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Does This Man Deserve an Annual Income of $786 Million?

By dianeravitch
January 10, 2019 //
54

After Nancy Pelosi was re-elected Speaker of the House, she gave a gracious speech in which she quoted Justice Louis Brandeis. She said, quoting him:

“‘As Justice Brandeis said, ‘We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both’”

This article was written by an economist at George Mason University (whose Economics Department was heavily influenced by gifts from the Koch brothers, who are low-tax libertarians). I suspect the Koch brothers would hate the views expressed here. Economist Steven Pearlstein addresses the issue raised by Pelosi:

The $786 million question: Does Steve Schwarzman — or anyone — deserve to make that much?

Last year, Stephen Schwarzman took home $786.5 million from the Blackstone Group, a leading private-equity firm that he co-founded and has run for more than 30 years. That sum included his salary, bonus and incentive fees totaling $125 million, plus more than $650 million Blackstone paid out as dividends associated with the sizable holding of Blackstone stock he retains as a founder and longtime executive. It was a big payday, to be sure, but not out of line with previous years, when Schwarzman’s Blackstone income ranged from $425 million to $734 million. Nor is it out of line with increases in wealth earned by a number of other billionaire financiers and company founders.

The question is: Do they deserve such extraordinary sums?

Schwarzman declined an invitation to talk through that question. But it’s a fair guess that as a staunch defender of free markets, he considers his take a proper reward for his talent, hard work, ingenuity and willingness to take risk over many years. In the past, he has criticized those who blame the wealthy for stagnant middle-class incomes and rising inequality. And when the Obama administration proposed a change in tax law that would have reduced his income, an outraged (and later apologetic) Schwarzman likened it to Adolf Hitler’s invasion of Poland.

In the theoretical models favored by economists, what Schwarzman or anyone else earns in the marketplace is thought to reflect how much we add to economic output — in the language of economics, our “marginal productivity.”

“My own reading of the evidence is that most of the very wealthy get that way by making substantial economic contribution,” Harvard economist Greg Mankiw wrote in a much remarked-upon essay a few years back that was titled “Defending the One Percent.”

Indeed, if we still had an economy of independent, self-sufficient farmers and artisans, Mankiw’s mental model might be the correct one. Someone could point to a bushel of tomatoes or a hand-knit sweater and credibly make the claim, “I produced that. It is the fruit of my labor, so what I earn from it in the competitive marketplace is my property, my just desert.”

But in a modern economy, creating products and services is a team sport, with individuals constantly interacting with other individuals and firms in complex arrangements that make it much more difficult to determine each person’s contribution to overall economic output. There are differences in market power between firms, and differences of individual power within firms, both of which have a significant effect on exactly who earns what.

One of the reasons Blackstone is so successful, for example, is that as one of the biggest private-equity firms, it gets a first look at most of the best investment opportunities. Everyone who works at, or invests with, Blackstone benefits from that kind of market power. And within Blackstone, Schwarzman has the “sole discretion” in setting the bonuses for top executives, according to its annual proxy filings.

More significantly, the amount anyone earns at Blackstone, or any other firm, is influenced by the rules, laws and norms that govern business behavior and market competition.
As someone who buys and sells companies, for example, Schwarzman has benefited handsomely from a uniquely American business environment in which companies are run with the single-minded focus of maximizing returns to shareholders and investors, rather than balancing the interests of all stakeholders.

The hotel companies and amusement parks that Blackstone has owned (Hilton, La Quinta, Motel 6, Six Flags, Busch Gardens) have benefited from a federal minimum wage that hasn’t budged in more than a decade, and labor laws that now make it almost impossible for workers to vote in a union at any company that is determined to stop them.

Over the past 30 years, the weakening of antitrust enforcement and regulations meant to protect consumers and investors have boosted the profits and increased the value of Blackstone-owned companies in the waste management, cable television, telephone, funeral and nursing home industries.

As a big investor in corporate debt, Blackstone also has benefited from bankruptcy rules that favor bondholders over workers, as it did in the restructuring of telecom firm Avaya in which $360 million in unfunded pension liabilities was effectively shifted to the government’s pension guarantee agency.
The extraordinarily low interest rates engineered by the Federal Reserve in recent years have boosted valuations for the many real estate investments that Blackstone has made, including its $37.7 billion purchase of Equity Office Properties at the top of the last real estate bubble. Low interest rates also have provided Blackstone with the financial headroom to shower its investors and executives with huge one-time dividends financed with debt.

Liberalized trade treaties have made it possible for Blackstone-owned firms such as Freescale Semiconductor and TRW Auto Parts to lower costs by moving work to low-wage countries overseas. The same treaties have also made it possible for Blackstone to attract more foreign investors, like the sovereign wealth funds of China and Saudi Arabia, while opening new investment opportunities for Blackstone abroad, such as Legoland and Versace.

Scharzman and his partners have benefited handsomely from the favorable tax treatment for “carried interest,” and the ability to defer taxes on profitable investments that are exchanged for new ones. And under the new law, their taxes will be lower, and returns higher, as a result of the new lower rates for corporations and partnerships. The repeal of the estate tax will also leave wealthy families with more money to invest in Blackstone funds.

