VOUCHERS

I'm starting to see a perfect storm here: attack public unions, masquerade as caring about poor kids; big pile of money to privatize using technology; bunch of (libertarian) billionaires (gates fdn provided precedent/cover?); also simple fable for free marketeers: choice fixes all.

SEE EDUCATION ON CLIMATE DENIAL/CREATIONISM

SEE VIRTUAL SCHOOL FOR ONLINE/CHARTER

PRIVATIZATION, FREE MKT, PRISON INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

also charters

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/public-school-funding-and-the-role-of-race/408085/

The Data Are Damning: How Race Influences School Funding Research shows that in Pennsylvania’s public schools skin color, not economics, determines how much money districts get

PHILADELPHIA—In America, schools with a lot of minority students are chronically underfunded. Is that the case because these students are poor, B U S I N E S S The Data Are Damning: How Race Influences School Funding Research shows that in Pennsylvania’s public schools skin color, not economics, determines how much money districts get.

G I L L I A N B . W H I T E S E P 3 0 , 2 0 1 5 Molly Riley / Reuters 10/1/2015 The Troubling Link Between School Funding and Race The Atlantic http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/publicschoolfundingandtheroleofrace/408085/ 2/6

and poor communities have fewer resources for funding their schools? Or, is it because of the color of these students’ skin? Unsettlingly, recent research from data scientist David Mosenkis finds that poverty alone does not explain the underfunding. Mosenkis delved into funding data for 500 school districts in the state of Pennsylvania. Because richer school districts are able to drum up more cash through taxes, they should receive less state funding, and poorer districts should receive more. He looked at how much money they received and sorted those findings based on race and income. Using a broad scope, Mosenkis found what one might expect: On the surface poor districts do receive more state funding than rich schools. But when he delved deeper into the data, sorting by race, what he found was disturbing.....

ALEC-Inspired Education Bill Helps Fund Loch Ness Monster Truthers In Louisiana

June 26, 2012 2:39 pm ET — Brian Powell

It's not a myth — the Loch Ness Monster has turned up in, of all places, Louisiana. According to the New York Daily News, Louisiana's Eternity Christian Academy is using a textbook that asserts the monster is not only real, but that its existence disproves evolution. What's more, the school is eligible for taxpayer funded vouchers, thanks to a bill signed by Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal that strongly resembles model legislation drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

From the NYDN (emphasis added):

The Scottish legend of the Loch Ness Monster is suggested as truth in a biology book that a private Christian school in Louisiana is using in its curriculum.

But that's only part of the outrage from critics: Students who are eligible for taxpayer-funded vouchers will be allowed to attend Eternity Christian Academy in Westlake for the 2012-13 school year, according to reports.

The startling claim about Nessie's authenticity is made to bolster creationism within the textbook, the Scotsman newspaper reported Monday. The Loch Ness Monster is described as a type of dinosaur, and if dinosaurs and man co-exist, then presumably there would be holes in the scientific argument for evolution.

[...]

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a Republican, advocated for the voucher plan, telling Reuters, "We are letting parents decide what's best for their children, not government."

According to Gannett Louisiana, the voucher plan was part of a Louisiana bill that allegedly mirrored model legislation written by ALEC, an influential conservative group that promotes model legislation favorable to its corporate funders through statehouses across the country. From Gannett (emphasis added):

The sweeping changes aimed at improving Louisiana's failing public schools are new to the state, but they are not new.

The changes signed into law in April — on teacher effectiveness, tenure and accountability; on charter schools, vouchers and other school-choice tactics; and on systemic changes to early childhood learning — all reflect the strategic thinking of one of the nation's most active conservative public-policy organizations.

Reading Gov. Bobby Jindal's education legislation — passed by the state Legislature in House Bills 974 and 976 and Senate Bill 581 — is akin to reading model bills drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council.

[...]

Whether ALEC, or any other such tax-exempt entity, does "too much lobbying" is a matter of annual scrutiny by the IRS.

Either way, ALEC has plenty of influence. Some say Jindal likely based his education legislation on models drafted by ALEC, which in August 2011 awarded Jindal the Thomas Jefferson Freedom Award for public service.

Kyle Plotkin, a spokesman for the governor, says that was not the case.

Earlier this month, Reuters described the education plan as "the nation's boldest experiment in privatizing public education," and noted that the voucher program would cover "the full cost of tuition at more than 120 private schools across Louisiana, including small, Bible-based church schools."

While one of those "Bible-based" schools is set to instruct students on the veracity of Loch Ness Monster sightings, another school — the Islamic School of Greater New Orleans — was forced to withdraw an application for government-paid vouchers after Louisiana lawmakers expressed concern about taxpayers funding "Islamic teaching." From the Huffington Post:

Stakes escalated last week when, to the frustration of some lawmakers, the Islamic School of Greater New Orleans applied for federal funds under the voucher program. Republican state Rep. Kenneth Havard objected to the Islamic School's request for 38 government-paid student vouchers, saying he opposed any bill that "will fund Islamic teaching," the Associated Press reports.

"I won't go back home and explain to my people that I supported this," he said.

"It'll be the Church of Scientology next year," Democratic state Rep. Sam Jones told AP.

The Islamic School of Greater New Orleans withdrew its request for vouchers before the bill went to vote.

http://www.alternet.org/education/nevadas-new-voucher-plan-designed-bankrupt-public-schools

7/15

Nevada is one of our nation’s 24 one-party, all Republican states. Writing for the Washington Post, Lyndsey Layton and Emma Brown note that, “In January, Republicans took control of the Nevada legislature and the governor’s mansion for the first time since 1929, generating the political momentum to enact the country’s most expansive voucher plan. ...Starting next school year, any parent in Nevada can pull a child from the state’s public schools and take tax dollars with them, giving families the option to use public money to pay for private or parochial school or even for home schooling… Nevada’s law is singular because all of the state’s 450,000 K-12 public school children—regardless of income—are eligible to take the money to whatever school they choose.” A child must be enrolled in a public school for at least 100 days in order to qualify.

Layton and Brown report that the new Nevada voucher bill was developed with the assistance of the Foundation for Excellence in Education, the foundation Jeb Bush launched in 2008, but from which he resigned at the end of 2014 to prepare for his presidential run. The Foundation’s chief executive Patricia Levesque describes Nevada’s new voucher bill: “This is the wave of the future. In all aspects of our life, we look for ways to customize and give individuals more control over their path and destiny…. This is a fundamental shift in how we make decisions about education.”

The Education Law Center recently circulated an analysis of Nevada’s new school vouchers from Educate Nevada Now, a statewide organization that promotes public education:

“The ESA (Education Savings Account) law requires the ‘statewide average basic support per pupil’—$5,100 per student and $5,710 for low-income and students with disabilities—be deposited into each ESA (Education Savings Account) from local district budgets, a process that will divert, over time, substantial resources from the public schools. Studies have shown that Nevada substantially underfunds K-12 public education… ESAs will trigger an outflow of funds from already inadequate school district budgets, beginning in the 2015-16 school year… As children leave public schools with ESA funds, some of the costs to educate those students will leave with them. But ESAs will cause a deficit for the local district, given the fixed costs of operating the school system for all children… ESAs also create instability in district and school budgets. Districts will not know how many students will exit and how much money will be taken out of the budget during the school year. This unpredictability will make it difficult to manage public school budgets, as local administrators won’t know how many teachers and staff to hire… or how to allocate funds to provide sufficient resources to schools throughout the school year.”

Nevada is making the vouchers for over $5,000 available to any family, while most other states with voucher programs reserve the vouchers for students living in poverty. The worry is that beneficiaries of this new program may well be upper income families who will use the vouchers as partial scholarships for expensive private schools. Educate Nevada Now explains:

“The ESA law has no limit on the income of households that can obtain ESA funds. There is only a handful of private schools in Nevada with tuition low enough to be covered by $5,100 or $5,710, the annual ESA amount. ESAs are designed to be a ‘subsidy’ by more affluent families who can already afford to send their children to selective private and religious schools. Conversely, ESAs are insufficient for students from low-income families, and those who need more costly English language instruction or special education services. At-risk students will stay in the public schools, therefore, increasing the segregation of students based on race, socioeconomic status, disability, English language proficiency, and other factors in those schools.”

Expansion of school choice very often operates by providing escapes for able children and leaving the students with greatest needs in what become public school districts of last resort.

The law was passed without attention to racial or economic discrimination and without any protection for equity:

“Unlike Nevada public schools, the private and religious schools accepting ESA funds are not prohibited from discriminating based on race, gender or disability…. (T)he private institutions… that participate in the ESA program are exempt from the most basic protections that prevent discrimination of disadvantaged and vulnerable student populations. Finally, the private for-profit or non-profit education providers that accept ESA funds can use their admissions rules, including competitive pretesting, transcript evaluation and letters of recommendation. These schools and entities are free to select students based on who they decide fits their religious or secular mission, culture and programs.”

The Education Law Center’s national 2015 school funding analysis,"Is School Funding Fair? A National Report Card,"ranks Nevada’s public school funding level 40th of the 50 states, and awards Nevada an “F” grade for its highly inequitable funding distribution. In a recent post, Jennifer Berkshire, who blogs as EduShyster, commented on the likely impact of Nevada’s voucher plan on Nevada’s already poorly funded public schools: “Speaking of overcrowding and deterioration (note that I’m bolding these for emphasis), it seems like building new off-ramps for kids who are fortunate enough to have more than $5,700 in their backpacks won’t only leave problems like overcrowding and deterioration unaddressed, but will actually leave the majority of kids in Nevada’s schools worse off.”

Before retiring, Jan Resseger staffed advocacy and programming to support public education justice for the United Church of Christ. She chaired the National Council of Churches Committee on Public Education for a dozen of those years.

http://www.alternet.org/education/wisconsin-republican-compromise-ups-state-ed-budget-then-steals-money-vouchers

Wisconsin, led by extreme-right Governor Scott Walker, demonstrates how one party state government can execute a compromise. In February, Walker proposed cutting $127 million out of the budget for K-12 public education. Last week the Republican dominated state legislature put back a good part of that money. Then the legislature re-directed much of it away from public education to private and parochial schools.

Here is how Jessie Opoien of the *Capital Times*describes what happened: “The co-chairs of the Wisconsin Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee said on Tuesday its Republican members have reached an agreement to provide an additional $200 million for K-12 education than what Gov. Scott Walker proposed in his two-year budget. The funds will restore a $127 million cut next year that was proposed in Walker’s budget, and will provide an additional $100 per pupil in state aid the following year.”

Except here’s the catch, according to *Wisconsin Public Radio*: “Republicans on the Legislature’s budget-writing committee filled Gov. Scott Walker’s proposed cut to public schools… but they also changed the way the state pays for school vouchers. From now on, public and private voucher schools will both be competing for the same pot of money. In the first year of the budget, that means voucher schools will get $18 million more while public schools get $18 million less.”

AnAssociated Press reportexplains the details. The plan would lift a 1,000 student cap statewide on the number of vouchers and let any public school student apply. Students in grades K-8 would receive $7,210 from their local school district to attend a voucher school. School districts would have to provide $7,856 for any high school student. In the 2014-2015 school year more than 3,500 students applied for a voucher, indicating that the new legislation would rapidly expand school choice beyond the current 1,000 student cap. Like other states with voucher programs, Wisconsin does not require a student to have been enrolled in a public school before applying for a voucher. This means that students already enrolled in private and parochial schools could qualify for public funds to underwrite their private school education....

http://www.alternet.org/economy/how-wall-streets-greedy-tentacles-sank-schools-trapping-them-massive-debts

fliers touted new ballfields, science labs and modern classrooms. They didn’t mention the crushing debt or the investment bank that stood to make millions.

— Melody Peterson, Orange County Register, February 15, 2013

Remember when Goldman Sachs – dubbed by Matt Taibbi the Vampire Squid– sold derivatives to Greece so the government could conceal its debt, then bet against that debt, driving it up? It seems that the ubiquitous investment bank has also put the squeeze on California and its school districts. Not that Goldman was alone in this; but the unscrupulous practices of the bank once called the undisputed king of the municipal bond business epitomize the culture of greed that has ensnared students and future generations in unrepayable debt.

n 2008, after collecting millions of dollars in fees to help California sell its bonds, Goldman urged its bigger clients to place investment bets against those bonds, in order to profit from a financial crisis that was sparked in the first place by irresponsible Wall Street speculation. Alarmed California officials warned that these short sales would jeopardize the state’s bond rating and drive up interest rates. But that result also served Goldman, which had sold credit default swaps on the bonds, since the price of the swaps rose along with the risk of default.

In 2009, the lenders’ lobbying group than proposed and promoted AB1388, a California bill eliminating the debt ceiling requirement on long-term debt for school districts. After it passed, bankers traveled all over the state pushing something called “capital appreciation bonds” (CABs) as a tool to vault over legal debt limits. (Think Greece again.) Also called payday loans for school districts, CABs have now been issued by more than 400 California districts, some with repayment obligations of up to 20 times the principal advanced (or 2000%).

The controversial bonds came under increased scrutiny in August 2012, following a report that San Diego County’s Poway Unified would have to pay $982 million for a $105 million CAB it issued. Goldman Sachs made $1.6 million on a single capital appreciation deal with the San Diego Unified School District.

Green Light to Exploit

In a September 2013 op-ed in SFGate.com called “School Bonds Are a Wall Street Scam,” attorney Nanci Nishimura wrote:

. . . AB1388, signed by then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2009, [gave] banks the green light to lure California school boards into issuing bonds to raise quick money to build schools.

Unlike conventional bonds that have to be paid off on a regular basis, the bonds approved in AB1388 relaxed regulatory safeguards and allowed them to be paid back 25 to 40 years in the future. The problem is that from the time the bonds are issued until payment is due, interest accrues and compounds at exorbitant rates, requiring a balloon payment in the millions of dollars. . . .

Wall Street exploited the school boards’ lack of business acumen and proposed the bonds as blank checks written against taxpayers’ pocketbooks. One school administrator described a Wall Street meeting to discuss the system as like “swimming with the big sharks.”

Wall Street has preyed on these school boards because of the millions of dollars in commissions. Banks, financial advisers and credit rating firms have billed California public entities almost $400 million since 2007. [State Treasurer] Lockyer described this as “part of the ‘new’ Wall Street,” which “has done this kind of thing on the private investor side for years, then the housing market and now its public entities.”

Gullible school districts agreed to these payday-like loans because they needed the facilities, the voters would not agree to higher taxes, and state educational funding was exhausted. School districts wound up sporting shiny new gymnasiums and auditoriums while they were cutting back on teachers and increasing classroom sizes. (AB1388 covers only long-term capital improvements, not daily operating expenses.) The folly of the bonds was reminiscent of those boondoggles pushed on Third World countries by the World Bank and IMF, trapping them under a mountain of debt that continued to compound decades later.

The Federal Reserve could have made virtually-interest-free loans available to local governments, as it did for banks. But the Fed (whose twelve branches are 100% owned by private banks) declined. As noted by Cate Long on Reuters:

The Fed has said that it will not buy muni bonds or lend directly to states or municipal issuers. But be sure if yields rise high enough Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan will be standing ready to “save” these issuers. There is no “lender of last resort” for muniland.

Debt for the Next Generation

Among the hundreds of California school districts signing up for CABs werefifteen in Orange County. The Anaheim-based Savanna School District took on the costliest of these bonds, issuing $239,721 in CABs in 2009 for which it will have to repay $3.6 million by the final maturity date in 2034. That works out to$15 for every $1 borrowed.

Santa Ana Unified issued $34.8 million in CABs in 2011. It will have to repay $305.5 million by the maturity date in 2047, or $9.76 for every dollar borrowed.

Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified issued $22.1 million in capital appreciation bonds in 2011. It will have to repay $281 million by the maturity date in 2049, or $12.73 for every dollar borrowed.

In 2013, California finally passed a law limiting debt service on CABs to four times principal, and limiting their maturity to a maximum of 25 years. But the bill is not retroactive. In several decades, the 400 cities that have been drawn into these shark-infested waters could be facing municipal bankruptcy – for capital “improvements” that will by then be obsolete and need to be replaced.

Then-State Treasurer Bill Lockyer called the bonds “debt for the next generation.” But some economists argue that it is a transfer of wealth, not between generations, but between classes – from the poor to the rich. Capital investments were once funded with property taxes, particularly those paid by wealthy homeowners and corporations. But California’s property tax receipts were slashed by Proposition 13 and the housing crisis, forcing school costs to be borne by middle-class households and the students themselves.

The same kind of funding shift has occurred in college education nationally. Tuition at public universities and colleges was at one time free. But in successive economic downturns, states have made up for shortfalls in educational budgets by raising tuition. By 2012, tuition was covering 44% of the operating expenses of public higher education. According to a March 2014 report by Demos, 7 out of 10 college seniors now borrow, and their average debt on graduation is over $29,000. The result nationally is a student debt that has grown to $1.5 trillion.

The State that Escaped: North Dakota ...

According to Demos, per-student funding has been slashed since 2008 in every state but one – the indomitable North Dakota. What is so different about that state? Some commentators credit the oil boom, but other states with oil have not fared so well. And the boom did not actually hit in North Dakota until 2010. The budget of every state but North Dakota had already slipped into the red by the spring of 2009.

One thing that does single the state out is that North Dakota alone has its own depository bank. The state-owned Bank of North Dakota (BND) was making 1% loans to school districts even in December 2014, when global oil prices had dropped by half. That month, the BND granted a $10 million construction loan to McKenzie County Public School No. 1, at an interest rate of 1% payable over 20 years. Over the life of the loan, that works out to $.20 in simple interest or $.22 in compound interest for every $1 borrowed. Compare that to the $15 owed for every dollar borrowed by Anaheim’s Savanna School District or the $10 owed for every dollar borrowed by Santa Ana Unified.

How can the BND afford to make these very low interest loans and still turn a profit? The answer is that its costs are very low. It has no exorbitantly-paid executives; pays no bonuses, fees, or commissions; pays no dividends to private shareholders; and has low borrowing costs. It does not need to advertise for depositors (it has a captive deposit base in the state itself) or for borrowers (it is a wholesale bank that partners with local banks, which find the borrowers). The BND also has no losses from derivative trades gone wrong. It engages in old-fashioned conservative banking and does not speculate in derivatives. Unlike the vampire squids of Wall Street, it is not motivated to maximize its bottom line in a predatory way. Its mandate is simply to serve the public interest.

