Archives for category: Privatization
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Linda Lyon Responds to a Reader about Fiscal Responsibility and Public Schools

By dianeravitch
January 23, 2018 //
28

 

Linda Lyon, a retired Air Force colonel and president of the Arizona School Boards Association, responds to a reader who supports school choice, charters, vouchers, and home schooling.

She writes:

”Yes Charles, you are correct that the military industrial complex does provide a valuable service to our military mission. There are many functions that are not a core competency of the military (such as building airplanes) that have made sense to be outsourced. But, outsourcing the defense of our nation is not one of those functions. Where we’ve done that, as with Blackwater, it has not ended well.

“Of course education is “built” on a mix of public and private. After all, our public district schools don’t publish their own textbooks, or build their own buses or computers. But, as with the military, the core mission of our districts — to educate ALL our children, should not be outsourced. I maintain this function, to ensure it remains a common good, should not be privatized.

“I believe you intimate that when private schools siphon funding away from our district schools, it doesn’t matter because the student (and presumably the cost to educate them) goes with them. Unfortunately, all the costs don’t follow. Research shows that about 19% of the fixed costs (utilities, facility maintenance, administration, teachers, etc.) remain.

“Ultimately, your “tell” about your perspective is that you used the term “government run schools.” This tells me that you believe government is the problem and that privatizing our schools is the answer to reducing the size of our government. I believe our public district schools, are critical to the good functioning of our democratic Republic in that they are the only schools that truly take all comers, are totally transparent and accountable, and represent their communities through locally elected governing boards. I believe that anyone’s right to “choose” where they send their child to school, should not be more important than my right to know how my tax dollars should be spent and what the return on investment is. I believe in REAL fiscal responsibility…that we get what we pay for.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Tom Ultican: Beware “Education Cities,” It Wants to Destroy Public Education

By dianeravitch
January 22, 2018 //
16

 

Tom Ultican, who recently retired as a high school teacher of advanced math and physics in California, has been studying the tentacles of the privatization movement.

His latest expose reveals the nefarious, insidious organization benignly called “Education Cities.” It is a spin-off of The equally insidious organization called The. I don’t Trust, which has hidden behind a facade of faux progressivism. The Mind Trust goal is the complete privatization of the public schools of Indianapolis.

Dont be fooled! Like The Mind Trust, Educatuon Cities is a central part of a long-range plan to destroy public education. It is now operating in 25 Cities. Like other privatization groups, it begins by telling you how terrible your public schools are. It warns that there are achievement gaps in your schools, based on race and income. It claims that it will lure schools to your city that are so great that every student will have high scores. It’s propaganda, like all propaganda, is shot through with lies, exaggerations, hyperbole, and false promises.

Is your city one of their targets? Read Tom’s article and find out.

These are the hollow men. They come to steal your public schools and give them to entrepreneurs.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization

Nebraska: Privatizers Not Welcome Here!

By dianeravitch
January 22, 2018 //
12

There is a renewed effort to impose privately managed charters in Nevada, without a referendum or any indication of public demand. This is ironic because Nebraska has a long tradition of good public schools that are the anchors of their communities. We know the playbook. A rightwing Republican will Press for charters for those poor black children in Omaha, for whom he has never shown any previous concern. He knows this is the nose under the camel’s tent, the wedge he can use to please his allies in ALEC, who want to privatize everything.

I visited Omaha in 2016 and learned about Nebraska before I went.

This is what I learned: Nebraskans love their public schools.

I gave a see h to civic and education leaders, and this is what I said:

“You are too independent, too smart, too stubborn to follow everyone else over the edge of a cliff. You have saved tens of millions (maybe hundreds of millions) of dollars by losing Race to the Top. You are a model for the nation. And without having adopted any of the so-called “reforms,” Nebraska is one of the highest-performing states in the nation on NAEP. In fact, Nebraska outperformed every state that won RTTT except Massachusetts.

“Nebraska dragged its feet implementing NCLB. It put in a proposal for Race to the Top, but fortunately lost. It has no charter schools, no Common Core. It didn’t get a waiver because the state doesn’t want to evaluate teachers by test scores. The state commissioner decided not to ask anymore but to wait and see if NCLB is overhauled.

