Archives for category: Networkfor Public Education Action Fund

The Network for Public Education Action fund is developing a web-based score card for the 2020 presidential candidates.

We need YOUR help!

We want to keep score on where the candidates stand on issues that matter to students, teachers, parents, and public schools.

We want to know if they support public schools or if they support privatization.

We will keep the website updated based on the candidates’ public statements on television and at town halls.

We will check their funding reports to see if they are funded by the usual privatization-friendly billionaires and hedge-fund managers.

We urge you to attend their town halls and ask them questions about funding for public schools, about charters and vouchers, about testing, about federal policy requiring (unnecessary) annual testing, and about (unnecessary) federal funding for charter schools.

We need your help to keep our score care up to date once it is up and running.

We will not let education be forgotten in the 2020 race!

Climate change. Health care. Taxes. These are topics that 2020 Presidential hopefuls are happy to discuss.  But as important as these topics are, we cannot let our public schools be ignored.

That is why we started The NPE Action 2020 Candidates Project.

In cities across this nation, public schools are disappearing. The city of New Orleans is now a system of privately run charter schools. Vouchers and voucher “workarounds” send taxpayer money from public schools to private and religious schools. Religious schools are flipping themselves into charter schools in order to get public funds. The Koch Brothers have promised to target five states in which they will work to make public education disappear.

Private “choice” is trumping public voice. Test scores are the rationale to shut and shutter community schools even though charter school test scores are not better than those of public schools, and studies show that students who leave public schools with vouchers often do worse.

The Network for Public Education Action’s 2020 Candidates Project will make sure that the issue of school privatization is not ignored. We will grade candidates on their positions regarding charter schools, vouchers, and high-stakes testing. We will grade them by how much they take from the billionaires who believe in the privatization of public schools and score each candidate on the company they keep. They can run for office but they can’t hide from the hard questions we will ask about school privatization.

On December 23, I posted an email exchange I had with Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, in which we disagreed about who was the Goliath and who was the David in the field of education.

Mike objected to my characterization of the billionaire-supported “Reform” movement as the Goliaths of American education, the behemoths making war on public schools. He insisted that his side–those supporting charter schools and vouchers–are the true Davids, and those who oppose them are the true Goliaths because we have the AFT and the NEA on our side.

I pointed out to him that the assets of the two big unions are not in the same league as the supporters of school choice, like the Waltons (at least $160 billion) and a long list of other multibillionaires, who avidly fund school choice, along with the U.S. Department of Education, which has shoveled billions into charter schools since 1994 (and will spend nearly $500 million on charters this year alone). You can’t be supported by billionaires, multiple foundations, the U.S. Department of Education, and call yourself the “David” of education.

My clincher, I thought, was to point out the Reformers’ absence from a Twitter campaign on #GivingTuesday sponsored by a website called #Benevity, which offered $10 for every retweet of its message (#BeTheGood) to the charity of your choice. Look at which groups were asking for $10 retweets. The Network for Public Education urged its followers to retweet the message so that we could be designated to receive $10 per tweet. We figured if we got 100 retweets, we could pull in $1,000. That amount of money means a lot to NPE. It means nothing, zero, nada, zilch to the well-funded “Reform” organizations. It means nothing to organization supported by the Waltons, Bill Gates, Eli Broad, etc.

I wrote:

On #GivingTuesday, I didn’t see a single Reformer group putting out a request for $10. Not one. Not TFA. Not Educators4Excellence. Not Stand for Children. Certainly not the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, which is sitting on tens of millions of dollars and gets huge grants from a long list of foundations.

No, they get gifts of hundreds of thousands and millions from foundations like Walton, Gates, Arnold, Broad, and about 50 other foundations who like to do whatever the big boys and girls do.

Ahem. We proudly claim the title of David to your Goliath. We know how that turned out.

I was surprised to get a response from Mike Petrilli.

He wrote a series of emails to demonstrate that several Reform organizations asked for money on #GivingTuesday. He must have skipped over what I wrote, because not a single one of them asked their followers to retweet #Benevity’s message and get $10 for each retweet. As I wrote, “Not one.” Not one of them cares about a gift of $10. That is not even a rounding error in their budgets.

So here are the Reformer groups that Petrilli sent me to prove that they asked for donations on #GivingTuesday and their annual revenues as of 2016, the last date the figures are available on their public tax reports (thanks to Darcie Cimarusti of the NPE staff for collecting the 990 information).