North Dakota currently has a population of about 740,000, or the size of Santa Ana and Anaheim combined. If a coalition of several such cities were to form a municipally-owned bank, they too could have their own low-cost capital funding mechanism, allowing them to escape the budget-sucking tentacles of Wall Street’s vampire squids.

Ellen Brown is an attorney, chairman of the Public Banking Institute, and author of twelve books including the bestselling Web of Debt. In her latest book, The Public Bank Solution, she explores successful public banking models historically and globally. She is currently running for California State Treasurer on a state bank platform.

1014

Power Players Behind the Corporate Takeover of Pennsylvania Schools

NEW REPORT FROM CMD! In 2007, Philly rolled out the red carpet for state legislators and lobbyists attending the annual “State and Nation” policy summit of the American Legislative Exchange Council. Pennsylvania legislators appropriated a whopping $50,000 of taxpayer money to help pay for the event, including $3,000 for cheesecake lollipops.

:{Read our new report on power players in Pennsylvania.:(style="outline:none;background-color:#ffffff;"):}:

This year, ALEC has a new executive director, Lisa Britton Nelson, who is a former lobbyist forVisa and AOL Time Warner -- both of which have had ties to ALEC -- and also worked with Newt Gingrich and GOPAC. Several new companies also recently joined its "Private Enterprise Advisory Council": NetChoice, the National Federation of Independent Business, and K12 Inc.

Changing Laws Providing for Public Education

The "Affordable Baccalaureate Degree Act" would enrich companies invested in online college degree programs and materials -- like Pearson (whose subsidiary Connections Education has been a prominent member of ALEC's Education Task Force), which sells the LearningStudio platform used by many universities like Arizona State University'spopular and much-hyped online degree program. It would "require all pubic [sic] four-year universities to offer bachelor's degrees costing no more than $10,000, total, for four years of tuition, fees, and books. The Act would require that ten percent of all public, four-year university degrees awarded reach this price-point within four years of passage of this act." The bill instructs universities to focus on online and blended learning "to achieve this price-point."
The "Public Charter Schools Act" would expand on ALEC's pre-existing "Next Generation Charter Schools Act" and enrich ALEC members like K12, Inc., the nation's largest provider of online charter schools or cyber schools. It would allow privately-operated charter schools to continue taking public funds, but without public accountability. The bill would give charter schools carte blanche to operate without being "subject to the state's education statutes or any state or local rule, regulation, policy, or procedure relating to non-charter public schools within an applicable local school district..."
The related "Public Charter Schools Funding Act" restates charters' autonomy from the rule of law and democratically-elected school boards while still giving each charter school "one hundred percent" of the state and federal education funding "calculated pursuant to the state's funding formula for school districts."

===

wu teach clan: koch

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/16/koch-brothers-education_n_5587577.html?utm_hp_ref=tw

...The official mission of Youth Entrepreneurs is to provide kids with "business and entrepreneurial education and experiences that help them prosper and become contributing members of society." The underlying goal of the program, however, is to impart Koch's radical free-market ideology to teenagers. In the last school year, the class reached more than 1,000 students across Kansas and Missouri.

Lesson plans and class materials obtained by The Huffington Post make the course's message clear: The minimum wage hurts workers and slows economic growth. Low taxes and less regulation allow people to prosper. Public assistance harms the poor. Government, in short, is the enemy of liberty.

Though YE has avoided the public spotlight, the current structure of the program began to take shape in November 2009, documents show, when a team of associates at the Charles G. Koch Foundation launched an important project with Charles Koch's blessing: They would design and test what they called "a high school free market and liberty-based course" with support from members of the Koch family's vast nonprofit and political network. A pilot version of the class would be offered the following spring to students at the Wichita Collegiate School, an elite private prep school in Kansas where Koch was a top donor.

First, the Koch team chose its mascot: a golden eagle holding a knife in its beak. They also assigned each other nicknames: Ol' Mucky Terrahawk, Mighty Killer, Big Gay Mule, Midnight Bandit and the Erratic Assassin. The group dubbed itself the "Wu-Teach Clan."

Over the next six months, members of the Wu-Teach Clan exchanged hundreds of emails with one another and with Koch lieutenants. Theyhashed out a strategy to infiltrate public schools after surveys showed that the wealthy prep school students largely failed to absorb their libertarian message. We know all this because the Wu-Teach Clan used a Google groupthat it had left open to the public.

The emails show that Charles Koch had a hands-on role in the design of the high school curriculum, directly reviewing the work of those responsible for setting up the course. The goal, the group said flatly, was to turn young people into "liberty-advancing agents" before they went to college, where they might learn "harmful" liberal ideas.

The Koch Foundation did not respond to requests for comment.

Charles Koch founded Youth Entrepreneurs in 1991 with his wife, Elizabeth Koch, who serves as chairman of the group's board. For much of the past two decades, YE offered little more than a pilot program teaching basic business skills -- and seemed an afterthought compared to the Kochs' massive investments in the political sphere. But the Kochs have renewed their focus on YE in recent years, pumping millions of dollars into it, expanding it considerably and molding it to project their worldview.

In 2007, YE reported assets of just over $450,000. In 2012, its assets topped$1.45 million. The lion's share of this growth was fueled by Koch family foundations.

During the 2012-2013 school year, YE's credit-bearing class reached more than 1,000 students in 29 schools in Kansas and Missouri, according to the group's annual report. Vernon Birmingham, YE's director of curriculum and teacher support, told HuffPost that the course will be in 42 schools in the coming school year. An offshoot in Atlanta, YE Georgia, reported being in 10 schools in the 2011-2012 school year. Since 2012, YE has also launched three major new initiatives: an online version of its course, an affiliate program to help rural schools access the class, and an after-school program, YE Academy, which served more than 500 students in its first year.

With spending on public education under heavy assault -- in large part by Koch-funded organizations and politicians they support -- the nation's poorest school districts are in desperate need of resources, making the free Koch curriculum an attractive alternative to nothing.....

funded by CA rw $ guy

The Vergara Verdict: Tenure and Seniority Laws Ruled Unconstitutional in California

By dianeravitch

June 10, 2014

Here are two accounts of the decision in the Vergara trial. This one appears in politico.com. This one appears in the New York Times.

The plaintiffs argued that poor and minority children suffered because they had ineffective teachers who could not be fired. Lawyers for the teachers unions maintained that the causes of low performance were poverty and inadequate school funding. The plaintiffs prevailed and promised to take their cause to other states with strong teacher job protections, like New Jersey and New York.

There will be appeals, and the battle will spread to other states. As due process is removed, it seems to be replaced by evaluations of “effectiveness” based on test scores.

The Disturbing Link Between ADHD and Conservative Education Reform

March 2, 2014 |

There has been a lot of public agonizing lately about the steep rise in diagnoses of ADHD over the last two decades. There is growing, and justifiable, worry that a lot of kids are being put on stimulant medications who don’t need them.

What there hasn’t been is a plausible theory about what’s driving this explosion of diagnoses — 40 percent over the last decade and more than 50 percent over 25 years. The CDC now estimates that 12 percent of school age kids, and as many as 20 percent of teenage boys have been diagnosed with ADHD.

Blame has been directed at parents, for being so poor at discipline that they reach for a pill to make unruly kids settle down. Teachers are blamed for being so inept at maintaining order that they want students medicated into submission. Psychiatrists are blamed for being the pawns of drug companies peddling ADHD meds. But blaming doesn’t explain it. It’s not credible that an increase of this magnitude comes from individual parents, teachers and doctors suddenly pathologizing ordinary child and adolescent behavior. In my experience, most parents are quite reluctant to put their kids on psychotropic medication unless they’re in serious distress.

Now comes a book that, finally, offers a data-based analysis that could begin to account for an increase on this scale. “The ADHD Explosion [2],“ by Stephen Hinshaw and Richard Scheffler, considers all kinds of factors that may contribute to the surge, from diagnosis by undertrained and harried pediatricians to pharmaceutical advertising.But the eye-opening insight from Hinshaw, a clinical psychologist, and Schleffler, a health economist, who are colleagues at University of California, Berkeley, is the correlation between educational policies and the prevalence of ADHD diagnoses.

Using Centers for Disease Control surveys, [3] Hinshaw and Sheffler found that when rates of ADHD diagnoses are broken down by state, it turns out that there are dramatic discrepancies. Based on the most recent survey, from 2011, a child in Kentucky is three times as likely to be diagnosed with ADHD as a child in Nevada. And a child in Louisiana is five times as likely to take medication for ADHD as a child in Nevada.

And these states aren’t just outliers. The five states that have the highest rate of diagnoses — Kentucky, Arkansas, Louisiana, Indiana and North Carolina — are all over 10 percent of school age children. The five states with the lowest percent diagnosed — Nevada, New Jersey, Colorado, Utah and California — are all under 5 percent. The disparity is even greater for kids prescribed ADHD medication. The same five states are at the top of the list, all of them with over 8 percent of kids getting medication. The states at the bottom of the list for medication — Nevada, Hawaii, California, Alaska and New Jersey — are all under 3.1 percent.

The authors set out to look for factors that could account for those sharp discrepancies.

“We thought it might have to do with the supply of providers — how many pediatricians or child psychiatrists in a given region — or the ways states supplement Medicaid,” explains Hinshaw. “It might have to do with advertising. But it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that most kids first get noticed for ADHD in a classroom setting. So we wondered, are there policies about schooling that might be relevant?”

What the team found was that high rates of ADHD diagnoses correlated closely with state laws that penalize schools when students fail. Nationally, this approach to education was enacted into law in 2001 with No Child Left Behind, which makes funding contingent on the number of students who pass standardized tests. In more recent years, similar testing-based strategies have been championed by education reformers such as Michelle Rhee. But many states passed these accountability laws as early as the 1980s, and within a few years of passage, ADHD diagnoses started going up in those states, the authors found, especially for kids near the poverty line.

ADHD diagnoses of public school students within 200 percent of the federal poverty level jumped 59 percent after accountability legislation passed, Hinshaw reports, compared with less than 10 percent for middle- and high-income children.They saw no comparable trend in private schools, which are not subject to legislation like this.

How do ADHD diagnoses help schools at risk of losing their funding? First, Hinshaw notes, for kids who do have ADHD, it should improve their performance in school, including their test scores. Second, it may help kids who are disruptive in class settle down, which could improve scores for the whole class. Finally, in many areas, the test scores of student with ADHD diagnoses aren’t counted. So even it if it doesn’t help the child, it might help the school.

By the time No Child Left Behind was signed into law, 30 states had already passed these accountability statutes. The maps of those states and the states that have high ADHD rates look remarkably similar — mostly Southern states, with a few in the Midwest.

This correlation between accountability laws and ADHD diagnosis is just that — a correlation. “But it’s close to a smoking gun for us,” Hinshaw notes. And it demonstrates how important it is to start looking seriously at economic and social pressures that might be shaping this wave of diagnoses, influencing what happens when a parent and child are sitting in the pediatrician’s office, where most ADHD medications are prescribed.

It doesn’t mean that ADHD isn’t a real thing, with a biological basis. Hinshaw and Scheffler are very clear about that. But it does underscore our worry that misdiagnoses are being handed out by doctors with little time, little training in psychiatric disorders, and a lot of pressure to do something to help kids who are failing.

ADHD is what clinicians call a “dimensional” disorder; all kids fall somewhere on a spectrum for inattention, hyperactivity and impulsivity. Only kids on an extreme end of the spectrum really fit the diagnosis. But pressure to perform at schools that are rigidly focused on test-taking may be causing kids lower on the spectrum to be swept into the diagnosis.

The trouble is that, taken separately, the symptoms associated with ADHD can be caused byother things [4]. Distraction and impulsivity and acting out in class[5] are often caused by undiagnosed anxiety, learning disorders or trauma and chaos at home — things that don’t respond to ADHD medication. Kids with these problems need and deserve treatment, too, but what’s most effective is often behavioral treatment and skill building that doesn’t involve medication. Teachers need better training [6] in skills that have been shown to diminish disruptive behavior in their classrooms. Pediatricians need better training in diagnosing what’s causing problem behavior in kids, other than ADHD.

What doesn’t help is subjecting ADHD to what Hinshaw and Sheffler call “major league ridicule” in the press. The authors note a 2012 editorial in the New York Times that reported a crisis in high blood pressure in the United States, at a much higher rate than that of ADHD, and urged steps to get care to people who aren’t managing their hypertension effectively, through medication, diet and lifestyle changes. “If the same tone from the spate of anti-ADHD stories in 2012 and 2013 had been applied to blood pressure,” Hinshaw and Sheffler write, “op-ed and opinion pieces on hypertension would have castigated the weak personal will of those with high blood pressure readings and equated medication use with laziness and moral turpitude.”

That ridicule doesn’t help anyone, particularly children who struggle in a learning environment that is unrecognizable to many of us. Let’s stop blaming parents, teachers and doctors, and instead help them find ways to help kids succeed in school, and in life, whether or not they have ADHD.

See more stories tagged with:

adhd [7],

michelle rhee [8],

education reform [9],

ritalin [10],

adderall [11],

education [12],

standardized testing [13],

North Carolina Becomes the Front Line of a Brutal Corporate Assault on Education Raging in America

July 31, 2013 |

Corporate education forces are on a destructive march throughout the U.S. While busting teachers' unions has been long been an initiative of the GOP and Christian Right, it’s also on the agendas of urban mayors like Chicago Democrat Rahm Emmanuel and New York City independent Michael Bloomberg. And it’s a large component of the regressive agenda that has sparked mass popular uprisings in Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s Wisconsin.

Enter the notoriously right-wing North Carolina General Assembly. The NCGA has been on the warpath since 2010, when the Tea Party took the state legislature and for the first time in over 150 years of NC history, conservatives gained control of both houses. Since coming to power, they have mounted vicious attacks on voting rights, abortion rights, Medicaid access, unemployment benefits, and public education.

The extreme agenda has prompted the North Carolina NAACP and its president, Rev. Dr. William Barber [3], to spearhead the Forward Together [4] coalition movement, a broad-based group of 150 organizations [5] in the state, including everything from NARAL Pro-Choice NC to Black Workers for Justice joining together in the fight. The coalition is best-known for drawing tens of thousands to the General Assembly between April and July to protest the aggressive legislative session. The protests galvanized public support throughout the state and led to 925 civil disobedience-related arrests [6] in the NCGA.

It’s no accident that the NC-NAACP-led coalition has made public education a rallying point. Rev. Dr. Barber first gained widespread recognition [3] in the state for his advocacy on behalf of public schools. He became a central figure in Triangle-area organizing against the resegregation of Chapel Hill/Carrboro schools, as well as school choice policies in Wake County that would have destroyed the area’s progress fostering diversity and equal opportunity.

Privatized Education Takes NC by Storm—And NC Teacher Association Fights Back

So the NC-NAACP and its coalition partners were ready when the GOP mounted a full-on assault on public education: In 2013 alone, North Carolina deregulated charter school administration, introduced school vouchers into the state budget, terminated most teaching assistants, raised class sizes, reduced funding for schools, ended supplemental teacher pay for graduate education and dismantled due process protection for teachers, called tenure. The new budget provided no teacher raise – remarkable only because it marked a six-year period in which teachers received virtually no raises and only one 1 percent raise to cover new health insurance costs.

Now North Carolina, long near the bottom in teacher pay, is lowest in teacher salary growth [7]. Plus, the state is rapidly approaching the bottom [8] when it comes to per-capita student spending. The cuts were so severe that when the punitive state budget passed almost two weeks ago, school superintendent June Atkinson, who usually stays below the radar of education politics, noted that she was worried about students [9] in North Carolina for the first time in 30 years.

The GOP’s attacks on education have antagonized the state’s major teacher union affiliate, the North Carolina Association of Educators [10], which assumed a leading role in the Moral Monday protests after the draconian budget passed. President Rodney Ellis spoke at the July 22 rally, where he said [11] he committed disobedience on behalf of the more than 95,000 teachers and 1.5 million students who would be negatively affected by the state budget. He also challenged teachers to play an active role on July 29, the final Raleigh Moral Monday protest of 2013.

Like every other Moral Monday, the final one had a theme: This time it was the future of education in North Carolina. According to organizers, the protest drew an estimated 10,000 participants. Teachers wearing “red for public ed” T-shirts crowded the lawn by the NCGA Building that day, and helped lead the march to Fayetteville Street. The downtown area became a sea of protest signs contesting corporate education “reforms “with messages like, “Say no to vouchers,” “I’m a teacher, not a tester,” “I teach the new voters of 2014,” “Just another public school teacher with a second job” and many others.

Barbara Parramore, 81, began her education career in Raleigh in 1954, serving as a teacher, principal and then NC State professor until her retirement in 1996. Though her career began during Jim Crow, Parramore says the future of education in the state looks bleaker now than at any time she remembers in the past. This is why on May 20, she committed civil disobedience alongside other protesters and suffered arrest (an experience she chronicled for AlterNet) [12].

Harnett County principal Angela Hill and teacher Gary Hill (husband and wife) share Parramore’s dreary assessment. Angela Hill, an educator of 12 years, tells AlterNet that finding and hiring good teachers is becoming more difficult. “Educators in North Carolina never wanted to go to South Carolina before, but now we have teachers and principals who are beginning to look for jobs there.”

Seventeen-year teaching veteran Gary Hill, meanwhile, discusses the inequitable system that vouchers and under-regulated charter schools will create. He also worries that dismantling pay raises for graduate education will diminish incentives for teachers to acquire greater expertise.

Retired Lenoir County public school teacher Lendell Wayne, who taught for 33 and a half years, says the changes “will be disastrous for the students of North Carolina. The very future of our children depends on every person who took time out to come to Moral Monday and take part in this struggle.” She says the policies will benefit an already privileged minority of students while leaving the masses in the dust, and she strongly opposes the use of her tax dollars to fund private school tuition.

North Carolina’s Historic Resistance to For-Profit Education

In Chicago, Mayor Emanuel has made fighting the Chicago Teachers Union—and replacing so-called “failed schools” with charters managed by for-profit companies—a central component of his program for the city. But North Carolina’s education landscape did not look much like that of Chicago in 2010 when the GOP took power. Because of North Carolina’s status as a right-to-work state and its generations-long suppression of labor organizing, the NCAE never had nearly as much leverage in negotiations as the Chicago Teachers Union.

But the story isn’t quite so simple. While North Carolina labor policy has always been backward, the state has served as an example of progressive approaches to education policy in other ways. During the late 1940s, Parramore says, the public became more aware that education opportunities for white and black students should be equalized. So an initiative to build better facilities for black schools meant that some were in better condition than white schools. In 1948, schools began paying equal salaries to white and black teachers, also a forward-thinking initiative for its time.

