California: School Districts Sue JUUL for Vaping Crisis

By dianeravitch
January 29, 2020 //
3

This is good news from California. A large group of school districts are suing JUUL Labs from the damage that their vaping products are causing to students.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Anaheim Union High School District Files Suit Against JUUL Labs, Inc. for Creating the E-Cigarette Epidemic that Disrupts District-Wide Education

 

Anaheim, California – January 28, 2020 – Today, the Anaheim Union School District filed a lawsuit against JUUL Labs, Inc. for the company’s role in cultivating and fostering an e-cigarette epidemic that disrupts the education and learning environment across the District. The suit was filed in the Orange County Superior Court on January 27, 2020 (Case No. 30-2020-01126712-CU-MT-CXC).

Five districts, all members of a consortium of California school districts filing against JUUL, filed on Monday, January 27th, including the following: Rocklin Unified School District, Alcanes Union High School District, Monterey Peninsula Unified School District, Anaheim Union High School District, and Poway Unified School District. 

Ten more school districts in the consortium had filed prior to January 27th, including the following: Los Angeles Unified School District, San Diego Unified School District, Glendale Unified School District, Compton Unified School District, King City Union School District, Ceres Unified School District, Anaheim Elementary School District, Campbell Union High School District, Chico Unified School District, Davis Joint Unified School District, all against JUUL for the same negligence and nuisance claims. Together, the consortium of school districts serve more than 1 million California students. 

The lawsuit seeks injunction and abatement to stop the e-cigarette epidemic, which has severely impacted the school districts by interfering with normal school operations. The District also seeks compensatory damages to provide relief from the district’s financial losses as a result of students being absent from school, coordinating outreach and education programs regarding the health risks of vaping, and enforcement actions – such as vape detectors, video surveillance, and staff to monitor the school’s property in an effort to combat the e-cigarette crisis. 

“We are holding JUUL accountable for its role in affecting our youth, our schools, and families across the country due to irresponsible practices.” said District Superintendent Michael Matsuda, “JUUL has used deceptive practices to market to our students and create a nicotine addiction. They must be held responsible for their actions.”

Since entering the market in 2015, JUUL has dominated the e-cigarette industry and now controls over 70% of the market. Reports found that in 2018, 4.9 million middle and high school students used tobacco products, with 3.6 million of those students using e-cigarettes. From 2017 to 2018, youth e-cigarette users increased by 1.5 million. The lawsuit alleges that growth is largely based on JUUL’s market strategy, which is to target school-age children to ensure the continual growth of their consumer base. 

The National Institute on Drug Abuse found that the 2018 spike in nicotine vaping was the largest for any substance recorded in 44 years. The lawsuits allege that JUUL’s aggressive, strategic marketing and product designs not only created an addiction crisis among youth consumers, but also a widespread burden on school districts. 

Anaheim Union High School District is represented by John P. Fiske and Torri Sherlin of Baron & Budd, P.C. and Brian Panish and Rahul Ravipudi of Panish, Shea, & Boyle, LLP.

About the Anaheim Union High School District

The Anaheim Union High School District serves approximately 30,000 students in the communities of Anaheim, Cypress, Buena Park, La Palma, and Stanton.  For more information about AUHSD visit our website, subscribe to our YouTube channel, and follow us on social media: Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

John Bautista

Public Information Officer 

Categories Accountability, California, Education Reform, Students

Nancy Flanagan: Who Is Goliath in the Education Debates?

By dianeravitch
January 29, 2020 //
25

Nancy Flanagan, retired teacher of music for 31 years in the public schools of Michigan, is also a respected blogger. Her blog, Teacher in a Strange Land, has long been a source of wisdom and reality. She writes with the authority acquired from her years in the classroom.

In this post, she writes a wonderful review of my new book SLAYING GOLIATH. Better yet, she sets it in the perspective of a decade-long debate in which the billionaires, allied with the power of the federal government, portrayed themselves as the Davids, fighting those all-powerful teachers’ unions and their members, who were the real Goliaths (said Goliath).

Is this a picture of David, slingshot in hand? The Waltons ($150 billion), the Koch brothers ($120 billion—now divided in half since the death of David Koch), billionaires Eli Broad, Betsy DeVos, Philip Anschutz, Michael Bloomberg, John Arnold, Bill Gates, on and on. The 1% is armed not with an axe or a spear but with the power of federal law, imposed by state governments.