The point here is not to quarrel with these policy choices (although there is much to quarrel with) or to suggest that Blackstone has benefited more than other firms (although that is probably the case). Rather, it is to illustrate that the amount that Schwarzman or anyone else earns in any year in the marketplace is determined in no small part by rules and norms that govern market competition.

Those rules and norms were not set in place by some all-knowing “invisible hand” — they were politically and socially determined. That is why wars have been fought over them, legislative battles have been waged over them and elections have been won and lost because of them. And it is why Blackstone and other companies spend lavishly on lobbying and electing friendly politicians who are in a position to shape them.

Under different sets of rules and norms, the market might have valued Schwarzman’s economic contribution last year at a measly $393 million — half of what he did receive, but surely still enough to persuade him to contribute his excellence.
Markets, in other words, are social constructs, and the idea that they generate a distribution of income based on a purely objective measure of individual economic contribution is a fiction, nothing more than free-market ideology. When it comes to the distribution of income, there is no “pure” market. Any distribution is, by its nature, “political,” reflecting changing social norms and the distribution of political power.

To point this out is not to suggest that I know of a more objective system for determining how income should distributed. Rather, it is to suggest that if we, as a society, decide that we find the current distribution of income unacceptable — if it offends our moral intuitions that a single financier earns as much in a year as 15,000 elementary school teachers — then it violates no great moral or economic principle to alter that distribution.

One way to make the distribution of income more equal would be to change some of the rules and norms that govern market competition.

Another would be to leave the rules and norms in place and alter the distribution after the market has delivered its judgment, through more progressive taxation and government spending.

The first has been called “predistribution,” the second redistribution, and there may be good economic and political reasons for favoring one or the other. But from a moral viewpoint, there is no meaningful distinction between the two. Both reflect the ways that societies determine the distribution of income based on subjective judgments of what is fair.
Defenders of free markets have long argued that shifting income away from those whom the market judges more talented and more productive would be to deny them their “just deserts.” But as a moral concept, just deserts is inadequate and incomplete.

For in determining whether any distribution of income is just, it is not enough to inquire whether someone has earned his income by playing by the rules. We must also look at the distribution of income and ask whether the rules themselves are fair and just.

Pearlstein is a business and economics columnist for The Washington Post and the Robison Professor of Public Affairs at George Mason University. He is also the author of “Can American Capitalism Survive? Why Greed is Not Good, Opportunity is Not Equal and Fairness Won’t Make Us Poor.”

Steven Pearlstein, a Washington Post economics columnist and the Robinson professor of public affairs at George Mason University, is the author of “Can American Capitalism Survive?”
Democracy Dies in Darkness
© 1996-2019 The Washington Post

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Democracy, Inequity

Mississippi: The Amicus Briefs in the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Lawsuit Against Diverting Local Funds to Charters

By dianeravitch
December 30, 2018 //
3

Is your school district losing funds to charter schools that it did not authorize? If so, you might find this information useful.

A few months ago, the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a lawsuit in Mississippi to block the state from removing tax revenues from local school districts to pay for charter schools. The district in question is Jackson, Mississippi. SPLC argued that the state constitution requires that the funds of each district are to be spent solely for its own public schools, under local control.

The SPLC brief is linked in the original post.

SPLC shared with me the amicus briefs, which are excellent. If your state or district is being drained by charters, you may find these legal briefs to be useful.

The three briefs can be found here, here, and here.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Funding, Inequity, Injustice, Mississippi, Privatization

Why Many Younger Educators Don’t Like “Reformers”

By dianeravitch
December 4, 2018 //
24

This is a heartening article posted by BardMAT program in Los Angeles.

Those of us who feared that the younger generation would become indoctrinated into reform ideology can take heart. They have maintained their sense of balance and their ethics.

Read this article.

Let’s consider why so many young educators today are in open rebellion.

How did we lose patience with politicians and policymakers who dominated the education reform debate for more than a generation? ……

Recall first that both political parties called us “a nation at risk,” fretted endlessly that we “leave no child behind,” and required us to compete in their “race to the top.”

They told us our problems could be solved if we “teach for America,” introduce “disruptive technology,” and ditch the textbook to become “real world,” 21st century, “college and career ready.”

They condemned community public schools for not letting parents “choose,” but promptly mandated a top-down “common core” curriculum. They flooded us with standardized tests guaranteeing “accountability.” They fetishized choice, chopped up high schools, and re-stigmatized racial integration.

They blamed students who lacked “grit,” teachers who sought tenure, and parents who knew too much. They declared school funding wasn’t the problem, elected school boards are obstacles, and philanthropists know best.

They told us the same public schools that once inspired great poetry, art, and music, put us on the moon, and initiated several civil rights movements needed to be split, gutted, or shuttered.

They invented new school names like “Green Renaissance College-Prep Academy for Character, the Arts, and Scientific Careers” and “Hope-Horizon Enterprise Charter Preparatory School for New STEM Futures.” They replaced the district superintendent with the “Chief Educational Officer.”

They published self-fulfilling prophecies connecting zip-coded school ratings, teacher performance scores, and real estate values. They accepted Brown v. Board as skin-deep, not as an essential mandate for democracy.

They implied “critical thinking” was possible without the Humanities, that STEM alone makes us vocationally relevant, and that “coding” should replace recess time.They cut teacher pay, lowered employment qualifications, and peddled the myth anyone can teach.