That the state government never really blocked challenges to Jim Crow made NC an unusual case. Over decades, the state—and especially the cities—developed a culture that was enthusiastic about promoting educational equity and student diversity. This is why many large school systems emerged during the 1970s and 1980s; the urban/suburban mix in places like Wake County allowed educational resources to be distributed equitably across large, diverse school districts.

While the populism that always inflected state education policy never quite helped unions, it did render the state more suspicious of the large-scale corporate reforms further along in other states. Policies that advanced disparity were looked on with disdain among both Democrats and some Republicans. Even former Wake County school board chair Bill Fletcher, a Christian conservative who pushed for abstinence-only education policies in the 1990s, backed Wake’s popular diversity policy. Wake was one of the South’s most successful turnarounds from the days of Jim Crow. Such idealism could be found virtually nowhere else in the U.S., not even in the Northeast’s highly segregated schools.

Before 2010, the state resisted opening its schools to expansive charter proliferation because charters are known [13] to entrench inequality and cause racial segregation in schools. Charters were capped, and Chicago-style “chain store” schools were never a part of the educational landscape. Those charter schools that did get off the ground were usually small parent- and/or teacher-led entities that had very little in common with Chicago charters.

While the right wing in other Southern states has long pushed vouchers—that is, the diversion of public resources into private school tuition—they were never part of the political discussion in NC, not even among state Republicans like former Governor Jim Martin. Even the state’s powerful Christian Right contingent has been slow to pick up the cause as a talking point or major policy initiative. Rather than pushing for vouchers, the movement has traditionally isolated itself in homeschools and private Christian schools.

It took a Tea Party super-majority in both houses of the General Assembly—and a puppet governor in Republican McCrory—to turn this tide. But now that it has turned, Barbara Parramore tells AlterNet, the progressive legacies of North Carolina public education could take generations to restore and the best things about North Carolina education are disappearing. So educators will continue the fight.

What’s Next?

No one denies the seriousness of the problem: This is one of the most severely GOP-gerrymandered states in the U.S. Combined with new voting restrictions, the redrawn voting map will make it difficult to unseat Republicans. Though barely 20 percent [14] of North Carolinians approve of the NCGA’s work thus far, true democratic elections will be difficult at best.

Teachers understand that a long-term battle is needed to stem the tide of Tea Party politics and save public schools. But many are hopeful since, like so many other North Carolinians, they are energized by Barber’s insistence that Tarheels must never again succumb to Old South politics.

Looking ahead, "Mountain Moral Monday" takes place in Asheville on August 5, and after that the movement goes on tour. Over the coming months, it will organize statewide resistance before the next legislative session and resumption of Raleigh protests. Meanwhile, the NC-NAACP and coalition partners have mounted what Rev. William Barber calls the “most aggressive” legal battle against civil rights challenges North Carolinians have seen in 50 years.

I have always said that North Carolina contains the very best and the very worst things about the U.S. The Moral Monday movement shows the state at its gentle—and deeply inclusive—best. If anyone can make a difference, it's these people. “What do we do?” Barber has often asked the crowd. “We fight, we fight, we fight” everyone responds. And given the righteous indignation of the charismatic preacher, people begin to believe they can really win

8/1/13 cmd extensive coverage, eg vouchers: http://www.prwatch.org/news/2013/07/12175/cashing-kids139-alec-bills-2013-promote-private-profit-education-model

Cashing in on Kids: 139 ALEC Bills in 2013 Promote a Private, For-Profit Education Model

by Brendan Fischer — July 16, 2013 - 7:55am

Topics: Corporations, Democracy, Education

Projects: ALEC Exposed

ALEC Vouchers Transfer Taxpayer Money to Private and Religious Schools

News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch has called public education a "a $500 billion sector in the U.S. alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed."

But this "transformation" of public education -- from an institution that serves the public into one that serves private for-profit interests -- has been in progress for decades, thanks in large part to ALEC.

ALEC boasts on the "history" section of its website that it first started promoting "such 'radical' ideas as a [educational] voucher system" in 1983 -- the same year as the Reagan administration's "Nation At Risk" report -- taking up ideas first articulated decades earlier by ALEC supporter Milton Friedman.

In 1990, Milwaukee was the first city in the nation to implement a school voucher program, under then-governor (and ALEC alum) Tommy Thompson. ALEC quickly embracedthe legislation, and that same year offered model bills based on the Wisconsin plan. For-profit schools in Wisconsin now receive up to $6,442 per voucher student, and by the end of the next school year taxpayers in the state will have transferred an estimated $1.8 billion to for-profit, religious, and online schools. The "pricetag" for students in other states is even higher.

In the years since, pro

n the years since, programs to divert taxpayer money from public to private schools have spread across the country. In the 2012-2013 school year, it is estimated that nearly 246,000 students will participate in various iterations of so-called "choice" programs in 16 states and the District of Columbia -- draining the public school system of critically-needed funds, and in some cases covering private school tuition for students whose parents are able and willing to pay.

But promised improvements in educational outcomes have not followed. "If vouchers are designed to create better educational outcomes, research has not borne out that result," says Julie Mead, chair of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin. "If vouchers are such a great idea," after twenty years in effect, "they would have borne fruit by now."

The ALEC education agenda also fits into the organization's broader attack on unions: by lowering teacher certification standards and funneling public money to non-unionized private schools, ALEC undermines teachers unions, which guarantee fair wages and working conditions and are a major political force that have traditionally backed the Democratic Party.

ALEC Education Bills Undermine Free, Universal Public Education

ALEC-influenced bills introduced in 2013 include legislation to:

Create or expand taxpayer-funded voucher programs, using bills such as the "Parental Choice Scholarship Act" (introduced in three states). Under many state constitutions, the use of public dollars to fund religious institutions has been rejected on separation-of-powers grounds, but the ALEC Great Schools Tax Credit Act, introduced in ten states in 2013, bypasses state constitutional provisions and offers a form of private school tuition tax credits that funnel taxpayer dollars to private schools with even less public accountability than with regular vouchers.
Carve-out vouchers for students with special needs, regardless of family income, through the "Special Needs Scholarship Program Act" (introduced in twelve states), which sends vulnerable children to for-profit schools not bound by federal and state legal requirements to meet a student's special needs, as public schools must. A proposal in Wisconsin would have allocated up to $14,658 to a for-profit school for each special needs student.
Send taxpayer dollars to unaccountable online school providers through the "Virtual Schools Act,"introduced in three states, where a single teacher remotely teaches a "class" of hundreds of isolated students working from home. The low overhead for virtual schools certainly raises company profits, but it is a model few educators think is a appropriate for young children.
Offer teaching credentials to individuals with subject-matter experience but no education background with the Alternative Certification Act, introduced in seven states. The bill is part of ALEC's ongoing effort to undermine unionized workers and promote a race to the bottom in wages and benefits for American workers.
Require that educators "teach the controversy" when it comes to topics like climate change -- where the only disagreement is political, not scientific -- through the Environmental Literacy Improvement Act, introduced in five states.
Create opportunities to privatize public schools or fire teachers and principals via referendum with the controversial Parent Trigger Act (glorified in the flop film "Won't Back Down"), introduced in twelve states. First passed in California, a modified Parent Trigger bill was brought to ALEC in 2010 by the Illinois-based Heartland Institute, which is perhaps best known for controversial billboards comparing people who believe in climate change to mass murderers like the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski.
Create an appointed, state-level charter school authorizing board through the Next Generation Charter Schools Act, introduced in seven states, which effectively shields charters from democratic accountability. The legislation "would wrest control from school boards, and likewise from the community that elects those school boards," Mead says, since it takes away their power to authorize charters in the community.

ALEC Corporations Reap the Rewards

Some of the for-profit corporations profiting from the ALEC Education privatization agenda include:

"Amplify," the newly-created education division of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, parent company of Fox News. News Corp is on the ALEC Education Task Force. In 2010, News Corp hired former New York City chancellor Joel Klein to run its education division, which includes the for-profit education company formerly known as Wireless Generation. The firm has big plans for a specialized "Amplify Tablet" that would provide lesson plans, textbooks and testing to cash-in on new "Common Core" required state standards.

K12 Inc., the nation's largest provider of online charter schools, where low-paid teachers manage as many as 250 students at a time and communicate with their pupils only through email and phone. The corporation, whose CEO Ron Packard received $5 million in total compensation in 2011 (and owns around $24 million in shares), is on the ALEC Education Task Force and its lobbyist Lisa Gillis has Chaired ALEC's Special Needs Subcommittee. According to a report in the *New York Times*, students in K12, Inc. schools often perform very poorly, and some K12 teachers claim that they have been encouraged to pass failing students so that the company can receive more reimbursement from states. K12 receives an average of between $5,500 and $6,000 for every student on its rosters -- the same amount that would be spent for students attending a brick-and-mortar school, despite K12 not having to pay for cafeteria, gyms, busing, or heat and air conditioning -- and much of K12's profits are spent on advertising targeted at increasing enrollment, rather than on investments in education. At K12's Agora Cyber Charter School, which produces more than 10% of the company's revenue, nearly 60% of students are behind grade level in math, nearly 50% are behind in reading, and a third do not graduate on time.

Corinthian Colleges is a for-profit college chain that operates campuses under names like Everest, Heald, and WyoTech, in addition to offering degrees online. It has become notorious for aggressive recruiting practices and leaving students unprepared for the job market and saddled with massive student loan debts. In Milwaukee, for example, where a Corinthian Everest campus was financed with $11 million in city bonds,just 25% of students found jobs and over half dropped out; the campus closed two years after it opened. Nationally, over 40 percent of Corinthian's students default on their loans, and only 60% of students complete their coursework. In June, Corinthian disclosed that it is under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and has been subpoenaed by California's Attorney General for its recruiting practices and financial responsibility.

Ideological Interests Lift the ALEC Agenda

An array of right-wing nonprofits also promote the school privatization agenda in ALEC.

The 501(c)(4) American Federation for Children and its 501(c)(3) wing the Alliance for Children, for example, have brought an array of privatization bills to ALEC and promoted the legislation across the country. The groups were organized and are funded by the billionaire DeVos family (heirs to the Amway fortune); Richard DeVos has received the ALEC "Adam Smith Free Enterprise Award." AFC's top lobbyist is disgraced former Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Scott Jensen, who was convicted of three felonies for misuse of his office for political purposes and banned from the state Capitol for five years (though the charges were later reversed and dropped as part of a plea agreement). Jensen represents the organization on the ALEC Education Task Force and has brought AFC bills to ALEC for adoption as "model" legislation. AFCspent at least $7 million electing privatization-friendly state legislators across the country in 2012, butreported far less to state election authorities.

In addition to the DeVos family foundations, the Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation is one of the top school privatization funders in the country, spending over $31 million over the past eleven years promoting "school choice" nationwide, according to One Wisconsin Now; for decades, Bradley has also been a major ALEC funder. The foundation has over $600 million in assets and is headed by Michael Grebe, Scott Walker's campaign co-chair.

Before Milwaukee became the first city in the nation to implement a school voucher program, Bradleybankrolled the groups that laid the groundwork. When the plan was challenged in Wisconsin courts, Bradleyfunded its legal defense, which included hiring Kenneth Starr -- later known for pursuing Bill Clinton over Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky -- to represent the state.

Average Americans Pay the Price....http://www.prwatch.org/node/12175

Former Indiana Superintendent, Lauded by ALEC and Education Privatizers, Cheats on School Grading Formula for Top Donor

by Brendan Fischer [1] — July 30, 2013 - 10:26am

Topics: Education [2]

Projects: ALEC Exposed [3]

Share this [4]

New documents show that former Indiana Schools Superintendent Tony Bennett -- who now heads Florida's schools -- overhauled Indiana's much-heralded school grading system to guarantee that a charter run by a major campaign donor would receive top marks. These revelations shine a light on the big bucks behind the education privatization agenda, its continued failure to meet the need of students, and provides another instance of cheating to cover up poor educational outcomes.

Bennett had been applauded by education privatizers like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) for enacting reforms like school grading, vouchers, and anti-union measures. He was a keynote [5] speaker [6] at ALEC's December 2011 States and Nation Policy Summit, and the education reforms he pushed were adopted by ALEC [7] in August 2011 [8] as a stand-alone bill called the "Indiana Education Reform Package" -- in no small part because they reflected ALEC model legislation.

"This will be a HUGE problem for us"

Christel DeHaan, a big Republican donor in Indiana and school privatization supporter, gave Bennett an astounding $130,000 in campaign contributions for his 2008 and 2012 elections. But when DeHaan's Christel House charter school received a "C" last September under Bennett's grading system, he and his staff scrambled to fix it, according to emails obtained by the Associated Press [9].

"They need to understand that anything less than an A for Christel House compromises all of our accountability work," Bennett wrote in a Sept. 12 email to then-chief of staff Heather Neal, who is now Gov. Mike Pence's chief lobbyist.

Bennett had made the A to F grading system a signature item of his 2011 radical education reforms, which he spearheaded with the support of then-Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels and ALEC legislators in the state [10]. Bennett often cited Christel House as a model charter school as he secured support for his education overhaul, and according to the emails [11] had assured the Chamber of Commerce and legislative leaders that Christel was an "A" school.

"This will be a HUGE problem for us," Bennett wrote to Neal about the school's "C" grade.

Neal emailed back a few minutes later: "Oh, crap. We cannot release until this is resolved."

"Legislative leadership as well as critics of A-F are going to use this against us to undo our accountability metrics through legislation," Bennett wrote in another email. "I hope we come to the meeting today with solutions and not excuses and/or explanations for me to wiggle myself out of the repeated lies I have told over the past six months."

According to the Associated Press, Bennett's staff scrambled to alter the grading system over the next week, and Christel House's grade jumped twice, eventually reaching an "A."

Indiana Has No Campaign Contribution Limits

In most states, a donor like DeHaan would be prohibited from directly giving a candidate tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, but Indiana has no campaign contribution limits for superintendent.

Bennett, first elected in 2008, raised an astounding amount of money [12] for his 2012 reelection campaign: DeHaan gave $75,000, and was one of Bennett's top donors, behind Wal-Mart heir Alice Walton, another major school privatization funder, who gave him $200,000. Other donors [13] included voucher proponent Eli Broad ($50,000) and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg ($40,000).

He also got $45,000 [12] from Hoosiers for Education Reform, a group bankrolled by the DeVos family's American Federation for Children, which itself has run into some campaign finance problems. As CMD has documented [14], AFC boasted to funders in 2012 that it spent $2.4 million in Wisconsin helping elect nine Wisconsin state legislators, but told the state's Government Accountability Board that it spent only $345,000 that year.

But despite significantly outraising his opponent, voters rejected Bennett and his education reform agenda, in what the head of the teacher's union called the biggest upset in Indiana history.

Money may not have bought that election, but given these latest email revelations, it sure did seem to buy some special treatment.

How Common is Cheating?

For years, educational reformers have promoted the notion that schools need to be run more like a business, with "competition" from for-profit entities and increased "accountability" through testing regimes. But the promised improvements in educational outcomes have not followed, apparently leading some to cook the books.

Perhaps the best-known cheating scandal came from former Washington, D.C., school Chancellor Michelle Rhee, whose controversial reforms had been credited with improving test scores in the District's schools -- an accomplishment that has been cast into doubt by evidence of widespread cheating, where teachers or school officials appeared to change students' incorrect test answers to improve results. Investigations have found extremely high erasure rates that were statistically anomalous, and some charter schools have been cited [15].

Despite these scandals, both Rhee and Bennett have moved on to greener pastures. After resigning from her position in 2010, Rhee went on to found the 501(c)(4) StudentsFirst, and after Bennett's election loss in Indiana, he was appointed by Florida Governor Rick Scott to head that state's school system.

Update August 1: Bennett has resigned from his post in Florida [16], citing the Indiana cheating scandal.