Not only is the 1% the Goliath of the story, they are the Status Quo. Don’t believe them when they claim they are fighting the Status Quo. Nonsense. They own it. No social movement was ever created by the rich and powerful. Genuine social movements rebel against the rich and powerful. They emanate from the millions who were left behind and excluded.

Flanagan writes in her review:

Diane Ravitch’s book—Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools—arrived at my house two days ago. Like all of her other volumes, this one is already highlighted, underlined and sticky-noted to a fare-thee-well. (Apologies to school librarians everywhere.)

Ravitch’s books are like that—they’re full of juicy, provocative information and the author tells it like she sees it. When she changes her mind, she tells you that, as well. Like The Death and Life of the Great American School System (2010) and Reign of Error (2013), Goliath is time-sensitive, including the most recent teacher strikes, elections and civic rebellions, and what they accomplished. Ravitch takes the temperature of the current education zeitgeist and finds reason for hope.

What’s happening to public education in America?

Ravitch is perhaps our keenest observer, and when it comes to strong, substantiated opinions, she doesn’t hold back. Absorbing a Ravitch book gives the reader a summation of facts, players and events that put disparate events and opinion into a comprehensive framework, a detailed portrait of right now.  Think of Death and Life as a warning, Reign of Error as blistering critique–and Goliath as we’re mad as hell and not going to take it anymore…

In short, it’s a really good book. It would be invaluable to anyone who wants a rundown on how education policy has morphed, over the past two and a half decades, from a locally controlled, state-influenced institution subject to incremental,  community-driven change–to a thoroughly commercialized venture heavily influenced by would-be ‘innovators’ and a federal power-grab.

Ravitch has done us all a favor by tracing the dark roots and substantial financial support for chipping away at neighborhood schools and public education. As always, follow the money…

Ravitch provides plenty of information and examples of how the real Davids in this fight, the Resistors, are making headway, on dozens of fronts. She is unsparing in her criticism of those who would damage or destroy public education for private profit. This has not gone down well with those who have invested in reforms and trendy disruptions.

There are not many people—Disruptors, if you will—who have empowered school privatization and are now willing to admit that their ROI yields are unimpressive and propped up by shaky data. Especially since those who have been educating kids, doing the work all along—teachers and school leaders—could have told them what will and will not make a difference.  Resistors have studied school improvement, up close and personal, for more than a century. It can be done, but it won’t involve destruction. Just more hard work.

Diane Ravitch has re-framed the argument and provided evidence that the great ship of public education may be turning around. That is a great gift. Thank you.

Thank you, Nancy Flanagan. It means a lot to me to know that the real experts, the educators who spent their careers as teachers, find my book valuable. It helps me ignore the slings and arrows of pundits and Goliath’s minions.

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Privatization, Resistance, Testing

Ohio GOP Grovels at Feet of Fordham and ALEC

By dianeravitch
January 28, 2020 //
20

Bill Phillis writes about the GOP’s pusillanimous capitulation to its masters and is prepared to sacrifice its public schools to satisfy DC-based Thomas B. Fordham Institute and ALEC, funded by CharlesKoch, the Waltons, and DeVos.

He writes:

School choice zealots seem to be driving the state education policy train
In spite of the harm being heaped on school districts due to corruption in the charter industry and the wild expansion of vouchers, the school choice zealots are in control. State officials seem powerless to establish rational Ohio education policy.
According to current media reports, the voucher “fix” being considered in the Ohio Senate, would lessen the harm to some school districts in the near term but would set the stage for a universal voucher system in the future. The local choice zealots and their big boy moneyed allies, such as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and Fordham Foundation, are driving policy that undercuts the very foundation of the public common school. State officials seem to cower when confronted by the choice crowd.
 
Time to march on Columbus.
Before I saw Bill Phillis’ post, I tweeted an article about a temporary “fix” proposed by the GOP.
Jan Resseger wrote to me that the “fix” is a fraud and her own integrated, mixed-income district will be devastated.

She wrote:

I noticed you forwarded the Dispatch piece as though it will help anybody.  The Ohio Senate “solution” will simply leave in place all the damage from current year.  In CH-UH we have 478 percent growth in vouchers this year.  These kids will carry those vouchers out of our district’s budget each year until they graduate from high school. 

