Glenda Ritz upset Tony Bennett.
She stands for genuine education reform. She believes in teachers. She was a teacher for 33 years.
She opposes vouchers, merit pay, letter grades for schools, and evaluating teachers by test scores.
She is a breath of fresh air.
Tony Bennett has conceded.
Bennett is the quintessential reformer: pro-charter, pro-voucher, pro-privatization. Anti-union, anti-teacher, surrounded in state education department by 11 TFA staff.
Head of Jeb Bush’s rightwing Chiefs for Change.
Rumor in Florida is that the state board of education wants Tony Bennet as state commissioner to implement the rightwing agenda in that state.
Congratulations to the educators in Indiana! Time to reform and rehabilitate your state’s education system.
Congratulations to Glenda Ritz, a genuine educator!
Watch this one.
Glenda Ritz is running ahead of Tony Bennett for state superintendent. Bennett is for charters, vouchers, teacher-bashing, anti-union, privatization, for-profit charters and cyber charters. He is head of Jeb Bush’s rightwing Chiefs for Change. He outspent Ritz 5-1.
The latest:
3,686 of 5,319 precincts – 69 percent
Glenda Ritz, Dem 970,768 – 51 percent
Tony Bennett, GOP (i) 918,172 – 49 percent
As of Oct. 30 finance reporting deadline, Bennett had raised more than $1.5 million; Ritz was slightly over $325,000.
I keep seeing articles about elections influenced by out-of-state and out-of-district contributions.
Sometimes, as in Los Altos, California, and in New Orleans, the elections are for local school board.
Sometimes, as in Louisiana, the election is for state school board.
Sometimes, as in Indiana and Idaho, the election is for state superintendent.
Sometimes, the election is a ballot initiative, as in Georgia, which is voting on whether to give the Governor the authority to create a commission to authorize charter schools even if the local school board objects; and in Washington State, where a referendum would create one of the nation’s most expansive charter laws; or in Michigan, where money is pouring in to oppose an initiative to make collective bargaining a right.
In school district after school district, state after state, PAC money is being bundled to promote candidates and issues with the same agenda: anti-union, anti-teacher, anti-public education, pro-privatization.
Some of the names are familiar: Bill Gates (in Washington), Michael Bloomberg (in Louisiana), Alice Walton (in Georgia and Washington), Joel Klein (in New Orleans), the DeVos family (American Federation for Children) in Michigan, Eli Broad (in Louisiana), Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst (in Michigan and in many districts). Much of the spending is targeted by Democrats for EducationReform (DFER), the Wall Street hedge fund managers group.
This cannot be sheer coincidence. In most places, the amount of money coming from outside is unprecedented. In Louisiana, the spending on a state board race was a multiple of 12 times what was previously spent.
To the naked eye, this seems to be a concerted effort to orchestrate a privatization of public education.
Big money undermining local control, democracy, and public education.
This passionate teacher in Indiana has the solution to improving education in Indiana:
1. Incentivize teachers by allowing the academic freedom to teach
2. End poverty
3. Vote for Glenda Ritz to replace Tony Bennett
In the Public Interest, a nonpartisan public policy group in DC, filed a Freedom of Information Act request for communications between Tony Bennett, the far-right Indiana State Superintendent of Education in Indiana, and certain individuals–specifically Jeb Bush and Joel Klein.
The question of interest is whether certain parties with a financial interest might be influencing Bennett’s decisions. Bush and Klein are both selling technology; Klein works for Rupert Murdoch and is a member of Bush’s board. Bush’s organization is funded by high-tech corporations and online for-profits.
The Indiana DOE is stalling on releasing the requested material, presumably until after Tuesday’s election, when Bennett faces challenger Glenda Ritz.
Two recent analyses show how convoluted and confusing Indiana’s school report cards are.
Matthew DiCarlo has been reviewing state grading systems and concludes that the one concocted in Indiana is the “probably the most rudimentary scoring system” he has seen. Like other school report cards, the Indiana marking system gives low grades to high-poverty schools and high-grades to low-poverty schools.
DiCarlo doesn’t say this but I will. Report cards weighted heavily by test scores, like this one, set up schools to fail if they enroll poor kids and make them prime candidates for closure and privatization.
If you want to see the full measure State Superintendent Tony Bennett’s wacky and punitive scheme, read this letter by Chris Himsel, superintendent of the Northwest Allen County Schools in Indiana. Himsel tries his best to explain why the A-F grades are confusing and incoherent. He ends up admitting that no one can really understand them. They make no sense.
