Archives for category: Privatization
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A Great Game Called CharterLand!

By dianeravitch
November 26, 2013 //
5

The National Opportunity to Learn campaign, working with Kevin Welner of the National Education Policy Center, adapted the well-known children’s game “CandyLand” into an infographic called “CharterLand.”

It is a very vivid illustrations of the strategies that many charters now use to weed out students they don’t want, the ones likely to get low test scores or to defy their “no-excuses” policies.

Open it up, and you will see tens of thousands of words condensed into a graphic and familiar game board.

Categories Charter Schools, Privatization

Who Are Our Highest-Paid Government Employees?

By dianeravitch
November 25, 2013 //
16

The Center for Media and Democracy has compiled a list of America’s highest-paid government employees. They are not teachers or nurses or social workers.

“Time and again we’re told that librarians, nurses and teachers are to blame for state and local budget problems,” said Lisa Graves, Executive Director of the Center for Media and Democracy. “In reality, taxpayers are being duped by corporate CEOs and Wall Street banks that are siphoning money out of our communities for huge salaries and bonus packages.”

CMD writes:

The effort is part of our ongoing new project,OutsourcingAmericaExposed.org, which focuses on 12 firms doing the most to privatize public services.

Today, CMD puts the spotlight on Ron Packard, CEO of K12 Inc., America’s highest paid teacher. 

K12 Inc. is a publicly-traded (NYSE: LRN) for-profit, online education company headquartered in Herndon, Virginia. On its own and as a member of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), K12 Inc. has pushed a national agenda to replace bricks and mortar classrooms with computers and replace actual teachers with “virtual” ones. As K12 Inc. notes in its most recent 10-K, “most of (its) revenues depend on per pupil funding amounts and payment formulas” from government contracts for virtual public charter schools and “blended schools” (combining online with traditional instruction), among other products. 

From 2009-2013, Packard received $19 million in taxpayer dollars. Not bad for a government employee!

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization

Financial Report: Charter Schools Strangling Public Schools in Michigan

By dianeravitch
November 22, 2013 //
25

Moody’s Investors Service downgraded the bond ratings of 53 school districts in Michigan.

Public schools are losing enrollment to charter schools, and losing the ability to balance their budgets.

More than 80% of the charter schools in Michigan are operated for-profit.

According to the linked article,

Justin Marlowe, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who has written about local government finance, said increased charter school competition and tight state budgets are squeezing the districts.

The “proliferation of charter schools and ongoing state budget problems have put more pressure on local school districts,” Marlowe said, adding there “don’t seem to be any immediate solutions unless we rethink how we finance school districts.”

According to the Moody’s report, 425 of the state’s 549 public school districts lost students between 2004 and 2012, with total enrollment slipping 13.2 percent.

But as overall enrollment was falling, charter schools were growing: They had 120,000 students in Michigan at the end of the last school year and the number of schools rose by 8 percent for this school year, to 298.

Michigan’s Electablog reports: “This is no accident. It’s a plan that’s been in place by those who wish to diminish the ability of teachers to bargain collectively for wages, benefits, and working conditions and to redirect tax dollars earmarked for educating our children into the coffers of for-profit charter school companies.”

In short, this is the culmination of efforts to privatize public education, remove any rights of teachers, and replace public education with profit-making businesses.

Is this the work of conservatives? No, conservatives don’t destroy traditional institutions. They don’t blow up the neighborhood public school so that someone can make a profit.

As Garrison Keillor said, “When you wage war on the public schools, you’re attacking the mortar that holds the community together. You’re not a conservative, you’re a vandal.”

The vandals are inside the gates in Michigan, ransacking public education across the state.

One of our regular readers wrote as follows:

Eli Broad is from Michigan, and he writes editorials in that state insisting he is NOT destroying public education. Would someone in media ask him to defend what’s happening in Michigan? 80% of the charters are for-profit and they are destroying the public school system. The governor and the state legislature are captured by for-profit education lobbyists.

Michigan could LOSE their public school system. Will Broad have to answer for what he’s done here? How far does this have to go before someone in state or federal government intervenes? Will Michigan be the first state to go to a fully privatized system?