Center for Media and Democracy • 520 University Avenue, Suite 260 • Madison, Wisconsin 53703

Phone: 608-260-9713 • Fax: 608-260-9714

Source URL: http://www.prwatch.org/news/2013/07/12198/former-indiana-superintendent-lauded-alec-and-education-privatizers-cheats-school

Links:

[1] http://www.prwatch.org/users/35275/brendan-fischer

[2] http://www.prwatch.org/topics/education

[3] http://www.prwatch.org/projects/alec-exposed

[4] http://www.addtoany.com/share_save?linkurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.prwatch.org%2Fnews%2F2013%2F07%2F12198%2Fformer-indiana-superintendent-lauded-alec-and-education-privatizers-cheats-school&linkname=Former%20Indiana%20Superintendent%2C%20Lauded%20by%20ALEC%20and%20Education%20Privatizers%2C%20Cheats%20on%20School%20Grading%20Formula%20for%20Top%20Donor

[5] http://www.alec.org/nearly-1000-state-legislators-business-leaders-and-public-policy-experts-discuss-free-market-solutions-to-creating-jobs-at-alecs-states-nation-policy-summit/

[6] http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2012/04/at_arizona_gathering_alec_teac.html

[7] http://www.alec.org/model-legislation/indiana-education-reform-package/

[8] http://www.commoncause.org/atf/cf/%7BFB3C17E2-CDD1-4DF6-92BE-BD4429893665%7D/education_35-day_mailing%20-%20new%20orleans.pdf

[9] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/29/tony-bennett-indiana_n_3672196.html?utm_hp_ref=tw

[10] http://stateimpact.npr.org/indiana/2011/12/16/meet-the-influencers-the-american-legislative-exchange-council/

[11] http://hosted.ap.org/specials/interactives/documents/ineds/ed2.pdf

[12] http://stateimpact.npr.org/indiana/2012/08/02/interactive-map-whos-giving-money-in-the-campaign-for-state-superintendent/

[13] http://inschoolmatters.wordpress.com/2012/10/22/indiana-superintendent-campaign-finance-the-rich-vs-the-many/

[14] http://www.prwatch.org/news/2013/05/12101/issue-ad-charade-american-federation-children-uncovered-wisconsin

[15] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/class-struggle/post/surprise-dc-admits-school-test-tampering-at-meridian-public-charter/2013/04/25/818ccb2e-ad66-11e2-a8b9-2a63d75b5459_blog.html

[16] http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/08/01/3535902/amid-grading-controversy-florida.html

labor and ethnic studies attacked (defunded) illegal in arizona cf AG Horn pbs doc

omg: http://www.muckety.com/2038788B3FEB6698337A48A2BF7EB8C9.map?autoGroup=7,7&big=true

Scott Walker, GOP Slip ALEC Education Agenda Into Wisconsin Budget

Center for Media and Democracy • 520 University Avenue, Suite 260 • Madison, Wisconsin 53703

Phone: 608-260-9713 • Fax: 608-260-9714

Source URL: http://www.prwatch.org/news/2013/05/12099/scott-walker-gop-slip-alec-education-agenda-wisconsin-budget

Links:

[1] http://www.prwatch.org/users/35275/brendan-fischer

[2] http://www.prwatch.org/topics/democracy

[3] http://www.prwatch.org/topics/education

[4] http://www.prwatch.org/topics/politics

[5] http://www.prwatch.org/projects/alec-exposed

[6] http://www.prwatch.org/projects/wisconsin-protests

[7] http://www.addtoany.com/share_save?linkurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.prwatch.org%2Fnews%2F2013%2F05%2F12099%2Fscott-walker-gop-slip-alec-education-agenda-wisconsin-budget&linkname=Scott%20Walker%2C%20GOP%20Slip%20ALEC%20Education%20Agenda%20Into%20Wisconsin%20Budget

[8] http://web.archive.org/web/20101118093945/http://www.scottwalker.org/issues/government-reform

[9] http://alecexposed.org/w/images/5/57/2D4-Next_Generation_Charter_Schools_Act_Exposed.pdf

[10] http://walker.wi.gov/Default.aspx?Page=65ea2073-bf41-460b-8f8a-911f18f8c620

[11] http://host.madison.com/news/local/education/republican-bill-calls-for-a-board-of-political-appointees-to/article_a685fc34-5426-11e0-bd7a-001cc4c002e0.html

[12] http://alecexposed.org/w/images/e/e7/2E3-Education_Accountability_Act_Exposed.pdf

[13] http://www.madisoncommons.org/?q=content/public-private-schools-in-madison-consider-the-impact-of-voucher-program

[14] http://www.prwatch.org/files/ALECs_17th_Report_Card.pdf

[15] http://www.jsonline.com/news/education/wisconsin-told-to-boost-oversight-of-voucher-schools-disability-rolls-7f9q8ht-205839281.html

[16] http://alecexposed.org/w/images/8/85/2F0-Alternative_Certification_Act_Exposed.pdf

[17] https://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/statutes/statutes/115/II/415

[18] http://www.prwatch.org/files/National_Journal_1984_full_plate .doc

[19] http://www.prwatch.org/files/Heritage_Milwaukee_1990_ALEC.doc

[20] http://cspcs.sanford.duke.edu/sites/default/files/Bradley%20Foundation%20and%20School%20Vouchers.pdf

[21] http://www.onewisconsinnow.org/p-is-for-payoff.pdf

[22] http://www.jsonline.com/blogs/news/207753841.html

[23] http://www.wisdc.org/pr040513.php

[24] http://www.prwatch.org/news/2013/05/12101/issue-ad-charade-american-federation-children-uncovered-wisconsin

All of which is a roundabout way of saying, I get where the sincere charter school people are coming from. I believe in alternatives, in choices, in freedom of movement. I’ve always been intrigued by the notion of Temporary Autonomous Zones, a concept developed by Hakim Bey that Wikipedia summarizes as “the socio-political tactic of creating temporary spaces that elude formal structures of control,” a form of creative, constructive anarchy. A truly independent school, constructed organically by those who will use it, is an awesome example of that, I believe.

Unfortunately, in the same way it is much, much easier to make a bad movie than a good one—so many things can go so terribly wrong!—it is quite common for the best of intentions when starting a school to collapse under the weight of actually starting and running a complex learning institution. So common, in fact, some studies show about half of all charters underperform their public school counterparts.

In Florida in 2011, elementary and middle school charters were seven times more likely than regular schools to get an “F” grade in the state’s official appraisal system, and less likely to get an A, B or C grade. In Ohio it was reported recently that “72 percent of charter schools would receive an ‘F’ for not meeting 75 percent proficiency on state tests” using an incoming appraisal system, according to CentralOhio.com, a Gannett news outlet. “That’s compared to 6 percent of school districts and 21 percent of traditional buildings that would receive failing grades.”

And like any startup, many are out of business within a few years.

Even if you are highly organized, have local community support and hire a good principal—all tough “gets”—things only become harder from there. Resources are tight, regardless of whether you pay teachers less, and expectations are through the roof. Educating young people turns out to be a very expensive endeavor; just ask any private school parent who pays through the nose for tuition—and then is asked repeatedly throughout the year to donate more, more, more.

Some charters are trying to solve these issues the same way Starbucks and McDonald’s do: franchise-model chains of schools (or firms that provide services to multiple charters) to try to control inputs and standardize outcomes. (The KIPP and Aspire schools are examples of this.)

And that’s for the sincere folks. Unfortunately, not everybody in this charter biz is, um, in it for the right reasons, to say the least. The loopholes for the greedy and immoral are astonishing.

Recently, a friend and former teacher half-jokingly suggested we start a charter school together. “Look, the only two ways to get rich quick in this town are growing weed and starting a charter,” he mock argued. “It’s all about real estate: You buy a property, rent it to the school at inflated rates. Cook the test scores and cherry-pick the students with Tiger Moms and drum out the SpEd kids and slackers until your ranking scores are sky-high and everybody is banging down your door to enroll. Then give ’em all a strict, textbook-based education with no frills, taught by 25-year-olds willing to work for 30K.”

Crazy talk, you say? Consider the fascinating case of the American Indian Model School in Oakland, Calif. Once upon a time, this urban middle school was just another well-intentioned but failing charter poorly serving poor children, until an enterprising and aggressive man named Ben Chavis took it over in 2000 and began a remarkable transformation. Using a variety of rather unorthodox and, er, rough-around-the-edges techniques—including mocking students with racial epithets, cutting off students’ hair as punishment, etc.—he managed to boot camp his school right to the top of the charts. Visits from The Governator, an expansion of the charter to several more campuses and even a book contract followed, as did a significant amount of controversy and a slew of imitators.

Unfortunately, for those who appreciated the results AIMS produced—and either embraced or ignored its methods—disaster has struck. It turns out Chavis wasn’t content with just earning fame as an educator; he apparently wanted fortune too and allegedly cut a few too many corners to get it. Last month, the Oakland school board voted 4-3 to revoke AIMS’ charter based on a steady flood of embarrassing news about the schools’ finances and management emerging from state and federal investigations. To wit: Millions of dollars of public school funds channeled to Chavis, all done under the auspices of his wife, who handled the books, and a sycophantic charter board picked by him.

The AIMS campuses are appealing to the county for a new charter and I wouldn’t bet against them, with those test scores and a for-show divorce from Chavis. They argue, basically, don’t throw out the baby (those scores) with the bathwater (Chavis).

"Won't Back Down" Film Pushes ALEC Parent Trigger Proposal

by Mary Bottari [1] — September 19, 2012 - 10:00am

Topics: Front Groups [2], Issue Management [3], Public Diplomacy [4], Third Party Technique [5], Children [6], Corporations [7], Democracy [8], Education [9]

Projects: ALEC Exposed [10]

Share this [11]

-- Mary Bottari and Sara Jerving

Well-funded advocates of privatizing the nation's education system are employing a new strategy this fall to enlist support for the cause. The emotionally engaging Hollywood film "Won't Back Down" -- set for release September 28 -- portrays so-called "Parent Trigger" laws as an effective mechanism for transforming underperforming public schools. But the film's distortion of the facts prompts a closer examination of its funders and backers and a closer look at those promoting Parent Trigger as a cure for what ails the American education system.

While Parent Trigger was first promoted [12] by a small charter school operator [13] in California, it was taken up and launched into hyperdrive by two controversial right-wing organizations: the American Legislative Exchange Council [14] (ALEC) and the Heartland Institute [15].

ALEC brings together major American corporations and right-wing legislators to craft and vote on "model" bills behind closed doors. These bills include extreme gun laws, like Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law implicated in the Trayvon Martin shooting, union-busting legislation, Arizona style anti-immigrant legislation and voter suppression laws that have sparked lawsuits across the nation. The organization's agenda is so extreme that in the last few months 40 major U.S. companies [16], including Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola, Kraft, and General Motors, have severed ties [17] with ALEC.

Similarly, the Heartland Institute recently suffered an exodus of corporate sponsors [18] after it launched a billboard comparing those who believe in the science behind global warming to the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski.

As the movie's stars take to the airwaves this week to promote the film, it is unlikely they will discuss the agenda of the film's billionaire backers or the right-wing politicians and for-profit firms who are promoting the Parent Trigger idea, the purpose of which is to promote the transformation of the American public school system into a for-profit enterprise. We provide a primer below.

Hollywood Fiction vs. the Facts on Parent Trigger

What is a Parent Trigger law? The proposals have varied from state to state, but they generally allow parents at any failing school, defined by standardized testing, to sign a petition to radically transform the school using any of four "triggers." Parents can petition to: 1) fire the principal, 2) fire half of the teachers, 3) close the school and let parents find another option, or 4) convert the school into a charter school. While the details of how the school can be "restructured" vary from state to state, the charter school option is always [19] present. Charter schools are privately managed, taxpayer-funded public schools which are granted greater autonomy from regulations applicable to other public schools, ostensibly in exchange for greater accountability for results, but they have been criticized for uneven and mediocre track records.

The film, starring Oscar nominee Viola Davis and Maggie Gyllenhaal, reportedly portrays the struggle of a teacher and a parent who work to transform a low-performing Pennsylvania school, despite resistance from the local union -- cast as the enemy of reform. Together, the African American teacher and the white, single mom unite to overcome hurdles and go [20] convincing parents to sign a petition to trigger a transformation.

While in reality most teachers do not sign the petitions and teachers are likely to get fired under Parent Trigger laws, "Won't Back Down" has teachers uniting with parents to sign the petition and transform the school. Eventually, 50 percent of teachers sign as well as parents and the intrepid duo finally turns the school into a charter school run by the Viola Davis character.

The film portrays Parent Trigger laws as a successful way of inspiring and uniting teachers and parents and the community. The real life history of Parent Trigger is quite different. Only two [21] school districts, both in California, have used the petition mechanism: Compton Unified School District and Adelanto School District. In Compton, a new group called "Parent Revolution" founded by a charter school operator paid [22] individuals to collect signatures to hand [23] the school over to a charter school operator [24], but the courts threw [25] out the petitions.

In Adelanto, parents first signed petitions, then had second thoughts. The school board rejected the petition after parents withdrew [26] their support, resulting in a lawsuit [27]. The courts ruled [28] that parents could not rescind their signatures. The parents had advocated for turning the school into a charter school, a plan which was rejected [29] by the school board. Instead, an advisory panel was created and headed by the superintendent. The legal battles are continuing.

Instead of prompting reform-minded unity, both petition drives have been criticized [30] for creating "chaos and division" in the community. Charges of fraud and intimidation abound. "This is destroying friendships and all relationships," one Adelanto parent, Chrissy Guzman-Alvarado, told The New York Times. "With our school divided, parents are scared to speak out or sign anything, and our community is falling apart. All for what?" she asks.

ALEC Spreads Parent Trigger Nationwide

The first Parent Trigger law was enacted [19] in 2010 in California and, with an assist from Heartland and ALEC, the idea is rapidly spreading.

The California law was based on a proposal [12] from Ben Austin, a policy consultant for a small non-profit education organization called Green Dot Public Schools, which manages charter schools [13] for the city of Los Angeles. Austin subsequently formed Parent Revolution, which promotes these laws across the country. But this is not your local PTA. Parent Revolution is backed [31] by big money, including receiving funding from the conservative Walton Family Foundation [31] (think Wal-Mart), which has spent over a billion to promote school privatization.

The rabid pro-privatization Heartland Institute [15] quickly took up the Parent Trigger idea in 2010. The Heartland version of the bill [32] (PDF) went a step further and gave parents the authority to trigger a school's restructuring regardless of whether it is "failing" or not. Heartland's version of the bill also calls for a "school voucher" option, which allows students to receive a monetary voucher to attend another private or public school. Voucher or "choice" schools have been criticized for diverting funds from public schools to unaccountable private schools, including for-profit religious and virtual schools.

When a new wave of school choice supporters were swept into power at the state level in November 2010, Heartland saw an opportunity to put the Parent Trigger idea on steroids by bringing it to ALEC, the controversial corporate "bill mill."

While ALEC has a governing board of state legislators it also has a governing board of corporations [33], packed with tobacco firms, giant pharmaceutical firms, and energy companies like Exxon Mobil. The ultra-conservative, billionaire Koch Brothers, have had a representative on the board for years and Koch-controlled money has funded ALEC to the tune of at least $1 million, according to estimates calculated by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) [34].

The ALEC Education Task Force [35] voted to approve the "Parent Trigger Act" [36] (PDF) at their critical December 2010 strategy meeting in Washington, D.C., and the idea quickly spread. According to CMD's analysis, ALEC members introduced or cosponsored various versions of the bill in 17 states.

At the time, ALEC's education task force was chaired [37] by the for-profit education firm Connections Academy, which specializes [38] in K-12 online education. Others on the task force include tech companies, testing companies and higher-education diploma mills like Bridgepoint Education [39] and Corinthian Education [40], both of which are under investigation [41] by state Attorneys General for aggressive recruiting policies that leave too many students in debt with no degree.

We have seen this pattern before. When the NRA finally succeeded in getting its first "Stand Your Ground" gun law passed into law in Florida, a law implicated in the tragic Trayvon Martin killing, its next step was to bring [42] the bill to ALEC which helped it spread to two dozen other states in short order.

Parent Trigger and ALEC were a match made in heaven. ALEC's education bills encompass more than 30 years [43] of effort to privatize public education through an ever-expanding network of school vouchers, an idea first advocated by economist Milton Friedman in the 1950s. ALEC bills also allow schools to loosen standards for teachers and administrators, exclude students with physical disabilities and special educational needs, eschew collective bargaining, and experiment with other pet causes like merit pay, single-sex education, school uniforms, and political and religious indoctrination of students.

Parent Trigger "A Clever Way to Trick Parents"?

But does it work? The support for Parent Trigger, according to University of Illinois Professor Christopher Lubienski [44], is based more on ideology than empirical data. Lubienski is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Organization.

"There is not good evidence that the options given [after the trigger is pulled] improve student achievement. The goal has more to do with changing school governance and giving opportunities for some of these organizations to get control of the public dollar," Lubienski said. "Policymakers need to look at the factors that actually influence student achievement."

"Unfortunately, that points to a lot more difficult issues than simply changing the structure of a school. It's relatively simple to fire the staff and bring in a charter operator. It's more important that kids are getting proper medical attention before they are born, that their mothers are getting the right nutrition at that time, that kids are read to at home, and that they are raised in an environment that values education. This is much more difficult to influence through policy."

The data shows that the conversion to charter schools, which Lubienski said is the constant theme running throughout the "Parent Trigger" legislation passed in states, has not shown to be effective in improving student outcomes. A study [45] conducted at Stanford University's Hoover Institution presents evidence that students in only 17 percent of charter school show greater improvement in math and reading than students in similar traditional public schools, whereas 37 percent, deliver learning results that are significantly worse than the student would have realized had they remained in public schools. However, the conversion to charter schools has proven profitable to many U.S. firms such as ALEC member National Heritage Academies, a for-profit charter school management organization operating in eight states, and K-12, Inc., which promotes "virtual" charter schools as well as "virtual" voucher schools. K-12, Inc. is under investigation [46] in Florida for improperly certifying teachers and asking them to cover it up.

In short, Parent Trigger laws are a "clever way to trick parents into seizing control of their schools and handing it over to private corporations," according to Diane Ravitch [47], an education historian and former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education in the first Bush Administration.

Philip Anschutz, Right-Wing Billionaire, Owns Production Company

"Won't Back Down," is a production of Walden Media, owned by billionaire investor and right-wing extremist Philip Anschutz. Anschutz participates in the[48] Koch brothers' secretive political strategy summits [49] and funds [50] David Koch's Americans for Prosperity [51] group, which backed Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker [52]'s union busting proposal and is working to defeat Barack Obama and other Democratic candidates across the country.

Anschutz bankrolls ALEC and ALEC member groups. In 2010, The Anschutz Foundation, gave [53] ALEC $10,000 and his Union Pacific firm was an ALEC sponsor [54] the following year. The Foundation funded [53] three ALEC members who sat on the ALEC Education Task Force which approved the Parent Trigger Proposal: The Independence Institute, Center for Education Reform, and Pacific Research Institute.

Anschutz has also supported the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which backs legislation designed to cripple unions; the Discovery Institute, which seeks to get creation "science" accepted in public schools; and the Mission America Foundation, whose president considers homosexuality to be a "deviance." He also owns the conservative magazine, the Weekly Standard.

Walden Media was one of the producers of the pro-charter documentary film [55]." This film was criticized by Diane Ravitch [56] as propaganda and as "a powerful weapon on behalf of those championing the 'free market' and privatization."

Rupert Murdoch, Media Mogul and Owner of Education Testing Company, Distributes Film

The film is being [20] by 20th Century Fox, owned [57] by News Corp. and media mogul Rupert Murdock. News Corp. owns Fox News, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post. Murdoch formerly owned the British newspaper News of the World, which imploded once it was revealed that reporters hacked into the cell phones of the family of a murdered child [58], as well as the cell phones of the royal family, politicians and celebrities. The paper's top editors and reporters were arrested although Murdoch himself has not been charged.

As CMD previously reported [59], News Corp. has been a member of both ALEC's Education Task Force and Communications and Technology Task Force. Wall Street Journal editorial board member Stephen Moore, is an ALEC "scholar" and both the Wall Street Journal and Fox News have gone to bat for ALEC as member corporations began to flee earlier this year. What is less well known is that News Corp. owns Wireless Generation, a for-profit online education, software, and testing corporation, acquiring it in 2010 for $360 million. Wireless Generation is also an ALEC member. Apparently, Murdoch was anxious to get a piece of the nation's education system, which he describes [60] as a "500 billion sector in the U.S. alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed." News Corp's senior Vice President in charge of its education division is none other than former Chancellor of New York City Schools, Joel Klein, who promoted a corporatist model of education reform.

Lubienski, for one is skeptical of "self-proclaimed experts on the topic of education" like Murdoch who "aren't accountable to the public" and who have a profit motive coupled with a political agenda of widespread privatization.

Michelle Rhee, Former D.C. Chancellor of Schools, Pushes Parent Trigger

The film is being promoted by former Washington, D.C., public schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee. Rhee spoke at both the RNC and DNC screenings of "Won't Back Down," and her involvement underscores what is often the bipartisan nature of the modern "school reform" movement.

