A Primer on the Damaging Movement to Privatize Public Schools

[boutons_deux]

When, about 30 years ago, corporate interests began their highly organized, well-funded effort to privatize public education, you wouldn't have read or heard about it. They didn't want to trigger the debate that such a radical change in an important ins ution warranted.

If, like most pundits and politicians, you've supported that campaign, it's likely you've been snookered. Here's a quick overview of the snookering process.

The Pitch

Talking Points:

(a) Standardized testing proves America's schools are poor.

(b) Other countries are eating our lunch.

(c) Teachers deserve most of the blame.

(d) The lazy ones need to be forced out by performance evaluations.

(e) The dumb ones need scripts to read or "canned standards" telling them exactly what to teach.

(f) The experienced ones are too set in their ways to change and should be replaced by fresh Five-Week-Wonders from Teach for America. (Bonus: Replacing experienced teachers saves a ton of money.)

(g) Public ("government") schools are a step down the slippery slope to socialism.

Tactics

Education establishment resistance to privatization is inevitable, so

(a) avoid it as long as possible by blurring the lines between "public" and "private."

(b) Push school choice, vouchers, tax write-offs, tax credits, school-business partnerships, profit-driven charter chains.

(c) When resistance comes, crank up fear with the, "They're eating our lunch!" message.

(d) Contribute generously to all potential resisters - academic publications, professional organizations, unions, and school support groups such as PTA.

(e) Create fake "think tanks," give them impressive names, and have them do "research" supporting privatization.

(f) Encourage investment in teacher-replacer technology - internet access, iPads, virtual schooling, MOOCS, etc.

(e) Pressure state legislators to make life easier for profit-seeking charter chains by taking approval decisions away from local boards and giving them to easier-to-lobby state-level bureaucrats.

(g) Elect the "right" people at all levels of government. (When they're campaigning, have them keep their privatizing agenda quiet.)

Weapon

If you'll read the fine-print disclaimers on high-stakes standardized tests, you'll see how grossly they're being misused, but they're the key to privatization.

The general public, easily impressed by numbers and mathematical razzle-dazzle, believes compe ion is the key to quality, so want quality quantified even though it can't be done. Machine-scored tests don't measure quality. They rank.

It's hard to rank unlike things so it's necessary to standardize. That's what the Common Core State Standards do. To get the job done quickly, Bill Gates picked up the tab, important politicians signed off on them, and teachers were handed them as a done deal.

The standards make testing and ranking a cinch. They also make making billions a cinch. Manufacturers can use the same questions for every state that has adopted the standards or facsimiles thereof.

If challenged, test fans often quote the late Dr. W. Edward Deming, the world-famous quality guru who showed Japanese companies how to build better stuff than anybody else. In his book, "The New Economics," Deming wrote, "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it."

Here's the whole sentence as he wrote it: "It is wrong to suppose that if you can't measure it, you can't manage it - a costly myth."

Operating the Weapon

What's turned standardized testing into a privatizing juggernaut are pass-fail "cut scores" set by politicians. Saying kids need to be challenged, they set the cut score high enough to fail many (sometimes most) kids.

When the scores are published, they point to the high failure rate to "prove" public schools can't do the job and should be closed or privatized. Clever, huh?

The privatizing machinery is in place. Left alone, it'll gradually privatize most, but not all, public schools. Those that serve the poorest, the sickest, the disabled, the most troubled, the most expensive to educate - those will stay in what's left of the public schools. (iow, public schools will be racist, segregated pens for blacks, browns)

Weapon Malfunction

Look at standardized tests from the kids' perspective. Test items

(a) measure recall of secondhand, standardized, delivered information, or

(b) require a skill to be demonstrated, or

(c) reward an ability to second-guess whoever wrote the test item.

Because kids didn't ask for the information, because the skill they're being asked to demonstrate rarely has immediate practical use, and because they don't give a tinker's dam what the test-item writer thinks, they have zero emotional investment in what's being tested.

As every real teacher knows, no emotional involvement means no real learning. Period. What makes standardized tests look like they work is learner emotion, but it's emotion that doesn't have anything to do with learning. The ovals get penciled in to avoid trouble, to please somebody, to get a grade, or to jump through a bureaucratic hoop to be eligible to jump through another bureaucratic hoop. When the pencil is laid down, what's tested, having no perceived value, automatically erases from memory.

Before You Write…

If you want to avoid cranking out the usual amateurish drivel about standardized testing that appears in the op-eds, editorials, and syndicated columns of the mainstream media, ask yourself a few questions about the testing craze:

(a) Should life-altering decisions hinge on the scores of commercially produced tests not open to public inspection?

(b) How wise is it to only teach what machines can measure?

(c) How fair is it to base any part of teacher pay on scores from tests that can't evaluate complex thought?

(d) Are tests that have no "success in life" predictive power worth the damage they're doing?

Here's a longer list of problems you should think about before you write.

Perspective

America's schools have always struggled - an inevitable consequence,

first, of a decision in 1893 to narrow and standardize the high school curriculum and emphasize college prep;

second, from a powerful strain of individualism in our national character that eats away support for public ins utions;

third, from a really sorry system of ins utional organization.

