Archives for category: Privatization
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The Economist Loves Privatization

By dianeravitch
July 7, 2012 //
14

The Economist magazine has two articles (here and here) about the “success” of charter schools in the U.S., which they admiringly refer to as privatization.

Charter advocates here might be embarrassed by the praise, as they prefer to call themselves “public schools.”

The Economist recognizes that charter schools are experiments in privatization, not simply another form of public school.

Unfortunately the magazine distorts the research on charter schools beyond recognition to justify its praise of privatization and free markets.

After a lame attempt to discredit the CREDO study–the one that found that only 17% of charters outperformed a matched neighborhood public school–the magazine nonetheless portrays charters as the sure cure to “save” black inner-city children. It seems that only private entrepreneurs know the secrets to educating poor black children.

Even charter advocates in the U.S. usually acknowledge that the academic results of charters are mixed, at best. There are some that get high test scores, some that get low test scores, and most that get scores no different from public schools.

The Economist articles do not acknowledge that charter schools typically serve fewer children with disabilities, and fewer children who are English language learners. They also exercise the right to remove students who don’t comply with their strict disciplinary code and return them to public schools.

And in the magazine’s lavish praise of New Orleans charters, it conveniently overlooks the fact that New Orleans is the next-to-lowest ranked district in the state of Louisiana, 69th out of 70. It is a very low performing district in a low performing state.

Also, the magazine ignores the disastrous results of the fastest growing segment of the charter world, and that is, the for-profit cyber-charters.

Why do charters require so much hype and spin to thrive? Why not admit that they face the same problems as public schools if they enroll the same children? Why not admit that the most successful charters spend more money than regular public schools? Why so much pretense?

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, For-Profit, Privatization

Follow the Money in Philadelphia

By dianeravitch
July 6, 2012 //
9

One man and one foundation decides what’s good for Philadelphia. One sharp-eyed investigative reporter learned the details.

That foundation–the William Penn Foundation–used to be concerned about equitable funding for the children and public schools of Philadelphia.

No longer.

The William Penn Foundation brought in the Boston Consulting Group to develop a plan to redesign the Philadelphia school system, and that plan predictably involved a heavy dose of privatization. If you ask business consultants what to do, their answer is always the same: bring in private entrepreneurs who keep their eye on the bottom line, who look on children as a profit or a loss, not as if they were their own children.

The Boston Consulting Group’s “Blueprint” ran into heavy opposition from parents. But don’t expect the privatizers to quit. They have more aces up their sleeve.

Categories Accountability, Boston Consulting Group, Charter Schools, Education Reform, Philadelphia, Privatization

More about Stand for Children in Memphis

By dianeravitch
July 5, 2012 //
10

It turns out that Stand for Children is not only the guiding organization behind the plan to transfer large numbers of public school students to charter schools, along with $212 million of taxpayers dollars, in Memphis/Shelby County, but it was previously active in promoting the pro-privatization propaganda film “Waiting for ‘Superman'” to parents and the public in Memphis.

As you will see in the link below, John Legend, the singer who is on the board of the Wall Street hedge fund manager group Democrats for Education Reform, funded the showing of this mockumentary to low-income communities. The purpose of the film was to show the failure of public education and the superiority of private management.

A reader sent this link. It shows how Stand on Children set the stage for privatization on a large scale in Memphis.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Privatization, Stand for Children, Tennessee

The Reformers’ “Fight Club”

By dianeravitch
June 29, 2012 //
25

Back when I was on the right side of the political fence, I was on the editorial board at Education Next. It is supported by the Hoover Institution and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, both conservative think tanks with which I was affiliated. The journal, which is based at Harvard and edited mainly by Paul Peterson, was created to counter what was seen as the liberal bias of the mainstream education media.

Education Next is a well-edited journal (I used to write a monthly book review there), but it does have a strong bias in favor of charter schools, vouchers, and testing. It is the journal of the corporate reform movement.

The current issue of Education Next has a fascinating article about the “reformers’ fight club.” I have been writing and speaking about the interconnections among these organizations (and there are many more), and it is good to see confirmation of what I have been saying.

For some reason, these incredibly rich and powerful organizations like to portray themselves as underdogs in contrast to the teachers’ unions.

So, get this picture: On one side are the 3.2 million teachers who belong to the NEA and the AFT. On the other side are the Gates Foundation ($60 billion), the Broad Foundation (billions), the Walton Foundation (billions, and spent $159 million this past year alone on education grants), the Dell Foundation, big corporations, Democrats for Education Reform (Wall Street hedge fund managers who can pump millions into political campaigns at will), and 50CAN (more hedge fund managers). And there are supposedly “liberal” advocacy groups like Education Trust and Ed Sector.