They celebrated school recycling programs that left consumption unquestioned, gave lip-service to “student-centered civic engagement” while stifling protest, and talked up “multiple intelligences” while defunding the arts.

They expected their critics to look beyond poverty, inequality, residential segregation, mass incarceration, homelessness, and college debt to focus instead on a few heartwarming (and yes, legitimate) stories of student resilience and pluck.

They expected us to believe that a lazy public-school teacher whose students fail to make “adequate yearly progress” on tests was endemic but that an administrator bilking an online academy or for-profit charter school was “one bad apple.”

They designed education conferences on “data-driven instruction,” “rigorous assessment,” and “differentiated learning” but showed little patience for studies that correlate student performance with poverty, trauma, the school-to-prison pipeline, and the decimation of community schools.

They promised new classroom technology to bridge the “digital divide” between rich, poor, urban, and rural, as they consolidated corporate headquarters in a few elite cities. They advertised now-debunked “value-added” standardized testing for stockholder gain as teacher salaries stagnated.

They preached “cooperative learning” while sending their own kids to private schools. They saw alma mater endowments balloon while donating little to the places where most Americans earn degrees. They published op-eds to end affirmative action but still checked the legacy box on college applications.

They were legitimately surprised when thousands of teachers in the reddest, least unionized states walked out of class last year.

Meanwhile……

The No Child Left Behind generation continues to bear the full weight of this malpractice, paying a step price for today’s parallel rise in ignorance and intolerance.

We are the children of the education reformer’s empty promises. We watched the few decide for the many how schools should operate. We saw celebrated new technologies outpace civic capacity and moral imagination. We have reason to doubt.

We are are the inheritors of “alternative facts” and “fake news.” We have watched democratic institutions crumble, conspiracy thinking mainstreamed, and authoritarianism normalized. We have seen climate change denied at the highest level of government.

We still see too many of our black brothers and sisters targeted by law enforcement. We have seen our neighbor’s promised DACA protections rescinded and watched deporters break down their doors. We see basic human rights for our LGBTQ peers refused in the name of “science.”

We have seen the “Southern strategy” deprive rural red state voters of educational opportunity before dividing, exploiting, and dog whistling. We hear climate science mocked and watched women’s freedom marched backwards. We hear mental health discussed only after school shootings.

We’ve watched two endless wars and saw deployed family members and friends miss out on college. Even the battles we don’t see remind us that that bombs inevitably fall on schools. We know know war imposes a deadly opportunity tax on the youngest of civilians and female teachers.

Against this backdrop we recall how reformers caricatured our teachers as overpaid, summer-loving, and entitled. We resent how our hard-working mentors were demoralized and forced into resignation or early retirement.

Our collective experience is precisely why we aren’t ideologues. We know the issues are complex. And unlike the reformers, we don’t claim to have the answers. We simply believe that education can and must be more humane than this. We plan to make it so.

We learned most from the warrior educators who saw through the reform facade. These heroes breathed life into institutions, energized our classrooms, reminded us what we are worth, and pointed us in new directions. We plan to become these educators too.

Bravo! Brava!

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Common Core, Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers, Democracy, Education Industry, Education Reform, Inequity, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Poverty, Privatization, Race to the Top, Testing

Linda McNeill: Charter Schools’ Lavish Spending vs. Public Schools’ Budget Cuts

By dianeravitch
September 28, 2018 //
3

Linda McNeill is a professor at Rice University who writes about funding, testing, and other education policy issues.

In this post, she describes her reaction when she received a beautiful invitation to a dinner to raise money for charter schools in Houston. The invitation came from one of Houston’s existing very well-funded charter chains. (Coincidentally, IDEA just announced plans to expand in Houston, as well as a plan to saturate El Paso with 20 IDEA charters).

She writes, in part:

The thick envelope gave a hint of elegance inside. An invitation. Colorful graphics, fine card stock, strategically placed photographs, “bold face” names inside the folds of this multi-layered, professionally crafted solicitation. A separate card, two-sided on high quality card stock, lists in bold contrasting colors the details of the events. Also inside, a return envelope for the enclosed commitment card suggesting “underwriting opportunities” from a mere $500 to levels of $50,000 and $100,000.

An invitation to a museum gala or symphony fund-raiser? A call to join the restoration of our Harvey-flooded opera house? The funding categories would seem to so suggest.

No, this was an invitation to a fund-raiser for a corporate charter school chain. A private company that has added “public” to its name because it is one of the corporate entities that takes taxpayer dollars (the “public” part) to fund its schools.

My first inclination was curiosity: who are these people? I looked over the names of the funders already listed on the invitation: the usual anti-public school billionaires, some names of really good people who should know better, and some people I didn’t recognize who probably have been sold on the idea that only by contributing to these charter chains can they save the city’s poor, minority children.

My next reaction was anger. This invitation – fancy graphics, elegant card stock, thick white envelopes – was expensive! Each one must have cost several dollars, even accounting for a bulk order discount. I turned each piece over to try to find the printing company that produced it. No designer or graphics company attributed, but a line that caught my eye: contact the charter chain’s “manager of special events” for more information. Really??

