Archives for category: For-Profit
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A World Without Public Schools?

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2012 //
22

This article was published in 2007. David Gelernter, a brilliant computer scientist at Yale with strong conservative views, asked why we could not have a world without public schools.

Imagine every school run by private entrepreneurs, private managers, religious groups, whoever, whatever.

Or every student with a voucher.

Why have public education at all?

Sometimes it seems that this is the true goal of faux reformers today: a world of privatized schools, perhaps with a few public schools remaining as repositories for the students that no one wants. Sort of like New Orleans today.

I read this article when it appeared in 2007 and remember being astonished by its audacity. It basically suggests that democratic control of education is a failure, and that the private sector is superior.

Of course, this was before the collapse of the economy in 2008, caused entirely by deregulated private banks and greedy individuals. It takes a vigorous public sector to rein in the predatory greed of some institutions and individuals. Not every private institution is greedy or predatory, but why should we trust our children to the whim and competence of the private sector?

We now see private equity investors looking at the schools as opportunities to make money. This is alarming, because whatever profit they extract is money taken away from the education of children. And we know that they will aim to cut costs by increasing class sizes or using technology to reduce the number of teachers.

It bears mentioning that every nation with a high-performing education system has a strong public school system.

Public institutions are committed to equity. Private institutions seek excellence, but they operate in a market that is guaranteed to produce winners and losers, not equity. If markets produced equity, no one would ever lose money in the stock market and the market would only go up, never down.

Our challenge is to pursue the changes that strengthen our public schools and nurture both equity and excellence.

As it happens, we have ample evidence that neither charters nor vouchers have produced either equity or excellence.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, For-Profit, Privatization, US Education

Here Come the Profiteers

By dianeravitch
August 10, 2012 //
10

Joe Bower is an educator who wants to reform education. But he has no sympathy for the rampant privatization that is now overtaking U.S. education with the support of the Obama administration. And it will only get worse under a Romney administration. In the post linked here, he has a video showing an advertisement for one of those aggressive for-profit operations now targeting American school children.

Why isn’t Secretary Duncan on the stump warning parents about these educational predators?

Technology is a good thing when used appropriately. But when advanced as it is now to lay off teachers and close schools, it is a disgrace. As Bower writes, children need real teachers, not home schooling by computer.

Time to say no. And say it loud.

Categories For-Profit, On-Line Education, Privatization

The Secret of School Reform

By dianeravitch
August 9, 2012 //
40

Matt Mandel is a National Board Certified Teacher in the Philadelphia public schools.

He has figured out reform.

He explains it here for those who were puzzled.

The most important thing you need to know is this:

“It’s not about the children.”

The reason reformers keep saying that it is “for the children,” is because it’s not.

They say that to confuse people.

Read Matt Mandel and learn what it would look like if it were really “about the children.”

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Privatization, Race to the Top

What’s Wrong with Privatization?

By dianeravitch
August 9, 2012 //
17

This could be a very long post, but this is a blog so I’ll keep it short.

Almost every day there is a new scandal about a public service that was privatized: prisons, hospitals, schools, preschool programs.

Today it is the prison half-way houses in New Jersey, which were privatized and are now plagued with drugs, corruption, and various other problems.

The New Jersey legislature wants to impose greater supervision.

Governor Chris Christie, that tower of rectitude, won’t permit it, if it includes closer supervision of existing contracts.

One of his close political associates runs half-way houses in New Jersey.

Categories Education Reform, For-Profit, New Jersey, Privatization

Privatizers Bare Their Faces Without Shame

By dianeravitch
August 8, 2012 //
6

Last week we saw a report from Reuters about the conference for equity investors held at the posh University Club in Manhattan.

And we learned there about the many new frontiers for making a buck by jumping into the public education marketplace.

Here is another article from the same conference, this one in Education Week, reporting with a straight face that the equity investors see new opportunities to make money when the new national tests inevitably produce low scores.

Message: Never let an opportunity to make money off other people’s misery go to waste!

A bonanza, to be sure!

If we let this happen, shame on us.

Shame on state education departments.

Shame on the U.S. Department of Education.

Shame on Arne Duncan and President Obama.

And shame on the investors who want to take a cut of the dollars intended to educate America’s children.

Are they part of the reform movement too?

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, For-Profit, Privatization

About that Digital Learning Council

By dianeravitch
August 8, 2012 //
5

Coach Bob Sikes put together a blog about the corporate supporters of Jeb Bush’s crusade for digital learning.

If you go back and read the report of the “Ten Elements of Digital Learning,” I suggest you scan the acknowledgments and you will find a representative of almost every corporation trying to sell hardware or software to the schools.

The other thing you need to know about the report is that it is based on zero evidence. It cites a US Department of Education study of evidence-based policy for online instruction, and that is supposed to impress the casual reader and make him/her think there is evidence to put every child online as much as possible. But I read that study and it says (p. 53) we don’t know enough about online instruction to make decisions in the K-12 area. There have been only five studies, not enough, the report says.

The accumulating evidence from places like Ohio and Pennsylvania is that online virtual schools are driven more by profit than by a desire to produce better education.

I just finished a chapter on this subject, and feel incensed that so much effort is being expended to spread the gospel on virtual schooling in the absence of evidence about where, where, and to whom. Certainly online instruction is important and necessary, but there is no support in research to have millions of chlldren home schooled in front of a computer, with the virtual school collecting millions of dollars while teachers have classes of 60:1, 100:1, even 200:1, at low pay.

Categories Bush, Jeb, Education Reform, Florida, For-Profit, On-Line Education, Privatization

What You Need to Know about For-Profit Online Schools

By dianeravitch
August 8, 2012 //
5

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.

Categories ALEC, Bush, Jeb, Charter Schools, Florida, For-Profit, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, K12 Inc., Luna, Tom, On-Line Education

How Charters Prosper

By dianeravitch
August 7, 2012 //
5

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.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Florida, For-Profit, Indiana

The Ten Elements of Digital Learning

By dianeravitch
August 7, 2012 //
14

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.

Categories Broad Foundation, Bush, Jeb, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, For-Profit, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, On-Line Education, Technology, Computers

Adam Smith Warns: Beware the Profit-Seekers

By dianeravitch
August 6, 2012 //
15

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.

Categories Economy, Education Industry, For-Profit, Privatization
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