Thanks, ed reformers. Good job! Every public school kid in Michigan will now suffer as a result of your cavalier, reckless, “cage busting” approach. Every single kid in a public school will pay.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Michigan, Privatization

Claudio Sanchez: The Crisis in Philadelphia Public Schools

By dianeravitch
November 21, 2013 //
14

Claudio Sanchez of NPR did an excellent analysis of the tragedy unfolding in the Philadelphia public schools. The schools have been under state control for a dozen years. When Paul Vallas was in charge, he implemented a bold privatization experiment, which failed. Now the schools are vastly underfunded by the state of Pennsylvania. Governor Tom Corbett can find any amount of money to give corporate tax breaks, but he wants to extract $300 million from the Philadelphia schools. His big idea is to squeeze the money out of the budget by cutting jobs and teachers’ salaries. The schools have been cut to the bone. Many lack guidance counselors, arts programs, librarians, social workers, and in addition, thousands of teachers were laid off.

The governor (whose approval rating is currently about 20%) wants more charters so that private operators can take charge of the kids. The city’s superintendent, Broad-trained William Hite, talks about “right-sizing” the district by closing as many as 60 public schools.

As Sanchez points out, the city’s elite civic and business leadership and big foundations want more charters, even though the existing charters do not outperform the regular public schools (and 19 of them have been investigated for fraudulent practices).

His segment ends thus:

Foundations say that money [for charter schools] is giving struggling kids a shot at a better education. In Philadelphia, though, most charters are actually performing the same — and in some cases, worse — than traditional public schools, and yet charter school enrollment has skyrocketed.

And that makes some parents nervous.

“It looks like they’re trying to do away with public schools and make everything charter. That’s the way it looks now to me,” says parent Donna Mackie. She has an 8-year-old at A.S. Jenks Elementary, a high-performing neighborhood school in South Philadelphia. She says parents’ biggest fear is that the district is going to shut down their school in a year or two to save money.

School district officials have talked about closing up to 60 in five years. They call it “right sizing” the system.

Jennifer Miller, also a Jenks mom, calls it a mistake.

“I feel bad, and I feel like I have nowhere to go. I mean, I live here. I can’t leave the city. I can’t afford private school. This is my only choice,” Miller says.

Sometimes, Miller says, she can’t sleep at night, not knowing whether her school and city will survive this crisis.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, Philadelphia, Privatization

What Is It About Billionaires and Privatization?

By dianeravitch
November 21, 2013 //
45

This is a long article but well worth your time. It seems that EBay billionaire Pierrer Omidyar is underwriting a major new media venture. While he is widely hailed as a “civic-minded billionaire,” authors Mark Ames and Yasha Levine see him as a standard-bearer for what is called neoliberalism, in which free markets rule our lives.

Since this will shortly go behind a paywall, read it now. Here’s a start.

Ames and Levine write:

“We ought to be looking at business as a force for good.” – Pierre Omidyar

“Like eBay, Omidyar Network harnesses the power of markets to enable people to tap their true potential.” – Omidyar Network, “Frequently Asked Questions”

* *

The world knows very little about the political motivations of Pierre Omidyar, the eBay billionaire who is founding (and funding) a quarter-billion-dollar journalism venture with Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill. What we do know is this: Pierre Omidyar is a very special kind of technology billionaire.

We know this because America’s sharpest journalism critics have told us.

In a piece headlined “The Extraordinary Promise of the New Greenwald-Omidyar Venture”, The Columbia Journalism Review gushed over the announcement of Omidyar’s project. And just in case their point wasn’t clear, they added the amazing subhead, “Adversarial muckrakers + civic-minded billionaire = a whole new world.”

Ah yes, the fabled “civic-minded billionaire”—you’ll find him two doors down from the tooth fairy.

But seriously folks, CJR really, really wants you to know that Omidyar is a breed apart: nothing like the Randian Silicon Valley libertarian we’ve become used to seeing.

“…billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo. Billionaires tend to have a finger in every pie: powerful friends they don’t want annoyed and business interests they don’t want looked at.