Manager of Special Events! I know of no public school, no neighborhood school, that has a manager of special events – much less the budget to hire one. But they all could use that $100,000 for a long list of needs after years of underfunding.

Then I immediately knew the source of my anger: the inequity of it all. These charter chains are privately incorporated, but they not only take our tax dollars out of our public schools – the public’s schools, but they may be using our tax dollars to pay their special events managers and printers to advertise against our public schools! Our tax dollars enable their “marketing” in competition with the public’s own schools. I took the invitation to a high-quality stationery store to ask if they had produced it and what it might have cost. The woman said they hadn’t produced it but confirmed it was definitely expensive and each would have cost “several dollars” even if, as I had suspected, several hundred or thousand had been printed and mailed out (yes, add the mailing costs). And even if the printing had been donated by an individual or corporation, those dollars would still have been taken from our public schools as a tax-deductible, “charitable” contribution.

So the first inequity is that all of these “contributions,” from the modest $500 (mere seat at luncheon) to the ‘naming rights’ (I’m not making this up!) for donors giving $100,000, all of these dollars end up subtracted from the public treasury.

The second inequity: the costs of those invitations. I suddenly realized each one must cost more than many of our teachers have for school supplies and instructional materials on any given day. So I asked some teachers. A 7th-grade biology teacher new to her current school was hopeful: “They say I’ll have the supplies I need for labs and we’ve ready sent in the order for frogs for the kids to dissect, so we’ll see. So far, so good.”

The next answer was less optimistic: “I’m told I have to require every student to bring a ream of copier paper; when that runs out we won’t get any more, so I’m trying to be careful to plan ahead.” From a high school teacher: “No, we don’t get to buy paperbacks for our classrooms. We have some on hand but if we want to assign other titles, the kids have to buy their own. If they can’t afford it, I see if I have an extra copy at home or maybe I just buy it for them.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Inequity, Privatization, Texas

Angie Sullivan: We Want Magnets, Not Charters!

By dianeravitch
September 24, 2018 //
17

Angie Sullivan teaches first grade in a Title 1 school in Clark County (Las Vegas) with large numbers of English learners.

She sends her missives to legislators and journalists in Nevada.

ASD is the all-charter district modeled on Tennessee’s failed Achievement School District. A complete and total failure that Nevada copies.

Angie writes:


We want MAGNETS – not disfunctional white flight charters.

Get away ASD.

__________________

ASD Rebecca holds her annual school grab.

She does not know what she is doing. Do not allow her or Jana to take your school.

Parents may have say in future of Clark County’s failing schools

Parents in Vegas can convert their neighborhood public school into a charter? And that has worked where?

Every successful white person Vegas charter – is sitting next to a successful white person public school. All in white neighborhoods full of five star “choices”. Successful Nevada charters are white. They support segregation and white flight.

The place folks need a real choice – charters do not work.

Get ready Vegas Parents to fight for your school. Our community will not be served by white folks in a white charters. Nor they will be served by young white folks imported into Nevada to do the takeover job.

For profit charters and corporate takeover is a scam.

Non-profit ASD is defunct. Futuro stinks. Agassi stinks. Do not go into that crap. ASD is now the worst district in Nevada. It used to be Nevada Charters were the lowest performers but now it is this new piece of garbage with 100% failure.

Where is the ASD data?

Is the ASD built to hide data?

Everyone involved needs to demand accountability for this new disfunction NVDOE is using to grab schools.

_______________________________

We want MAGNETS – not disfunctional white flight charters.

Get away ASD.

_______________________________

Look at the list closely attached to the bottom of this file.

Keep in mind that Vegas has 349 schools. 39 are struggling – they seem to all be in minority impoverished areas of town. Most serve language learners who research has shown need several years to learn academic English. Not difficult to figure out how to fix a money and support problem. Those schools need money and support. Lower class sizes and supplies.

NVDOE and the ASD will try to grab CCSD schools.

They do not know our students.

They do not love our students.

They will not serve our students.

They will grab schools listed because parents will not be informed.

Spread the word – no to ASD charters.

If they want to give a school money to improve – with research based best practice – great.

Turning any Vegas school into a charter is a scam.

If ASD Rebecca wants to come into your school and show a crappy charter video – tell her to hit the road.

We already know how to read a science book to kids or plug students into the computer. That is not teaching or effective.

Privatization is not education.

___________

We want MAGNETS – not disfunctional white flight charters.

Get away ASD.

__________________

Every year I get angry that our community is targeted while the rest of the state flounders. NVDOE – do your job. You have plenty to grab. Go to these white areas and get it done.

Look at Elko. 100% of its schools are in severe failure. What is happening there? Those schools are along the Carlin Trend and heavily susidized by mining proceeds in a primarily white English speaking area. What is going on?

Look at Washoe which has pages on that list. A heavy heavy percentage of those schools are struggling – with more per pupil than Vegas. And again largely English speaking and middle class areas. What is going on?

Rural Nevada is sinking. When a school fails in a small town – it may be the only school in town. Better address those first. Charter “competition” kills the public schools and does not help small towns. It leaves expensive and hard to educate special education students in public schools and allows “choice” to everyone else.

Again the NV Charter schools are sinking. These schools serve white flight families. They are failing. Severely. That data which at least includes more of their 80+ campuses – is bad – extremely bad considering there are 24 charters and a large chunk are the lowest performers – again. Every year. Again.