We’ll hope that this afternoon the House mitigates this in some way.  Leaves vouchers in place for now—but moratorium on their growth for a while.  Leaves flawed state report cards in place without a deadline to change them.  Expands income cap on the other kind of state funded vouchers.

The mess is embedded right in this so-called “solution.”

–Jan

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Fraud, Funding, Ohio, Privatization, Vouchers

Trump Picks DeVos as Surrogate for His Campaign

By dianeravitch
January 28, 2020 //
43

Politico Morning Education writes that Trump has chosen billionaire Betsy DeVos as a campaign surrogate, despite the fact that she is the most disliked member of his Cabinet. No doubt he hopes for DeVos campaign money but also wants to stick his thumb in the eye of teachers and supporters of public schools. DeVos campions charter schools and vouchers. She despises public schools.

DEVOS HITS THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL: Long a target for the left and protesters, DeVos is being deployed as a political asset for Trump. She will be among more than 80 surrogates campaigning for him at caucus locations across Iowa on Feb. 3, the campaign announced. Two days later, she’ll be with Vice President Mike Pence and senior White House aide Kellyanne Conway on Feb. 5 at a “Women for Trump” event in Camp Hill, Pa.

— Joining DeVos in the Hawkeye state will be several other agency heads, governors, and members of Congress and the state legislature, along with other campaign officials and advisers. Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. will also be on hand for what the campaign is calling an “unprecedented” surrogate operation.

— “This will be the strongest, best funded, and most organized presidential campaign in history,” said Brad Parscale, Trump 2020 campaign manager. “We are putting the Democrats on notice — good luck trying to keep up with this formidable reelection machine.”

— DeVos visited Iowa in March for a closed-door meeting in the state Capitol to pitch her proposal for Education Freedom Scholarships. Iowa Democrats at the time blasted the plan, saying it would undermine public education, the Des Moines Register reported, and the proposal hasn’t gotten traction on Capitol Hill.

— Iowa has a tax credit scholarship program, but it’s not considered a school choice leader. Its charter school law is considered weak, ranking in the bottom five of state laws for accountability, flexibility, funding equity and other metrics, according to a new report by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

HAPPENING TODAY: DeVos will join Pence in delivering remarks at the Wisconsin School Choice Student Showcase in celebration of National School Choice Week.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Education Reform, Privatization, Vouchers

NYC: Good News about the “Community Schools” Project

By dianeravitch
January 28, 2020 //
109

I heard from Sarah Jonas, executive director of New York City’s Office of Community Schools, about the good work of community schools. Note that the results refer to engagement in school, not test scores. That’s good news!

I asked Jonas for a brief description of the community schools model. She wrote:

“The principal and his/her leadership team (i.e. SLT) formally partner with a community-based organization (aka Lead CBO) through a contract to do three things: 1) collaborate with families to develop a vision for and co-lead the community school; 2) provide services that meet the needs of the community and the whole child (i.e. social-emotional, physical, and cognitive); 3) hire a community school director to coordinate services to ensure that the right services support the right child at the right time.”

To learn more about them, open the link to the RAND report:

Dear Diane,

I am reaching out to share exciting news about our Community Schools work in NYC.  As you may know, we hired the RAND Corporation early in the launch of NYC’s Community Schools initiative to study implementation and impact of the work.

Today, RAND will release the impact study entitled “Illustrating the Promise of Community Schools: An Assessment of the Impact of the NYC Community Schools Initiative” that will offer incredibly encouraging news.  Mayor de Blasio will hold a press conference about the report at PS 67, a Community School near Fort Greene.

According to the report, NYC is implementing Community Schools  on a scale that has not been seen before in the United States.  RAND found that “the Community Schools strategy is having tangible and significant impact on a variety of student outcomes.”  Specifically:

• Students in Community Schools are more likely to graduate on time.  In 2017-18, graduation rates in community schools were 7.2 percentage points higher than comparison schools.

• Students miss fewer days of school.  Chronic absenteeism was 7.3 percentage points lower in community elementary and middle schools, and 8.3 points lower in high schools.

• Disciplinary incidents declined sharply in elementary and middle schools compared to non-community schools.  For every 100 students in elementary and middle community schools, community schools had 10 fewer disciplinary incidents per year.

