Archives for category: Privatization
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What Do All Those School Rankings Really Demonstrate?

By dianeravitch
July 5, 2013 //
24

Scott Waldman writes thoughtfully about education for the Albany Times-Union newspaper in upstate New York.

In this article, he demonstrates what most educators know and what ought to be common sense for everyone else:

The schools rankings in affluent districts have the highest rankings, and the schools in districts with high levels of poverty have the lowest rankings.

Some people don’t seem to know this. Unfortunately, the people who don’t know this are in Congress, state legislatures, the U.S. Department of Education, and the governors’ offices.

Thus, policymakers berate those who teach children in impoverished districts and even close or privatize their schools.

Children who grow up poor are not destined to do poorly in school. If they attend well-resourced schools that are not dominated by poverty and segregation, they do better in school.

Call it peer effects, or something about getting the attention and resources needed.

Categories Poverty, Privatization

Indiana Governor Picks Charter Leader as His Advisor

By dianeravitch
July 5, 2013 //
32

Newly elected Indiana State Superintendent Glenda Ritz won a smashing victory last fall, collecting even more votes than Governor Mike Pence. Since taking office, she has been an effective leader.

However, those hoping for a slowdown of the attacks on public education in Indiana were disappointed to learn that Governor Pence had selected the executive director of the state charter school board as his education advisor. She has a long history as an advocate of privatization.

What’s happened to the Republican Party? Why are so many Republicans dedicated to harming public education? Do they hate public schools? Why?
What is it about having a dual school system that appeals to them?

Categories Charter Schools, Indiana, Privatization

A Fight to Save the Public Sector

By dianeravitch
July 4, 2013 //
56

In city after city, state after state, the privatization movement is seeking to take control of public sector institutions and to turn a profit.

They begin by attacking the public sector as costly, wasteful, and inefficient. This is the classic use of FUD (look up the term in wikipedia, it has a long history in public relations as a way to destroy your competition): Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt.

In the case of public education, they say our schools are failing when they are not. Our schools are doing exceptionally well, and where test scores are low is in schools with high levels of poverty and racial segregation. The privatizers don’t want to talk about poverty and segregation. Instead, they blame unions, teachers, and public control. They want what privatizers want: private control of public dollars.

The good news: the public is growing aware of this attack on the commons. The pushback has begun. The public is beginning to understand that the private sector “succeeds” by pushing out the toughest cases. The private sector does not do education or prisons or hospitals or parks or libraries better or cheaper.

When the public understands the raid on the commons, the privateers lose.

That is why we must all tell the public what is happening. We must defend what belongs to us all. We must defend it not to be defensive but to preserve it for the future. We do not want the “status quo.” The status quo is testing and privatization. We reject the status quo. Nor do we want to go back to a mythical past.

We want better schools. We want good schools in every neighborhood. We want schools that are subject to democratic control, not to corporate or autocratic control. Restoring democracy is at the heart of our struggle against privatization. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice.”

We will continue to resist all efforts to turn schools into profit-making enterprises. We will demand that our nation resume its struggle for equal opportunity for all, a goal that has been cynically abandoned these past dozen years.

May the private sector grow and thrive. And may we work together until the public sector once again recaptures its purpose, which is to serve the public without fear or favor.

Categories Privatization

Ohio: Privatization Is a Challenge to Our Democracy

By dianeravitch
July 4, 2013 //
4

Bill Phillis of the Ohio Coalition for Education and Adequacy writes the following description of the assault on public education in that state:

 

FY2014-FY2015 State Budget Proposal:  Assault on school districts and boards of education

July 1, 2013

The state is responsible for a thorough and efficient system of public common schools.  School district boards of education are responsible for delivering educational opportunities to the children of the community.

Charter schools and vouchers bypass the boards of education in Ohio except for the few charters that are operated by a board of education.

HB 59 greatly expands the choice programming in Ohio and opens the door to the nationwide scheme to remove school funding from the system.  The money-follows-the-child mantra is a code for dismantling the public school system which is democratic operated, community-by-community all across Ohio and America.  The board of education is the fourth branch of government and is being systematically eroded and dismantled.