It is not Vegas that is the high priority problem.

Folks who are brown do not want to be a target.

This has to stop.

Did not work in New Orleans.

Did not work in Tennessee.

Is not working in Nevada.

How many students have to be hurt to stop this ASD madness?

________________

We want MAGNETS – not disfunctional white flight charters.

Get away ASD.

The Teacher,

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Inequity, Injustice, Nevada, Privatization

Jeff Bryant: How the Rich Get Richer by Destroying Public Schools

By dianeravitch
September 18, 2018 //
26

I think we are beginning to understand the real purpose of Corporate Reform. The 1% and their minions repeat ad nauseum that school choice will fix all education problems, lift the poor out of poverty, and no new taxes are needed. Indeed, they have pushed for tax cuts and cheered on deep cuts to public education. We are watching a generation of defunding public schools, refusing to invest in teachers’ salaries, and a massive transfer of resources from the public sector to private institutions.

Jeff Bryant explains it here.

“Recent news stories about wealthy folks giving multi-million donations to education efforts have drawn both praise and criticism, but two new reports by public education advocacy groups this week are particularly revealing about the real impact rich people have on schools and how they’ve chosen to leverage their money to influence the system.

‘The Education Debt’

“The first report, “Confronting the Education Debt” from the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools examines the nation’s “education debt” – the historic funding shortfall for school systems that educate black and brown children. The authors find that through a combination of multiple factors – including funding rollbacks, tax cuts, and diversions of public money to private entities – the schools educating the nation’s poorest children have been shorted billions in funding.

“One funding source alone, the federal dollars owed to states for educating low-income children and children with disabilities, shorted schools $580 billion, between 2005 and 2017, in what the government is lawfully required to fund schools through the provisions of Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

“The impact of not fully funding Title I is startling, the report contends, calculating that at full funding, the nation’s highest-poverty schools could provide health and mental health services for every student including dental and vision services, and these schools would have the money to hire a full-time nurse, a full-time librarian, and either an additional full-time counselor or a full-time teaching assistant for every classroom.

“State and local governments contribute to underfunding too by keeping in place tax systems that chronically short schools, particularly those that educate low-income students, mostly of color. Two school districts in Illinois are highlighted – one where 80 percent of students are low-income and gets about $7,808 per pupil in total expenditures, while another, where 3 percent of students are low-income, spends $26,074 per student…

“In the meantime, while the nation’s education debt expands, the accumulated wealth of the richest Americans continues to grow. During that time period the federal government was shorting schools billions, the personal net worth of the nation’s 400 wealthiest individuals grew by $1.57 trillion, the report notes.

“There is a direct correlation between dwindling resources for public schools and the ongoing political proclivity for transferring public dollars to the nation’s wealthiest individuals and corporations,” the report declares. “The rich are getting richer. Our schools are broke on purpose.”

This is the context for Bryant’s discussion of the NPE Action Report, “Hijacked by Billionaires.” The 1% buy control of state and local races so they can advance their tax-cutting, budget-cutting ideas and promote school choice.

“What motivates these wealthy people from exerting their will in the electoral process varies. They are bipartisan politically. Some are directly connected to the charter school industry. Others have expressed disdain for democratically controlled schools and argue, instead, for school governance to transfer to unelected boards. Some are motivated by their hatred of teachers’ unions. While others believe strongly that public education needs to be opened up to market competition from charters.

“But what billionaire donors all have in common, the report authors write, is their devotion to blaming schools and educators for problems posed by educating low-income children. Instead of using their political donations to advocate for more direct aid to schools serving low-income kids, wealthy donors “distract us from policy changes that would really help children,” the report argues, “such as increasing the equity and adequacy of school funding, reducing class sizes, providing medical care and nutrition for students, and other specific efforts to meet the needs of children and families.”

Their one unifying idea is lower taxes.

His third example is a new book about how predatory elites subvert democracy.

“Rich people are playing a double game,” writes Anand Giridharadas in his new book ‘Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World.’ “On one hand, there’s no question they’re giving away more money than has ever been given away in history … But I also argue that we have one of the more predatory elites in history, despite that philanthropy.”

Categories Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Corporate Reformers, Democracy, Education Industry, Funding, Inequality, Inequity, Injustice, Philanthropy, Privatization

Lewis Hine, the Man Whose Photographs Ended Child Labor, and Reflections on Labor and Our Moment

By dianeravitch
September 3, 2018 //
34

Lewis Hine was the photographer whose work led to the passage of child labor laws.

Here are some of the photographs that touched the conscience of the nation and its leaders.

There was a time when our nation’s leaders had a conscience.

There was a time when Labor Day parades were a major event.

There was a time when labor unions provided a path to a secure, middle-class life for millions of people.

Now the parades have ended.

Now we have a new economic approach.

The rich get richer. Full employment. Stagnant wages.

The purpose of labor unions was to ensure that working people received a fair share for their contribution to their employer’s success.

Labor unions ensured that prosperity lifted up working people, not just shareholders, Wall Street speculators, and corporate owners.