The A-F report cards only make sense if you recognize that they are intended to demoralize educators and set the table for the privatizers that Tony Bennett represents.
Indiana Superintendent Tony Bennett is running for re-election. He has raised more than $1 million from supporters of an anti-public school agenda.
He just received $25,000 from a gubernatorial candidate who wants vouchers for private and religious schools with NO accountability.
Way to go in handing out public dollars with zero accountability for their use.
Just more evidence that the voucher advocates no longer even pretend that vouchers will improve education.
Their goal is to destroy public education.
Wake up, parents and citizens of Indiana.
It is not teachers who are in peril. It is the public sector.
It is the public schools of Indiana, once a source of great civic pride, now slated for demolition by a rightwing wrecking crew.
The big corporate money is flowing into Indiana to re-elect privatizer Tony Bennett as its champion.
But fortunately the voters have a chance to throw him out and elect Glenda Ritz, an educator who wants to improve public education.
Please read this post from a Hoosier.
I commend to you the anonymous comment by a man who served as a teacher and principal for many years in the state. He understands what is happening, as Bennett systematically gives away public schools to private interests.
“At no time in the one-hundred-and-twenty-one years that my grandfather, my father, my kids and I have been teaching in Indiana public schools has education faced a bigger crisis. We are on the verge of losing local control of our schools to the corporate, for profit, privatization movement. This movement has started in parts of Indiana already as State School Superintendent Tony Bennett has sold off inner-city schools to private, profit making companies and charter schools. Studies show that these schools either fail or do no better than public schools, even though they are often given more money, more staff and more resources. What this does is take money away from public schools and gives it to private, profit-making schools. This year Fort Wayne Public Schools lost 2.6 million dollars that was given to private schools in their district. This sets up public schools to fail, which some feel is the purpose anyway (the more public schools that “”fail” the more private, for profit schools we can create.)
Why is he doing this? Follow the money. Check out the big donors to Tony Bennett’s campaign. It is pouring in from out-of-state, from big corporations and testing services that stand to make a profit from privatizing Indiana’s schools. If Tony wins re-election, they stand to make a nice profit. Tony Bennett doesn’t want to answer public concerns about this. He stays out of the public eye, failing to show up over four times in my town when asked to attend a forum. He even delivered his annual State of Education speech to a hand-picked, private audience so he wouldn’t face any embarrassing questions.
How is he setting up schools to “fail” so he can take them over? By spending millions of dollars on testing programs (pleasing his donors) that don’t begin to assess what all schools really do. He repeats the dubious message that schools are “failing” until it becomes his and his followers reality, neglecting to praise schools for their many successes (when we were in high school, the graduation rate in the U.S. was 50%: now it is 85% and climbing; actually higher when you factor in those who go back and get a G.E.D.) He is setting up a grade system for schools, publicly calling them out as F, D, C, B, or A schools, based on what kids did on a test. Does anybody not know how that will come out? Indianapolis Public Schools will largely “fail.” Carmel will be “A+, and he will award them and turn IPS over to private, corporate schools which will do no better and maybe worse.
What is the elephant in the room? What Bennett and his friends don’t want to admit is what hundreds of studies have shown: that the number one predictor of lower functioning schools is their level of poverty. This is obvious to any teacher who has taught in the inner city. I personally have visited over 130 schools in Indiana and several out of state, and have served on and chaired North Central Association (the nation’s major school accreditation agency) evaluations of over 25 inner city, rural, and surburban schools, from Lake Michigan to the Ohio River . I have great respect for the teachers in the inner city schools. No one works harder under adverse conditions than they do. To let Tony Bennett label them failures is beyond reason and shows how great his disconnect is from the reality of what schools really do. Heard enough? Then hear this: after he labels them failures, he plans to get rid of them!
What can we do about this? We need to let everybody who cares about the future of education know what is going on. Feel free to share his and talk about it before the election. I have grave doubts that the schools we knew and benefited from will be available to kids in the future if we don’t speak up and become active.”
Read here to learn Indiana State Superintendent Tony Bennett’s description of “a beautiful day.”
I can think of so many other ways to describe a beautiful day.
I’m going out to take a walk and experience one of those beautiful days in Brooklyn. I want to forget about the people who smile when they cause other people to be miserable. Who smile when children are taking tests again and again, for hours on end. Who smile when teachers and principals are fired. Who smile when all the joy is squeezed out of learning and teaching.
I have a different idea about a beautiful day. I’m going out to enjoy one.
Diane Ravitch's blog 