Sara Roos writes in the new L.A. Education Examiner that more charter millions are flowing into the school board race. The biggest spender is billionaire Bill Bloomfield, who has thus far spent nearly $4 million to defeat pro-publics school incumbents. He says he is “against special interests,” but fails to recognize or admit that he alone is putting his thumb on the scale to support a pro-charter candidate. The charter industry, backed by a long list of billionaires, is a special interest with far deeper pockets than the union.
Archives for category: Privatization
Mike Rose is a thinker, writer, and scholar whose works I greatly admire. He has the capacity to identify with the lives of those he writes about and to understand their point of view. He tends to align himself with those who live on the margins, not the rich and powerful who enjoy the exercise of power over others, the others who who did not choose to be the subjects of the powerful.
I was therefore deeply gratified to read his thoughtful review of SLAYING GOLIATH. He recognized that the underlying them was about power and control. Who makes decisions? By what right do they impose their will on others?and, how can those without power stand up for themselves and prevail? Whose narrative will dominate decision-making?
He writes:
The story told in Slaying Goliath is primarily a story of the clash between the long-dominant Goliath and the emergent and energized David, a story of power and politics, of grass-roots activism, of organizing and mobilizing— and a story of recapturing a narrative. I am also taken by a parallel story that runs through the book, one that is certainly present in Ravitch’s telling, but that, given my current fixation, I’d like to highlight. It is a story about knowledge and power—knowledge about schools and children and the art and science of teaching.
As I wrote earlier, there are multiple actors and multiple motives involved in the so-called school reforms of the last few decades, but one dominant characteristic a number of them share is a reliance on ideas and language drawn from business schools, economics, and the high-tech sector: the use of standardized tests to measure learning; the application of those tests to assess teacher effectiveness through “value-added” methodology; the creation of curriculum standards with the intention of systematizing instruction as well as the development of scripts and routinized behavioral techniques to direct and improve teaching; computer-based instruction to “personalize” learning. This technocratic orientation also encourages a certain kind of systems-level thinking: what are the mechanisms, the “levers” that will yield broad systemic change? The structural or technological magic bullet.
There is value in asking the kinds of questions the critics ask— How do we know students are learning? Can we improve teacher quality? —and certainly value in taking a broad, systems-level perspective on schooling. The problem is that the solutions the technocratic orientation yield tend toward the mechanistic and simplified. As I argued in Why School?, the faith in technology can lead to a belief that complex human problems can be framed as engineering problems, their social and political messiness factored away. Hand-in-glove is an epistemological insularity, a lack of knowledge about social and cultural conditions—or worse, a willful discounting of those conditions as irrelevant. It is telling how rarely one hears any references to history or culture in the technologists’ discourse. Also minimized is the value of on-the-ground, craft knowledge; experience in classrooms is not as valuable as abstract knowledge of organizational dynamics and technological principles and processes. A professor of management tells a class of aspiring principals that the more they know about the particulars of instruction, the less effective they’ll be, for that nitty-gritty knowledge will blur their perception of the problem and the application of universal principles of management —as fitting for a hospital or a manufacturing plant as a school…
After decades of Goliath’s public relations success in stomping all over the public schools and those who work them (remember that Forbes tagline “the largest, most dysfunctional field of all”), David and his slingshot crew were able to change the story, reach the public with what they knew, with a different way of seeing the everyday life in our schools: Kids without nurses or librarians; overcrowded classrooms; testing gone off the rails; teachers living paycheck to paycheck, if they could make it that far; parents giving first-person testimony about what their neighborhood school means to them. Ravitch is correct in characterizing this shift in perception as remarkable. The story she tells is a compelling political drama, and an account of the formation of social policy, and a master class for activists. It is also an epic tale about knowledge, whose knowledge counts, and what can happen when a kind of knowledge that has long been distorted and discounted gains authority and power. That is quite a story to tell.
This article by Leslie T. Fenwick, dean emeritus at Howard University, was published in Valerie Strauss’s Answer Sheet blog in 2013, yet it remains even relevant today. I was in Washington, D.C., a few weeks ago and was astonished to see the dramatic gentrification of the city. My son was in New Orleans, having left a week before Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and he was astonished by the pace of gentrification. More than 200,000 African Americans have left Chicago since 2000. Is the transformation of America’s urban districts, with high-rise condos that sell for more than $1 million and Starbucks and gourmet shops merely a coincidence?