“By hiring Greenwald & Co., Omidyar is making a clear statement that he’s the billionaire exception….It’s like Izzy Stone running into a civic-minded plastics billionaire determined to take I.F. Stone’s Weekly large back in the day.”
Later, the CJR “UPDATED” the piece with this missing bit of “oops”:

(UPDATE: I should disclose that the Omidyar Network helps fund CJR, something I didn’t know until shortly after I published this post.)
No biggie. Honest mistake. And anyway, plenty of others rushed to agree with CJR’s assessment. Media critic Jack Shafer at Reuters described Omidyar’s politics and ideology as “close to being a clean slate,” repeatedly praising the journalism venture’s and Omidyar’s “idealism.” The “NewCo” venture with Greenwald “harkens back to the techno-idealism of the 1980s and 1990s, when the first impulse of computer scientists, programmers, and other techies was to change the world, not make more money,” Shafer wrote, ending his piece:

“As welcome as Omidyar’s money is, his commitment to the investigative form and an open society is what I’m grateful for this afternoon. You can never uphold the correct verdict too often.”
What all of these orgasmic accounts of Omidyar’s “idealism” have in common is a total absence of skepticism. America’s smartest media minds simply assume that Omidyar is an “exceptional” billionaire, a “civic-minded billionaire” driven by “idealism” rather than by profits. The evidence for this view is Pierre Omidyar’s massive nonprofit venture, Omidyar Network, which has distributed hundreds of millions of dollars to causes all across the world.

And yet what no one seems able to specify is exactly what ideology Omidyar Network promotes. What does Omidyar’s “idealism” mean in practice, and is it really so different from the non-idealism of other, presumably bad, billionaires? It’s almost as if journalists can’t answer those questions because they haven’t bothered asking them.

So let’s go ahead and do that now.

Since its founding in 2004, Omidyar Network has committed nearly $300 million to a range of nonprofit and for-profit “charity” outfits. An examination of the ideas behind the Omidyar Network and of the investments it has made suggests that its founder is anything but a “different” sort of billionaire. Instead, what emerges is almost a caricature of neoliberal ideology, complete with the trail of destruction that ensues when that ideology is put into practice. The generous support of the Omidyar Network goes toward “fighting poverty” through micro-lending, reducing third-world illiteracy rates by privatizing education and protecting human rights by expanding property titles (“private property rights”) into slums and villages across the developing world.

In short, Omidyar Network’s philanthropy reveals Omidyar as a free-market zealot with an almost mystical faith in the power of “markets” to transform the world, end poverty, and improve lives—one micro-individual at a time.

All the neoliberal guru cant about solving the world’s poverty problems by unlocking the hidden “micro-entrepreneurial” spirit of every starving Third Worlder is put into practice by Omidyar Network’s investments. Charity without profit motive is considered suspect at best, subject to the laws of unintended consequences; good can only come from markets unleashed, and that translates into an ideology inherently hostile to government, democracy, public politics, redistribution of land and wealth, and anything smacking of social welfare or social justice.

Categories Privatization

Mother Crusader Comes to My Defense

By dianeravitch
November 18, 2013 //
14

On November 11, right before I fell ill, I gave two lectures in Princeton. The first was held at Princeton High School and open to the community. After dinner I lectured as part of a series at Princeton University. Two different speeches, but the message was the same. The High School speech was focused on New Jersey, the evening speech on national trends.

Within a few days, I noted that someone from a New Jersey charter school attended the High School lecture and disagreed. It happens. I forgot about it. These days my attention is devoted to getting well.

Mother Crusader (Darcie Cimarusti) was there, and she didn’t like the column one bit. In this post, she took apart the charter advocate’s claims one by one, with her usual research skills and panache. You can see the original column and Darcie’s careful dissection here.

Behind the point-counterpoint is a larger question. What happens when charters open in small towns and villages? I recently read about a push to introduce charters in Idaho? What happens in a town of 15,000 when the public school loses money and students to the charter? With less money, the public school is not likely to get better. In the larger picture, however, the real danger is that the school that was once the glue of the community is torn asunder. The public school suffers. The community suffers. The academic results are no different. One school has few or no students with serious disabilities or English learner. The other gets them all. What’s the point?

