against which to conclude our schools are failures. The logic here is brilliant: Set the standard so impossibly high that the schools will be failures by default. Keep the focus on the unions and test scores, so the public won’t make the real connections between the economics policies of the past three decades but instead will follow the reformers in blind rage.
Diane Ravitch's blog 