National Alliance for Public Charter Schools
Annual revenues: $9,582,733

Education Reform Now (nonprofit arm of Democrats for Education Reform, the hedge fund managers’ group)
Annual revenues: $12,379,392

GreatSchools.Org
Annual revenues: $10,774,696

Center for Education Reform (loves all choices, except for public schools)
Annual Revenues: $4,090,687

Rocketship Education:
Total annual revenues: $82,957,671
Net income: $6,761,892
(There are separate reports for local and state Rocketships, like Rocketship DC and Rocketship Wisconsin)

Expect More Arizona
Annual revenues: $3,729,325

Bricolage (the new charter school that will replace the last public school in New Orleans)
Since the school has not opened yet, there are no tax forms, but it is supported by the Walton Family Foundation, NewSchools Venture Fund, New Schools for New Orleans, and the Arnold Foundation.

Washington State Charter Schools. No 990 forms yet, but the charter schools in Washington State were funded entirely by Bill Gates and a small group of billionaires, including Alice Walton, Nick Hanauer, Alice Walton, the parents of Jeff Bezos, and a few others with very deep pockets.

Why in the world would any of these organizations ask you to retweet a message that would win $10 for them?

Ahem. The Reform and privatization industry is a hobby of the billionaires. It is not a “movement.” Its purpose is to destroy public education and eliminate unions. It is a substitute for funding public schools, which 85% of American children choose.

If the money dried up, the entire edifice of privatization would shrivel and blow away.

Meanwhile, the Network for Public Education, whose annual revenues are not in the same league with the Reformers, would be delighted to receive your gift of $5, $10, $20, $50, $100. If 100 people give $10 each, that’s $1,000. That means a lot to us. Unlike the Reformer groups mentioned above, we don’t have office space. We have a Post Office Box. Not a penny of your donation will be wasted on exorbitant salaries or lavish facilities. We have no facilities! We have 1.5 staff members, and none of them is paid a six-figure salary. We are a lean, keen organization. Every dollar you give will support our work to protect, support, and improve public schools.

Make the Network for Public Education your charity of choice this year. We need the money. Don’t be fooled. We are the Davids of education. And you know how that turned out!

The Network for Public Education Action Fund is delighted to endorse Jackie Goldberg for election to the Los Angeles Unified School District School Board.

Jackie is the ideal candidate to replace convicted felon and charter school founder Ref Rodriguez.

She has experience, knowledge, integrity, and wisdom.

The Network for Public Education Action has endorsed Jackie Goldberg for the District 5 seat on the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education.

Jackie has a long history as a public servant with a passionate voice in defense of public education. She previously served on the LAUSD board from 1983 to 1991, and the Los Angeles City Council from 1993-2000. She went on to serve in the California State Assembly from 2000-2006, where she chaired the Assembly Education Committee for several years.

With her decades of experience, Jackie has concluded that “the billionaires have stacked the deck against district public schools.” The 2017 LAUSD school board election was the most expensive in history, with almost $10,000,000 in outside spending coming from pro-charter groups.

By winning this election Jackie hopes to prevent a 4 to 7 majority controlled by the board members elected with pro-charter money.

Jackie has remained active with grassroots activism as a founding member of TEAch (Transparency, Equity, and Accountability for Charters), a group dedicated to increasing public accountability within the charter sector. She has also remained active as a community watchdog of the LAUSD board, delivering powerful public comment at meetings.

Jackie will be up against an avalanche of money in this election. The board and staff of NPE Action urge you to vote for Jackie Goldberg in the primary election on March 5, 2019. It will be up to us to show that people power can triumph over the billionaire’s agenda for LAUSD.

John Thompson of Oklahoma attended the NPE Conference in Indianapolis and learned a lot about how allies in other cities and states are resisting the Corporate Goliaths invading public schools.

He writes:

“Previously, I overestimated how much of Goliath’s failure was due to the arrogance of power. Today’s Silicon Valley Robber Barons’ hubris can match that of their 19th century counterparts, but their control of data makes them uniquely dangerous. As the latest NPE presentations enlightened me on what is working for us Davids as we successfully resist Goliath, I was mostly struck by the evidence that he only continues to exist for the purposes of privatization, profits, and the monetization of data.

“Fortunately, the 2018 NPE conference was extremely positive, so I can move beyond my errors to a post which provides an overview of a) what I learned and b) some ideas on future messaging.”

Thompson attended many workshops and all the keynotes and he weaves together a coherent narrative, answering the question:

“Why do they [the Corporate Goliaths] keep infusing money into charters?

“The answer, it is now clear, is that they are monetizing data. Pearson testing company thinks it knows more about the children they test than their parents do. As Leonie Haimson has shown, Goliath has bought 400 identifiable data points on students. And Summit Learning says it will follow your child through her entire life.