Her tenure as the head of the D.C. school system was so controversial, she is widely credited with losing D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty's reelection campaign. She was credited with greatly improving test scores in Washington, D.C. schools, but this accomplishment was cast into doubt by a USA Today [61] investigation that suggested that test score gains during her term may have been the result of cheating on the part of school officials. The report found extremely high erasure rates that were statistically anomalous.

After resigning from her position in 2010, Rhee went on to start StudentsFirst [62], a 501(c)4 non-profit organization planning to engage in "direct and grassroots lobbying" on education issues including Parent Trigger. [63] Derrell Bradford, a state director for StudentsFirst, [64] spoke on "Enacting a Comprehensive K-12 Education Reform Agenda" at the 2011 ALEC annual meeting.

Rhee's group receives funding from Murdoch, who "has pledged to spend more than $1 billion to bring for-profit schools, including virtual education, to the entire country by electing reform-friendly candidates and hiring top-notch state lobbyists." News Corp's Joel Klein serves [65] on her organization's board. Other supporters include New Jersey hedge funder manager David Tepper [66], and Alan Fournier (reportedly [64] big backers of Romney).

Rhee was also [55] in Anschutz's film "Waiting for 'Superman'."

Reform or Russian Roulette?

The movie ends when the hard work of turning around a struggling school begins. The Hoover Institution study [67] discussed above shows that only 17 percent of charter schools do a better job educating students.

With no data backing the benefits of the Parent Trigger proposal, many doubt that throwing a school system into chaos is the best way to improve troubled schools. Chaos does however give the privatizers and the profiteers starring roles in the ongoing debate over the future of the American educational system.

The Center for Media and Democracy is a non-profit investigative reporting group whose work aids public awareness about the people, companies, and groups attempting to shape the media and our democracy. CMD launched its award winning ALEC Exposed [68] project in July 2011. Our websites are ALECExposed.org [68], PR Watch.org [69], SourceWatch.org [70], BanksterUSA.org [71], and FoodRightsNetwork.org [72].

Center for Media and Democracy • 520 University Avenue, Suite 260 • Madison, Wisconsin 53703

Phone: 608-260-9713 • Fax: 608-260-9714

Source URL: http://www.prwatch.org/news/2012/09/11763/wont-back-down-film-pushes-alec-parent-trigger-proposal

ALEC ib WI used special needs kid as stalking horse see Pocan

chart https://twitter.com/HectorSolon/status/386893601864552449/photo/1

bowen levesque lapage

When Gerald "Jerry" Conti decided to retire from his teaching career after 27 years at Westhill High School in New York, he went out with a bang.

On March 29, Conti, 62, posted the text of his resignation letter on Facebook, along with a photo of Porky Pig saying "That's All Folks!"

The letter lays out why, after several decades, Conti believed he had to call it quits. Conti points the blame at legislators who "failed us by selling children out to private industries such as Pearson Education," a testing company. He argued the New York State United Teachers union failed its members by not mounting an effective campaign against standardized testing, and said there's now a "pervasive atmosphere of distrust" preventing teachers from developing their own tests and quizzes.

"After writing all of this I realize that I am not leaving my profession, in truth, it has left me. It no longer exists," Conti wrote in the letter.

(READ THE LETTER BELOW)

So far, the post has received 86 "Likes," 745 "Shares" and more than 30 comments of praise for Conti's teaching ability, as well as expressions of sadness about his departure from the classroom, though Conti said he may substitute teach. Soon after the letter made the rounds on Facebook, the Syracuse Post-Standard picked it up. Conti told the Post-Standard his frustration isn't directed at his local school district, but rather at the "larger forces" of education reform.

"This whole thing is being driven by people who know nothing about education,” Conti told the Post-Standard. "It's sad."

Conti has some company when it comes to his dislike of standardized testing. Earlier this year, teachers in Seattle refused to administer the Measures of Academic Progress, or MAP, test "on ethical and professional grounds." In February, roughly 10,000 parents, teachers and students rallied in Texas for more funding and fewer exams, the Texas Observer reported.

In his interview with the Post-Standard, Contialso elaborated on his impression that testing is eating his profession, and that educating is being taken out of teachers' hands.

"Education to me is completely qualitative, it's not quantitative," Conti said. "It's about personal relationships, and it's about getting kids to be curious. And that's what I've been trying to do all my career."

Hippies Demonized in Louisiana Voucher School Textbook

March 7, 2013 |

If Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) gets his way Louisiana taxpayers will continue funding private school curricula rife with right-wing revisionism and biblical pseudoscience.

Jindal’s voucher program spends tens of millions of dollars in state funds to send low-income students to one of 134 [3] approved private schools. But the Louisiana Supreme Court will rule this month whether it’s constitutional to divert public funds to private institutions. Also of concern is the misinformation peddled in several approved voucher schools, many institutions espousing a right wing, Christian bastardization of social studies and science.

Most recently, AmericaBlog discovered a rather cartoonish depiction of one of the largest counter-culture movements in American history printed in a Louisiana voucher textbook. The 8^th grade history book, titled America: Land I love, gives this lesson on hippies:

Many young people turned to drugs and immoral lifestyles; these youth became known as hippies. They went without bathing, wore dirty, ragged, unconventional clothing, and deliberately broke all codes of politeness or manners. Rock music played an important part in the hippie movement and had great influence over the hippies. Many of the rock musicians they followed belonged to Eastern religious cults or practiced Satan worship.

Of course, the devil’s influence extends beyond America’s “immoral” youth. Reads another textbook: “It is no wonder that Satan hates the family and has hurled his venom against it in the form of Communism.”

Last year, Mother Jones listed some of the most egregious falsities found in Louisiana voucher school textbooks. Apparently, “Dinosaurs and humans were definitely on the earth at the same time” and “The majority of slave holders treated their slaves well.” A reminder: Just last November, Governor Jindal, who supports this curriculum, urged his fellow GOPers to “stop being the stupid party [4].”

It'd be easier to take the governor seriously if he stopped spreading stupidity in his own backyard.

See more stories tagged with:

bobby jindal [5],

misinformation [6],

education [7],

vouchers [8],

hippies [9]

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/education/hippies-demonized-louisiana-voucher-school-textbook

Links:

[1] http://www.alternet.org

[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/steven-hsieh

[3] http://www.fox8live.com/story/21190166/more-schools-planned-for-louisiana-voucher-program

[4] http://canindia.com/2013/02/bobby-jindal-tells-republicans-to-stop-being-the-stupid-party/

[5] http://www.alternet.org/tags/bobby-jindal-0

[6] http://www.alternet.org/tags/misinformation

[7] http://www.alternet.org/tags/education-0

[8] http://www.alternet.org/tags/vouchers

[9] http://www.alternet.org/tags/hippies-0

[10] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

When Billionaires Become Educational Experts

“Venture philanthropists” push for the privatization of public education.

By Kevin K. Kumashiro

For years, critics have pointed to the decreasing ability of health-care professionals to make decisions and provide services because of the demands of insurance companies and health-management organizations to sustain profits. Health-care decisions are increasingly being made by the wrong people and for the wrong reasons.

So, too, with public education. Current reforms are allowing certain individuals with neither scholarly nor practical expertise in education to exert significant influence over educational policy for communities and children other than their own. They, the millionaires and billionaires from the philanthropic and corporate sectors, are experimenting in urban school districts with educational reform initiatives that are not grounded in sound research and often fail to produce results. And yet, with funding for public education shrinking, the influence of these wealthy reformers is growing.

There is also much profit to be earned from public education. The American educational system today is a $500–600 billion enterprise, funded overwhelmingly by public dollars, with billions of dollars in services and products being outsourced, and with political lobbying groups like the Democrats for Education Reform, financed by hedge-fund millionaires, leading the push to further outsource. The public educational system has always had ties to the business sector, including business leaders themselves and the philanthropies funded by business fortunes. But that influence has not always looked the same. Despite the fact that philanthropic giving has never constituted more than 1 percent of total educational funding, in recent years a handful of millionaires and billionaires have come to exert influence over educational policy and practice like at no other time in American history. What has happened? The roles of business and philanthropy have shifted, reconfigured, and converged over the past century, and therefore seeing the bigger picture of public education requires understanding the interrelated histories of philanthropic and corporate influence.

Early Corporate Influence

Philanthropies have a long history of giving to public education, a history that includes early efforts by white businessmen to shape the education of communities of color. Following the US Civil War, for example, philanthropies helped to establish primary and vocational schools for African Americans in the South, as well as normal schools that eventually became black colleges and universities, which expanded access even as they reinforced segregated and differentiated learning. In the first half of the twentieth century, philanthropies supported and expanded the use of intelligence testing that justified a racialized understanding of what different groups of students could learn and do, making commonsensical the notion of academic tracking. Clearly, the early philanthropies were varied in their goals and impact, funding initiatives that both reinforced and challenged inequities in education. But these philanthropies, perhaps the best known of which were the Carnegie Corporation, the Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation, increasingly tried to raise the visibility of educational inequities and thus were widely perceived as liberal and altruistic for much of the twentieth century.¹(http://www.aaup.org/article/when-billionaires-become-educational-experts#note1)

The business sector also has a long history of influencing public education, particularly in the period from 1890 to 1940, when public school districts were consolidating and becoming larger and larger. As immigration made cities increasingly diverse, and as members of the working class won more and more seats in city governments, the business elite made concerted efforts to take control of local school boards, not only by getting business leaders elected to school boards but also by structuring the boards to reflect the centralized control and bureaucracy that characterized the large industries that were emerging at this time. That is, the business elite influenced school governance both by constituting its governing bodies and by structuring its model of management. The business elite turned its attention to higher education as well, as in the 1950s when the US Chamber of Commerce and other corporate advocates began creating a network of organizations on university campuses that aimed to cultivate probusiness values in the next generation of leaders.²(http://www.aaup.org/article/when-billionaires-become-educational-experts#note2)

Philanthropy and Business Roundtables

As the United States entered the second half of the twentieth century, significant economic, legal, cul- tural, and ideological changes occurred that would prompt the formation of new structures in both the philanthropic and the corporate sectors. In the early 1970s, two national groups emerged that would have enormous influence on public policy generally, and educational policy in particular, in the decades to follow: the Philanthropy Roundtable and the Business Roundtable.

First, the Philanthropy Roundtable. The 1950s and 1960s were a time of numerous and significant legal and cultural challenges to inequities of race, class, and gender. The civil rights movement brought together a range of constituents to push for landmark legislation and policy changes across the nation. To opponents of the civil rights movement, such attempts at resource redistribution and governmental regulation departed from the American ideals of self-sufficiency and meritocracy and in the process threatened to weaken the American economic system of “free enterprise.” Opponents also took note of how such legal changes were led by a “liberal establishment” that was organized and strategic in ways that conservatives were not yet.

In 1971, Lewis Powell, who would soon after become an associate justice on the US Supreme Court, wrote an internal Chamber of Commerce memorandum known as the “Powell Manifesto.” This memorandum described a concerted liberal attack on the American free-enterprise system and on American democracy itself and called for organizing and action. In response to the Powell Manifesto, a group of conservatives, particularly philanthropists with family business fortunes, came together and formed a national roundtable that would strategize about how to use their personal wealth for conservative movement building.

At the helm were wealthy conservatives whose philanthropic work helped to seed what eventually grew into an interconnected web of organizations and initiatives. Their project was as much legislative as it was ideological, in that they aimed to influence legislation and policy as well as to shape “common sense” in society. In the decades to follow, the conservative philanthropies developed interconnected funding priorities and strategies to advance publicpolicy agendas that favored business and opposed social welfare and that would enable the American political and economic systems to continue to benefit those racial and social-class groups that were already privileged in society.

They sought to develop a cadre of students in higher education who embraced conservative ideologies, a generation of scholars who produced research that would make conservative ideologies accessible and who would then enter government service, a network of regional and state policy think tanks and advocacy organizations, and a protocol for using the media to reach the public effectively.³(http://www.aaup.org/article/when-billionaires-become-educational-experts#note3) Their strategies have been quite successful, as evidenced by the emergence of such public figures as Dinesh D’Souza, Chester Finn, Newt Gingrich, and Thomas Sowell, all of whom were once beneficiaries of fellowships and other forms of professional support from the philanthropies, as well as by the preponderance of messages in the media and legislation that were developed in related think tanks.

At the top of the chopping block was public education, considered by some to be a drain on the government and a crutch for society not only because it was the most expensive of domestic enterprises but also because it exemplified what they considered to be a socialist enterprise. Conservatives called for the entire school system to be privatized, made into a free enterprise, and the conservatives�� strategy of choice was school vouchers. Early on, Milton Friedman, one of the leading proponents of free-market reform, argued that “vouchers are not an end in themselves; they are a means to make a transition from a government to a free-market system.” Not surprisingly, the focus of many conservative foundations has been and continues to be school-choice and school-voucher initiatives.

Until recently, the four most influential conservative foundations nationally were the Bradley, Olin, Scaife, and Smith Richardson foundations, sometimes dubbed the Four Sisters. The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation in Wisconsin is the country’s largest conservative foundation and includes among its priorities the ending of affirmative action and of welfare. A former board member is William Bennett, secretary of education under President Reagan. The Bradley Foundation is involved in various educational policy initiatives, including the support of school-voucher programs and privatization. The John M. Olin Foundation, which ceased operations in 2005, focused on developing research through think tanks as well as through higher education, with large gifts to Harvard, Yale, the University of Chicago, and other universities, as well as to individual researchers. The Scaife Family Foundations, consisting of the Sarah Scaife, Allegheny, and Carthage Foundations and funded by the Mellon family fortune, gives to a range of think tanks and lobbying and publishing groups. The H. Smith Richardson Foundation in North Carolina supports, according to its website, the “next generation of public policy researchers and analysts” by funding think tanks and universities. All of the Four Sisters have contributed funding to the leading conservative think tanks, including the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, the Heritage Foundation, and the Hoover Institution.

Several other foundations gave more than $100 million to conservative causes between 1998 and 2004, including the Walton Family and DeVos foundations. Created by the heirs of Sam Walton of Wal-Mart, the world’s largest corporation, the Walton Family Foundation in Arkansas has financed nearly every ballot initiative for vouchers since 1993. Walton funds such provoucher organizations as the Alliance for School Choice, as well as organizations that draw communities of color into the provoucher movement, such as the Black Alliance for Educational Options and the Hispanic Council for Reform and Educational Options. The Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation in Michigan, funded by the AmWay fortune, supports vouchers as well as organizations of the Christian Right, including Focus on the Family, which have vast media and communications resources. More recently, the Charles Koch Foundation has targeted higher education by funding faculty positions, think tanks, and educational initiatives in universities across the country. The websites of the Media Matters Action Network (http://mediamattersaction.org) and People for the American Way (http://www.pfaw.org) provide descriptions of these and numerous other such foundations.

Of course, conservative foundations are not the only ones funding education. Liberal philanthropies that identify with the goals and legacy of the civil rights movement also contribute to education, but they are far less visible and influential in changing federal or state-level policy. Perhaps the most notable strategic difference between conservative and liberal philanthropic organizations is the expectation of how organizations will use their funds. Whereas the liberal philanthropies tend to fund a large number of organizations for specific projects of limited term and scope, the conservative ones are more likely to fund the general operations of a smaller number of organizations over longer periods of time in order to build institutional infrastructure. The conservative foundations especially direct funding to organizations that aggressively lobby in state legislatures and Congress and that engage effectively in media campaigns, thus ensuring that their ideas are enacted into law with public support. Consequently, the conservative movement has emerged as an interconnected web of organizations with aligned missions and coordinated strategies, often facilitated by shared board members.⁴(http://www.aaup.org/article/when-billionaires-become-educational-experts#note4)

The history and function of the Business Roundtable parallel those of the Philanthropy Roundtable. The 1960s were marked by declining corporate profits resulting from such factors as deficit spending to fund the war in Vietnam, rising oil prices following the formation of OPEC, and an increasingly competitive market in a globalizing economy.⁵(http://www.aaup.org/article/when-billionaires-become-educational-experts#note5) The decade also saw increasing governmental regulation of the workplace and increasing influence of organized labor. In response, some business leaders felt the need to organize the corporate sector in order to influence public policy in ways that advanced corporate interests, particularly the interests of the business elite. In 1972, the Business Roundtable formed, consisting of the top three hundred CEOs in the nation.

The Business Roundtable had always addressed a range of public policies, but in the late 1980s it began focusing significant attention on public education. In 1989, it called for six “national education goals” and, soon after, nine ��essential components of a successful education system.” This call put pressure on states to move toward an outcomes-based model of educational reform, using standardized tests to measure student and teacher performance, with sanctions and rewards for failure or success. Reinforcing the pressure put on states was a large network of influential foundations, centers, universities, and public media, assembled by the roundtable, that consisted of such entities as the Annenberg Center, the Broad Foundation, the Education Trust, Harvard Graduate School, and most newspaper editorial boards.

In so doing, the Business Roundtable effectively laid out a blueprint for standards-based reform, begun during the Reagan administration but culminating in the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, which has become so taken for granted as the way to think about educational quality and educational reform that even Democrats, from Clinton onward, have put forth proposals that were framed by these concepts.

Venture Philanthropy

As the United States neared the end of the twentieth century, the globalizing economy provided fertile ground for an unprecedented accumulation of wealth by the corporate elite. Taking this new wealth and the lessons learned about leveraging wealth for both increased profits and political influence, several millionaires and billionaires transformed the landscape of philanthropy, developing new organizations that operate much more like the conservative foundations than traditional philanthropies. These are the venture philanthropies.⁶(http://www.aaup.org/article/when-billionaires-become-educational-experts#note6)

Unlike traditional philanthropy, which sought, at least in principle, to “give back” to society, venture philanthropy parallels venture capitalism in its goal of investing capital in ways that earn more. In contrast to venture capitalism, one benefit of venture philanthropy is that it operates under different incorporation laws, providing tax shelters for what are really financial investments. Whereas the financial returns may not be as immediate as those of corporate transactions, the policy foci of today’s venture philanthropists indeed reveal the economic incentive of their investments. They overwhelmingly are pushing for the privatization of public education, creating new markets worth hundreds of billions of dollars, as well as for the prerogative to direct how public tax dollars get spent. They target the large urban school districts, experimenting with models they hope eventually to “scale up” nationally, as they have done in Chicago, where the Gates Foundationalone has spent millions on small-school initiatives, school turnarounds, youth organizing, and parent organizing.⁷(http://www.aaup.org/article/when-billionaires-become-educational-experts#note7)

Another departure from traditional philanthropy is the role that venture philanthropists play in their investments. Whereas traditional philanthropists view their giving as donations that support what others were doing, venture philanthropists view their giving as entryways into that work. That is, philanthropists themselves are now getting significantly involved in goal setting, decision making, and evaluating progress and outcomes to ensure that their priorities are met. This hands-on role allows venture capitalists to affect public policy more directly and substantially, particularly in a climate where their financial aid is so desperately needed.