Gosh, that is surely an unequal lineup. No wonder the “fight club” feels like underdogs. Those teachers’ unions are just so doggone powerful and rich. Why, they have the big foundations and Wall Street trembling. Who knew that teachers had so much power?

Diane

Categories Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, ConnCAN, Corporate Reformers, Democrats for Education Reform, Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), Privatization, Race to the Top, Stand for Children

Can You Negotiate with Corporate Reformers?

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2012 //
10

I love Twitter for many reasons. I have met many friends on Twitter, some of whom I will never encounter in person. I learn from Twitter. People from across the country and even from other countries send me news stories, opinion pieces, blogs, ideas.

I received one this morning that I thought was, well, awesome.

On many occasions, I have had discussions with friends and allies and friendly adversaries about whether there is a middle ground between corporate reformers–the people who want to rearrange education so that it is based on incentives and sanctions, who believe that test scores are the best ways to measure the quality of students and teachers and schools, who see virtue in closing down neighborhood public schools, and who applaud the transfer of public schools to private management–and those who disagree with them, myself included.

Can’t we negotiate our differences? Can’t we all just get along, as the late Rodney King once memorably asked. We all know important it is to collaborate.

Why not collaborate with the people whose ideas you disagree with? Why not find a middle ground with those who want vouchers and those who think that teachers can be judged by the changes in their students’ test scores? Why be unreasonable?

The post I read this morning reinforced my sense that there are some things, some principles, some bedrock values that are nonnegotiable. When the other side wants you to do things that you think will cheapen and degrade education, how can you compromise? When they want you to do things that will humiliate teachers and lower the status of the teaching profession, how can you compromise? When they want to end collective bargaining rights, is there room for compromise? When they want you to turn education into a consumer product rather than a public good, is that negotiable?

But in every dispute, there must be a middle ground, right? There must be a way for reasonable people to agree, right?

The blog I read earlier today, written by someone I do not know, spoke to this issue of when it is wrong to negotiate.

The first thing that got my eye was that he wrote about the choice facing a young person who wants to find a career in the world of education policy. Face it, there are two sides, and one side has all the money and projects political power and has lots of organizations that need to be staffed. He writes:

“Most of the money in education policy is on the side of organizations like Stand for Children and Democrats for Education Reform. If he ever wants to work in education policy, the good jobs are all going to be on the side of the pro-privatization reformers. Pro-privatizers have done a good job of conflating being against their version of reform (e.g., being with parents and teachers) as being pro-status quo. It’s the surest way to keep yourself out of the education policy job market to be on the side of the straw man status quo.”

Who are these powerful groups? He answers: “Notoriously funded by tiny groups of immensely wealthy people, with no control by or buy-in from communities, no democratic structures that allow for parent participation, and in fact nothing other than the whims of their millionaire funders, these groups have unilaterally decided they deserve a spot at the negotiating table. They bought their button, in other words.”

And why should they not be in a position to call the shots? They are the reformers, and those who don’t agree with them represent, in their words, “the status quo.” Yet teachers, school board members, parents, principals, administrators, etc. are in awe of the reformers. And this is who they are and this is why they have a seat at the table and determine what happens to your school, your job, your children:

“…although we don’t live in your community, don’t send our children to school there, don’t vote there, don’t have any meaningful membership there and, to what degree we do have some supporters there, they have no meaningful say in how we as organizations make decisions, we are rich. In other words, we are not rooted in your communities at all; we have no stake in the outcome of our programs and policies insofar as they don’t materially affect us; nobody in your community has any say in how our organization is run; but we, for no reason other than our wealth empowering our speech, deserve a seat at the table and you must negotiate with us, or you–not we–are “politicizing children.”

And you must negotiate with them because they have so much money and they bought a seat at the table! Or did they buy the table?

What are their goals? “liquidate teachers’ ability to collectively bargain and privatize enough the school systems to reduce the public schools to last-resort catchalls, not unlike public County Hospitals. Use unreliable but easily consumed standardized test scores and fluidly defined “graduation” rates to allow parents to choose a school from a menu, encouraging competition.”

But can you negotiate with them?

“Parents and teachers see, in the middle distance, the death of public education as the incubator of civil society with the goal of equality, in the form of neoliberal privatization reform. Who says you have to negotiate with death to be reasonable? You don’t negotiate with death. You fight death to your dying breath.”