We need them again. Working people need and deserve a collective voice. Now, more than ever it is time to spread the wealth, open new paths to the middle class, restore the dignity of work, and rebuild the hope for and the reality of a better life for all. To do that means to move away from the current emphasis on consumerism and libertarianism to a public philosophy that embraces the importance of the common good. That means a revival of the nearly forgotten concept of “We the People.” E pluribus unum. A shared destiny in which every life counts, in which we recognize our common humanity and our mutual obligations for one another, our brotherhood and sisterhood.

That won’t happen by wishing and hoping but by political action. It begins by voting out the agents of the current status quo. It must start now.

Categories Billionaires, Childhood, Economy, Inequity, Injustice

“School Choice Is the Enemy of Justice”

By dianeravitch
August 15, 2018 //
56

The editorial pages of the New York Times have been an echo chamber for school choice for years. The editorials regularly applaud charter schools as escape hatches from public schools and repeat the talking points of the billionaires and hedge fund managers who have gleefully replaced public schools with privately managed schools. I can’t recall an editorial that acknowledged the importance of rebuilding, revitalizing, and strengthening public education as a major responsibility of our society. I can’t recall one that criticized the onslaught of privatization against public education in our nation’s urban schools, where parents of color have lost not only their public schools, but their voice as citizens in creating public schools that serve the entire community. The editorial board has steadfastly ignored the coordinated and bipartisan assault on democratic governance of public schools in cities and states across the nation. The op-ed page, which was created to provide a space for views different from the editorial page has seldom challenged school choice orthodoxy. Almost every regular opinion writer has lauded the “miracle” of charter schools, including David Brooks, Nicholas Kristof, and David Leonhardt. The op-ed page recently included an article urging liberals not to give up on charters even though Betsy DeVos likes them too, even though they are segregated and non-union.

But now comes a new and welcome voice.

Erin Aubrey Kaplan writes that school choice is the enemy of justice. She has been selected as a regular opinion writer, which is more good news. She writes about her personal experience as a child in California, a state that is controlled by Democrats but purchased by the billionaires who sneer at public schools and want to replace them with charter schools. She reminds us that school choice was the battle cry of segregationists. In many states and cities, it still is.

Her article poses an essential question: Is public education, democratically controlled, still part of the social contract? And she writes that many white liberals, including Jerry Brown (and in New York, Andrew Cuomo) have said no.

She writes:

“LOS ANGELES — In 1947, my father was one of a small group of black students at the largely white Fremont High School in South Central Los Angeles. The group was met with naked hostility, including a white mob hanging blacks in effigy. But such painful confrontations were the nature of progress, of fulfilling the promise of equality that had driven my father’s family from Louisiana to Los Angeles in the first place.

“In 1972, I was one of a slightly bigger group of black students bused to a predominantly white elementary school in Westchester, a community close to the beach in Los Angeles. While I didn’t encounter the overt hostility my father had, I did experience resistance, including being barred once from entering a white classmate’s home because, she said matter-of-factly as she stood in the doorway, she didn’t let black people (she used a different word) in her house.

“Still, I believed, even as a fifth grader, that education is a social contract and that Los Angeles was uniquely suited to carry it out. Los Angeles would surely accomplish what Louisiana could not.

“I was wrong. Today Los Angeles and California as a whole have abandoned integration as the chief mechanism of school reform and embraced charter schools instead.

“This has happened all over the country, of course, but California has led the way — it has 630,000 students in charter schools, more than any other state, and the Los Angeles Unified School District has more than 154,000 of them. Charters are associated with choice and innovation, important elements of the good life that California is famous for. In a deep-blue state, that good life theoretically includes diversity, and many white liberals believe charters can achieve that, too. After all, a do-it-yourself school can do anything it wants.

“But that’s what makes me uneasy, the notion that public schools, which charters technically are, have a choice about how or to what degree to enforce the social contract. There are many charter success stories, I know, and many make a diverse student body part of their mission. But charters as a group are ill suited to the task of justice because they are a legacy of failed justice.

“Integration did not happen. The effect of my father’s and my foray into those white schools was not more equality but white flight. Largely white schools became largely black, and Latino schools were stigmatized as “bad” and never had a place in the California good life.

“It’s partly because diversity can be managed — or minimized — that charters have become the public schools that liberal whites here can get behind. This is in direct contrast to the risky, almost revolutionary energy that fueled past integration efforts, which by their nature created tension and confrontation. But as a society — certainly as a state — we have lost our appetite for that engagement, and the rise of charters is an expression of that loss.

“Choice and innovation sound nice, but they also echo what happened after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, when entire white communities in the South closed down schools to avoid the dread integration.

“This kind of racial avoidance has become normal, embedded in the public school experience. It seems particularly so in Los Angeles, a suburb-driven city designed for geographical separation. What looks like segregation to the rest of the world is, to many white residents, entirely neutral — simply another choice.

“Perhaps it should come as no surprise that in 2010, researchers at the Civil Rights Project at U.C.L.A. found, in a study of 40 states and several dozen municipalities, that black students in charters are much more likely than their counterparts in traditional public schools to be educated in an intensely segregated setting. The report says that while charters had more potential to integrate because they are not bound by school district lines, “charter schools make up a separate, segregated sector of our already deeply stratified public school system.”

“In a 2017 analysis, data journalists at The Associated Press found that charter schools were significantly overrepresented among the country’s most racially isolated schools. In other words, black and brown students have more or less resegregated within charters, the very institutions that promised to equalize education.