��

Indeed, the timing was fortuitous for venture philanthropy. Setting the stage was the 1983 report by the Reagan administration,A Nation at Risk,which claimed not only that public schools were failing but also, more significantly, that their failure was a primary cause of the nation’s economic recession at that time. Such a crisis gave the business elite yet another reason to turn their attention to public education. And for their part, educational leaders needed the additional funding because fewer and fewer tax dollars were being earmarked for education. States have been disinvesting in education for decades: over the past twenty years in Illinois, for example, state contributions to public higher education dropped from almost 50 percent to less than 20 percent of university budgets. Cities and districts have also been disinvesting: from the 1980s through the 1990s, the federal government reduced its funding to cities, and, when combined with the global financial crisis of the past few years, this reduction in funding provided cities and districts new justification to slash education budgets further, resulting in the current furloughs of public school teachers and staff, shortened school years, reduced services and resources, and reduced educational quality. This was the result not only of less money, caused in large part by dramatically decreasing taxes paid by corporations and the wealthy, but also of lower priority being placed on education at a time when budgets for prisons and wars were steadily increasing.

Such cuts, of course, disproportionately affect students of color and working-class students, who disproportionately populate the public schools and public universities, which brings us full circle to the time of the early philanthropies when white businessmen were using their wealth to change the education of primarily poorer students of color, often with even greater disparities resulting. The change is not only in educational policy but also in public-policy decision making more broadly, signaling the transition from public deliberation by an elected government to decisions of self-appointed individuals with no accountability to the public.

The two leading venture philanthropies, the Gates Foundation and the Broad Foundation, do include among their grantees historically liberal organizations like the teacher unions. However, their funding priorities and strategic initiatives are so framed by neoliberalism, and their partnerships with conservative organizations and leaders so extensive, that their impact is indistinguishable from that of the conservative foundations. Overwhelmingly, by number of initiatives and amount of funding, the leading venture philanthropies are emphasizing the privatization and marketization of public education with such initiatives as outsourcing of school management, which can best be seen in school districts that are targeted for charter- school growth, where the majority of charter schools are managed by for-profit companies; incentive pay for teachers; alternative routes to certification for teachers and school leaders; and school-choice and charter- school initiatives. The leading venture philanthropies are investing in a web of organizations not unlike the web of foundations, think tanks, media organizations, and advocacy groups that characterizes the conservative network. The Gates Foundation, for example, funds think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute to issue reports, communications groups like Teach Plus to amplify the voices of teachers who specifically counter the voices of the teacher unions, and leadership groups like the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers to develop policies around the common-core standards.

The top-giving venture philanthropies include a broad mix of foundations from family fortunes: the Broad Education Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, the Donald and Doris Fisher Fund, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. These megaphilanthropies are funding other education-related venture philanthropies, like the Charter School Growth Fund and the NewSchools Venture Fund. Venture philanthropies include not only the national foundations from individual family fortunes but also the local philanthropies that were founded by collectives of business leaders, as is the case in Chicago with the Chicago Public Education Fund and the Renaissance Schools Fund. The result is a philanthropic sector that is inseparable from the business sector, advancing school reforms that cannot help but to be framed by corporate profitability.

Kevin K. Kumashiro is professor of Asian American studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he was formerly chair of educational policy studies. He is president-elect of the National Association for Multicultural Education. His e-mail address is*kevink@uic.edu*.

Notes

William Watkins, The White Architects of Black Education: Ideology and Power in America, 1865–1954 (New York: Teachers College Press, 2001).
Anuradha Mittal and Felicia Gustin, Turning the Tide: Challenging the Right on Campus (Oakland, CA: The Oakland Institute and the Institute for Democratic Education and Culture—Speak Out, 2006); David B. Tyack, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974).
Kathleen deMarrais, “’The Haves and the Have Mores’: Fueling a Conservative Ideological War on Public Education (or Tracking the Money),” Educational Studies 39, no. 3 (2006): 201–40.
Jeff Krehely, Meaghan House, and Emily Kernan, Axis of Ideology: Conservative Foundations and Public Policy (Washington, DC: National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, 2004).
David Hursh, “Assessing No Child Left Behind and the Rise of Neoliberal Education Policies,” American Education Research Journal 44, no. 3 (2007): 493–518.
Kenneth Saltman, The Gift of Education: Public Education and Venture Philanthropy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Janelle Scott, “The Politics of Venture Philanthropy in Charter School Policy and Advocacy,” Educational Policy 23, no. 1 (2009): 106–36.
Pauline Lipman, The New Political Economy of Urban Education: Neoliberalism, Race, and the Right to the City (New York: Routledge, 2011).

http://www.aaup.org/article/when-billionaires-become-educational-experts

Tags:

http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/13-education-reform-a-trojan-horse-for-privatization/

http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/20-stealing-from-public-education-to-feed-the-prison-industrial-complex/

http://schoolingintheownershipsociety.blogspot.com/2011_05_01_archive.html

A group called EdVoice filed a lawsuit to compel the teachers of Los Angeles to comply with 40-year-old legislation (the Stull Act), requiring that student performance be part of teacher evaluation. The Los Angeles teachers’ union has opposed the suit, and they are currently in litigation.

The issues are supposed to be resolved in December. There are many ways to demonstrate pupil performance, not just standardized test scores.

There are so many of these ��reform” groups that it is hard to keep track of them.

What and who is EdVoice?

Here is an answer from Sharon Higgins, an Oakland parent activist who is a relentless researcher, and who maintains two websites, one called “charterschoolscandals,” the other called “The Broad Report.” Higgins is an example of the power of one voice, devoted to facts:

Here are a few more specifics about EdVoice, the education lobbying group.

EdVoice was founded in 2001 by Reed Hastings (CEO of Netflix, Microsoft board member, Green Dot founding funder) and John Doerr (venture capitalist, investment banker), along with and former CA state Assembly members Ted Lempert and Steve Poizner. Eli Broad and Don Fisher (deceased CEO of The Gap and major KIPP supporter) once served on EdVoice’s board.

EdVoice has received a ton of money from all of the above as well as from Carrie Walton Penner and Fisher��s widow, Doris. Penner lives in the Bay Area and is a Walton Family Foundation trustee. She also sits on KIPP’s board, as does Reed Hastings, and the Fishers’ son, John.

Back in 1998, Hastings also co-founded Californians for Public School Excellence with Don Shalvey. This is the organization that pushed for the Charter Schools Act of 1998, the law that lifted the cap on the number of charter schools in the state.

Don Shalvey was involved with starting the first charter school in California, just after the passage of the California Charter School Act of 1992 (CA was the second state to pass a law). He is also founder and former CEO of Aspire Public Schools. Reed Hastings has been a major source of Aspire��s financial backing, including its launch. In 2009, Shalvey stepped down from his post at Aspire and went to work for the Gates Foundation, but for a while he stayed on Aspire’s board. The Gates Foundation has given generously to Aspire.

In 2011, Hastings and Doerr pumped $11M into DreamBox Learning, an online education company started by a former Microsoft executive and the CEO of a software company. It was acquired by Hastings with help from the Charter School Growth Fund.

BTW, EdVoice co-founder Lempert is currently president of an Oakland-based org called Children Now; he occasionally teaches at Cal. Poizner, a conservative Republican and wealthy Silicon Valley high tech entrepreneur, was defeated by Meg Whitman in the June 2010 gubernatorial primary, and is now the State Insurance Commissioner. For several years he worked for Boston Consulting Group as a management consultant.

More conniving fun and games. diance ravich

http://www.alternet.org/how-higher-education-us-was-destroyed-5-basic-steps?paging=off

5. The U.S. education system is what made this country prosperous in the twentieth century -- but no longer:Perhaps no issue is more urgent than this, yet for all the talk of teacher’s unions and testing, real education programs, ideas that will matter, are nonexistent this election season. During the last century, the best education system in the world allowed this country to grow briskly and lift standards of living. Now, from kindergarten to college, public education is chronically underfunded. Scarcely 2% of the federal budget goes to education, and dwindling public investment means students pay higher tuitions and fall ever deeper into debt. Total student debt surpassed $1 trillion this year and it’s growing by the month, with the average debt burden for a college graduate over $24,000. That will leave many of those graduates on a treadmill of loan repayment for most or all of their adult lives.

Renewed public investment in education -- from pre-kindergarten to university -- would pay handsome dividends for generations. But you aren’t going to hear either candidate or their vice-presidential running mates proposing the equivalent of a GI Bill for the rest of us or even significant new investment in education. And yet that’s a recipe for and a guarantee of American decline.

Ironically, those in Washington arguing for urgent deficit reduction claim that we’ve got to do it “for the kids,” that we must stop saddling our grandchildren with mountains of federal debt. But if your child turns 18 and finds her government running a balanced budget in an America that's hollowed out, an America where she has no chance of paying for a college education, will she celebrate? You don’t need an economist to answer that one.

Mattea Kramer is senior research analyst at*National Priorities Project*and a*TomDispatch regular*. She is lead author of the new bookA People’s Guide to the Federal Budget.

Published on The Nation (http://www.thenation.com)

How Online Learning Companies Bought America's Schools

Lee Fang | November 16, 2011

This article was reported in partnership with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute.

If the national movement to “reform” public education through vouchers, charters and privatization has a laboratory, it is Florida. It was one of the first states to undertake a program of “virtual schools”—charters operated online, with teachers instructing students over the Internet—as well as one of the first to use vouchers to channel taxpayer money to charter schools run by for-profits.

But as recently as last year, the radical change envisioned by school reformers still seemed far off, even there. With some of the movement��s cherished ideas on the table, Florida Republicans, once known for championing extreme education laws, seemed to recoil from the fight. SB 2262, a bill to allow the creation of private virtual charters, vastly expanding the Florida Virtual School program, languished and died in committee. Charlie Crist, then the Republican governor, vetoed a bill to eliminate teacher tenure. The move, seen as a political offering to the teachers unions, disheartened privatization reform advocates. At one point, the GOP’s budget proposal even suggested a cut for state aid going to virtual school programs.

Lamenting this series of defeats, Patricia Levesque, a top adviser to former GovernorJeb Bush, spoke to fellow reformers at a retreat in October 2010. Levesque noted that reform efforts had failed because the opposition had time to organize. Next year, Levesque advised, reformers should “spread” the unions thin “by playing offense” with decoy legislation. Levesque said she planned to sponsor a series of statewide reforms, like allowing taxpayer dollars to go to religious schools by overturning the so-called Blaine Amendment, ��even if it doesn’t pass…to keep them busy on that front.” She also advised paycheck protection, a unionbusting scheme, as well as a state-provided insurance program to encourage teachers to leave the union and a transparency law to force teachers unions to show additional information to the public. Needling the labor unions with all these bills, Levesque said, allows certain charter bills to fly “under the radar.”

If Levesque’s blunt advice sounds like that of a veteran lobbyist, that’s because she is one. Levesque runs a Tallahassee-based firm called Meridian Strategies LLC, which lobbies on behalf of a number of education-technology companies. She is a leader of a coalition of government officials, academics and virtual school sector companies pushing new education laws that could benefit them.

But Levesque wasn’t delivering her hardball advice to her lobbying clients. She was giving it to a group of education philanthropists at a conference sponsored by notable charities like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation. Indeed, Levesque serves at the helm of two education charities, the Foundation for Excellence in Education, a national organization, and the Foundation for Florida’s Future, a state-specific nonprofit, both of which are chaired by Jeb Bush. A press release from her national group says that it fights to “advance policies that will create a high quality digital learning environment.”

Despite the clear conflict of interest between her lobbying clients and her philanthropic goals, Levesque and her team have led a quiet but astonishing national transformation. Lobbyists like Levesque have made 2011 the year of virtual education reform, at last achieving sweeping legislative success [1] by combining the financial firepower of their corporate clients with the seeming legitimacy of privatization-minded school-reform think tanks and foundations. Thanks to this synergistic pairing, policies designed to boost the bottom lines of education-technology companies are cast as mere attempts to improve education through technological enhancements, prompting little public debate or opposition. In addition to Florida, twelve states have expanded virtual school programs or online course requirements this year. This legislative juggernaut has coincided with a gold rush of investors clamoring to get a piece of the K-12 education market. It’s big business, and getting bigger: One study estimated that revenues from the K-12 online learning industry will grow by 43 percent between 2010 and 2015, with revenues reaching $24.4 billion.

In Florida, only fourteen months after Crist handed a major victory to teachers unions, a new governor, Rick Scott, signed a radical bill that could have the effect of replacing hundreds of teachers with computer avatars. Scott, a favorite of the Tea Party, appointed Levesque as one of his education advisers. His education law expanded the Florida Virtual School to grades K-5, authorized the spending of public funds on new for-profit virtual schools and created a requirement that all high school students take at least one online course before graduation.

“I’ve never seen it like this in ten years,�� remarked Ron Packard, CEO of virtual education powerhouse K12 Inc., on a conference call in February. “It’s almost like someone flipped a switch overnight and so many states now are considering either allowing us to open private virtual schools” orlifting the cap on the number of students who can use vouchersto attend K12 Inc.’s schools. Listening to a K12 Inc. investor call, one could mistake it for a presidential campaign strategy session, as excited analysts read down a list of states and predict future victories.

Good for Business; Kids Not So Much

While most education reform advocates cloak their goals in the rhetoric of “putting children first,” the conceit was less evident at a conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, earlier this year.

Standing at the lectern of Arizona State University’s SkySong conference center in April, investment banker Michael Moe exuded confidence as he kicked off his second annual confab of education startup companies and venture capitalists. A press packet cited reports that rapid changes in education could unlock “immense potential for entrepreneurs.” “This education issue,” Moe declared, “there’s not a bigger problem or bigger opportunity in my estimation.”

Moe has worked for almost fifteen years at converting the K-12 education system into a cash cow for Wall Street. A veteran of Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch, he now leads an investment group that specializes in raising money for businesses looking to tap into more than $1 trillion in taxpayer money spent annually on primary education. His consortium of wealth management and consulting firms, called Global Silicon Valley Partners, helped K12 Inc. go public and has advised a number of other education companies in finding capital.

Moe��s conference marked a watershed moment in school privatization. His first “Education Innovation Summit,” held last year, attracted about 370 people and fifty-five presenting companies. This year, his conference hosted more than 560 people and 100 companies, and featured luminaries like former DC Mayor Adrian Fenty and former New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein, now an education executive at News Corporation, a recent high-powered entrant into the for-profit education field. Klein is just one of many former school officials to cash out. Fenty now consults for Rosetta Stone, a language company seeking to expand into the growing K-12 market.

As Moe ticked through the various reasons education is the next big “undercapitalized” sector of the economy, like healthcare in the 1990s, he also read through a list of notable venture investment firms that recently completed deals relating to the education-technology sector, including Sequoia and Benchmark Capital. Kleiner Perkins, a major venture capital firm and one of the first to back Amazon.com and Google, is now investing in education technology, Moe noted.

The press release for Moe’s education summit promised attendees a chance to meet a set of experts who have “cracked the code” in overcoming “systemic resistance to change.” Fenty, still recovering from his loss in the DC Democratic primary, urged attendees to stand up to the teachers union “bully.” Jonathan Hage, CEO of Charter Schools USA, likened the conflict to war, according to a summary posted on the conference website. “There’s an air game,” said Hage, “but there’s also a ground game going on.” “Investors are going to have to support” candidates and “push back against the pushback.” Carlos Watson, a former cable news host now working as an investment banker for Goldman Sachs specializing in for-profit education, guided a conversation dedicated simply to the politics of reform.

Sponsors of the event ranged from various education reform groups funded by hedge-fund managers, like the nonprofit Education Reform Now, to ABS Capital, a private equity firm with a stake in education-technology companies like Teachscape. At smaller breakout sessions, education enterprises made their pitches to potential investors.

Another sponsor, a group called School Choice Week, was launched last year as a public relations gimmick to take advantage of the opportunity for rapid education reforms. Although it is billed as a network of students and parents, School Choice Week is one of the many corporate-funded tactics to press virtual school reforms. The first School Choice Week campaign push earlier this year featured highly produced press packets, sample letters to the editor, a sign in Times Square and rallies for virtual and charter schools organized with help from the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity. The blitz got positive press coverage, providing “grassroots” cover for newly elected politicians who made school privatization their first priority.

A combination of factors has made this year what Moe calls an “inflection point” in the march toward public school privatization. For one thing, recession-induced fiscal crises and austerity have pressured states to cut spending. In some cases, as in Florida, where educating students at the Florida Virtual School costs nearly $2,500 less than at traditional schools, such reform has been sold as a budget fix. At the same time, the privatization push has gone hand in hand with the ratcheting up of attacks on teachers unions by partisan groups, like Karl Rove’s American Crossroads and Americans for Prosperity, seeking to weaken the union-backed Democrats in the 2012 election. All of this has set the stage for education industry lobbyists to achieve an unprecedented expansion in for-profit elementary through high school education.

From Idaho to Indiana to Florida, recently passed laws will radically reshape the face of education in America, shifting the responsibility of teaching generations of Americans to online education businesses, many of which have poor or nonexistent track records. The rush to privatize education will also turn tens of thousands of students into guinea pigs in a national experiment in virtual learning—a relatively new idea that allows for-profit companies to administer public schools completely online, with no brick-and-mortar classrooms or traditional teachers.

* * *

Like many “education entrepreneurs,” Moe remains a player in the education reform movement, pushing policies that have the potential to benefit his clients. In addition to advising prominent politicians like Senator John McCain, Moe is a board member of the Center for Education Reform, a pro-privatization think tank that issues policy papers and ads to influence the debate. Earlier this year, the group dropped $70,000 on an ad campaign in Pennsylvania comparing those who oppose a new measure to expand vouchers to segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace, who blocked African-American children from entering white schools.

Moe isn’t the only member of the Center for Education Reform with a profound conflict of interest. CER president Jeanne Allen doubles as the head of TAC Public Affairs, a government relations firm that has represented several top education for-profits. Allen, whose clients have included Kaplan Education and Charter Schools USA, served as transition adviser to Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett on education reform.

