This full-page ad appeared in the Los Angeles Times a few days ago. It was paid for by the United Teachers of Los Angeles.
Archives for category: Privatization
Austin Beutner wants to convert Los Angeles into a “portfolio district.” He is not an educator, which qualifies him to reform the nation’s second largest school district, imposing ideas gleaned from the corporate sector, where he spent his career, buying and selling get, opening and closing, without knowing anything about the businesses he oversaw.
What is a portfolio district?
This is an article that appeared in Chalkbeat a year ago, explaining the concert of a “portfolio district” and some of the billionaire-funded Reformers promoting it.
The billionaires have funded an organization to bring “portfolio models” to 40 cities in 10 years. They begin their discussion by acknowledging that “very little works in education reform,” which is an accurate assessment.
They go on to claim that Denver, New Orleans, and Washington, D.C. are breakthrough districts whose successes should be spread. Not many people other than Reformers would look on D.C. as a model district; what’s it is best known for during the Rhee-Reform era is covered up cheating scandals, graduation rate scandals, and politicized data. D.C. has the largest achievement gaps of any urban district tested by NAEP. Jeanne Kaplan has written numerous posts about Denver’s bad habit of massaging the data. New Orleans has a highly stratified district, in which 40% of the charters are rated D or F by the state and highly segregated. Louisiana, under reform control for at least a decade, recently dropped on NAEP and is one of the lowest performing states in the nation (and New Orleans is one of its lowest performing districts).
Here are Powerpoint presentations assembled by one of Beutner’s shadow government firms that is paid for by Broad and others – Kitamba, the one that worked with Michelle Rhee in Washington, DC. This is from a “how to” conference in Texas on portfolio districts. Look at the power points associated with the workshop called “How to Thoughtfully Manage Your Portfolio,” especially slides 10 and 11. This explains exactly how it works – closing schools, turning schools over to charters. Assembled were big thinkers, failed Superintendents and consultants brought together to discuss the Reform strategies, which have worked nowhere. Jeanne Kaplan has written numerous posts about Denver’s bad habit of massaging the data.
Corporate reformers managed to gain control of the Atlanta School Board hired America Carstarphen as its superintendent; she previously worked in Austin, where voters ousted the charter-friendly board.
Now Atlanta has ambitious plans to turn itself into a portfolio district and disrupt schools across the city. Reformers say that when they are finished with their mass disruption, every student will attend an excellent school.
Sadly, they can’t point to a district anywhere in the nation where this has happened. In New Orleans, the Star Reform District, 40% of schools are rated D or F by the reform-loving Dtate Education Department, and these schools are almost completely segregated black.
This is the key exchange:
School board chairman Jason Esteves acknowledges the work will lead to “tough decisions,” but says it’s necessary to create excellent schools for every child.
Over the coming months, the district will develop a rating system to grade its schools as well as determine how to respond when schools excel or fail. The board that will consider any changes includes several members who joined after the 2016 turnaround plan was approved.
“The vast majority of the community has seen the progress that we’ve made, has endorsed the work that we’ve done, and … wants to see more of it,” he said. “The electorate has generally been supportive in the face of pretty significant changes.”
But there are critics, and they say the district needs to shift priorities, not redesign its structure.
Shawnna Hayes-Tavares, president of Southwest and Northwest Atlanta Parents and Partners for Schools, fears officials want to bring in more charter schools or charter operators to run neighborhood schools, especially in those parts of the city.
“We’ve had the most change on this side of town. It’s like trauma,” she said. “The parents are just tired. They can’t take it anymore.”
Promises and lies.
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!
Mayor Muriel Bowser of the District of Columbia announced today that she had chosen Dr. Lewis Ferebee as the next chancellor of the D.C. Public Schools. Dr. Ferebee is currently superintendent of the Indianapolis Public Schools. From what I know, he has worked amiably with the reformer group Mind Trust, which is intent on characterizing as many schools as possible in Indianapolis.
If you live in that city and can provide advice to readers in D.C. about Dr. Ferebee, please let us know. Perhaps my view from afar is unfair. Answer this question: Is Dr. Ferebee committed to public schools under democratic control? Has he resisted the Reformers? Will he steer a middle course in D.C., where the Waltons have opened a large number of charter schools and nearly half the DC pupils are in charters? Will reformers continue to have the run of the place? Will Dr. Ferebee insist on accountability for charters?