Dean Fenwick prophesied what she saw and was remarkably prescient:
The truth can be used to tell a lie. The truth is that black parents’ frustration with the quality of public schools is at an all time righteous high. Though black and white parents’ commitment to their child’s schooling is comparable, more black parents report dissatisfaction with the school their child attends. Approximately 90 percent of black and white parents report attending parent teacher association meetings and nearly 80 percent of black and white parents report attending teacher conferences. Despite these similarities, fewer black parents (47 percent) than white parents (64 percent) report being very satisfied with the school their child attends. This dissatisfaction among black parents is so whether these parents are college-educated, high income, or poor.
The lie is that schemes like Teach For America, charter schools backed by venture capitalists, education management organizations (EMOs), and Broad Foundation-prepared superintendents address black parents concerns about the quality of public schools for their children. These schemes are not designed to cure what ails under-performing schools. They are designed to shift tax dollars away from schools serving black and poor students; displace authentic black educational leadership; and erode national commitment to the ideal of public education.
Consider these facts: With a median household income of nearly $75,000, Prince George’s County is the wealthiest majority black county in the United States. Nearly 55 percent of the county’s businesses are black-owned and almost 70 percent of residents own homes, according to the U.S. Census. One of Prince George’s County’s easternmost borders is a mere six minutes from Washington, D.C., which houses the largest population of college-educated blacks in the nation. In the United States, a general rule of thumb is that communities with higher family incomes and parental levels of education have better public schools. So, why is it that black parents living in the upscale Woodmore or Fairwood estates of Prince George’s County or the tony Garden District homes up 16th Street in Washington D.C. struggle to find quality public schools for their children just like black parents in Syphax Gardens, the southwest D.C. public housing community?
The answer is this: Whether they are solidly middle- or upper-income or poor, neither group of blacks controls the critical economic levers shaping school reform. And, this is because urban school reform is not about schools or reform. It is about land development.
In most urban centers like Washington D.C. and Prince George’s County, black political leadership does not have independent access to the capital that drives land development. These resources are still controlled by white male economic elites. Additionally, black elected local officials by necessity must interact with state and national officials. The overwhelming majority of these officials are white males who often enact policies and create funding streams benefiting their interests and not the local black community’s interests.
The authors of “The Color of School Reform” affirm this assertion in their study of school reform in Baltimore, Detroit and Atlanta. They found:
Many key figures promoting broad efficiency-oriented reform initiatives [for urban schools] were whites who either lived in the suburbs or sent their children to private schools (Henig et al, 2001).
Local control of public schools (through elected school boards) is supposed to empower parents and community residents. This rarely happens in school districts serving black and poor students. Too often people intent on exploiting schools for their own personal gain short circuit the work of deep and lasting school and community uplift. Mayoral control, Teach for America, education management organizations and venture capital-funded charter schools have not garnered much grassroots support or enthusiasm among lower- and middle-income black parents whose children attend urban schools because these parents often view these schemes as uninformed by their community and disconnected from the best interest of their children.
In the most recent cases of Washington D.C. and Chicago, black parents and other community members point to school closings as verification of their distrust of school “reform” efforts. Indeed, mayoral control has been linked to an emerging pattern of closing and disinvesting in schools that serve black poor students and reopening them as charters operated by education management organizations and backed by venture capitalists. While mayoral control proposes to expand educational opportunities for black and poor students, more-often-than-not new schools are placed in upper-income, gentrifying white areas of town, while more schools are closed and fewer new schools are opened in lower-income, black areas thus increasing the level of educational inequity. Black inner-city residents are suspicious of school reform (particularly when it is attached to neighborhood revitalization) which they view as an imposition from external white elites who are exclusively committed to using schools to recalculate urban land values at the expense of black children, parents and communities.
So, what is the answer to improving schools for black children? Elected officials must advocate for equalizing state funding formula so that urban school districts garner more financial resources to hire credentialed and committed teachers and stabilize principal and superintendent leadership. Funding makes a difference. Black students who attend schools where 50 percent of more of the children are on free/reduced lunch are 70 percent more likely to have an uncertified teacher (or one without a college major or minor in the subject area) teaching them four subjects: math, science, social studies and English. How can the nation continue to raise the bar on what we expect students to know and demonstrate on standardized tests and lower the bar on who teaches them?
As the nation’s inner cities are dotted with coffee shop chains, boutique furniture stores, and the skyline changes from public housing to high-rise condominium buildings, listen to the refrain about school reform sung by some intimidated elected officials and submissive superintendents. That refrain is really about exporting the urban poor, reclaiming inner city land, and using schools to recalculate urban land value. This kind of school reform is not about children, it’s about the business elite gaining access to the nearly $600 billion that supports the nation’s public schools. It’s about money.