“The state is mainly rural so there is not much enthusiasm for charters except in Omaha, where there is a poor black community. Some black leaders think that charter schools will be a panacea. Some white legislators agree. But so far no action on that front.

“Despite the fact that Nebraska avoided almost every part of the reform menu, its students did very well on the 2015 NAEP. The state was in the top tier, ranked 9th or 11th in the nation. It outperformed every Race to the Top winner except Massachusetts, which has been number 1 for years.

“Nebraska is a conservative state, in the best sense of the word. It doesn’t believe in following the crowd. It doesn’t want to blow up its public schools and hope for the best. It wisely decided to wait and see. No creative disruption. No experiments on children. Just common sense.

“Also, being a state where people know one another in small cities, towns, and rural communities, Nebraska loves its public schools. Even Warren Buffett, one of the richest men in the world, sent his own children to Omaha public schools.

“But there is a new governor, and he is convinced that Nebraska needs charters, vouchers, virtual schools, the whole bag of privatization schemes.

“Hopefully the good citizens of Nebraska will persuade him that conservatives don’t destroy; conservatives conserve. Hopefully, they will inform the governor that Nebraska’s public schools are among the best in the nation.”

If it ain’t broke, don’t break it.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization

Steven Singer: The Farther from Public Schools, the Greater the Chances for Child Abuse

By dianeravitch
January 21, 2018 //
46

 

Steven Singer explains here why public schools are the safest environments for children. They are supervised. They are run by professionals, who are licensed and certified.

He writes:

“A California home-school where parents shackled, starved and abused their children is a symptom of a larger disease.

“And that disease is privatization.

“David Allen Turpin and his wife, Louise Anna Turpin, were arrested after police found the couple’s 13 children living in deplorable conditions in their Perris, California, home.

“Some of the children were actually young adults but were so malnourished investigators at first mistook them for minors.

“It is a situation that just could not have happened had those children been in the public school system.

“Someone would have seen something and reported it to Child Protective Services. But school privatization shields child predators from the light and enables a system where minors become the means to every adult end imaginable.

“Let me be clear. Privatization is defined as the transfer of a service from public to private ownership and control.

“In education circles, that means home-schools, charter schools and voucher schools – all educational providers that operate without adequate accountability.

“We are taking our most precious population – our children – and allowing them to be educated behind closed doors, out of sight from those tasked with ensuring they are getting the best opportunities to learn and are free from abuse.

“And since home-schooling operates with almost zero oversight, it is the most susceptible to child neglect and mistreatment.

“Children who in traditional public schools would have a whole plethora of people from teachers to counselors to principals to cafeteria workers who can observe the danger signs of abuse are completely removed from the home-school environment.

“Home-schooled children receive their educations almost exclusively from parents.

“While most moms and dads would never dream of abusing their kids, home-schooling provides the perfect cover for abusers like the Turpins to isolate children and mistreat them with impunity.

“It is a situation that at least demands additional oversight. And at most it requires we rethink the entire enterprise as dangerous and wrongheaded.

“Charter and voucher schools at least utilize whole staffs of people to educate children. The chances of something like this happening at these institutions is much smaller. However, both types of school also are much less accountable for their actions than traditional public schools.

“And that is the common factor – responsibility. Who is being held answerable when things go wrong? At traditional public schools, there is a whole chain of adults who are culpable for children. At these other institutions, the number of people in the hot seat shrinks to zero.”

Read it all. Think about it.

Categories Education Industry, Home Schooling, Privatization

Mother Jones: The GOP’s Biggest Charter Scam Just Imploded

By dianeravitch
January 20, 2018 //
14

 

Readers of this blog are familiar with the story of ECOT, the mammoth virtual charter school in Ohio. It made over $1 Billion for the entrepreneur who founded it. But it seems to be slipping rapidly down the drain hole.

Mother Jones tells the story here in graphic detail. 