“Pasi Sahlberg’s presentation on GERM, the Global Education Reform Movement, showed graphically how the corporate reform assault undermined schools around the world. He then described counter-attacks against GERM in New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, Liberia, Scotland, Chile, and elsewhere. Educators have a duty to reclaim our professional autonomy. But we also must be willing to state some hard truths.

“Sahlberg says that people want to believe that the kids are “alright.” But, globally, they face a threat that must be explicitly addressed. The well-being of students is declining as screen time increases. Students and teachers must push back against the Goliath which profits from more eyes being glued to digital devices.

“Susan Ochshorn and Denisha Jones brought this dangerous trend closer to home. They condemned children being placed in front of keyboards before they are ready. And this may be the narrative that will really take off. Silicon Valley elites don’t put their 4-year-olds in online courses.

“During the previous generation, Goliath used charters that increased segregation to supposedly undo the damage done by segregation, but most voters didn’t send their children to the high-poverty schools that were targeted. So, many people didn’t understand why those corporate reforms were doomed to fail. Surely the broader public will grasp the absurdity of placing 70 students and 2 teachers in “personalized” learning to address toxic stress that is made worse by premature exposure to too many hours in front of keyboards.

“Helen Gym’s account of victories in Philadelphia is also encouraging. Goliath won when they rushed implementation of policies without an open discussion of their theories. After the Reformers got so overconfident they consulted parents, they lost. In other words, to know Goliath’s agenda is to understand that they grasp very little about what students need and parents want.”

NPE Action endorses David Garcia for Governor of Arizona. The current governor is a disaster, who has done his darndest to destroy public schools.

If you live in Arizona, please vote for David Garcia and vote NO on Prop 305 to stop vouchers.

The Network for Public Education has endorsed David Garcia for Governor of Arizona. David‘s opponent is the present Governor, Doug Ducey. Ducey has systematically attacked public education through defunding public schools and public universities, expanding voucher programs, and pushing the proliferation of charter schools despite numerous scandals, frauds, nepotism, and charter closures.

Among the 50 states and Washington D.C, Arizona received the lowest grade on the Network for Public Education’s and the Schott Foundation’s Privatization Report Card. Arizona’s dismal score is the result of the state’s expansion of privatization, dilution of student civil rights, and the lack of transparency and accountability for charters and vouchers. Ducey is responsible, in great part, for Arizona’s shockingly low rating.

David Garcia, in contrast, has focused on educational improvement during his campaign. He is opposed to PROP 305, the referendum that would expand ESA vouchers, and he is a strong proponent of increased education funding.

Garcia has also made it clear that he stands for reform in the state’s charter school law to eliminate both fraud and profit. Although we would prefer that Garcia call for a charter moratorium, we believe the contrast between the two candidates is so stark that Garcia deserves the vote of every friend of public education in the state.

We also would like to remind our Arizona friends to Vote NO on Proposition 305 that would expand ESA vouchers and rob public schools of much needed funding.

Please vote for David Garcia for Governor and vote AGAINST Prop 305 on November 6.

The Network for Public Education Action Fund is pleased to endorse Liz Watson for Congress in Indiana’s 9th Congressional District.

The Network for Public Education Action has endorsed Liz Watson in the general election for Indiana’s 9th Congressional District seat in the United States House of Representatives.

One of Liz’s highest priorities and a centerpiece of her platform is fully supporting our public schools. The Indiana Coalition for Public Education—Monroe County was one of the first groups Liz met with when she began her campaign – and she has been a partner since then. Liz believes that teachers should be paid a professional, living wage that keeps up with inflation and is commensurate with their experience and education level.

According to Liz, “When taxpayer dollars are diverted to private schools through vouchers, this weakens our public schools. While vouchers have been billed as a means for students to leave so-called ‘failing schools’ for private ones, only a tiny proportion of voucher users are leaving schools that the state calls failing. More than half of vouchers are going to students who have been in private schools their entire lives. Using public funds to pay the private school tuition of students from higher-income families, while leaving children from low-income families struggling to make do with less, hurts our schools, our kids, and our future.

She continues, “Charter schools are a slippery slope into a two-tiered system of education. That’s why, as a policy matter, I oppose any further expansion of charter schools. Charter schools have been a failed experiment, because they are largely unaccountable and lack transparency. While they were intended to be hubs of innovation that would bring new ideas back to public schools, this has not happened on a consistent basis, and has not been the end result.”

Liz Watson is running against Trey Hollingsworth who is in his first term and is primarily funded through large donations from outside Indiana and who has been unresponsive on education issues. The 9th Congressional district is a gerrymandered district that runs from central Indiana to the Kentucky border.