Dean Fenwick gave the Benjamin E. Mays Lecture at Georgia State University in 2018.
She comes on at about the 15:00 minute mark, and she goes into detail about the education “reform” movement and its failure to help black and brown children. She calls it “Looking Behind the Veil of School Reform.”
The charter industry is nearing a flection point. The number of schools that open each year is almost the same as the number that close. The charter industry is rushing to open new schools before the public is fully woke to the crisis of charter corruption.
The Network for Public Education started a hashtag (#) on Twitter called #AnotherDayAnotherCharterScandal. Every day a new scandal, sometimes two or three.
Mercedes Schneider describes the latest charter debacle in Texas, where Betsy DeVos has dropped many millions to open new charters.
The Texas Education Agency (TEA) will be closing the Kauffman Leadership Academy (KLA) (Cleburne) charter school with one week’s notice, as reported in WFAA.com.
In this February 13, 2020, letter to KLA leadership, TEA cites, “the [closure] order was issued as a result of the financial situation at the charter school having deteriorated significantly, including federal tax liens and levies issued by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) that had frozen all accounts of the charter school.”
KLA filed with the Texas Secretary of State (SOS) as a business entity on August 23, 2010 (search here; KLA’s taxpayer ID# is 32042519895). According to KLA’s charter application dated 02/23/11 and on file with TEA, KLA planned “to open in August 2011 operate as a private school, pending charter approval.” These archived web pages from July 2011 and May 2015 have KLA identifying itself as an “open enrollment private school pending charter approval.”
According to the IRS, KLA received nonprofit status in August 2014, and according to KLA’s website, the school opened as a charter school in August 2016.
What took TEA so long to identify KLA’s suspicious financial situation is a looming question.
According to the IRS, KLA has only ever filed 990-N tax forms, also known as “e-postcards,” because according to KLA, for tax years 2013 to 2017 (the most recent filing,) KLA has reported “gross receipts not greater than 50,000.”
So, for five tax years, KLA told the IRS, “We have almost no money,” and the public– including TEA– had ready access to that information.
Meanwhile, on its website, KLA states, “every employee of the Academy earns the same salary, $35,000,” a statement that has remained consistent on its website since the time KLA received its charter in fall 2016, as evidenced by this October 2016 archived web page announcing KLA’s grad opening celebration.
If KLA had $50K or less per annum in 2016, that would have been enough for only a single KLA employee based upon state funding for perhaps 8 students.
Red flag, no?
Question: Why didn’t they just write to the Waltons or John Arnold or any number of other billionaires to get an infusion of cash?
By now, the California Charter Schools Association knows that they are harming public schools, where 80-90% of California’s students are educated.
By now, the CCSA knows that charter schools do not get higher test scores than public schools.
By now, they know that their industry is rife with corruption and fraud, and some of its leaders are serving jail time or on the lam.
By now, they know that charters do not have a secret sauce.
By now, they know that all they fight for is survival and power.
But they are pouring millions into the four contested seats on the Los Angeles Unified School District races, hoping to regain control so they can continue to do the bidding of Eli Broad, Reed Hastings, Michael Bloomberg, and Bill Bloomfield.
Here is the latest from the LA Education Examiner in the closing days of the campaign.
See here for the money dump in the closing days of the campaign, with nearly one million going to a charter candidate running against Scott Schmerelson.
Here is Howard Blume in the Los Angeles Times, reporting on the ugly smear campaign against Scott Schmerelson.
Charter supporters are angry at Schmerelson, first because he supports public schools, but also because he revealed that more than 80% of the LA charters have vacancies.
Blume writes:
A million-dollar attack campaign is underway portraying Los Angeles school board member Scott Schmerelson as greedy, corrupt and determined to score fast cash by exposing children to deadly vaping and McDonald’s French fries.
One mailer — which included a cartoonish image of Schmerelson, who is Jewish, bedecked with a gold dollar-sign chain and holding a cigar and fistful of cash — came under fire as anti-Semitic and its use was halted.
Behind the surge of negative mailers in this West San Fernando Valley board district is an intense effort by charter school supporters to defeat Schmerelson and elect Marilyn Koziatek, a district parent who works at a local charter school managing community outreach efforts.
The pivotal race could tip the board majority toward the protection and expansion of charter schools, which enroll about 1 in 5 district students. Charter advocates are especially concerned about a new law that will soon give school boards more authority to reject new charters.
Blume reports that the charter industry has stopped sending out its antiSemitic image of Schmerelson but that’s a meaningless gesture since it was already sent out in a mass mailing.