“Now, with ECOT imploding, some state politicians have floated the idea that Lager, who has made millions in profits off the school and come a long way from the Waffle House, should be personally held responsible for paying back some of the $80 million owed to the state. But while the coming days will reveal if the political will or mechanisms exist to make this happen, it’s unclear how he might ever be held accountable—because the real scandal is that ECOT grew up legally, with the support of state politicians and national GOP power brokers, and that in many ways it has served as a model for schools like it across the country. Now, the same districts ECOT pulled its funds from are scrambling to find a way to take in its former students, and Ohio is facing a reckoning, after nearly two decades when the state became one of the country’s freest laboratories for pro-charter policies. “Why did it take a generation and a half of kids to go through this crappy system for us to do something about it,” Stephen Dyer, a former Ohio state representative asked me in exasperation in December. “The reason is because a lot of money came in.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, Virtual Charter Schools

Peter Greene on a Defector from the World of “Personalized Learning”

By dianeravitch
January 20, 2018 //
24

 

I applaud those who defect or dissent from received wisdom. I know from personal experience that it is especially hard to dissent when it means stepping off a money train and leaving behind your friends.

Paul Emerich was a true believer in “personalized learning.” On this Blog, the term is translated to mean “depersonalized learning.”

Peter Greene is not sure whether to congratulate him for waking up or to chastise him for his cluelessness. 

Greene writes:

“I’ve been trying to understand why this piece, which confirms so much of what many of us have said, and does so from the perspective of someone who’s been there– why does this rub me the wrong way. The best explanation is this: Emerich calls himself naive, but I think he’s letting himself off easy. I don’t think he’s so much naive as arrogant, and the same arrogance that was displayed in heading off to charter techno-teaching without doing any due diligence is the same arrogance that leads him to make this Momentous Announcement of things that he has personally discovered, as if a few thousand other folks hadn’t already caught on years and years ago.

“I appreciate his point of view, and his confirmation that charter school companies are businesses, not schools, and that personalized learning via computer is a sham and a fraud, and I’m happy that people are sharing this like crazy. But dammit– if more of these tech folks would do their damn homework, we wouldn’t have to keep learning the same old lessons over and over, and we wouldn’t keep subjecting live human children to foolishness that we already know is foolishness. In the meantime, he’s now the Academic Chair at the high-end private Latin School of Chicago. I guess time will tell what lessons he actually learned from his stay in Silicon Valley.”

I’m willing to be charitable and welcome Paul to the Club of Reformed True Believers.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Privatization

What You Need to Know about ALEC, the Koch Brothers, the DeVos Family, and Privatization

By dianeravitch
January 19, 2018 //
9

This article was written in 2015 but it is as timely today as it was then. Maybe more timely, because in 2015, who would have dreamed that Betsy DeVos would soon be U.S. Secretary of Education?

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is a bill mill founded in 1973 and funded by the Koch Brothers, the DeVos family, and major corporations. It operates secretively. It does not issue press releases. It churns out model laws that state legislators introduce into their own states to deregulate business and privatize the public sector for profit. It is a stealth political campaign to privatize everything for profit while classified by the IRS as a charity. Its members include one of every four state legislators in the nation. It’s corporate members include some of the nation’s pre-eminent businesses.

One of the major targets of ALEC is public education, because it is public. ALEC has model legislation for charter schools, vouchers, and cybercharters. It has Model legislation to eliminate collective bargaining and unions. It has Model legislation to lower standards for teachers and deregulate entry into teaching.

To learn more about ALEC, watch DeVos and read the website ALEC Exposed.

Alecexposed.com

Circulate this post and the links to everyone you know.

Categories ALEC, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Koch Brothers, Privatization

The Walton Family: Billionaires at Work and Play

By dianeravitch
January 19, 2018 //
22

The Waltons are a singular American family. Not exactly like you or me, to be sure. They are, according to Forbes, the richest family in America, with a net worth of $140 billion or more.

They were recently praised by Trump for raising the minimum wage for their 1 million workers to $11 an hour. On the same day, however, they closed down 63 Sam’s Club warehouse stores, putting more than 11,000 people out of work without notice.

I wish any member of the Walton family would try to live for a month on only $11 an hour wages. However, since they are all heirs to their great fortune, it’s likely that none ever held a paying job where they had to show up every day.