Politicians, not educators, make education policy, basing it on the simplistic conventional wisdom that educating means "delivering information."
In fact, educating is the most complex and difficult of all professions. Done right, teaching is an attempt to help the young align their beliefs, values, and assumptions more closely with what's true and real, escape the bonds of ethnocentrism, explore the wonders and potential of humanness, and become skilled at using thought processes that make it possible to realize those aims.

Historically, out of the ins ution's dysfunctional organizational design came schools with lots of problems, but with one redeeming virtue. They were "loose." Teachers had enough autonomy to do their thing. So they did, and the kids that some of them coached brought America far more than its share of patents, scholarly papers, scientific advances, international awards, and honors.

Notwithstanding their serious problems, America's public schools were once the envy of the world. Now, educators around that world shake their heads in disbelief (or maybe cheer?) as we spend billions of dollars to standardize what once made America great - un-standardized thought.

A salvage operation is still (barely) possible, but not if politicians, prodded by pundits, continue to do what they've thus far steadfastly refused to do - listen to people who've actually worked with real students in real classrooms, and did so long enough and thoughtfully enough to know something about teaching.

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/ite...public-schools

America is being ed to un ability by the VRWC/1%/BigCorp

[boutons_deux]

Cashing in on Kids: Corporate Lobbying Powerhouse ALEC Pushed 172 School Privatization Bills Last Year

ALEC's agenda would destroy public education and turn it into one that serves for-profit interests.

One of ALEC's biggest funders is Koch Industries and the Koch brothers' fortune. The Kochs have had a seat at the table — where the private sector votes as equals with legislators — on ALEC's education task force via their "grassroots" group Americans for Prosperity and their Freedom Partners group, which was described as the Kochs' "secret bank."

The Kochs also have a voice on ALEC's Education Task Force through multiple state-based think tanks of the State Policy Network, ALEC's sister organization, which is funded by many of the same corporations and foundations and donor en ies.

ALEC's Education Task Force is also funded by the billionaire DeVos family, which bankrolls a privatization operation called "American Federation of Children," and by for-profit corporations like K12 Inc., which was founded by junk-bond king Michael Milliken.

ALEC's education task force has pushed legislation for decades to privatize public schools, weaken teacher's unions, and lower teaching standards.

ALEC's agenda would transform public education from a public and accountable ins ution that serves the public into one that serves private, for-profit interests.

ALEC model bills divert taxpayer money from public to private schools through a variety of "voucher" and "tuition tax credit" programs. They promote unaccountable charter schools and shift power away from democratically elected local school boards.

ALEC Vouchers, a Step toward "Abolishing Public Schools" according to Milton FriedmanUntil recently, ALEC boasted on the "history" section of its website that it first started promoting "such 'radical' ideas as a [educational] voucher system" in 1983, taking up ideas first articulated decades earlier by ALEC ally, Milton Friedman, who was an economist with the University of Chicago.

Although ALEC and other school privatizers today frame "vouchers" — taxpayer-funded tuition for private, and often religious, schools — in terms of "opportunity" for low-income students and giving parents the "choice" to send their children to public or private schools, the group was less judicious in its earlier years.

The commentary to ALEC's original 1984 voucher bill states that its purpose is

"to introduce normal market forces" into education, and

to "dismantle the control and power of" teachers' unions

by directing money from public ins utions to private ones that were less likely to be unionized.

Friedman was more explicit when addressing ALEC's 2006 meeting. He explained that vouchers are really a step towards "abolishing the public school system."

"How do we get from where we are to where we want to be?" Friedman asked the ALEC crowd.

"Of course, the ideal way would be to abolish the public school system and eliminate all the taxes that pay for it.

Then parents would have enough money to pay for private schools, but you're not gonna do that."

http://www.alternet.org/education/cashing-kids-corporate-lobbying-powerhouse-alec-pushed-172-school-privatization-bills-last

[Wild Cobra]

Maybe the teachers unions and their represented employees should start making efforts for the public to appreciate their position, instaed of being the bad examples they are.

People are tired of their arrogance, and self worth over the worth of the children.

[Nbadan]

It's allll the unions fault.....



Public education isn't the problem....if you want to do well in school the avenues you can pursue are endless..charter schools and vouchers aren't gonna change crap except give money to special interest that could go to the kids....the most prevalent problem is parents thinking that schools should 'fix' their kid because they never talk to him/her.....the kid plays video games 10+ hours a day....they never encourage the kid to put down the phone, turn off the TV and do their homework or read a book...

[rmt]

I know you guys hate my anecdotes but here goes:

At my ds charter school, they take care of their teachers. His AP Calc teacher has cancer and is going through treatment. He's been dog sick, gone bald, missing classes, and yesterday he said that he wishes that the administration would stop making him so much soup - they have different people making home cooked soup to build him up. Ds had a AP Euro teacher - so flaky, weird - misses half the school year (not because of illness or anything) but so good that in the half year he does turn up, the kids learn the material well. Ds got a 4 on the exam (more than I expected as he's a nerdy, science type). These two examples would never have survived in a public school where attendance (but not results) is paramount. They treasure their good teachers, give them flexibility and get rid of the bad teachers (who don't last longer than the year they're contracted for). For me, the most important criteria I have when choosing a school is the quality of the teachers - specifically the math teachers (because it's a foundational/building subject).