A bit of history is in order:

Early in the history of Ohio, education was deemed to be a fundamental function of government.  In fact, prior to Ohio statehood, the Land Ordinance of 1785 set aside the sixteenth section of each township* for the support of schools.  “There shall be reserved the Lot N16, of every township, for the maintenance of public schools.” The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 declared education a governmental function in Article 3: “Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”

This 1787 provision was, nearly word for word, included in both the 1802 and 1851 Ohio Constitutions.  In 1821, the legislature enacted the first general school act which provided for the establishment of school districts within townships and made property within the township subject to taxation authorized by the electors.

In 1825, legislation was enacted to require that townships be divided into school districts and to require the election of directors for each district.  Also, each community was required to levy taxes for the support of its schools.

In 1847, legislation was enacted which required the entire state to be divided into school districts.  Then, in 1851, Ohioans adopted a new Constitution which required the state to secure a thorough and efficient system of common schools throughout the state.  It was determined by law that locally elected school officials would be responsible for delivering the state’s educational programming to the children of each community. This governmental arrangement for public education was reaffirmed and strengthened by the 1912 constitutional amendment which provided “by law…for the organization, administration and control of the public school system of the state supported by public funds: provided, that each school district embraced wholly or in part within any city shall have the power by referendum vote to determine for itself the number of members and the organization of the district board of education…”  The 1912 amendment reconfirmed the role of the state and boards of education in ensuring high quality educational opportunities for the children in all of the communities throughout Ohio.

This legal framework provides that each school community, as a part of the state’s common school system, will operate its district through an elected board of education.  The school district is a governmental unit responsible for the delivery of educational programming to all of the children of all the people within the district.  The board of education is truly the FOURTH BRANCH OF GOVERNMENT.

This common school arrangement is fundamental, workable and essential to the preservation of democracy.  The time-honored practice of each community operating its schools via an elected board of education is being challenged on many fronts. TheCenter on Reinventing Public Education helps communities develop alternative governance systems for public K-12 education.  The Center’s founder, Dr. Paul Hill, was involved in the New Orleans “reform” that resulted in four out of five students ending up in charter schools. The Fordham Foundation, a leading advocate of replacing the public common school with private operations, put out a policy brief on April 23 entitled,Redefining the School District in Tennessee.  The Brief states, “As the challenges of education governance loom ever larger and the dysfunction and incapacity of the traditional K-12 system reveal themselves as major roadblocks to urgently needed reforms across that system, many have asked, ‘What’s the alternative?'”  This is not only a challenge to the elected board of education concept, but to democracy. 

A community that is stripped of its right to elect board of education members is one that loses a democratic right.  If people can be stripped of the right to elect board of education members, they can be denied the right to elect other public officials.  If people are perceived as not being capable of the discretion to elect members to the fourth branch of government, why would they be capable of electing persons to any branch and level of government?  Citizens’ cherished right to vote is dwindled by replacing elected governmental official with appointed persons.

Elected board members who believe in the democratic process should resist, with passion and conviction, the movement to remove the election process from the fourth branch of government or to undermine the elected board’s birthright to manage their schools.

*A township was a six by six miles land area divided into 36 one by one mile sections, thus 36 sections per township.

William Phillis
Ohio E & A

100 South 3Rd StreetColumbusOhio43215United States

(614) 228-6540(614) 228-6542Fax

www.ohiocoalition.org

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Ohio, Privatization, Vouchers

In Search of a Metaphor for “Reform”

By dianeravitch
July 3, 2013 //
17

Over recent years, I have heard many metaphors used to explain what is happening–what is being done to–the nation’s public schools. In New York City, parents often use the phrase “the emperor has no clothes.” Others may have different metaphors to suggest. In this post, reader Joanna Best thinks that the story of Hansel and Gretel best explains what is happening across the nation:

 

So, as I have worked to compartmentalize all the aspects to Ed Reform (to get a clear understanding of everything), I keep coming back to this being like the opera Hansel and Gretel. Humperdink’s sister adapted the libretto from the Grimms’ tale: the parents have fallen on hard times (like our current generation of working-age Americans)—they are broom makers and they go into the surrounding villages to try and sell brooms (like efforts are being made to get our economy back to a pleasant level); in doing so they leave Hansel and Gretel (the children) doing measurable tasks (a la testing) so that they will be contributing to the welfare in general (working on a broom and fixing a sock); a neighbor gives them some milk which leads Hansel and Gretel to abandon their measurable tasks and frolick as they dream about the milk. When mother discovers they are not working (like those who think the schools must measure and measure), in the shuffle of disgruntlement the milk is spilled (NCLB). So the children are sent into the enchanted forest to find berries (RttT). There are some good breaks for them (the sandman lures them to sleep–they have each other—and they pray quite a bit). Meanwhile mother also prays (those of us in teaching realizing that we have in fact sent our children into the enchanted forest), and realizes she has over-reacted. Father, who has had a good day in the villages, brings home lots of food (those of us finally getting a break in the economy, or finding excitement in how can we better the children’s lives), but it is too late. The children are already out there.