“This has not stemmed the popular appeal of charters. School board races in California that were once sleepy are now face-offs between well-funded charter advocates and less well-funded teachers’ unions. Progressive politicians are expected to support charters, and they do. Gov. Jerry Brown, who opened a couple of charters during his stint as mayor of Oakland, vetoed legislation two years ago that would have made charter schools more accountable. Antonio Villaraigosa built a reputation as a community organizer who supported unions, but as mayor of Los Angeles, he started a charter-like endeavor called Partnership for Los Angeles Schools.

“This year, charter advocates got their pick for school superintendent, Austin Beutner. And billionaires like Eli Broad have made charters a primary cause: In 2015, an initiative backed in part by Mr. Broad’s foundation outlined a $490 million plan to place half of the students in the Los Angeles district into charters by 2023.

“I live in Inglewood, a chiefly black and brown city in Los Angeles County that’s facing gentrification and the usual displacement of people of color. Traditional public schools are struggling to stay open as they lose students to charters. But those who support the gentrifying, which includes a new billion-dollar N.F.L. stadium in the heart of town, see charters as part of the improvements. They see them as progress.

“Despite all this, I continue to believe in the social contract that in my mind is synonymous with public schools and public good. I continue to believe that California will at some point fulfill that contract. I believe this most consciously when I go back to Westchester and reflect on my formative two years in school there. In the good life there is such a thing as a good fight, and it is not over.“

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Education Industry, Education Reform, Inequity, Justice, Privatization, Racism, School Choice, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration

News: Trump Administration Abandons Affirmative Action

By dianeravitch
July 3, 2018 //
15

The Trump administration has officially abandoned affirmative action, having decided that African Americans and Latinos no longer need any additional breaks and can pull themselves up by their own shoelaces.

Trump forgot that his son-in-Law Jared Kushner was the beneficiary of affirmative action. As detailed by journalist Daniel Golden in a book about preferential treatment for rich boys, Kushner’s dad gave Harvard a couple of million dollars, although no one in the family ever went to Harvard. This cleared the way for Jared’s admission, who vaulted over better qualified applicants from the same high school. Golden’s Book is called “The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges—and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates.”

I’m not sure how Donald got into the Wharton School. It surely wasn’t grades or brains or even athletic skills (remember that the bone spur in his foot enabled him to avoid the Vietnam draft, his fifth deferment).

The story begins:

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration will encourage the nation’s school superintendents and college presidents to adopt race-blind admissions standards, abandoning an Obama administration policy that called on universities to consider race as a factor in diversifying their campuses, Trump administration officials said.

Last November, Attorney General Jeff Sessions asked the Justice Department to re-evaluate past policies that he believed pushed the department to act beyond what the law, the Constitution and the Supreme Court had required, Devin M. O’Malley, a Justice Department spokesman said. As part of that process, the Justice Department rescinded seven policy guidances from the Education Department’s civil rights division on Tuesday.

“The executive branch cannot circumvent Congress or the courts by creating guidance that goes beyond the law and — in some instances — stays on the books for decades,” Mr. O’Malley said.

The Supreme Court has steadily narrowed the ways that schools can consider race when trying to diversify their student bodies. But it has not banned the practice.

Now, affirmative action is at a crossroads. The Trump administration is moving against any use of race as a measurement of diversity in education. And the retirement of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy at the end of this month will leave the court without its swing vote on affirmative action and allow President Trump to nominate a justice opposed to a policy that for decades has tried to integrate elite educational institutions.

A highly anticipated case is pitting Harvard against Asian-American students who say one of the nation’s most prestigious institutions has systematically excluded some Asian-American applicants to maintain slots for students of other races. That case is clearly aimed at the Supreme Court.

“The whole issue of using race in education is being looked at with a new eye in light of the fact that it’s not just white students being discriminated against, but Asians and others as well,” said Roger Clegg, president and general counsel of the conservative Center for Equal Opportunity. “As the demographics of the country change, it becomes more and more problematic.”

The Obama administration believed that students benefit from being surrounded by diverse classmates, so in 2011, the administration offered schools a potential road map to establishing affirmative action policies that could withstand legal scrutiny. The guidance was controversial at the time that it was issued, for its far-reaching interpretation of the law. Justice officials said that pages of hypothetical scenarios offered in the guidance were particularly problematic, as they clearly bent the law to specific policy preferences.

In a pair of policy guidance documents, the Obama Education and Justice departments told elementary and secondary schools and college campuses to use “the compelling interests” established by the court to achieve diversity. They concluded that the Supreme Court “has made clear such steps can include taking account of the race of individual students in a narrowly tailored manner.”

The Trump administration’s decisions on Tuesday brought government policy back to the George W. Bush administration guidances. The Trump administration did not formally reissue Bush-era guidance on race-based admissions, but, in recent days, officials did repost a Bush administration affirmative action policy document online.

That document states, “The Department of Education strongly encourages the use of race-neutral methods for assigning students to elementary and secondary schools.”

For the past several years, that document had been replaced by a note declaring that the policy had been withdrawn. The Bush policy is now published in full, with no note attached. It reaffirmed its view in 2016 after a Supreme Court ruling that said that schools could consider race as one factor among many.