It is encouraging to see significant impact across a range of domains including academic, attendance and behavior.    Attached is a two-page summary with more details. The full report can be viewed at this link on RAND’s website.

The Washington Post ran a story about the report this morning, and we expect more media coverage after the press conference.  Please help spread the good news to your networks on social media –  #CommunitySchools!!

Categories Education Reform

Arthur Camins: Don’t Believe the Destroyers of Hope

By dianeravitch
January 28, 2020 //
24

Arthur Camins warns us against the prophets of doom and gloom, the pundits who say that we can’t hope for anything better, who try to persuade us not to fight for a better future.

He begins:

Beware the apostles of dystopia. They come to destroy your hope.  There are two sects. One preaches survival-of-the-fittest disdain for any social responsibility.  The other preaches defeatism and accommodation in the face of wealth and power. They are all hope, destroyers.

The necessity of hope struck me hard on Saturday, January 25. In the morning, I read two provocative op-eds in the NY Times.

Trump-disdaining conservative columnist, Bret Stevens, cautions, “Anyone but Trump? Not So Fast. Let’s not exchange one reckless president for another.” Essentially he argues that Trump, while personally reprehensible, hasn’t changed life for most Americans.  He goes on to plant fear of radical progressives: Too much hope for a more equitable future is dangerously destabilizing.

Historian David Motadel warns us about, “The Myth of Middle-Class Liberalism. The bourgeois are supposed to ensure open, democratic societies. In fact, they rarely have.” Historically, he argues, “the middle classes have frequently sided with illiberal forms of government when they feared for their privileges and social stability.”

In the evening, my wife and I watched the movie Just Mercy.  It dramatizes the relentless efforts of Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, to exonerate death row victims of racial injustice and fear.  Freed from jail after many years wrongful imprisonment, Walter McMillan tells Stevenson, “We’ve all been through a lot, Bryan, all of us. I know that some have been through more than others. But if we don’t expect more from each other, hope better for one another, and recover from the hurt we experience, we are surely doomed.”

Between now and the 2020 presidential primary and general election, apologists for and defenders of our inequitable, livable climate-destroying status quo will try to scare hope out of middle-class voters into selecting anyone but the dangerous progressives in the race, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Every fear-based, divisive scare tactic will be employed.  In fact, they are our best hope. Some will allude to, but not explicitly advocate, exclusionary authoritarianism as the only viable path for America.  Others will plead with voters to take the safe “moderate” path.

Progressives need to heed Motadel’s and McMillan’s warning.  Anyone who gets the dire threat of Trumpism needs to heed the warning.  Anyone with a mind to sit out the election or vote for third party candidate needs to heed the warning.  Things always can and often do get worse long before they get better. When it does, innocent people suffer and die. However, the solution is not to bend to the illusion of a safe moderate. It is to vote for hope.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Hope, Trump

Carol Burris: The Five Biggest Charter Scandals of 2019

By dianeravitch
January 28, 2020 //
10

Carol Burris reviews here the five biggest charter scandals of 2019. 

There were many to choose from.

Numero uno, of course, was the giant charter scam in California:

1. A3 Education: Eleven are indicted over their involvement in a charter scheme that defrauded California taxpayers of more than $50 million.

In May, the California Superior Court for the County of San Diego indicted 11 people on charges that they helped defraud California taxpayers out of $50 million via an elaborate scheme to create phony attendance records to increase revenue to an online charter chain known as A3. You can find a summary of the story with its elaborate kickbacks and fraud schemes here.

The alleged theft took place over the course of several years. In 2016, Jason Schrock and Sean McManus reportedly purchased Mosaica Online learning, which got its start with a $100,000 grant from the federal Charter Schools Program (CSP). They eventually renamed the online schools Valiant. Schrock and McManus managed the schools through the nonprofit Academic, Arts and Action (A3) Charter Academy. Eli Johnson would reportedly approach small, cash-strapped school districts to enlist them as authorizers, for which they would receive an authorizer fee.

In addition to Valiant Academy charter schools, A3 expanded by starting CA STEAM Academies throughout the state. Using the 19 resulting charter schools that enrolled thousands of students, they put their scheme in place. Thousands of summer school students would enroll, some unwittingly, and never take any classes. Meanwhile, according to the indictment, the money flowed into Schrock and McManus’s real estate ventures, bank accounts and the kitty they created for payoffs.