Corbett, a Republican who rode the Tea Party election wave in 2010, supports a major voucher expansion that is working its way through the state legislature. The expansion would be a windfall for companies like K12 Inc., which currently operates one Pennsylvania school under the limited charter law on the books. According to disclosures reported in Business Week, Pennsylvania’s Agora Cyber Charter School—K12 Inc.’s online school, which allows students to take all their courses at home using a computer—generated $31.6 million for K12 Inc. in the past academic year.

Thirteen other states have enacted laws to expand or initiate so-called school choice programs this year. Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels has pushed the hardest, enacting a law that removes the cap on the number of charter schools in his state, authorizes all universities to register charters and expands an existing voucher program in the state for students to attend private and charter schools (in some cases managed by for-profit companies). Critics note that Daniels’s law allows public money to flow to religious institutions as well. Twenty-seven other states, in addition to Pennsylvania, have voucher expansion laws pending. And states like Florida are embracing tech-friendly education reform to require that students take online courses to graduate. In Idaho this November, the state board of education approved a controversial plan to require at least two online courses for graduation.

“We think that’s so important because every student, regardless of what they do after high school, they’ll be learning online,” said Tom Vander Ark, a prominent online education advocate, on a recently distributed video urging the adoption of online course requirements. Vander Ark, a former executive director of education at the influential Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, now lobbies all over the country for the online course requirement. Like Moe, he keeps one foot in the philanthropic world and another in business. He sits on the board of advisors of Democrats for Education Reform and is partner to an education-tech venture capital company, Learn Capital. Learn Capital counts AdvancePath Academics, which offers online coursework for students at risk of dropping out, as part of its investment portfolio. When Vander Ark touts online course requirements, it is difficult to discern whether he is selling a product that could benefit his investments or genuinely believes in the virtue of the idea.

To be sure, some online programs have potential and are necessary in areas where traditional resources aren’t available. For instance, online AP classes serve rural communities without access to qualified teachers, and there are promising efforts to create programs that adapt to the needs of students with special learning requirements. But by and large, there is no evidence that these technological innovations merit the public resources flowing their way. Indeed, many such programs appear to be failing the students they serve.

A recent study of virtual schools in Pennsylvania conducted by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes atStanford University revealed that students in online schools performed significantly worse than their traditional counterparts. Another study, from the University of Colorado in December 2010, found that only 30 percent of virtual schools run by for-profit organizations met the minimum progress standards outlined by No Child Left Behind, compared with 54.9 percent of brick-and-mortar schools. For White Hat Management, the politically connected Ohio for-profit operating both traditional and virtual charter schools, the success rate under NCLB was a mere 2 percent, while for schools run by K12 Inc., it was 25 percent. A major review by the Education Department found that policy reforms embracing online courses “lack scientific evidence” of their effectiveness.

“Why are our legislators rushing to jump off the cliff of cyber charter schools when the best available evidence produced by independent analysts show that such schools will be unsuccessful?” asked Ed Fuller, an education researcher at Pennsylvania State University, on his blog.

The frenzy to privatize America’s K-12 education system, under the banner of high-tech progress and cost-saving efficiency, speaks to the stunning success of a public relations and lobbying campaign by industry, particularly tech companies. Because of their campaign spending, education-tech interests are major players in elections.In 2010, K12 Inc. spent lavishly in key races across the country, including a last-minute donation of $25,000 to Idahoans for Choice in Education, a political action committee supporting Tom Luna, a self-styled Tea Party school superintendent running for re-election. Since 2004, K12 Inc. alone has spent nearly $500,000 in state-level direct campaign contributions, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics. David Brennan, Chairman of White Hat Management, became the second-biggest Ohio GOP donor, with more than $4.2 million in contributions in the past decade.

The Alliance for School Choice, a national education reform group, set up PACs in several states to elect state lawmakers. According to Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, American Federation for Children spent $500,000 in media in the lead-up to Wisconsin’s recall elections. AFC shares leaders, donors, and a street address with ASC. Bill Oberndorf, one of the main donors to the group, had been associated with Voyager Learning, an online education company, for years. A few months ago, Cambium Learning, the parent company of Voyager, paid Oberndorf’s investment firm $4.9 million to buy back Oberndorf’s stock. Cambium currently offers a fleet of supplemental education tools for school districts. With the recent acquisition of Class.com, a smaller online learning business, the company announced its entry into the virtual charter school and online course market.

Allies of the Right

Lobbyists for virtual school companies have also embedded themselves in the conservative infrastructure. The International Association for Online Learning (iNACOL), the trade association for EdisonLearning, Connections Academy, K12 Inc., American Virtual Academy, Apex Learning and other leading virtual education companies, is a case in point. A former Bush appointee at the Education Department, iNACOL president Susan Patrick traverses right-leaning think tanks spreading the gospel of virtual schools. In the past year, she has addressed the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, a group dedicated to setting up laissez-faire nonprofits all over the world, as well as the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.

Two pivotal conservative organizations have helped Patrick in her campaigns for virtual schools: the American Legislative Exchange Council and the State Policy Network.SPN nurtures and establishes state-based policy and communication nonprofits with a right-wing bent. ALEC, the thirty-eight-year-old conservative nonprofit, similarly coordinates a fifty-state strategy for right-wing policy. Special task forces composed of corporate lobbyists and state lawmakers write “template” legislation [see John Nichols, “ALEC Exposed,” August 1/8]. Since 2005, ALEC has offered a template law called “The Virtual Public Schools Act” to introduce online education. Mickey Revenaugh, an executive at virtual-school powerhouse Connections Learning, co-chairs the education policy–writing department of ALEC.

At SPN’s annual conference in Cleveland last year, held two months before the midterm elections, the think tank network adopted a new push for education reform, specifically embracing online technology and expanding vouchers. Patrick opened the event and led a session about virtual schools with Anthony Kim, president of the virtual-school business Education Elements.

SPN has faced accusations before that it is little more than a coin-operated front for corporations. For instance, SPN and its affiliates receive money from polluters, including infamous petrochemical giant Koch Industries, allegedly in exchange for aggressive promotion of climate denial theories. But SPN’s conference had less to do with policy than with tactics. Kyle Olson, a Republican operative infamous in Michigan and other states for his confrontational attacks on unionized teachers, gave a presentation on labor reform in K-12 education. Stanford Swim, heir to a Utah-based investment fortune and head of a traditional-values foundation, ran a workshop at the conference on creating viral videos to advance the cause. He said policy papers wouldn’t work. Tell your scholars, “Sorry, this isn’t a white paper,” Swim advised. “You gotta go there,” he continued, “and it’s because that��s where the audience is.” “If it’s vulgar, so what?” he added.

Since the conference, SPN’s state affiliates have taken a lead role in pushing virtual schools. Several of its state-based affiliates, like the Buckeye Institute in Ohio, set up websites claiming that unions��the only real opposition to ending collective bargaining and the expansion of charter school reforms—led to overpaid teachers and budget deficits. In Wisconsin, the MacIver Institute’s “news crew” laid the groundwork for Governor Walker’s assault on collective bargaining by creating news reports denouncing protesters and promoting the governor. In March, while busting the teachers unions in his state, Walker lifted the cap on virtual schools and removed the program’s income requirements.

State Representative Robin Vos, the Wisconsin state chair for ALEC, sponsored the bill codifying Walker’s radical expansion of online, for-profit schools. Vos’s bill not only lifts the cap but also makes new, for-profit virtual charters easier to establish. As the Center for Media and Democracy, a Madison-based liberal watchdog, notes, the bill closely resembles legislative templates put forward by ALEC.

Although SPN’s unique contribution to the debate has been clever web videos and online smear sites, the group’s affiliates have also continued the traditional approach of policy papers. In Washington State, the Freedom Foundation published “Online Learning 101: A Guide to Virtual Public Education in Washington”; Nebraska’s Platte Institute released “The Vital Need for Virtual Schools in Nebraska”; and the Sutherland Institute, a Utah-based SPN affiliate, equipped lawmakers with a guide called “Thinking Outside the Building: Online Education.�� SPN think tanks in Maine, Maryland and other states have pressed virtual school reforms. Patrick visited SPN state groups and gave pep talks about how to sell the issue to lawmakers.

Meanwhile, ALEC has continued to slip laws written by education-tech lobbyists onto the books. In Tennessee, Republican State Representative Harry Brooks didn’t even bother changing the name of ALEC’s Virtual Public Schools Act before introducing it as his own legislation. Asked by the Knoxville News Sentinel’s Tom Humphrey where he got the idea for the bill, Brooks readily admitted that a K12 Inc. lobbyist helped him draft it. Governor Bill Haslam signed Brooks’s bill into law in May. The statute allows parents to apply nearly every dollar the state typically spends per pupil, almost $6,000 in most areas, to virtual charter schools, as long as they are authorized by the state.

SPN’s fall 2010 conference featured the man perhaps happiest with the explosion in virtual education: Jeb Bush. “I have a confession to make,” he said with grin. “I am a real policy geek, and this is like the epicenter of geekdom.” Bush shared his experiences initiating some of the nation’s first for-profit and virtual charter school reforms as the governor of Florida, acknowledging his policy ideas came from some in the room. (The local SPN affiliate in Tallahassee is the James Madison Institute.)

Bush: Man Behind the Virtual Curtain

Jeb Bush campaigned vigorously in 2010 to expand such reforms, with tremendous success. About a month after the election, he unveiled his road map for implementing a far-reaching ten-point agenda for virtual schools and online coursework. Former West Virginia Governor Bob Wise, a Democrat, has barnstormed the country to encourage lawmakers to adopt Bush’s plan, which calls for the permanent financing of education-technology reforms, among other changes. In one promotional video, Wise says it is “not only about the content” of the online courses but the “process” of students becoming acquainted with learning on the Internet.

The key pillar of Bush’s plan is to make sure virtual education isn’t just a new option for taxpayer money but a requirement. And several states, like Florida, have already adopted online course requirements. As Idaho Republicans faced a public referendum on their online course requirement rule last summer, Bush arrived in the state to show his support. ��Implemented right, you’re going to see rising student achievement,” said Bush, praising Idaho Governor Butch Otter and school superintendent Tom Luna, who was elected with campaign donations from the online-education industry. Bush also claimed that making high school students take online classes would “put Idaho on the map” as a “digital revolution takes hold.” Bush was in Michigan in June to testify for Governor Rick Snyder’s suite of education reform ideas, which include uncapped expansion of virtual schools, and he was back in the state in July to continue to press for reforms.

In August, at ALEC’s annual conference in New Orleans, the education task force officially adopted Bush’s ten elements agenda. Mickey Revenaugh, the virtual school executive overseeing the committee, presided over the vote endorsing the measure. But when does Bush’s advocacy, typically reported in the press as the work of a former governor with education experience advising the new crop of Republicans, cross the threshold into corporate lobbying?

The nonprofit behind this digital push, Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education, is funded by online learning companies: K12 Inc., Pearson (which recently bought Connections Education), Apex Learning (a for-profit online education company launched by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen), Microsoft and McGraw-Hill Education among others. The advisory board for Bush’s ten digital elements agenda reads like a Who’s Who of education-technology executives, reformers, bureaucrats and lobbyists, including Michael Stanton, senior vice president for corporate affairs at Blackboard; Karen Cator, director of technology for the Education Department; Jaime Casap, a Google executive in charge of business development for the company’s K-12 division; Shafeen Charania, who until recently served as marketing director of Microsoft’s education products department; and Bob Moore, a Dell executive in charge of “facilitating growth” of the computer company’s K-12 education practice.

Like other digital reform advocates, the Bush nonprofit is also supported by Microsoft founder Bill Gates’s foundation. The fact that a nonprofit that receives funding from both the Gates Foundation and Microsoft pressures states to adopt for-profit education reforms may raise red flags with some in the philanthropy community, as Microsoft, too, has moved into the education field. The company has tapped into the K-12 privatization expansion by supplying a range of products, from traditional Windows programs to servers and online coursework platforms. It also contracts with Florida Virtual School to provide cloud computer solutions. Similarly, Dell is seeking new opportunities in the K-12 market for its range of desktop products, while the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, the charitable nonprofit founded by Dell’s CEO, promotes neoliberal education reforms.

Through Bush, education-technology companies have found a shortcut to encourage states to adopt e-learning reforms. Take his yearly National Summit on Education Reform, sponsored by the Foundation for Excellence in Education.

At the most recent summit, held in San Francisco in mid-October, a group of more than 200 state legislators and state education department officials huddled in a ballroom over education-technology strategy. Rich Crandall, a state senator from Arizona, said to hearty applause that he had developed a local think tank to support the virtual school reforms he helped usher into law. Toward the end of the discussion, Vander Ark, acting as an emcee, walked around the room acknowledging lawmakers who had recently passed pro–education tech laws this year. He handed the microphone to Kelli Stargel, a state representative from Florida, who stood up and boasted of creating “virtual charter schools, so we can have innovation in our state.”

Throughout the day, lawmakers mingled with education-technology lobbyists from leading firms, like Apex Learning and K12 Inc. Some of the distance learning reforms were taught in breakout sessions, like one called “Don’t Let a Financial Crisis Go to Waste,” an hourlong event that encouraged lawmakers to use virtual schools as a budget-cutting measure. Mandy Clark, a staffer with Bush’s foundation, walked around handing out business cards, offering to e-mail sample legislation to legislators.

The lobbying was evident to anyone there. But for some of those present, Bush didn’t go far enough. David Byer, a senior manager with Apple in charge of developing education business for the company, groaned and leaned over to another attendee sitting at the edge of the room after a lunch session. “You have this many people together, why can��t you say, ‘Here are the ten elements, here are some sample bills’?” said Byer to David Stevenson, who nodded in agreement. Stevenson is a vice president of News Corporation’s education subsidiary, Wireless Generation, an education-technology firm that specializes in assessment tools. It was just a year ago that News Corp. announced its intention to enter the for-profit K-12 education industry, which Rupert Murdoch called “a $500 billion sector in the US alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed.”

As attendees stood up to leave the hall, the phalanx of lobbyists surrounding the room converged, buttonholing legislators and school officials. On a floor above the main hall, an expo center had been set up, with companies like McGraw-Hill, Connections Academy, K12 Inc., proud sponsors of the event, providing information on how to work with politicians to make education technology a reality.

Patricia Levesque, a Bush staffer speaking at the summit and the former governor’s right hand when it comes to education reform, does not draw a direct salary from Bush’s nonprofit despite the fact that she is listed as its executive director, and tax disclosures show that she spends about fifty hours a week at the organization. Instead, her lobbying firm, Meridian Strategies, supplies her income. The Foundation for Florida’s Future, another Bush nonprofit, contracts with Meridian, as do online technology companies like IQ-ity Innovation, which paid her up to $20,000 for lobbying services at the beginning of this year. The unorthodox arrangement allows donors to Bush��s group to avoid registering actual lobbyists while using operatives like Levesque to influence legislators and governors on education technology.

Levesque��s contract with IQ-ity raises questions about Bush’s foundation work. As Mother Jones recently reported, the founder of IQ-ity, William Lager, also founded an education company with a poor track record. Lager’s other education firm, Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, is the largest provider of virtual schools in Ohio. ECOT schools have consistently underperformed; though the company serves more than 10,000 children, its graduation rate has never broken 40 percent. The company was fined for billing the state to serve more than 2,000 students in one month, when only seven children logged on during the same time period. Nevertheless, after Levesque spent at least two years as a registered lobbyist for Lager’s firm, Bush traveled to Ohio to give the commencement speech for ECOT. “ECOT proves a glimpse into what’s possible,” Bush said with pride, “by harnessing the power of technology.”

* * *

Levesque is no ordinary lobbyist. She is credited with encouraging the type of bare-knuckle politics now common in the wider education-reform movement. In an audio file obtained by The Nation, she and infamous anti-union consultant Richard Berman outlined a strategy in October 2010 for sweeping the nation with education reforms. The two spoke at the Philanthropy Roundtable, a get-together of major right-wing foundations. Lori Fey, a representative of the Michael Dell Foundation, moderated the panel discussion.

Rather than “intellectualize ourselves into the [education reform] debate…is there a way that we can get into it at an emotional level?” Berman asked. “Emotions will stay with people longer than concepts.” He then answered his own question: “We need to hit on fear and anger. Because fear and anger stays with people longer. And how you get the fear and anger is by reframing the problem.” Berman’s glossy ads, which have run in Washington, DC, and New Jersey, portray teachers unions as schoolyard bullies. One spot even seems to compare teachers to child abusers. Although Berman does not reveal his donors, he made clear in his talk that the foundations in the room were supporting his campaign.

Levesque ended the strategy discussion with a larger strategic question. She pointed to the example of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg donating $100 million to Newark schools. She then asked the crowd to imagine instead raising $100 million for political races where we “could sway a couple of seats to have more education reform.” “Just shifting a little bit of your focus,” she added, noting that new politicians could have a greater impact.

Levesque��s ask has become reality. According to author Steven Brill, ex–DC school chancellor Michelle Rhee’s new group, StudentsFirst, raised $100 million within a few months of Levesque’s remarks. Rhee’s donors include Rupert Murdoch, philanthropist Eli Broad and Home Depot founder Ken Langone. Rhee’s group has pledged to spend more than $1 billion to bring for-profit schools, including virtual education, to the entire country by electing reform-friendly candidates and hiring top-notch state lobbyists.

A day before he opened his education reform conference to the media recently, Bush hosted another education meeting. This event, a private affair in the Palace Hotel, was a reconvening of investors and strategists to plan the next leg of the privatization campaign. Michael Moe, Susan Patrick, Tom Vander Ark and other major players were invited. I waited outside the event, trying to get what information I could. I asked Mayor Fenty how I could get in. “Just crash in, come on in,” he laughed, adding, “so what company are you with?” When he learned that I was a reporter, he shook his head. “Oh, nah, you’re not welcome, then.”

An invitation had billed the exclusive gathering as a chance for “philanthropists and venture capitalists�� to figure out how to “leverage each other’s strengths”—a concise way to describe how for-profit virtual school companies are using philanthropy as a Trojan horse.

Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/article/164651/how-online-learning-companies-bought-americas-schools

Links:

[1] http://www.thenation.com/interactive/164595/education-reform

Beware of Privatization of Education: It Reduces Our Homeschooling Freedoms

http://homeedmag.com/HEM/281/beware-privatization-of-education.php

STATE REP. MARK POCAN: Some of their legislation sounds so innocuous, but when you start to read about why they’re doing it, you know there’s a far different reason why something’s coming forward, and that’s important. If the average person knew that a bill like this came from some group like ALEC, you’ll look at the bill very differently, and you might look at that legislator a little differently about why they introduced it.