Please do what you can this November 6 to send this committed, engaged public education advocate to Washington D.C. to fight for all of Indiana’s children.

The Network for Public Education Action Fund is pleased to endorse Rep. Mark Pocan of Wisconsin for re-election to Congress.

The Network for Public Education Action is proud to announce its endorsement of Mark Pocan for Congress, representing the 2nd Congressional District of Wisconsin.

NPE Action ​Executive Director, Carol Burris, had the following to say, “Mark Pocan is a true friend of public education. He is a staunch opponent of vouchers and critic of the lack of accountability and corruption in the charter sector. During this year’s budget hearings, he pressed Betsy DeVos​ on how she would ensure accountability in the charter sector. In response to her appointment, he began the House Public Education Caucus.”

Mark Pocan understands that public education is the pillar of our democracy. He wants to “modernize our classrooms, reduce class sizes, enhance special education programs, provide students with access to affordable higher education opportunities, and ensure America has the best-trained and most qualified teachers.”

He also seeks to make Pre-K education more accessible for all children. He introduced the Student Loan Refinance Bill to help college graduates pay off their debt.

For all of these reasons and more, we give Mark Pocan our strongest endorsement.

The Network for Public Exucation Action Fund is delighted to endorse Bob Peterson for the Milwaukee School Board. Seldom has there ever been a better qualified candidate. Maybe never.

NPE Action enthusiastically endorses Bob Peterson for the at-large seat on the Board of School Directors of the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS).

Bob started as a Paraprofessional in MPS and later became a bilingual educator, teaching in the classroom for 30 years. Bob was active in his union for 35 years, including service on the executive board of the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association (MTEA). He was MTEA president for four years immediately following Gov. Walker’s ACT 10 legislation.

Bob is also a founding editor of the Rethinking Schools magazine.

Bob’s campaign message is clear. “We must come together to defend and transform Milwaukee Public Schools.”

He told NPE Action that “MPS has been ground zero for school privatization starting in 1990. The privatizers continue to increase private voucher schools and privately-run charter schools. We need to simultaneously fight privatization attempts AND improve our public schools.”

He plans to fight privatization and improve Milwaukee’s public schools by building “a social movement to secure adequate and equitable funding so that we can lower class sizes, have strong professional development on issues of restorative practices, anti-racist culturally relevant curriculum, social-emotional learning, and the replacement of mass standardized testing with forms of authentic assessment.”

Please head to the polls on November 6th and cast your vote for Bob Peterson.

I have waited a few days to digest the exciting events of last weekend.

My first thought is: I wish you had been there.

You would have seen teachers, parents, school board members, superintendents, researchers, college students, and lots of others who want to save their schools from privatization and save their students from endless over-testing. They came not to defend the status quo, but to fight the status quo.

At every NPE conference–in Austin, Chicago, Raleigh, Oakland, and Indianapolis–the spirit and goodwill were infectious. The same was true in Indianapolis.

Many people saw friends that they met at last year’s conference, or met their favorite blogger or researcher.

Every year, I hear the same statement: “This was the best conference yet.” And I believe it.

This was the first year that NPE awarded the Phyllis Bush Award for Grassroots Activism. The winners were the teacher-activists in Arizona who won the right to put a referendum on the ballot about vouchers. This was a high point of the first day. The award will be given out every year for teachers, parents, and other activists who display courage, tenacity, and heroism on behalf of public education and the common good.

I won’t report on all the keynotes but want to be sure that you watch Pasi Sahlberg.

Pasi Sahlberg was amazing. He talked about the “Global Education Reform Movement” (GERM) and accompanied his talk with slides and even a video (all of which were posted by him on Twitter @pasi_sahlberg. Pasi wrote the wonderful book Finnish Lessons and Finnish Lessons 2.0. His new book, with William Doyle, is Let the Children Play. Pasi talked about the birth of GERM as a reflection of the exuberant belief in the 1980s that markets and standardization solved all problems. Pasi showed the spread of GERM, especially in English-speaking countries. He is now based in Australia, and he told us that the government of New Zealand has dropped national standards and will soon eliminate national testing. He predicted that Australia would drop its NAPLAN tests and standards in the not-distant future. You can watch him on this video; his presentation begins at 27:00.

I attended several panels. One was exhilarating, another was very sad.

The exhilarating one was a presentation by teachers from Arizona who are active in #RedForEd and in the effort to stop a legislative plan for universal vouchers. The teachers pointed out that 95% of the children in Arizona attend public schools, which are underfunded. They described their fight against the Koch brothers, whom they beat in court when the brothers tried to get their referendum knocked off the ballot. The vote on the referendum takes place November 6. VOTE NO on PROP 305! Congratulations to these wonderful teachers, who have done all this work on their own dime and stood up to the most powerful rightwing machine in the nation!