In 2016, I exposed the mysterious growth of the CA STEAM Academies and other charters in which Johnson and McManus were involved here on The Answer Sheet. As part of my investigation, I spoke with Johnson on the phone. He claimed he did not know the name of the company he worked for or who signed his paycheck.

The CA STEAM empire extended into Ohio. Whether it has been investigated in that state is unknown. The A3 investigation and prosecutions continue as they hunt for McManus, who has disappeared.

Read on to learn about the other four members of the Dishonor Roll.

I had the odd experience of meeting McManus a year ago. I happened to be at breakfast in a hotel in Newport Beach, California. My companion and I were seated next to a table where a man was in harmonious discussion with two or three others. He spoke in a loud voice and I heard references to “schools,” “sports,” “$5 a head,” etc.

When their party broke up, I stopped and asked him I’m if he was “in the charter industry.” Yes, he answered, and told me proudly he owned many corporations.

That was Sean McManus, now on the lam.

In case the story is behind a paywall, number 2 was the decision by the board of Texas-based IDEA charter chain IDEA to lease a private jet for $2 million a year. The board reversed the decision in response to public reaction. Now the executives and their wives fly first class.

Number 3 is a small California Charter Chain whose owners somehow became multimillionaires, although their charters are “nonprofit.”

”4. A nonprofit operator of migrant shelters, Southwest Key, coordinated with its for-profit organizations to bleed its charter schools into rat-infested classrooms.

A Texas charter school named East Austin College Prep made national news in 2019 when the New York Times reported complaints of raccoons and rats invading classrooms, rain pouring in through a leaky roof, and furniture occasionally falling through rickety floors. Yet, according to the story, the charter high school pays almost $900,000 in annual rent to its landlord, Southwest Key Programs.

The school, which received a CSP grant of $450,900, is owned by Southwest Key Programs, the nation’s largest provider of shelters for migrant children who’ve been separated from their families at the border….

5.The North Jersey Record uncovered hundreds of millions in taxpayer funds going to buildings owned by private interests, with charter schools paying inflated rents that far exceed building debt.

A 2019 five-part series written by a team of reporters from the North Jersey Record exposed the shady dealings hidden from the public eye that allow developers to cash in on public money and tax breaks by providing real estate to charter schools. The reporters found that information was buried so deeply in documents, it was difficult in many cases to find out who was making the profit.

The report resulted in a federal grand jury subpoena issued to the Thomas P. Marion Charter School in Newark. Its nonprofit “Friends of” organization purchased two public school buildings and flipped them for a profit of nearly $10 million.

I left out the details. Burris’ article includes them. Read it in full if you can. The details are shocking.

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Fraud, Privatization, Scandals

Book Tour Diary: Early Days

By dianeravitch
January 28, 2020 //
11

My new book SLAYING GOLIATH was launched in Park Slope, Brooklyn, on January 21. It was a delightful event, with Carol Burris and I discussing the book, talking about the national picture, and explaining the role of the Network for Public Education in pushing back against the Billionaire Combine. It was a lively and engaged crowd, including Lisa Rudley of New York State Allies for Public Education, one of the heroes of my book.

On Friday, Mary and I flew to Fort Lauderdale, where one of my nephews was getting married. It was a good time to catch up with family whom I don’t see often and to eat vast quantities of food (blowing away one of my New Year’s resolutions).

After the wedding festivities concluded, we moved to the apartment of New York friends who spend every winter in Fort Lauderdale.

Monday night was an event at one of America’s best independent bookstores: Books and Books in Coral Gables. And what a bookstore it is! I’m glad I got there early, with time to browse the shelves of this beautiful store, which has a vast supply of unusual books of literature and history. I could have spent hours there.

I met the owner, Mitchel Kaplan, who graduated from Miami public schools, spent three years as a high schoolEnglish teacher, then opened Books and Books. We did a podcast, and he was wonderfully enthusiastic about the book and had read it carefully (I have been interviewed in the past by people who had read nothing but the flap copy). After our conversation, which I will post here in a few days, we talked about our families and discovered that our grandparents came from the same place in Poland, called LOMZA (NOT Lombardi). My paternal grandparents emigrated in the 19th Century. His came to the U.S. at the end of World War 1. All the Jews of LOMZA were killed by the Nazis during the Second World War.