In that case, Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, a white woman claimed she was denied admission because of her race, in part because the university had a program that admitted significant numbers of minorities who ranked in the top 10 percent of their class.

“It remains an enduring challenge to our nation’s education system to reconcile the pursuit of diversity with the constitutional promise of equal treatment and dignity,” Justice Kennedy wrote for the 4-3 majority.

The Trump administration’s plan would scrap the existing policies and encourage schools not to consider race at all. The new policy would not have the force of law, but it amounts to the official view of the federal government. School officials who keep their admissions policies intact would do so knowing that they could face a Justice Department investigation or lawsuit, or lose federal funding from the Education Department.

A senior Justice Department official pushed back against the idea that these decisions are about rolling back protections for minorities. He said they are hewing the department closer to the letter of the law.

He noted that rolling back guidance is not the same thing as a change of law, so that the decision to rescind technically would not have a legal effect on how the government defends or challenges affirmative-action related issues.

The move comes at a moment when conservatives see an opportunity to dismantle affirmative action.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions has said his prosecutors will investigate and sue universities over discriminatory admissions policies. And the conservative-backed lawsuit against Harvard is being pushed by the same group, the Project on Fair Representation, that pressed Fisher.

Categories Academic Freedom, Betsy DeVos, Civil Rights, Education Reform, Higher Education, Inequity, Injustice

G.F. Brandenburg: Why Are Charter School Operatives Picking the D.C. Chancellor?

By dianeravitch
July 2, 2018 //
6

Yesterday I posted G.F. Brandenburg on the same question. He posted a letter by a parent activist, who thinks the charter industry wants a chancellor on their side. She wrote: “the D.C. Public School Chancellor has absolutely no authority over any charter school in this city. The Chancellor cannot make any determinations on the siting of a school, the board composition of a school, the curriculum, staff or any other matter related to a charter.” Furthermore, charters can locate wherever they choose, even across the street from a public school.

If charters are competing with public schools, why do they get a large say in picking the chancellor who leads the other team?

Here is another post by Brandenburg, with the names of those on the search committee. He cites a post written by Valerie Jablow.

He adds:

“All told, of the 14 people on the selection panel, half have ties to charter and ed reform interests. And several were the source of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions for the mayor.

“[Confidential note to Mayor Bowser: Does this mean that if I and two of my DCPS BFFs donate $5000 to your current campaign, one of us will be named by you to serve on the charter board? I mean, this is the selection panel for the DCPS chancellor we’re talking about here! Why have any charter reps at all, as there have been zero purely DCPS reps. EVER on the charter board? Or is this all OK here because, um, well, because cross sector something something?]

“Then, too, of those 14 people on the selection panel, there are a total of 1 teacher; 1 student; and 4 parents, half of whom have ties to ed. reform and charter interests.

“The law regarding chancellor selection states (boldface mine) that “the Mayor shall establish a review panel of teachers, including representatives of the WTU, parentS, and studentS to aid the Mayor . . . in the selection of the Chancellor.” The law also says nothing about principals or officials from organizations unrelated to DCPS serving on the selection panel.

“Notwithstanding the (remote) possibility that the singular student and teacher selected for this panel have multiple personalities, the math here simply doesn’t add up: there are more than a hundred THOUSAND parents and students in DCPS and several THOUSAND teachers.

“And yet we have a rep from Friendship charter school on this panel and not even TWO DCPS teachers or students??

“Gees, Mayor Bowser: it’s nice that you’re soliciting limited feedback on the next chancellor from us unwashed masses, but can’t you dial back the public dissing?

“Amazingly, all of this is downright familiar in DC public education:

“For instance, several years ago the process to change school boundaries showed that people wanted, overwhelmingly, a strong system of by right public schools in every neighborhood.

“Since then, our city leaders have enacted policies and taken actions that ensure that remains a pipe dream:

“–Thousands of new seats have been created in the charter sector, with little public notification. (One–Statesman–will start this fall without any public notification or input whatsoever beforehand. Yeah: check out these public comments.) Without commensurate growth in the population of school-age children, the result is a declining share of DCPS enrollment–all without any public agreement whatsoever.

“–A closed DCPS school (Kenilworth) was offered to a charter school in violation of several DC laws, including public notification; RFO to other charter schools; and approval of the council. (I am still waiting for my FOIA request to DCPS about this to be answered, since no one on the council, at the deputy mayor for education’s office, or at DCPS ever answered my questions as to how this offer actually came about.)

“–A test-heavy school rating system was approved, which tracks closely with what our charter board uses, without any consideration for what the public actually said it wanted. (And with a private ed. reform lobbying organization phonebanking to ensure it got what it–not the public–wanted.)

“–Ours is a public education landscape in which wealthy donors set the conversation (watch the linked video starting at 1:21:25); determine the way in which schools are judged; and profit from it all, while the public is left far, far behind.

“–Despite clear data showing problems in both sectors for graduation accountability and absences, there has been little movement in city leadership to ensure both sectors are equally analyzed.

“In the same manner, in our new chancellor selection panel the public is disenfranchised and the law not followed, while personnel from private groups are heavily involved and stand to profit in a variety of ways.

“Hmm: Familiar indeed.”

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, District of Columbia, Inequity, Injustice
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