Categories Charter Schools, New Jersey, Privatization

Ohio Charter Schools: Are They Accountable?

By dianeravitch
November 16, 2013 //
16

The invaluable blogger Plunderbund in Ohio posted a description of the 150 state education laws from which charter schools are exempt. Are charter schools more accountable than public schools? Well, that depends on how you defend “accountable,” and how you define “public.”

The question remains for Ohio’s leaders: If exemption from state laws and regulations and mandates is such a good thing, why don’t they get rid of unnecessary laws that apply to public schools?

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Ohio, Privatization

The Secrets of Arizona’s Most Successful Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
November 8, 2013 //
42

Amanda U. Potterton, a doctoral student at Arizona State University, analyzed the success stories of two of Arizona’s most celebrated charter chains: BASIS and Great Hearts Academies.

The myth of charter miracles is built on stories generated by chains like these two. This myth has been celebrated repeatedly by President Obama and Secretary Duncan. Therefore this analysis is of more than local interest.

She calls it “A Citizen’s Response to the President’s Charter School Education Proclamation.” She profiles two “highly performing charter school organizations in Arizona, BASIS and Great Hearts Academy.

The full text of the article may be found here.

It is available and free for one week only.

President Barack Obama has been the nation’s most important cheerleader for charter schools. He declared a week in May to be “National Charter Schools Week.” He seems not to know or care that in many districts the charter schools are more segregated than the surrounding school district. Some accomplishment. He seems not to know or care that charter schools do not serve the same students as public schools.

The two charter chains that Potterton reviewed, using public data, enroll unusually high proportions of white students and unusually small proportions of English learners, of students who are poor, and students who have disabilities.

Is this what the President wants?

In the old days, we used to call that a dual school system: separate and unequal.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, Privatization

EduShyster: Getting Big $$$ on the Charter Gravy Train

By dianeravitch
November 7, 2013 //
13

EduShyster, tongue firmly planted in cheek, defends the huge salaries collected by charter operators in New York City. That’s the price of excellence, she says. She links to an article by Rachel Monahan of the New York Daily News, who listed 16 charter executives who make more money to run a small charter school or a small charter chain than the chancellor of the City of New York. Missing from Monahan’s list was Geoffrey Canada, who is paid somewhere between $400,000-500,000. .

Some of those on Monahan’s list have charters in other cities, and it would be interesting to know if they are receiving additional payments as executives in multiple sites.

When you see these rewards, you can understand the lure of charters for those young people who are eager for fame and fortune. They won’t win it in the classroom, so it makes sense to open a charter, spend huge amounts of money to market the product and lure customers, conduct a lottery (thus excluding the families who are not alert enough to do the paperwork for a lottery), exclude students with severe disabilities and students who don’t speak English, and counsel out troublemakers and students with low scores. It is a formula that always works!

And those who follow the formula get very rich and are idolized by the media.

Collateral damage: America’s democratic public school system.

Tough. But that’s the price of excellence for the few.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization

Indiana: GOP Plan to Privatizatize Public Schools Revealed

By dianeravitch
November 6, 2013 //
33

There is a pattern on the rug.

First, you silence the teachers’ unions.

Then, you strip teachers of tenure, ie, any job protection, to keep them fearful.

Along the way, you keep saying that the public schools are broken, failing, obsolete.

Keep demonizing teachers.

Destroy public confidence in public schools.

That clears the way to hand public money to private corporations. That opens the door to for- profit schools.

As Randi says in this article, “Follow the Money.”

Here is how it happened in Indiana.

There was a snag in the plan when the voters turned out privatizer-in-chief Tony Bennett and elected Glenda Ritz, who polled more votes than the governor.

Since then, Tony Bennett was hired by Florida but resigned because of a grade-fixing scandal back home in Indiana. And Governor Mike Pence has set out to strip the job of Commissioner of Education of all its powers, to sneer at the voters and keep the destruction of public education on track.

Categories Charter Schools, Indiana, Privatization, Unions
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