After the podcast, I hurried to a gathering of the leadership of United Teachers of Dade County at a nearby restaurant. Their president, Karla Hernandez Mats, is a very impressive, dynamic leader. She is also beautiful and enthusiastic. I couldn’t help but notice that she had a copy of the galleys of my book, filled with post-its. She read it!

We all went to the bookstore, which had a packed house, about 250 people, many of them teachers. Karla and I had a public discussion. I love this format. She raised the questions most important to Dade County, and I responded, riffing off into whatever else occurred to me.

The audience asked questions. Towards the end, a woman rose to speak and said ominously that all the schools in America were teaching Satanism, and they had to be stopped. She would have gone on and on, but I was able to pause her and told her I had visited many schools but had never seen any that taught Satanism.

A few more questions, and I started signing books. The line was long, and near the end, I realized I had to take a bathroom break, and I excused myself. I rushed to the WC, where I proceeded to drop my cell phone in the toilet (clean water) but it miraculously survived the ordeal. (A few years ago, my cell melted down after getting one drip of water on it at the bottom of my handbag…so, progress).

The evening over, I hugged my new lontzman, Mitchel Kaplan, and went with my friends back to Fort Lauderdale, an hour’s drive. This morning, off to DC. I will speak at Politics and Prose tomorrow night.

Categories Education Reform

The Ex-Labor Leader Who Now Fights Teachers’ Unions

By dianeravitch
January 28, 2020 //
43

Andy Stern was once a powerful labor leader as head of the SEIU (Service Employees International Union). Since stepping down, however, he has turned against the movement he once led and is an outspoken foe of teachers’ unions. He even joined the board of the Broad Foundation, which is anti-union and anti-public school. I don’t know Stern, but I have seen one article that describes his change of views.

Stern developed a reputation as a business-friendly union leader, known for striking deals with companies that were often seen as too weak by many in the labor movement. Under the guise of modernization and growth, Stern seemed to lose his connection to the grassroots, radical, people-powered aspects of the union world. In 2010, The Nation quoted one union leader as saying, “Andy Stern leaves pretty much without a friend in the labor movement.”

His post-SEIU years have only intensified this feeling. Stern has spent the past decade serving on corporate boards, touting the idea of a universal basic incomeas an economic solution superior to building labor power, and further ingratiating himself to corporate America as a sort of post-union ambassador to the Aspen Institute world. He also took a seat on the board of the Broad Foundation, a billionaire-funded group that pushed charter schools—raising eyebrows from teacher’s unions, who are often cast as the villain by wealthy reformers seeking to build alternatives to America’s public education system.

Of course, he is not the only labor leader who flipped to the other side. George Parker was president of the Washington, D.C., teachers union at the time when Michelle Rhee became chancellor and started her famous campaign to crack down on teachers. At the end of his term in 2011, he teamed up with Rhee and spoke out against the same issues he had once championed. He went to work for Rhee’s StudentsFirst and joined her campaign for charters, vouchers, merit pay, and test-based evaluation. Now he works with the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

Paul Toner was vice-president, then president of the Massachusetts Teachers Union from 2006 to 2014. After his term ended, he joined the “reform” movement, as a Pahara-Aspen Institute Fellow, a graduate of the Broad Academy,  and currently executive director of the Gates-funded Teach Plus, which is generally pro-testing and anti-union (its CEO is John B. King Jr. and its board includes DFER favorite, former Congressman George Miller). For criticism, see here and here.

In 2011, Sam Dillon of the New York Times called out TeachPlus for its role in pushing through policies in state legislatures that Gates favored, but unions did not. Dillon was one of the first journalists to realize that Gates was creating Astroturf groups to advance his agenda:

INDIANAPOLIS — A handful of outspoken teachers helped persuade state lawmakers this spring to eliminate seniority-based layoff policies. They testified before the legislature, wrote briefing papers and published an op-ed article in The Indianapolis Star.