Linda Lyon is a retired U.S. Air Force officer who now lives in Arizona, where she was elected president of the Arizona School Boards Association. Her blog “Restore Reason” is not only reasonable but insightful and brilliant.
Her latest post dissects the claim that people who are concerned about poverty are somehow way out there as “socialists.”
She writes, and I quote in part,
I was recently in a public forum on education when a school board member asked me whether my call to address inequities in our schools was a call for the “redistribution of wealth”. I told him local control dictates that our Governing Boards, representing the communities in which they live, are best positioned to decide how to allocate district resources for the maximum benefit of all their students. I hoped, I said, they would do that.
His question though, caused me to think about this term, and why it seems to be a lightning rod for conservatives. Social scientist researcher Brené Brown believes it is because of the “scarcity” worldview held by Republicans/conservatives. “The opposite of scarcity is not abundance” she writes, “It’s enough.” Basically, “they believe that the more people they exclude from “having”, the more is available to them.” And, in this binary way of thinking, the world is very black and white (pun sort of intended), e.g., if you aren’t a success, you’re a failure, and should be excluded. Of course, this sort of mindset is a gold mine for those who fear-monger to garner support for their exclusionary agendas. “We’ve got to stop the illegal hoards from coming across the border” the narrative goes, or “they’ll be stealing our jobs and elections.”
I offer that the redistribution of wealth can also flow the other way as with the privatization of our public schools. Those who already “have” are redistributing the “wealth” of those who “have not”. They do this by encouraging the siphoning of taxpayer monies from our district public schools, for charters, home and private schools. Once slated for the education of all, our hard-earned tax dollars are now increasingly available to offset costs for those already more advantaged.
In Arizona, approximately 60% of our one million public K-12 students qualify for the free and reduced price lunch program, with over 1,000 schools having over 50% of their students qualifying. As you might guess, schools with the highest number of students qualifying for “free and reduced” are located in higher poverty areas and with few exceptions, have lower school letter grades. Zip code it turns out, is an excellent predictor (irrespective of other factors) of school letter grade. According to a study by the Arizona Partnership for Healthy Communities, “Your ZIP code is more important to your health than your genetic code” and a life-expectancy map for Phoenix released three years ago, “found life expectancy gaps as high as 14 years among ZIP codes.”
Clearly, when it comes to inequities in our public schools, the “public” part of the equation is at least as important as the “schools” part. In other words, the problem is bigger than our schools and must be dealt with more holistically if it is to be solved. Poverty is obviously a big part of the problem and is nothing new. What is relatively new, is the purposeful devaluation of concern for the common good and the marketing of privatization as the solution to all our problems.
Privatization has not however, proven itself to be the panacea for fixing our “failing schools”, rather, it is exacerbating their problems. In Arizona, all forms of education privatization (vouchers, tax credits, home schooling, for-profit charters) are taking valuable resources out of the public district school system while delivering mixed results. We’ve also seen countless examples of shameless self-enrichment and outright fraud with taxpayer dollars. Meanwhile, some 80% of Arizona students are left in underresourced district schools, many of which are seeing (not by accident), their highest level of segregation since the 1960s.
Noliwe M. Rooks, director of American studies at Cornell University and author of “Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education, coined the term “segrenomics” to define the business of profiting from high levels of this segregation. In an interview with Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post, Rooks said that, “Children who live in segregated communities and are Native American, black or Latino are more likely to have severely limited educational options. In the last 30 years, government, philanthropy, business and financial sectors have heavily invested in efforts to privatize certain segments of public education; stock schools with inexperienced, less highly paid teachers whose hiring often provides companies with a “finder’s fee”; outsource the running of schools to management organizations; and propose virtual schools as a literal replacement for — not just a supplement to — the brick and mortar educational experience. “ She went on to say that, “The attraction, of course, is the large pot of education dollars that’s been increasingly available to private corporate financial interests. The public education budget funded by taxpayers is roughly $500 billion to $600 billion per year. Each successful effort that shifts those funds from public to private hands — and there has been a growing number of such efforts since the 1980s — escalates corporate earnings.”