Meanwhile a tasty candy and gingerbread house pops up (a solution to the children’s fear and hunger!!! charters, vouchers, TFA). The children nibble and are then set under the spell of the witch (those who do not have children’s best interest in mind, but just want to plump them up to devour them or line them up in the fence of gingerbread children already captured)!!
For a while, the children are at her mercy. But clever Gretel outsmarts the witch and the children then set all the other captured gingerbread children free—and they become real boys and girls again. The spell is broken. And mother and father appear, after having searched the enchanted forest throughout the night to find them. There is prayer and celebrating and the family is reunited, the witch ousted.
I am sure the analogy doesn’t fit directly, but it is where my musical brain has taken me this week when reading this blog. Here’s hoping all witches with candy houses can be outsmarted by the Gretels of the world—and Hansel can be freed. And the family can get about their business of enjoying what father and mother are able to provide from their business and the children can frolick and be children, as they learn.

Categories Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization

Voice, Not Choice, Improves Public Schools

By dianeravitch
July 3, 2013 //
6

Steve Hinnefeld writes a terrific blog in Indiana.

In this one, he explains that public schools get better when parents become active and use their voice.

They do not become better when parents vote with their feet and exit the door to a charter school, a  private school, or something else.

I am going to be watching this blogger.

He understands how our public schools are being wrecked by misguided ideas about consumerism, the free market, competition, and choice that are not successful outside of the financial sphere.

Of course, if your goal is not to  improve public schools but to privatize them and turn them into money-making ed-ventures, then choice works well indeed.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, Privatization

Bloomberg DOE Hurries to Privatize As Many Schools As Possible Before He Leaves Office

By dianeravitch
July 2, 2013 //
18

This is an alarming account of the frenzied efforts by Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Department of Education to cement his “legacy” of opening privately managed charter schools while abandoning the public schools for which he is responsible.

The high school named for the famed Socialist Norman Thomas will be closed and set aside as space for privately managed charters. This is a way of spitting on the memory of a crusader for the public sector, that is, if anyone at the New York City Department of Education ever heard of Norman Thomas.

The new charter high schools will not accept any transfer students; after all, they are not public schools, so why should they comply with the same rules as real public schools?

The article by Gail Robinson of City Limits says that the charter school community of hedge fund managers and equity investors is worried about what will happen after Bloomberg leaves office. There is always the risk that someone might be elected who doesn’t want to privatize public education.

“Until then, Bloomberg is doing what he can. When the new school year starts, the city will open 24 new charter schools, for a total of 183, with spending on the publicly funded, privately run schools set to top $1 billion. And the city Department of Education (DOE) continues to allocate space in public school buildings to many charter schools, which use the rooms rent free.

But the department is also looking beyond Bloomberg’s term, carving out rooms in district buildings for schools that will not open until fall 2014. One, PAVE II, got space in a Bushwick middle school building even though the state has not yet approved its existence. And DOE also has set aside space for a charter that was supposed to open in August 2011; the plan now is for it to finally begun admitting students in September 2014.”

PAVE Academy was started by a billionaire who prefers free space in public buildings, rather than buying or leasing space. Who can blame him? Why not take free public space if the mayor wants you to have it?

Bloomberg himself plans to open four new charter schools, in partnership with billionaire George Soros.

We can only hope and pray for a mayor who takes seriously his responsibility to improve the public education system, which enrolls more than one million children. The needs of those children have been treated as a measurement issue for a dozen years; the public schools have gotten no support, only threats of closure, as the mayor blithely pursues a free-market system, with favor and preference for schools that he does not control, the privately managed schools that enroll 6 percent of the city’s children. Who will care for the other 94%?

The first thing a new mayor should do is clean out the top layers of administrative personnel, those who have abetted the privatization of public education in the City of New York. Shame on them.