Diane

Categories Corporate Reformers, Privatization, US Education

How to Rip Off Children with Disabilities and Taxpayers Too

By dianeravitch
June 25, 2012 //
4

The New York Times reveals today some of the findings of an ongoing audit of New York State’s privatized program to provide special education services for prekindergarten children Thomas P, DiNapoli, the Comptroller of the state of New York, has found evidence of massive fraud. New York’s preschool special education program is a $2 billion system that relies mostly on private contractors, many of them for-profit operators. New York spends more to provide these services than any other state in the nation.

Here are key excerpts:

“The owners of a Bronx company that employs teachers for disabled toddlers used thousands of dollars in government funds to fix up a weekend getaway in the Poconos, state auditors found. A Brooklyn company in the same program, which provides treatment for prekindergarten special education students, billed taxpayers for his wife’s $150,000 salary as his assistant director when she was a full-time professor at the City University of New York, the auditors said.”

“And the owners of an upstate company improperly diverted more than $800,000 to pay, among other things, rent and interest to themselves and the full-time salary of an executive who lived in South Carolina and seldom worked.”

A valuable story to read and ponder as our nation’s policymakers are pushing more and more districts and states to privatize the management and control of their public schools.

Diane

Categories New York, Privatization, Special Education

Deathwatch for Public Schools in Michigan, part 2

By dianeravitch
June 23, 2012 //
14

When I wrote about the end of public education in two districts in Michigan, I pointed out that the state’s emergency manager law is a mechanism to end democracy when there is a fiscal crisis. That strikes me as draconian.

Surely we don’t want to see governmental entities running up deficits that they can’t pay, but there is another side to the story. Some districts don’t have the property tax base to provide an adequate education. When that is the case, it is the state’s responsibility to assure that there is enough money to educate the children and to make sure that the money is spent responsibly. A fiscal monitor or a financial control board could perform that function. When New York City teetered on the edge of bankruptcy in 1975, the governor did not shut down democracy in New York City; he appointed a financial control board that helped the city to return to fiscal health.

What is happening in Michigan is extremist and anti-democratic. The governor has the power to appoint an emergency manager and to end the functioning of democratically elected and appointed bodies. Is it mere happenstance that in both instances cited, Muskegon Heights and Highland Park, the emergency manager made the same decision to close down public education and to outsource the children to privately managed charter corporations? In Muskegon Heights, the only offers came from for-profit corporations that have poor track records.

In a Michigan article about my blog, several conservatives (I assume they are conservatives as who else would be happy to privatize school districts) expressed their approval at the idea of ending democracy and local control in these two districts. This is simply bizarre. Don’t conservatives prefer local control to the heavy hand of government? Don’t they usually defend the rights of people to determine their own destiny?

According to the article in Michigan, I and others “have not condemned the behavior that led to the deficits or proposed solutions.”

Yes I do have a solution.

My solution is this: The state of Michigan should preserve public education for future generations in every school district, as the founding fathers intended when they passed the Northwest Ordinance. If they suspect fiscal irresponsibility, they should appoint a fiscal expert to make sure that the district is returned to fiscal health. But if the district lacks the resources to educate its children, then the state should supply what is needed to take care of the children.

And yes, I do condemn the behavior that led to the deficits. I condemn Governor Rick Snyder and the Michigan Legislature for heedlessly cutting the funding for public schools and plunging dozens of school districts in Michigan into fiscal distress. I condemn Governor Snyder and the Michigan Legislature for giving tax breaks to corporations instead of funding public schools. I condemn Governor Snyder and the Michigan legislature for fiscal irresponsibility. I condemn them for not caring about other people’s children. I condemn them for preferring privatization over public responsibility.

Diane

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, For-Profit, Michigan, Privatization

What Romney Reform Looks Like

By dianeravitch
June 23, 2012 //
8

We don’t have to wonder what Mitt Romney’s education plan would look like if he is elected. It would look like the Jindal legislation passed this spring in Louisiana.

The Louisiana “reforms” represent the purest distillation of the rightwing agenda for education.

First, they create a marketplace of competition, with publicly funded vouchers and many new charter schools under private management.

Second, more than half the children in the state (400,000+) are eligible for vouchers, even though only about 5,000 seats have been offered, some in tiny church schools that don’t actually have the seats or facilities or teachers.

Third, the charter authorities will collect a commission for every student that enrolls in a charter, a windfall for them. And of course, there is a “parent trigger” to encourage the creation of more charters as parents become discouraged by neglected, underfunded public schools.