This shift of taxpayer dollars from public to private hands is clearly a redistribution of wealth. Worst of all, in Arizona, it is a redistribution of wealth with little to no accountability nor transparency. Private, parochial and home schools are not required to provide the public information on their return on investment. And make no mistake, this investment is significant and continues to grow. In 2017 alone, taxpayer dollars diverted from district schools to private school options, amounted to close to $300 million. About $160 million of this, from corporate and personal tax credits with the other $130 million from vouchers. All told, according to the Payson Roundup, “vouchers have diverted more than $1 billion in taxpayer money to private schools. These dollars could have instead, gone into the general fund to ensure the vast majority of Arizona students were better served.
There has never been an election for State Superintendent of Public Instruction like the one recently concluded in California between Marshall Tuck and Tony Thurmond. Tom Ultican says that $61 Million was spent. It might eventually be even more.
This was an epic showdown between charter supports and charter skeptics.
The charter billionaires spent heavily on former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. He didn’t get to the runoffs.
“When Villaraigosa lost badly in the June 6 primary, many of the same billionaires listed above turned their full attention toward electing Marshall Tuck SPI.
“Following a brief career in investment banking, Tuck took a job at the politically connected Green Dot charter schools. Steve Barr a former chair of the Democratic Party who had served on national campaigns for Bill Clinton, Gary Hart and Michael Dukakis founded Green Dot charter schools in 1999. He hired Tuck in 2002 to be Chief Operating Officer (COO) and eventually promoted him to President and COO.
“When Los Angeles Mayor Anthony Villaraigosa was rebuffed in his efforts to take control of Los Angeles Unified School District, he convinced a few donors to underwrite the takeover of ten schools in areas which had suffered years of poor standardized testing results. They created a non-profit called Partnership for LA. Villaraigosa tapped Marshall Tuck to lead the Partnership.
“Tuck was extremely unpopular at the Partnership. The Sacramento Bee reported, “Teachers passed a vote of no confidence at nine of the schools at the end of the first year, leading to independent mediation.”
“During this education reform era in which connections are more important than skill, experience and training, Tuck remained in good standing with the Destroy Public Education (DPE) financiers. Subsequent to loosing the formerly most expensive SPI race in California’s history; Tuck’s benefactors took care of him. Despite no training as an educator, he was given a job as Educator-in-Residence at the New Teacher Center. Bill Gates provides much of the centers funding including grants totaling $26,305,252 since 2009…
“In Tuck versus Thurmond, the direct giving only accounted for 12% of total money spent. Although the direct money spent was comparatively small, it was revealing. In this race the contribution limit was $7,300 and it could be given twice (once for the primary and once for the general). Tuck received 377 maximum contributions for a total of $2,748,500. Thurmond received 170 maximum contributions for a total of $1,234,854.
“The race is generally viewed as a battle between billionaires and teachers unions, but that obscures some realities. Tuck’s maximum contributions came from 259 sources of which 257 were individuals. Thurmond’s Maximum contributions came from 129 sources of which 16 were individuals. Tuck received max contributions from 76 non-employed people, 65 financial industry employees, 39 corporate executives and 29 billionaires. Thurmond received a maximum contribution from one billionaire, Tom Steyer and two corporate executives, Stewart Resnick and Linda Ray Resnick, who also were maximum contributors for Tuck.
“The groups who gave maximum contributions to Thurmond were almost all organized by labor unions. Surprisingly, much of the money came from voluntary contributions and not union dues. For example, the California State Retirees PAC, made a maximum contribution to Thurmond. The largest amount contributed to the PAC by the 1404 contributors was $15.50. Another example is The California Federation of Teachers COPE which made two max donation to Thurmond. The money came from 1326 member organizations like the San Jose Federation of Teacher Local 957 whose members made voluntary contributions totaling to $73,391.
“It was the PACs who drove the election financially.”
You have to open the post to see the excellent LittleSis diagram of the billionaire funding of the Tuck campaign.
No doubt about it. Propivatization was the issue on the ballot in this race.
“When the year began, many supporters of public education were concerned because the candidate apposing Marshall Tuck was a one-term Assemblyman from Richmond, California with no name recognition. Not only that, he was a black man vulnerable to the race card. Then the Judases at the Association of California School Administrators endorsed Marshall Tuck for SPI.
