Archives for category: Privatization
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The Georgia Federation of Teachers Denounces Charter Legislation

By dianeravitch
September 25, 2012 //
9

Governor Nathan Deal of Georgia is supporting a constitutional amendment to create a commission to approve charter schools despite the objection of local school boards. This proposal was drafted by the rightwing ALEC organization, which is heavily funded by big corporations and counts 2,000 state legislators among its members.

This is the statement issued by the Georgia Federation of Teachers about the constitutional amendment that would curtail the powers of local school boards:

Children, Not Profits, Are Our Priority
Georgia Federation of Teachers President Verdaillia Turner
on the Charter School Amendment

The Charter School Amendment is not about supporting parents or student achievement. It is about granting the governor, lieutenant governor and speaker unprecedented power over billions of local and state tax dollars via creating a new state agency which will control billions of tax dollars for private interests. This agency would be appointed by the governor and accountable only to the governor. This agency would siphon precious tax dollars away from 1.7 million Georgia school children. It would support and fatten special schools for select people by exacerbating class and racial segregation. The Charter School Amendment is about “who chooses and who loses.”

Children, not profits, are our priority. We agree with Georgia’s State School Superintendent, Dr. John Barge. Until all of Georgia’s schools are financed appropriately, and students and teachers are no longer furloughed, it is unconscionable to fund a new state agency or support the objectives of the Charter School Amendment. The money for these special “for profit” schools will create a dual state school system and will cost Georgia’s taxpayers billions of dollars.

While the powers at the state capitol deceive the public by pushing for less government, they are creating more government via another state agency to add to the 128 state agencies that already exist. And while the powers at the state capitol deceive the public and claim that they support local control, they are attempting to take local control away from locally elected school boards, the men and women most accountable to the public, by pushing this amendment. And while the powers at the state capitol claim that this amendment is about expanding parental choice and helping students achieve, they deceive the public by taking over 6 billion dollars from public schools and setting up Georgia’s citizens for an educational Enron encounter. Over 70 school districts are operating with a deficit. At least 4 school districts are broke, and over 20 school districts are still furloughing teachers and students. Parents already have a choice. Local boards of education may and do grant charters. And if a board denies a charter petition, the Georgia Department of Education has an appeal process. The only “choice” as per this amendment is the choice to finance private schools at the public’s expense!

If we can’t trust the state with Medicare, transportation, or to use dollars earmarked for the foreclosed homes our families and students need, why would we trust the state with our children?

This amendment is not about charters, achievement, or parental choice. It is about giving five people who will only be accountable to the governor, free range unprecedented control and power over our billions of tax dollars. And it is about big profits for private interests on the backs of our children and at the expense of Georgia’s taxpayers.

###

Georgia Federation of Teachers
(404) 315-0222

Categories ALEC, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, For-Profit, Privatization

Conservative Think Tank Promotes Parent Trigger

By dianeravitch
September 25, 2012 //
19

It sounds so easy.

Take a vote. Get control of your school. Hire a new staff. Next year, your school is a great success.

The Heartland Institute recommends it for everyone.

This think tank in Chicago helped to write the ALEC model legislation to encourage state legislatures to pass a “parent trigger.”

This is meant to privatize public schools across the nation.

The only thing that the Heartland website doesn’t admit is that there is not a single school in the United States or anywhere in the world where a parent trigger has actually happened.

There is no example of a successful (or unsuccessful) parent trigger.

Please note there is no parent trigger for charter school parents.

Once the trigger is fired, there is no going back.

This has got to be one of the most idiotic of all “reforms” on the table.

No evidence, no experience, just privatization ideology as their guide.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, Parent trigger, Privatization

Is This What School Reform Looks Like?

By dianeravitch
September 24, 2012 //
17

A reader writes, referring to Muskegon Heights, Michigan:

The for-profit company that is operating the entire school system near me fired all the teachers and hired new ones back at half price.  I can’t wait to see how this is going to work.  I have heard that teachers are walking off the job at the end of the day.  Cheaper is just not always better.

Categories Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Privatization

Who Paid for the Anti-Union Ads?

By dianeravitch
September 23, 2012 //
6

During the strike, there was an outpouring of ads undermining and attacking the union. This blogger wondered who was paying for them. The group is called Education Reform Now. It is the non-profit arm of Democrats for Education Reform. DFER, as it is known, is the political action group of Wall Street hedge fund managers.

So many of them went to Andover, Exeter, Deerfield Academy, and other elite private schools. But for some reason, they want something different for poor and minority children: Not schools like Andover, Exeter, etc., which have small classes and a rich curriculum and beautiful facilities, but boot camps, where children learn to be silent, to walk in straight lines, and to obey without question.