The other panel was a presentation by four Puerto Rican activists, who described the effort to close and privatize the Island’s public schools. The Governor is working with the hedge fund managers who are salivating over the chance to close down public education. Nothing seems to stand in their way, although it was clear that the Island’s teachers are adamantly opposed to the takeover. A woman named Julie Keleher was imported to do the dirty work for Wall Street.

I also sat in on a panel led by Mercedes Schneider, Darcie Cimarusti, and Andrea Gabor, in which they explained in detail how to “follow the money.” They gave specific directions about sources that tell you who is funding what, how to unearth “Dark Money.” The session was packed, and attendees took notes. Darcie is our communications director and half-time staff at NPE, she is a school board member in her community, and she is an expert on following the money.

The closing speaker was the national chairman of the NAACP, Derrick Johnson. I will post his remarks as soon as the video is available. He was eloquent and spoke without a note. He talked about the systemic racism that has harmed African American children and teachers for many generations; about promises made and broken; and about the importance of making the child the center of all education. He was brilliant in recounting the history of legal efforts to establish rights for black children and about efforts to sabotage those rights. He gave us all a lesson in legal history. He stayed to answer every question. The leaders of the NAACP in Indiana and Indianapolis expressed their great concern about the Mind Trust and its plans to privatize the public schools of Indianapolis. The session–and conference–ended with yet another standing ovation.

It was a wonderful conference, well organized, well attended, filled with energy. As soon as videos are prepared for the sessions that were live-streamed, I will post them here.

I can’t begin to tell you how proud I am to be a part of this inspiring organization, how happy I am that Carol Burris is the executive director, how grateful I am to the other members of the board, and to the many volunteers that made it work. NPE can’t match the dollars of the billionaires, but we far exceed them in numbers, passion, dedication, and conviction. NPE expects to support grassroots organizations in every state for many years to come. We expect to work with them in making our schools better and more responsive to the needs of our children.

The next conference will be better still!

Ruth Conniff, editor of “The Progressive,” suggests that the Save Our Schools Movement could be the determining factor in the midterm elections.

She writes:

The “education spring” protests, in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, Colorado and North Carolina, won increases in teacher pay and education budgets, launched hundreds of teachers into campaigns for political office, and showed massive support for public schools this year. In Wisconsin and other states, education is a key issue in the 2018 governor’s race. Public opinion has turned against budget cuts, school vouchers, and the whole “test and punish” regime.

“The corporate education reform movement is dying,” Diane Ravitch, the Network’s founder declared. “We are the resistance, and we are winning!”

As the Save Our Schools movement swept the nation this year, blaming “bad teachers” for struggling schools also appears to have gone out of style.

A Time Magazine cover story on teachers who are underpaid, overworked, and have to donate their plasma to pay the bills painted a sympathetic portrait.

“As states tightened the reins on teacher benefits, many also enacted new benchmarks for student achievement, with corresponding standardized tests, curricula changes and evaluations of teacher performance,” Time reported. “The loss of control over their classrooms combined with the direct hit to their pocketbooks was too much for many teachers to bear.”

That’s a very different message from Time’s December 2008 cover featuring Washington, D.C., schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, standing in a classroom and holding a broom: “her battle against bad teachers has earned her admirers and enemies—and could transform public education,” Time declared.

The idea that bad teachers were ruining schools, and that their pay, benefits, and job security should be reduced or revoked, spread across the country over the last decade. Doing away with teachers’ collective bargaining rights propelled Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker to political prominence in 2011. In October 2014, Time’s “Rotten Apples,” cover declared “It’s nearly impossible to fire a bad teacher. Some tech millionaires have found a way to change that.”

But today, demoralized teachers, overtested students, and the lack of improvement from these draconian policies have pushed public opinion in the opposite direction.

Charter schools, it turns out, perform no better than regular public schools. School-voucher schemes that drain money from public education to cover private-school students tuition yield even worse results—and are unpopular with voters. And testing kids a lot has not made them any smarter.

The bold walkouts and strikes of teachers and the determined resistance of parents and students are making a difference.

The public is getting “woke.”

Billionaires have poured many millions into demonizing teachers, attacking their rights, and privatizing public schools, but they have spent not a penny to increase the funding of our nation’s public schools, not even in the most distressed districts. All they have to offer are tests, charter schools, and vouchers.

It’s a hoax, intended to cut taxes, not to help children or to improve education.

We are no longer fooled.