Here is an article about them that appeared on the Walton Foundation blog.

While other billionaires have pledged to give away most of their money to charity, the Waltons decline to join them. They know money is power. Also, it means you never have to go to work.

Their primary takeover target is education.

“The largest chunk of the foundation’s retooled and accelerated giving plan — $1 billion over the next five years — will go to education. While family members still evangelize about the benefits of “school choice” for struggling families, they’ve fought enough battles over the past two decades to determine that simply providing parents a slate of options among traditional public schools, charter schools, and private institutions isn’t enough to improve student achievement.

“For school choice to succeed, the Waltons concluded, the foundation has to move beyond making start-up grants for charters and focus more on building a constituency of supporters in local school districts.”

Typically, that means they have to actually buy elections, although the article doesn’t put it quire like that.

Their passion is charter schools. This is a handy way to bust unions and advance the privatization of public education. The Waltons claim to have started one of every charter schools in the U.S.

“Some critics have complained that the Waltons have donated a relatively small percentage of their enormous wealth to charity. Still, their giving is so substantial in terms of raw dollars that other critics contend it gives them too much influence over public policy. In response, the family has sought safe havens: school districts where there are plenty of skilled teachers and administrators excited about new educational models. In those places, the foundation has courted local officials open to charter schools operating alongside traditional neighborhood schools.

“The new approach means the foundation will exit cities where charters have been a tough sell, including Phoenix, Chicago, and Albany, N.Y. Its roster of 13 target areas now includes New Orleans, Oakland, and San Antonio, where charters are seen as ripe for success.”

See, they just sit around and decide how to privatize the public schools in your community. Arkansas is one of the poorest states in the nation. Couldn’t they just concentrate on raising up the families in their own backyard?

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, Walton Foundation

Eva Opening a Charter in Hudson Valley

By dianeravitch
January 18, 2018 //
14

 

Warning to parents in the Hudson Valley, New York.

Eva Moskowitz is opening a no-excuses Charter School in your neighborhood.

https://thehudsonvalleysuccessacademy.com/

Protect your children against harsh discipline.

Defend your public schools against raids on their funding.

 

 

Categories Discipline and Suspensions, Education Industry, Harlem Success Academy, New York, Privatization

Peter Greene on How Little that Betsy DeVos Has Learned in One Year

By dianeravitch
January 18, 2018 //
8

 

Betsy DeVos speaks only to guaranteed-friendly audiences, so she spoke at AEI, a think tank subsidized by her foundation.

Peter Greene reviews her speech here. 

What has she learned?

She has learned that she is always right.

She has learned that ignorance is bliss.

She has learned that all her biases are revealed Truth.

She will do nothing to dislodge the Common Core.

She says, “If the purpose of public education is to educate the public, then it should… not… matter what word comes before school.

Greene responds:

“This, for my money, is an even dumber statement than the infamous grizzly comment. If the word before “school” is “for-profit” or “flat earth” or “Aryan race” or– well, good lord, the list is endless. Does she really mean to suggest that as long as it’s some kind of school, we’re good…”

”First, it takes a special combination of ignorance and hubris to imagine that you are setting a new standard for calling to put students first, as if none of the millions of people who have worked in education never once thought, “You know, I’d rather like to make students my main focus here.” While DeVos has scrubbed a lot of the language that used to be her bread and butter– US schools are so bad they couldn’t get worse, and the whole government school system is just a scam created by unions to get fat checks for so-called teachers who just want to do nothing all day– this line shows some of the old DeVos creeping through.

“Second, let’s think about this. Because the short form of the DeVosian position is, “Here at the Department of Education, we will put students first by doing nothing.” That’s a neat trick, but it goes with that DeVosian disconnect in which the secretary remains unable to imagine a situation where her department would step in and say, “No, you can’t do that” to any school. Does she think that any state or federal agency should have stepped in and said, “No, Mr. Turpin, you cannot open a school where the curriculum is to chain your children in the basement without food and water.” And if the answer is no, as it seems to be, then how does she think this works? If her beloved marketplace is free to be overrun by fraudsters, scam artists, and cheats, how exactly are parents empowered?”

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization
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