Someday sociologists will figure out how the hedge fund managers became the primary players in “school reform,” and why they want minority children to have a schooling for compliance, not the kind of schooling they had or the kind they want for their own children. And why they hate unions and look down on teachers.

For now, it will remain a puzzle of our time.

Categories Charter Schools, Chicago, Corporate Reformers, Democrats for Education Reform, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Testing

The Pattern on the Rug

By dianeravitch
September 23, 2012 //
6

A reader sees how the pieces of the reform movement fit together:

I think that all the double-speak is just to divert attention away from the major process of dismantling education that has been taking place across the country, and the smoke and mirrors is to conceal the intention to ultimately declare brick and mortar schools obsolete and teachers expendable and unnecessary. Effectively, the goal is to not have teachers anymore.

One online teacher I work with put it this way recently, “We’re just glorified graders now.” Honestly, for a teacher, there is no glory when your job boils down to just grading. But politicians, corporate reformers and companies like Pearson and K-12 seem to think that education can be reduced to presenting material on a screen and testing, and that they can train virtually anyone to be graders.

Actually, online, you can set it up so that tests are self-administered and automatically generate grades, so currently instructors are grading papers, class discussions, group projects, participation, etc. and I can see how that might one day be considered superfluous to the powers that be.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, For-Profit, On-Line Education, Parent trigger, Privatization, Race to the Top, Stand for Children, Teach for America TFA, Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching, Technology, Computers, Unions, US Education

Hope for the Children of Chicago: Despite Rahm

By dianeravitch
September 22, 2012 //
6

Ms. Katie is one of the best education bloggers out there. She has deep experience working with children in need, she is passionate, and she writes from the heart.

In this post, she explains what the Chicago Teachers Union won for the children of Chicago.

And she makes clear why Rahm Emanuel should stop saying he is doing it “for the children,” for “our children.” He has not earned that right. Who is he doing “it” for? Why does he want to close another 100 public schools and turn them over to private managers? Read on.

Categories Charter Schools, Chicago, Corporate Reformers, Emanuel, Rahm, Privatization

If You Happen to Be in NOLA

By dianeravitch
September 21, 2012 //
2

If you happen to be in New Orleans this Saturday September 22, you won’t want to miss this fascinating panel discussion about “The Education Experiment: Petri Dish Reform in New Orleans and Louisiana.”

And even if you can’t get there for the panel discussion, open the link and see what they are talking about.

New Orleans is the first American city to wipe out public education and replace it with a charter system (80% of the students are in charters). Louisiana has passed legislation that will transfer $2 billion in public fund away from public schools to voucher schools.

Pay attention.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Jindal, Bobby, Louisiana, On-Line Education, Privatization, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Tenure, Testing, Vouchers

Obama’s Dreadful Education Agenda

By dianeravitch
September 21, 2012 //
14

The Washington Post has a good article about the aggressive way that the Obama administration has imposed its education agenda in the past three+ years.

The article notes, almost in passing, that there is no evidence for the success of any part of this agenda. No one will know for many years whether the Obama program of testing, accountability, and choice will improve education.

When reading the article, it is easy to forget that the U.S. Department of Education was not created to impose any “reforms” on the nation’s schools. It was created to send federal aid to hard-pressed districts that enrolled many poor children.

When the Department was created in 1980, there were vigorous debates about whether there might one day be federal control of the schools. The proponents of the idea argued that this would never happen. It has not happened until now because Democrats and Republicans agreed that they didn’t want the other party to control the nation’s schools.

But now that the Obama administration has embraced the traditional Republican ideas of competition, choice, testing and accountability, there is no more arguing about federal control. Republicans are quite willing to allow a Democratic administration to push the states to allow more privately managed schools, to impose additional testing, and to crush teachers’ unions.

Republicans would never have gotten away with this agenda at any time in the past three decades. The Democrats who controlled Congress would never have allowed it to happen.

Who would have imagined that it would take a Democratic President to promote privatization, for-profit schools, evaluating teachers by student test scores, and a host of other ideas (like rolling back the hard-won rights of teachers) that used to be only on the GOP wish-list?

Categories Charter Schools, Common Core, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, Federal Waiver, Merit pay, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Obama, Privatization, Race to the Top, U.S. Department of Education

The Real Story Behind “Won’t Back Down”

By dianeravitch
September 20, 2012 //
5

The Center for Media and Democracy keeps a careful watch on the activities of ALEC, the ultra-conservative organization of state legislators. One of ALEC’s model law is a “parent trigger” bill.

The new film “Won’t Back Down” pulls together the threads of corporate backing for the privatization of public education.

Read about it here.