I continue to be an advocate for charter schools, vouchers, whatever system where compe ion rules instead of the public schools where it's near impossible to get rid of bad teachers. And this is coming from some one who worked for the school system for 12 years and has seen the "inside." Lots of them are just biding time waiting for their precious pensions.

[Nbadan]

I continue to be an advocate for charter schools, vouchers, whatever system where compe ion rules instead of the public schools where it's near impossible to get rid of bad teachers. And this is coming from some one who worked for the school system for 12 years and has seen the "inside." Lots of them are just biding time waiting for their precious pensions.

Most of the teachers who have made it for more than 10 years are probably good teachers....there are bad teachers, just as there are bad lawyers, doctors, engineers, and politicians...but bad teachers don't last long anymore because they burn out or they are moved to schools where even a bad teacher is better than a new teacher....there are schools like that..scary...in Texas the avg starting salary for teachers is close to $50k and most new teachers still don't last longer than three years..many last long enough to pay for their certification and leave....

[boutons_deux]

Charter boosters plan to Swift Boat Massachusetts education

Massachusetts voters will face the choice in November whether to lift a cap on the number of charter schools in the state, and the big money is already rolling in, with some notorious names attached:

Public Charter Schools for MA, the group supporting a referendum to lift the state’s charter school cap, has reserved $6.5 million in advertising for the seven weeks before election day, according to The Tracking Firm, a service that tracks TV advertising spending.
The ads will be produced by DC-based SRCP Media, the same firm behind the infamous “Swift Boat Veterans For Truth” campaign against John Kerry in 2004. The ads will begin airing on Sept. 20.

Even under the current cap system, charters are sucking money out of public school systems in Massachusetts:

Here’s the math: If charter-bound students happened to leave in tidy groups of 25 — it would also help if each group had similar abilities, grade-levels, and interests — then a neighborhood school could consider firing a teacher every time this imaginary, genous cohort left.

But 25 students leaving Amherst Regional take $303,000 with them, five times a $60,000 mid-range teacher’s salary. For every five children — a fraction of a class — who go to charter schools from a district with a relatively low $12,000 charter assessment, a teacher’s salary goes with them. Or another art or phys. ed. or language program

Relatively tight regulation and the charter cap keep Massachusetts charter schools at a higher quality than we see in many places where charters have been allowed—encouraged, even—to expand without oversight or regard for quality.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/0...28Daily+Kos%29

BigMoney/VRWC strategy is to destroy public schools to pocket taxpayer $100Bs through for-profit charter school scams.

[rmt]

Charter boosters plan to Swift Boat Massachusetts education

Massachusetts voters will face the choice in November whether to lift a cap on the number of charter schools in the state, and the big money is already rolling in, with some notorious names attached:

Public Charter Schools for MA, the group supporting a referendum to lift the state’s charter school cap, has reserved $6.5 million in advertising for the seven weeks before election day, according to The Tracking Firm, a service that tracks TV advertising spending.
The ads will be produced by DC-based SRCP Media, the same firm behind the infamous “Swift Boat Veterans For Truth” campaign against John Kerry in 2004. The ads will begin airing on Sept. 20.

Even under the current cap system, charters are sucking money out of public school systems in Massachusetts:

Here’s the math: If charter-bound students happened to leave in tidy groups of 25 — it would also help if each group had similar abilities, grade-levels, and interests — then a neighborhood school could consider firing a teacher every time this imaginary, genous cohort left.

But 25 students leaving Amherst Regional take $303,000 with them, five times a $60,000 mid-range teacher’s salary. For every five children — a fraction of a class — who go to charter schools from a district with a relatively low $12,000 charter assessment, a teacher’s salary goes with them. Or another art or phys. ed. or language program

Relatively tight regulation and the charter cap keep Massachusetts charter schools at a higher quality than we see in many places where charters have been allowed—encouraged, even—to expand without oversight or regard for quality.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/0...28Daily+Kos%29

BigMoney/VRWC strategy is to destroy public schools to pocket taxpayer $100Bs through for-profit charter school scams.

Are the taxpayers paying more overall by the kids going to charter schools instead of public schools? Are the results of the charter schools better than the public schools? Why are the students leaving the public schools to go to charter schools (especially if they require volunteer work and special transportation considerations). If the answer to my first question is no and to the second is yes, what do you care as long as the kids are being educated better for the same amount of money? Or are you just stuck on the idea that most schools should be public and not for-profit? To me, if for-profit schools produce better results for our kids and it doesn't cost taxpayers any more, we should convert them all to charter for-profit schools. But the teachers' unions and Democrat party wouldn't go along with that, would they? - no matter that it's better for the kids.

I guess my overall question is when are you going to acknowledge that for most cases, the private sector does a better, cheaper, more efficient job at most things than the government?