They described themselves simply as local teachers who favored school reform — one sympathetic state representative, Mary Ann Sullivan, said, “They seemed like genuine, real people versus the teachers’ union lobbyists.” They were, but they were also recruits in a national organization, Teach Plus, financed significantly by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

For years, Bill Gates focused his education philanthropy on overhauling large schools and opening small ones. His new strategy is more ambitious: overhauling the nation’s education policies. To that end, the foundation is financing educators to pose alternatives to union orthodoxies on issues like the seniority system and the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers.

In some cases, Mr. Gates is creating entirely new advocacy groups. The foundation is also paying Harvard-trained data specialists to work inside school districts, not only to crunch numbers but also to change practices. It is bankrolling many of the Washington analysts who interpret education issues for journalists and giving grants to some media organizations.

Toner was succeeded at the Massachusetts Teachers Association by firebrand Barbara Madeloni, who led the successful fight to block a Walton-funded referendum in Massachusetts in 2016 to stop charter school expansion.

Just last year, Madeloni wrote an article about Toner’s switching sides. She writes that as soon as someone becomes a union president, he or she is offered the “soft handshake” by corporate and political leaders who want to woo them to the other side. She wrote:

As an elected leader of the largest union in Massachusetts, I found myself with many invitations to meet and cut deals with the very people whose policies the members opposed.

I wasn’t elected to get a better bad deal. I was elected to refuse their deals and reestablish the power of educators, students, and families.

Everyone has a right to change his or her mind. I did it myself. Still, I was not the leader of an organization; I was an individual who said, “I was wrong.” I admit that I don’t entirely understand how someone goes from being the president of a labor union to opposing the people they previously represented. 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, Unions

Shawgi Tell: Charter Schools Have No Valid Claim to Public Property

By dianeravitch
January 28, 2020 //
7

Shawgi Tell is a professor of education at Nazareth University in New York. He has taken note of states where charter schools are given ownership of public property, where they buy property and supplies with public money but keep title to their purchases if their charter should close. He has seen states that require districts to hand over empty buildings to charter owners for $1, which then becomes their private property. He thinks these transfers of public assets to private ownership are wrong.

He bases his argument on the belief that public property belongs to taxpayers, but charter schools are privately owned.

He writes:

Public facilities and infrastructure are produced by the working class and people and belong to the public. They exist in order to serve the common good and to contribute to the extended reproduction of society.

This collectively-produced wealth must not be handed over to competing owners of capital who are only concerned with maximizing profit as fast as possible, regardless of the damage caused to society and the environment. Socially-produced wealth must be off limits to narrow private interests. The aims and purposes of the private sector and public sector are not the same.

Non-profit and for-profit charter schools are not public entities. It does not matter how often they are called public, the fact remains that they are inherently privatized arrangements owned-operated by unelected individuals and companies. Yet they siphon billions of dollars a year from public schools and seize billions more in public facilities and assets. Most state charter school laws are deliberately set up to facilitate this massive transfer of pubic wealth to narrow private interests. Charter schools have long functioned as pay-the-rich schemes masquerading as “schools” that “benefit kids.”

Charter school owners-operators have never stopped piously demanding that public school facilities worth millions of dollars be freely and automatically handed over to them. They righteously declare that they have an inherent right to public facilities produced by the working class. The consequences, of course, are disastrous for public schools and the public interest. For example, a new report shows that in 2018 more than $100 million was spent by New York City alone on charter school facilities.1 This is wealth and property that no longer belongs to the public that produced it; it is now in private hands, essentially for free.2 Even worse, existing institutions and arrangements provide the public with no recourse for effective redress.

One of the most recent surges in antisocial demands from charter school promoters for more public property comes from Washington D.C. where charter schools have a long record of serious problems. Charter school promoters in D.C. have launched an intense effort in recent months to lay claim to “vacant” or “unused” public school facilities worth millions of dollars. They have even cynically claimed that efforts to block them from seizing public facilities that belong to the public is tantamount to denying parents “school choice” and undermining “opportunity.”

But whether public school facilities are vacant or not, whether they are being used or not, they still belong to the public, not private sector actors who own-operate segregated and de-unionized contract schools plagued by racketeering, poor performance, low accountability, discriminatory enrollment practices, high employee turnover rates, inflated administrator pay, large advertising budgets, and frequent closures. How does any of this benefit the public?

It is amazing that private entrepreneurs have situated themselves to demand free public property, but they are doing it “for the kids.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, Privatization
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