Categories ALEC, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, For-Profit, Parent trigger, Privatization, Rhee, Michelle

No, You Are Not Paranoid

By dianeravitch
September 20, 2012 //
2

A reader from Maine writes:

I think you’re right to feel paranoid–Sometimes they really are out to get you!

One thing that is starting to get some notice, but is still too far below the radar, is that while the state’s pile on more and more restrictive and demanding requirements for public schools, simultaneously they are pushing for reducing or eliminating those requirements for charters and virtual charters. As the Portland Press Herald noted in its expose of the LePage administration’s virtual charter games in Maine:

Digital education companies also have something less than an arm’s-length relationship with [Jeb] Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education, the organization [Maine’s Education] Commissioner Bowen has leaned on in developing administration policy.

The foundation’s Digital Learning Now! initiative receives funding from Pearson, K12, textbook publishing giants Houghton Mifflin-Harcourt and McGraw-Hill, and tech companies such as Apple, Intel and Microsoft, and digital curriculum developers Apex Learning and IQ Innovations iQity. The initiative – whose 10-point strategy has been formally embraced by the LePage administration – focuses on removing legal barriers to public financing of virtual classes.

The “10 elements” include dozens of specific policy directives, including for states to:

• eliminate restrictions on online student-to-teacher ratios, enrollments, class sizes, budgets, providers, or the number of credits a student can earn;

• not regulate “seat time” in classes, or require that online providers, their teachers, or their governing board members be located in the state;

• avoid assessment of “inputs such as teacher certification, programmatic budgets and textbook reviews” and focus instead on “student learning data” from digital testing;

• fund digital learning “through the public per-pupil funding formula;”

• provide all students with access to “any and all” approved online providers;

• require students to take online courses in order to graduate;

• pay for the online classes of all students, including homeschoolers and those in private schools;

• ensure by law that full-time virtual schools are available for all students;

• deprive school districts of “the ability to deny access to approved virtual schools and individual online courses” even as they pay for their students to use them out of their per-pupil budget allocation.

“One of the striking things about these reforms is the extent to which they remove control of the schools from democratic governance and turn them over to corporate decision-making and appointed bodies,” says Alex Molnar, research professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder’s National Education Policy Center. “Education policy is now being made to some degree by people who have a financial stake in what they are making policy about.”

Digital education companies also have something less than an arm’s-length relationship with Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education, the organization Commissioner Bowen has leaned on in developing administration policy.

The foundation’s Digital Learning Now! initiative receives funding from Pearson, K12, textbook publishing giants Houghton Mifflin-Harcourt and McGraw-Hill, and tech companies such as Apple, Intel and Microsoft, and digital curriculum developers Apex Learning and IQ Innovations iQity. The initiative – whose 10-point strategy has been formally embraced by the LePage administration – focuses on removing legal barriers to public financing of virtual classes.

The “10 elements” include dozens of specific policy directives, including for states to:

• eliminate restrictions on online student-to-teacher ratios, enrollments, class sizes, budgets, providers, or the number of credits a student can earn;

• not regulate “seat time” in classes, or require that online providers, their teachers, or their governing board members be located in the state;

• avoid assessment of “inputs such as teacher certification, programmatic budgets and textbook reviews” and focus instead on “student learning data” from digital testing;

• fund digital learning “through the public per-pupil funding formula;”

• provide all students with access to “any and all” approved online providers;

• require students to take online courses in order to graduate;

• pay for the online classes of all students, including homeschoolers and those in private schools;

• ensure by law that full-time virtual schools are available for all students;

• deprive school districts of “the ability to deny access to approved virtual schools and individual online courses” even as they pay for their students to use them out of their per-pupil budget allocation.

“One of the striking things about these reforms is the extent to which they remove control of the schools from democratic governance and turn them over to corporate decision-making and appointed bodies,” says Alex Molnar, research professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder’s National Education Policy Center. “Education policy is now being made to some degree by people who have a financial stake in what they are making policy about.”

(See: http://www.pressherald.com/news/virtual-schools-in-maine_2012-09-02.html?searchterm=K12)

And in Louisiana, Bobby Jinal’s administration has come in for similar scrutiny: http://cenlamar.com/2012/09/12/bobby-jindal-and-john-whites-voucher-scam-violates-the-louisiana-state-constitution-and-they-know-it/

The answer is clear–All of the charters want to paid on a fully-burdend per-pupil basis, i.e., at the same rate as the public schools. But they want to reduce their overhead to maximize their profits. So, the game is not about improving education by providing better schools, it’s about a bait and switch to transfer tax money to corporate profits.

Categories Bush, Jeb, Charter Schools, For-Profit, On-Line Education, Privatization
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