Fourth, the money for the vouchers and charters will come right out of the minimum funding allocated for the public schools, guaranteeing that the remaining public schools will have less money, more crowded classes, and suffer major budget cuts.

Fifth, the law authorizes public money for online instruction, for online for-profit schools, and for instruction offered by private businesses, universities, tutors, and anyone else who wants to claim a share of the state’s money for public education.

Sixth, teacher evaluation will be tied to student test scores and teachers can be easily fired, assuring that no one will ever dare teach anything controversial or disagree with their principal. Teachers in charter schools, the biggest growth sector, will not need certification.

Rather than go on, I here link to a blog I wrote at Bridging Differences (hosted by Education Week). My blog links to an article written by a Louisiana teacher who happens to have been a professional journalist. You should read what she wrote.

The Jindal plan is sweeping and it seeks to dismantle public education. It is a plan to privatize public education. It is not conservative. Conservatives don’t destroy essential democratic institutions. Conservatives build on tradition, they don’t heedlessly cast them aside. Conservatives are conservative because they take incremental steps, to fix what’s broken, not to sweep away an entire institution. Jindal’s plan is not conservative. It is reactionary.

And it is a template for what Romney promises to do.

Diane

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, Jindal, Bobby, Louisiana, On-Line Education, Parent trigger, Privatization, Romney, Mitt, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Tenure

A Sickening Feeling in Philadelphia

By dianeravitch
June 19, 2012 //
1

I wrote a blog about the press for privatization in Philadelphia, and someone sent me the following email. For a minute, I felt as helpless as he does, then I took a deep breath, redoubled my resolve, and determined to fight back. We can’t let the elites take away what belongs to all of us.

He wrote:

I read your recent article about privatization in Philly.  Thanks for the support.  We need it.  You likened it to the nineteenth century when we were dependent on the largesse of the wealthy.  The current threat is even worse.  Organized money is picking over the carcass of public education.  Taxpayers pay taxes to enrich the already wealthy who have bought lobbyists and politicians.  Even the robber barons didn’t do that nearly as blatantly.  Sadly, we are losing ground and the end could come this summer.  As a “little person” I’ve done what little people can do.

Categories Education Reform, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Privatization

The High Cost of Privatizing Special Education

By dianeravitch
June 7, 2012 //
4

As the movement to privatize public schools grows stronger, we should pay attention to the costs of privatization.

Those who push for privatization also claim that private business operates more efficiently than government and will thus save taxpayers’ dollars.

If only it were true.

The latest example in the privatization sage was a story in the New York Times of June 6 about what has happened to the cost of privatized special education for preschool children in New York City. The cost, now at $1 billion for 25,000 children of ages 3 and 4, has doubled in the past six years. It is far more than is paid for the same services in other cities and states.

New York City now spends about $40,000 per child in the program. Says the article, “Massachusetts, whose program is considered “resource-rich” by experts in the field, spends less than $10,000 a child.”

Oversight by the city and state has been lax, and efforts to tighten regulation in Albany has been blocked by the industry’s lobbyists.

The private contractors, who have their tuition rates set by the state, have become an influential lobbying force in Albany, where they have regularly rallied parents of disabled children to protest spending curbs in the program.

Auditors’ reports have found that:

Some contractors have billed the program for jewelry, expensive clothing, vacations to Mexico and spa trips to the Canyon Ranch resort, The Times found in a review of a decade’s worth of education, financial and court records. Others have hired relatives at inflated salaries or for no-show jobs, or funneled public money into expensive rents paid by their preschools to entities they control personally.

New York is the only state that has turned this program over to private contractors, many of which operate for-profit. Typically, the same firms evaluate the children and then provide services to them. 83% of the firms that conducted the evaluation also provided the services needed. Critics believe, not without reason, that the companies have a finanical incentive to over-identify children’s needs to inflate their bottom line.

When services are privatized, there will inevitably be operators who overbill for their services and pad the books and their profits. Lax oversight enables fraud. In the case of this program, oversight is very lax indeed: Regulators rely on contractors’ own accountants to vouch for billing. City and state officials conduct audits infrequently, and when they do, the results often languish on the shelves of the State Education Department. Some audits have not been given final approval and released until years after the contractors being audited went out of business.

Thus, the growing cost does not mean that children are getting more services they need, but that private firms are getting more profits at the expense of the children they supposedly serve.

A spokesman for New York City’s Department of Education defended the program and said that although it was expensive, it works.

As this article shows, it certainly works for the private contractors, who use the children and their parents to prevent appropriate and necessary oversight.

Diane

Categories Education Reform, NYC, Pre-K, Privatization, Special Education
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