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, New York City, Privatization

Matt Di Carlo on the New CREDO Study of Charters

By dianeravitch
July 1, 2013 //
28

Matt Di Carlo here reviews the new national CREDO study of charters.

The findings are not much different from those of 2009, mainly, that charters vary widely in their ability to produce higher test scores and that on the whole the test scores of students in charters are not significantly better than students in public schools.

Ever the patient social scientist, Di Carlo is impressed that the charters seem to be getting better results than in 2009 (but could it be because of the number of low-performing charters that were closed? What happened to the students in those charters? Did they get sent back to the public schools? Is there “survivorship bias,” in which only the better charters survive?).

Di Carlo scrutinizes the data about test scores in math and reading. But he does not address the questions that Wendy Lecker asked when she reviewed the same study. Lecker, a senior attorney and director of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, wrote this:

“In Connecticut, the human toll of charter schools includes severe discipline policies, such as shockingly high suspension rates of elementary school students as young as 5; mistreatment of those few students with disabilities in their schools so extreme it necessitates a civil rights settlement; high attrition rates; and exclusion of Connecticut’s neediest students.

Charter schools exact a toll on parents, as well. Public schools are overseen by elected school boards that hold public meetings. When charters replace public schools, parents lose their voice in education. Charter boards are not democratically elected. There is no requirement that board members live in the community or answer to parents. Often, members are corporate executives with no children in charter schools.

The cost of charters extends beyond the individual family. In neighborhoods across this country, public schools are community hubs. Funding a parallel school system starves the existing public schools and dooms vital community institutions. In Chicago and Philadelphia, officials de-funded public schools to fund charters, then closed an unprecedented number of neighborhood schools, despite dramatic protests by parents and students. In New Orleans, charter school expansion increased segregation, with children of color concentrated in low-performing schools and white students in higher-performing ones. In these cities, the negative effects of charter expansion fall hardest on poor children of color.

At the same time states shell out billions of dollars on charter schools, courts have ruled that states have deprived public schools of billions of dollars owed to them. Since 1997, Connecticut taxpayers have spent more than a half a billion dollars on charter schools, not including special education, transportation and other expenses host districts pay, while the state has consistently underfunded Connecticut’s public schools.

Taxpayers pay billions to fund parallel charter school systems that lack public oversight, exclude our neediest children, increase segregation, starve existing schools and decimate communities. As a nation and a state, it is time to question whether this price is too high to pay for an average of eight days extra in reading.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Privatization

TeacherKen: BAT Has a Website: Join Us

By dianeravitch
July 1, 2013 //
18

TeacherKen reports that the Badass Teachers Association has enrolled more than 20,000 members in only two weeks.

It has a new website, so you can join without going to Facebook. TeacherKen has the link. That’s great news for those of us who are not on FB.

Keep it going.

You don’t have to be a teacher to join. You have to be mad as hell at the mess the corporations, the foundations, and the federal government have made of education and what they are doing to our kids.

We can take back our schools and our profession.

Yes, we can.

Categories Education Reform, Privatization, Race to the Top, Teachers and Teaching, Testing

The BTA Launches New Media Today

By dianeravitch
June 30, 2013 //
25

Having sprouted nearly 20,000 members in barely two weeks, the distinguished Badass Teachers Association prepares for the long haul. Mark NAISON writes:

“Today, with the Official Launch Party for the group Logo, the youtube channel, and the opening of the BAT Store, members of the Badass Teachers Association will see how hard the administrators of this group have worked to create an organizational structure built for the long, hard, struggle to take back our profession and our schools from the profiteers, hustlers and opportunists who have marginalized our voices and deluged our schools with tests and assessments. No one should pretend this struggle will be easy, or that it will not provoke arguments in the group as to best carry it out. But I am confident that with the organization we have all created together, the national group plus the 50 state organizations, teachers now have the opportunity to speak more frankly and honestly, in collective solidarity, than they did two weeks ago. The collective courage and creativity of people on this site inspires me every day. Now let the whole nation learn what Badass Teachers can do.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/140244172840677/

Mark D Naison
Professor of African American Studies and History
Fordham University

“If you Want to Save America’s Public Schools: Replace Secretary of Education Arne Duncan With a Lifetime Educator.” http://dumpduncan.org/

Categories Privatization, Support for public schools, Teachers and Teaching, Testing
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