Tomorrow February 27, Betsy DeVos defends her budget before the House Appropriations sub-committee led by Rosa DeLauro. This year, DeVos took the funding for the Charter Schools Program out of her budget and put it in a block grant.
Our job is to make sure that the nearly half billion dollars to start up new charter schools is not restored. Nearly one billion dollars of waste on charter schools that never open, or open and close, is enough.
Call the following committee members now. The hearing begins tomorrow at 10:00 am.
Lucille Roybal-Allard–(202) 225-1766
Rosa DeLauro–(202) 225-3661
Barbara Lee–(202) 225-2661
Mark Pocan–(202) 225-2906
Katherine Clark–(202) 225-2836
Lois Frankel–(202) 225-9890
Cheri Bustos–(202) 225-5905
Bonnie Watson-Coleman–(202) 225-5801
Keep your message simple:
My name is (your name). I am calling Representative X to ask that the Charter Schools Program funding not be restored. The Charter Schools Program has wasted nearly a billion dollars that could have gone to our neediest students. The Charter Schools Program should not be funded. The federal government should leave the funding for new charter schools to the state.
If the phone is not answered, or you call after hours, leave a message.
Then send an email to your representative.
Click here.
Naming names is very important when discussing the movement to privatize public schools. In my book SLAYING GOLIATH, I devote an entire chapter to naming names. It’s not good enough to you “business interests” or “foundations.”
Name names.
Tom Ultican names names. In this podcast, he describes the wealthy people who are determined to privatize education. Why do they do this? They profess their love of the needy at the same time they try to take away one of the few institutions that belongs to them and give it to corporations.
After 20 years of corporate reform in charge of federal education policy, there is not a single example of success. It seems fair to predict that the deformers will fail in Dallas as they have everywhere else.
On Super Tuesday, we will find out whether the huge cash spent by Mike Bloomberg is enough to win any primaries. Current national polls show him number two, behind Senator Sanders. There is no reason for him to be polling high other than the many millions he has lavished on advertising and staff, outspending all the other candidates combined. The best we can say for Bloomberg is that he is not propelled forward by billionaire cash. He is one of the richest men in the world and he doesn’t need any contributions from others.
As mayor, Bloomberg tried to run the public schools like a business. He showered favor on the charter sector, because he believed that private management was superior to public management, even though he had total control of the schools. He is the quintessential corporate reformer, focused on data (testing) and the bottom line. Schools with high scores were good, schools with low scores were closed, regardless of the challenges they faced.
In this article, Jake Jacobs writes about what he experienced as an art teacher in New York City during Bloomberg’s mayoralty, which lasted 12 years, despite the City Charter’s term limit of two four-year terms.
He writes:
Mike Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City now running for President, often brags about being one of the most prolific charter school creators in the United States. Bloomberg says he “absolutely” intends to expand charters in his federal education plan. This is a serious threat to public education, especially given Bloomberg’s history of using his fortune to shape policy.
Since 2013, Bloomberg has been one of the nation’s biggest donors to candidates and ballot initiatives promoting charters and vouchers, giving more than $4 million to candidates in New Jersey, Colorado, Minnesota, and Louisiana, often through “dark money” PACs. In California, Bloomberg spent a whopping $39 million, backing both Democrats and Republicans who support charters. In Pennsylvania, he gave $6 million to pro-charter incumbent Republican Sen. Pat Toomey, who won re-election with a narrow 1.5 percent edge, and ended up casting a critical vote for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
New York City teachers are vocal critics of Bloomberg, who not only used public money for school privatization but usurped the power of elected community school boards as the state granted Bloomberg “mayoral control” of New York City schools in 2002.
Bloomberg proceeded to appoint corporate attorney Joel Klein as head of New York City’s education department. Klein began a “test-and-punish” regime, which led to the closure of 150 schools and earned him an 80 percent disapproval rating with teachers
As an art teacher during the Bloomberg years, I saw the nightmare firsthand. When the former mayor cut funding for arts programs by 47 percent, over a quarter of public schools went without a full-time arts teacher; in black and brown neighborhoods like the South Bronx, it was more than half. Elementary schools were hit the hardest, with a staggering 92 percent “out of compliance” with state mandates for art.
At times, this meant teaching in an overcrowded middle school with one box of colored pencils and one box of markers to last a whole year. Forget about erasers, glue, scissors, painting supplies, charcoal, poster board or technology. I was lucky to have enough copy paper for my students to draw on.
Forget about erasers, glue, scissors, painting supplies, charcoal, poster board or technology. I was lucky to have enough copy paper for my students to draw on.