“That might have been the point at which Thurmond demonstrated he was a special guy. On the weekend of January 20th he spoke at the CTA delegates meeting. He already had their endorsement since October, but in this speech the delegates met a charismatic candidate who brought them to their feet cheering. He declared “no privatization of public schools in California. Not in this state. Not on my watch.”
Robin Lake is one of the key figures in the Center for Reinventing Public Education, which is generally recognized as the inventor and chief promulgator of the “portfolio” district, in which the central board is supposed to open and close public schools, charter schools, and every other kind of school like a stock portfolio. Recently she wrote a post at The 74 (Campbell Brown’s site) saying that she was not a reformer.
Peter Greene dissected the logic behind Lake’s argument, which is sometimes hard to follow. Who’s stereotyping whom?
Lake says she no longer knows what the term “Reformer” means.
To which Greene responds, “True that. One of the implicitly insulting parts of the “reformer” narrative has been that only they are really interested in making schools better, and the people who have actually dedicated their entire careers to working in schools somehow have no desire to make things better.”
He is troubled by her insistence that “reformers” are not a monolithic group, coupled with her implication that those who resist “reformers” are a monolithic group. Which they are not.
He adds:
Sigh. But here we go. Lake segues into a call for the reformy flavor of the month– Personalized [sic] Competency Proficient Mass Customized Algorithm Driven Learning Education. She does a better job than many of describing it in glowing glossy terms. Oh, and as always, change must happen right now. Staying still is not an option, just as it wasn’t an option for Common Core or teacher test-based accountability or turnaround/takeovers or charters etc etc etc.&
It occurs to me that Lake could avoid the reform monolith perception by not using the same old used-car-salesman pitches. In fact, as I look around at all the reformy folks who are suddenly fans of Personalized [sic] Competency Blah Blah Blah Learning Tech Product, I’m thinking another way to avoid the perception that “reformers” operate in one unified block would be to NOT all come out in favor of the exact same Next Big Thing at the same time.
He closes. By offering an olive branch:
Lake’s desire to seek out new types of discussion is fine, but– Did I mention that this is published at The 74, a website established by reform supporter and teacher union hater Campbell Brown. Ms. Lake, let me invite you to cross some boundaries and publish elsewhere. Drop me a line and we can work something out here.
Gary Rubinstein, once deeply embedded in the world of Teach for America, is a close observer of the world of top-Down, billionaire-funded corporate reform. In the past, he wrote open letters to leading reformers and some responded.
Lately, he has noticed an effort by reformers to rebrand themselves. Now, one of the leading practitioners of “reform” posted an article on the main reform website saying she does not want to be called a Reformer anymore. She rejects the label. But she disparages those who object to “Reform” as “stand patters.”
He writes:
The ‘reformers’ had a pretty good run. From about 2008 until just recently ‘reformers’ had their way. With Race To The Top they got states to invent complicated, though supposedly objective, ways to measure teacher quality by analyzing standardized test scores. Bill Gates funded many studies to show that this was working. But after ten years, it became clear that the ‘reformers’ didn’t really know much about improving education and maybe they didn’t deserve to have the steering wheel anymore.
But people don’t give up power easily. So they changed their strategy. They ditched the toxic Michelle Rhee — last I heard she was working for Miracle-Gro. They set up some propaganda websites, like The74, and got a new leader, Campbell Brown. Then Campbell Brown was out and not really replaced by anyone.
Not all ‘reformers’ agreed on all issues. Some liked vouchers and private schools, some didn’t. But what all ‘reformers’ had in common was the belief that the main obstacle to education improvement in this country is people, including the majority of teachers in this country, who are defenders of the ‘Status Quo’.
But the term ‘reformer’ was still out there and, to teachers especially, it means that someone who knows little to nothing about education who is making top-down decisions that will result in students learning less. So some ‘reformers,’ realizing that they had a tainted brand, began abandoning the term.
It seems the term “Reformer” has become toxic. But the money backing “reform” is so huge that it just keeps stumbling forward, certain about what other people should do, loaded with money and power, but without any examples of success.
Jeb Bush, the puppet-master of corporate reform, is convening his annual “summit” of people who support his love of charters and vouchers. The queen of school choice is the superstar of the event: Eva Moskowitz.
Peruse the agenda to see who supports Jeb Bush’s efforts to privatize public education.
The registration fee is $649, enough to keep out the riffraff.