When I was a student in 1980, my New York City middle school had a dedicated art room (with a working sink), a full band program, separate orchestra and chorus programs as well as dance, a full ceramics studio and shop class.
Today, middle schools in the city are lucky to have just one teacher in an arts discipline. We can trace this directly to Bloomberg’s “Small Schools Initiative,” where large schools were broken up into small academies, and the number of administrators tripled as class sizes grew and student services disappeared.
Bloomberg’s claims to have made gains on test scores while reducing racial achievement gaps ended up being disproven. By 2014, New York City was the most racially segregated school system in America. Under “stop and frisk,” Bloomberg’s racist policing policy, many of my students were searched for no reason. It didn’t help that Bloomberg’s pro-developer housing policies accelerated the gentrification of New York City, leading to the displacement of low-income renters of color.
While Bloomberg was particularly bad for the arts, he impacted teachers across all subjects. In 2011, when teachers learned that New York State’s new “accountability” metrics would use student test scores in teacher evaluations, Bloomberg went even farther, threatening that test scores would be published in the newspaper alongside the name of each teacher. With this, the best math teachers in my school transferred out to schools in more affluent neighborhoods.
I first started writing about New York’s absurd accountability policy in 2013, after being told my evaluation as an art teacher would be based on math scores. I was offended by the waste and fraud and by 2016, the state Supreme Court had indeed ruled that the formulas used to calculate teacher ratings were “arbitrary and capricious.”
Rooted in cost-cutting practices from the corporate world, Bloomberg’s harmful education policies are today being papered over as his money cascades through the media. Spending $220 million on advertising in January alone, Bloomberg is even blanketing platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and podcasts.
So if you see effusive, rainbow-pooping endorsements of Bloomberg, it’s likely because of this unprecedented and highly deceptive media blast.
Read the whole article. It is very instructive.
Joel Malin and Kathleen Knight-Abowitz of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, write here about the forces determining education policy in Ohio.
Ohio education policy is a train wreck. It is not benefiting students or teachers or society. So who is it benefiting?
In our view, it pays to start asking larger questions about EdChoice to understand how education policy is made in Ohio. Why, for instance, did this dramatic increase in voucher eligibility occur? Why would lawmakers experiment with such an expensive initiative, when studies of such voucher programs – including a rigorous study of EdChoice – have most often revealed large, negative impacts on student learning? And, in what universe does it make sense that schools would be judged, and voucher eligibility triggered, by students’ scores in 2013 and 2014 (but not 2015-2017)?
The great uproar around EdChoice should have us asking about how policy is made: specifically, whose voices are being elevated, and whose are being diminished, when Ohio education policy is being created?
Taking a step back, we can see that the policies adopted in Ohio are part of a broader pattern of favoring business and for-profit interests over those of community members, including parents, students, and teachers. In fact, community members’ perspectives are regularly ignored in favor of business lobbyists, charter school operators, and national influencers like U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos or companies like Pearson Education.
Ohio Excels, for instance, is a recently formed, powerful business interest group that’s “quickly emerged as a heavyweight lobbying force in education policy” in Ohio, as described recently by Aaron Marshall in Columbus CEO magazine…
Many of the assumptions and methods of the business world do not neatly transfer into education. In addition, parents and communities want students to be good citizens and well-rounded thinkers, as well as good workers, when they graduate from schools.
When private sector interests dominate education policy discussions, other perspectives are routinely ignored.
Most important are the views of professional educators, who have firsthand knowledge and expertise that can shape our policy decisions in realistic and positive directions. Their participation would also serve to prevent lawmakers from making disastrous, foreseeable errors.
Education policy in Ohio and a few other states, including Indiana and Florida, has been powerfully shaped by the interests of for-profit, pro-business, and private education providers in the past decade.
In a broad and general sense, they are right, of course. The voices of educators have been silenced. Control has shifted to for-profit, pro-business, and private providers.
But what they are missing are the two most important links in this chain of influence: the D.C.-based Thomas B. Fordham Institute, which lobbies constantly for pro-business policies, and ALEC, which writes model legislation that promotes vouchers and charters.
Leonie Haimson, one of New York City’s leading people-public education advocates, has written a comprehensive appraisal of Mike Bloomberg’s education record as mayor. You will not read a more deeply knowledgeable article anywhere.
In his multimillion dollar ad campaign, Bloomberg presents himself as a champion of children. If you read Haimson’s article, you will see that he was a champion of charter schools. You will also see that he was autocratic, condescending towards parents, and disrespected educators.
Please read it.