This is not about education. This is not about helping kids with special needs. This is about privatization. This is about corporate profits. And this is about dismantling public education.

BILL MOYERS:��The bill passed in the Wisconsin House but failed to make it through the Senate. However, in its education report card,ALEC boasts that similar bills have passed in Oklahoma, Louisiana, North Carolina and Ohio. ALEC’s education agenda includes online schooling, as well. Take a careful look, and you’ll find the profit motive there, too.

LISA GRAVES: What you see is corporations that have a direct benefit, whose bottom line directly benefits from these bills, voting on these bills in the ALEC��task force. And so, corporations like Connections Academy, corporations like K12, they have a direct financial interest in advancing this agenda.

BILL MOYERS: Those corporations, Connections Academy and K12, which specialize in online education, can profit handsomely from laws that direct taxpayer money toward businesses like theirs. In 2011, both sat on ALEC’s Education Task Force. But the two companies didn’t just approve the model bill, they helped craft it. The proof is in one of ALEC’s own documents. And there’s more to the story.

STATE SEN. DOLORES GRESHAM: Thank you, Mr. Speaker. House Bill 1030 has to do with the establishment of virtual public schools.

BILL MOYERS: Last year, an online schooling bill based on the ALECmodel turned up in another state where ALEC has a powerful influence: Tennessee. It was introduced in both the state Senate and House byALEC members. The bill passed, making private corporations eligible for public money for online education. Then, within weeks, the K12 corporation got what amounted to a no-bid contract to provide online education to any Tennessee student from kindergarten through the eighth grade.

So, let’s review. The ALEC member corporations helped craft the bill.ALEC legislators introduced it and vote on it. And now there’s a state law on the books that enables one of those corporations to get state money. Game, set, match. But remember, this story isn’t about one company and the education industry and one law in Tennessee; it’s about hundreds of corporations in most every industry influencing lawmakers in state after state, using ALEC as a front.

ALEC Spreads Parent Trigger Nationwide

The first Parent Trigger law was enacted in 2010 in California and, with an assist from Heartland and ALEC, the idea is rapidly spreading.

The California law was based on a proposal from Ben Austin, a policy consultant for a small non-profit education organization called Green Dot Public Schools, which manages charter schools for the city of Los Angeles. Austin subsequently formed Parent Revolution, which promotes these laws across the country. But this is not your local PTA. Parent Revolution is backed by big money, including receiving funding from the conservative Walton Family Foundation (think Wal-Mart), which has spent over a billion to promote school privatization.

The rabid pro-privatization Heartland Institute quickly took up the Parent Trigger idea in 2010. The Heartland version of the bill (PDF) went a step further and gave parents the authority to trigger a school’s restructuring regardless of whether it is "failing" or not. Heartland's version of the bill also calls for a "school voucher" option, which allows students to receive a monetary voucher to attend another private or public school. Voucher or “choice” schools have been criticized for diverting funds from public schools to unaccountable private schools, including for-profit religious and virtual schools.

While ALEC has a governing board of state legislators it also has a governing board of corporations, packed with tobacco firms, giant pharmaceutical firms, and energy companies like Exxon Mobil. The ultra-conservative, billionaire Koch Brothers, have had a representative on the board for years and Koch-controlled money has funded ALEC to the tune of at least $1 million, according to estimates calculated by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD).

The ALEC Education Task Force voted to approve the “Parent Trigger Act” (PDF) at their critical December 2010 strategy meeting in Washington, D.C., and the idea quickly spread. According to CMD's analysis, ALEC members introduced or cosponsored various versions of the bill in 17 states.

At the time, ALEC’s education task force was chaired by the for-profit education firm Connections Academy, which specializes in K-12 online education. Others on the task force include tech companies, testing companies and higher-education diploma mills like Bridgepoint Education and Corinthian Education, both of which are under investigation by state Attorneys General for aggressive recruiting policies that leave too many students in debt with no degree.

We have seen this pattern before. When the NRA finally succeeded in getting its first “Stand Your Ground” gun law passed into law in Florida, a law implicated in the tragic Trayvon Martin killing, its next step was to bring the bill to ALEC which helped it spread to two dozen other states in short order.

Parent Trigger and ALEC were a match made in heaven. ALEC's education bills encompass more than 30 years of effort to privatize public education through an ever-expanding network of school vouchers, an idea first advocated by economist Milton Friedman in the 1950s. ALEC bills also allow schools to loosen standards for teachers and administrators, exclude students with physical disabilities and special educational needs, eschew collective bargaining, and experiment with other pet causes like merit pay, single-sex education, school uniforms, and political and religious indoctrination of students.

Parent Trigger “A Clever Way to Trick Parents”?

But does it work? The support for Parent Trigger, according to University of Illinois Professor Christopher Lubienski, is based more on ideology than empirical data. Lubienski is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Organization.

The data shows that the conversion to charter schools, which Lubienski said is the constant theme running throughout the "Parent Trigger" legislation passed in states, has not shown to be effective in improving student outcomes. A study conducted at Stanford University's Hoover Institution presents evidence that students in only 17 percent of charter school show greater improvement in math and reading than students in similar traditional public schools, whereas 37 percent, deliver learning results that are significantly worse than the student would have realized had they remained in public schools. However, the conversion to charter schools has proven profitable to many U.S. firms such as ALEC member National Heritage Academies, a for-profit charter school management organization operating in eight states, and K-12, Inc., which promotes "virtual" charter schools as well as "virtual" voucher schools. K-12, Inc. is under investigation in Florida for improperly certifying teachers and asking them to cover it up.

In short, Parent Trigger laws are a "clever way to trick parents into seizing control of their schools and handing it over to private corporations," according to Diane Ravitch, an education historian and former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education in the first Bush Administration.

Philip Anschutz, Right-Wing Billionaire, Owns Production Company

"Won't Back Down," is a production of Walden Media, owned by billionaire investor and right-wing extremist Philip Anschutz. Anschutz participates in the Koch brothers' secretive political strategy summits and funds David Koch’s Americans for Prosperity group, which backed Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's union busting proposal and is working to defeat Barack Obama and other Democratic candidates across the country.

Anschutz bankrolls ALEC and ALEC member groups. In 2010, The Anschutz Foundation, gave ALEC $10,000 and his Union Pacific firm was an ALEC sponsor the following year. The Foundation funded three ALEC members who sat on the ALEC Education Task Force which approved the Parent Trigger Proposal: The Independence Institute, Center for Education Reform, and Pacific Research Institute.��

Anschutz has also supported the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which backs legislation designed to cripple unions; the Discovery Institute, which seeks to get creation “science” accepted in public schools; and the Mission America Foundation, whose president considers homosexuality to be a “deviance.” He also owns the conservative magazine, the Weekly Standard.

Walden Media was one of the producers of the pro-charter documentary film “Waiting for 'Superman'.” This film was criticized by Diane Ravitch as propaganda and as ��a powerful weapon on behalf of those championing the ‘free market’ and privatization.”

Rupert Murdoch, Media Mogul and Owner of Education Testing Company, Distributes Film

The film is being distributed by 20th Century Fox, owned by News Corp. and media mogul Rupert Murdock. News Corp. owns Fox News, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post. Murdoch formerly owned the British newspaper News of the World, which imploded once it was revealed that reporters hacked into the cell phones of the family of a murdered child, as well as the cell phones of the royal family, politicians and celebrities. The paper's top editors and reporters were arrested although Murdoch himself has not been charged.

As CMD previously reported, News Corp. has been a member of both ALEC's Education Task Force and Communications and Technology Task Force. Wall Street Journal editorial board member Stephen Moore, is an ALEC “scholar” and both the Wall Street Journal and Fox News have gone to bat for ALEC as member corporations began to flee earlier this year. What is less well known is that News Corp. owns Wireless Generation, a for-profit online education, software, and testing corporation, acquiring it in 2010 for $360 million. Wireless Generation is also an ALEC member. Apparently, Murdoch was anxious to get a piece of the nation's education system, which��he describes as a "500 billion sector in the U.S. alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed." News Corp's senior Vice President in charge of its education division is none other than former Chancellor of New York City Schools, Joel Klein, who promoted a corporatist model of education reform.

Michelle Rhee, Former D.C. Chancellor of Schools, Pushes Parent TriggerThe film is being promoted by former Washington, D.C., public schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee. Rhee spoke at both the RNC and DNC screenings of “Won’t Back Down,” and her involvement underscores what is often the bipartisan nature of the modern "school reform" movement.

Her tenure as the head of the D.C. school system was so controversial, she is widely credited with losing D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty's reelection campaign. She was credited with greatly improving test scores in Washington, D.C. schools, but this accomplishment was cast into doubt by a USA Todayinvestigation that suggested that test score gains during her term may have been the result of cheating on the part of school officials. The report found extremely high erasure rates that were statistically anomalous.

After resigning from her position in 2010, Rhee went on to start StudentsFirst, a 501(c)4 non-profit organization planning to engage in “direct and grassroots lobbying” on education issues including Parent Trigger. Derrell Bradford, a state director for StudentsFirst, spoke on "Enacting a Comprehensive K-12 Education Reform Agenda" at the 2011 ALEC annual meeting.

Rhee’s group receives funding from Murdoch, who “has pledged to spend more than $1 billion to bring for-profit schools, including virtual education, to the entire country by electing reform-friendly candidates and hiring top-notch state lobbyists.” New Corp's Joel Klein serves on her organization's board. Other supporters include New Jersey hedge funder manager David Tepper, and Alan Fournier (reportedly big backers of Romney).

Rhee was also featured in Anschutz's film “Waiting for ‘Superman'.”

Reform or Russian Roulette?

The movie ends when the hard work of turning around a struggling school begins. The Hoover Institution study discussed above shows that only 17 percent of charter schools do a better job educating students.

The Center for Media and Democracy

chic strike: ctr-spin rfers to Wa Post that ~ union;

As Molly Ball at the Atlantic wrote last week, Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, the chairman of the Democratic National Convention, spoke during the convention at a movie screening hosted by the face of the pro-charter-school movement, Michelle Rhee. “Another Democratic star, Newark Mayor Cory Booker, spoke at the cocktails-and-canapes reception afterward,” Ball noted. “Across the country, Democratic officials from governors like Colorado's John Hickenlooper to former President Clinton -- buoyed by the well-funded encouragement of the hedge-fund bigwigs behind much of the charter-school movement -- are shifting the party's consensus away from the union-dictated terms to which it has long been loyal.”

And of course, Chicago's teachers are facing down Mayor Rahm Emanuel, former White House Chief of Staff for Barack Obama.alternet silly on yjis Wa Post and slate

new doc race to the nowhere; she cites book on china going oppos of us; bay area patent Vicki Abeles,

origin 1983 nation at risk, nclb 2002; media ranking of HS and colleges; one size fits all does not work (//Rx)

the case against homework book: doing more of what does not work (kids need time to process w/ brain)

http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2009/12/new_documentary_race_to_nowher.html

Striking Teachers, Parents Join Forces to Oppose "Corporate" Education Model in Chicago http://www.democracynow.org/2012/9/10/striking_teachers_parents_join_forces_to

Univ of Phoenix pvt

Peter V. Sperling

Phoenix, AZ

University of Phoenix

24 donations: 13 to candidates, 7 to ballot measures and 4 to parties

$9,155,000

And we round out the show with Prof. Adam Bessie, contributor to the upcoming Censored 2013: Dispatches from the Media Revolution book, about G.E.R.M Warfare: How to Reclaim the Education Debate from Corporate Occupation and his recent work on a graphic novel on education published by Truthout. http://www.ustream.tv/channel/2992684

charter cheats: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-crescendo-20120818,0,5672962,full.story

crecendo not corp?

reason fdn:

Lisa Snell is the director of education and child welfare at Reason Foundation, a nonprofit think tank advancing free minds and free markets.

Snell has frequently testified before the California State Legislature and numerous other state legislatures and government agencies. She has authored policy studies on school finance and weighted student funding, universal preschool, school violence, charter schools, and child advocacy centers.

Snell is a frequent contributor to Reason magazine, School Reform News and Privatization Watch. Her writing has also appeared in Education Week, Edutopia, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, San Francisco Chronicle, Orange County Register, Los Angeles Times, and numerous other publications.

Ms. Snell is also an advisory board member to the National Quality Improvement Center for the Children’s Bureau; is on the charter school accreditation team for the American Academy for Liberal Education; and serves as a board member for the California Virtual Academy.

Before joining Reason Foundation, Snell taught public speaking and argumentation courses at California State University, Fullerton. She earned a Master of Arts in communication from California State University, Fullerton. http://reason.org/staff/opeds/lisa-snell

Bush, who is giving a prime time speech at the RNC Thursday, said Mitt Romney will be a “very good president on education.” But he also praised President Obama and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan on their education initiatives, including Race to the Top. “This will be very heretic but I’m getting used to being heretical,” Bush said. ��The president by picking Arne Duncan did a good thing for the country.”

Rhee, the former Washington D.C. education chancellor who now heads the advocacy group StudentsFirst, said it’s important to continue building bipartisan bridges to counter critics who will continue to try and sow division. “We have to fight really hard against that polarization,” she said.

Comments from the pair came after StudentsFirst sponsored a special screening of “Won’t Back Down,” the soon-to-be-released Hollywood movie about a mother and a teacher who use a parent-trigger-type law to turn around a struggling, inner-city school. They spoke before hundreds at the Straz Center for the Performing Arts along with the film director, Daniel Barnz, producer Mark Johnson and the moderator, former CNN anchor Campbell Brown. (Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was also scheduled to be part of the panel, but could not make it because of the weather.)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/08/bobby-jindal-school-voucher_n_1755449.html?view=print&comm_ref=false

Bobby Jindal School Voucher System Blasted As 'Destruction Of Education' By Religious Group

The Huffington Post | By Nick Wing Posted: 08/08/2012 10:08 am Updated: 08/08/2012 10:08 am

The leader of a national multi-faith religious group blasted Republican Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal's school voucher program this week, charging that it was an effort to mount a "ruthless attack on public education" and violate the separation of church and state.

In a letter to the governor, C. Welton Gaddy, a Baptist minister and President of the Interfaith Alliance, accused Jindal of initiating a program that “is bad for religious freedom and bad for public education as well as a blatant attack on the religious freedom clauses in the United States Constitution.”

Gaddy says Louisiana's sweeping new voucher system, ushered in by Jindal, is problematic because it uses state taxpayer dollars to offer vouchers to more than half of Louisiana’s public school students. These students can then use these vouchers to attend a number of religious learning institutions, some of which have been shown to teach extreme anti-science and anti-history curriculums.

“Let me be clear: I am not appalled that a Christian school is teaching its students that God created the Earth ... Children in my church learn that every Sunday," Gaddy said. “I am appalled that these schools are teaching theology as science, and they’re doing so with government money, my tax dollars."

"Teaching the theology of Creationism is part of the mission of religious schools, and religious education more broadly – I defend with my life’s work their right to teach future generations about their faith. But they should not receive financial support from our government to do so.”...

alternet ussr:

Education: Testing, Not Teaching

My eighth-grade civics teacher used to terrify our class with grim stories about the education endured by our unlucky peers in the USSR. Communist education, she said, was nothing but rote learning -- no discussion, no critical thinking skills, all aimed at preparing kids for high-stakes standardized testing that would ultimately determine their place in the Party hierarchy. They weren't free like we were to explore our own interests, or choose professions that pleased them. Rather than being treated like full, autonomous human beings being prepared for a limitless future of their own design, they were sorted and graded like potatoes, and tracked to serve the needs of the state. All of the decisions, we were told, were dictated by the central authorities in charge of determining what kind of workers the state would need, and which schools students would be sent to in order to fulfill those goals.

The ironies abound. Even as China has ramped up its efforts to inculcate creativity and critical thought in its students, the United States has voluntarily given up on those values -- our competitive edge over the world for the past 150 years -- in favor of a centralized, test-driven schooling regimen that only a Soviet bureaucrat could love. Increasingly, the doors to the best high schools and universities are closed to everyone but those in the top echelons of society, just as the best schools in the USSR were set aside for the children of the Party leadership. But the greatest irony of all is that, far from being done in the name of the state, this is being done by taking education out of the hands of the state and giving it over to for-profit corporations. Again, the more "private industry" gets involved, the more the outcome looks like something from a 1950s John Birch caricature of the horrors of Soviet life.

kpfa interview henwood; 7/19/12 some beleive b/c they come from unreg industries and have gotten rich; some hustlers

Death spiral: make the schools crappy to create more bix for pvt schools:

A contributing writer for The Nation, Liza Featherstone

New York, NY - The US public school system, once a model for the world, is under sustained attack by the nation's elites. Philadelphia, the latest casualty, is getting ready to sell off its schools - and their governance - to profiteers and snake-oil salesmen. We already know how this story ends.

The Philadelphia school system announced in late April that it was on the brink of insolvency and would be turned over to private operators, dissolving most remnants of democratic governance. Specifically, if the city's leaders have their way, 64 of the city's neighbourhood public schools will close over the next five years, and by 2017, 40 per cent of the city's children will attend charter schools. These are are privately run schools that use public funds. Perhaps most disturbingly to those who value democracy and doubt the wisdom of corporate elites, the city will have no oversight of its own school system. Schools will instead be governed by "networks", control of which will be auctioned off through a bidding process, and could be bestowed on anyone - including a CEO of a for-profit education company.

The situation in Philadelphia, which has received amazingly little attention from the national media in the US, offers a disturbing window onto what the US elite is planning for the rest of our public schools - disturbing because Philadelphia's experience has already demonstrated that turning public education over to private entities will ultimately lead to its destruction.

The fact is Philadelphia is already the most privatised system in the US. In 2001, the state of Pennsylvania took over the city's school system and turned many of its schools over to private operators, even offering up 25 schools to for-profit companies. A study [PDF] by Vaughan Byrnes of Johns Hopkins University showed that, five years into this sweeping overhaul, the schools under private management were academically underperforming the public schools.

"In American public schools, privatisation and austerity are presented as solutions to problems largely caused by - wait for it - privatisation and austerity."

Not surprisingly, the bad education delivered by privatised education also comes with a heavy dose of corruption: at least six Philadelphia charter schools are under criminal investigation by the office of the state's attorney general, after the Philadelphia Inquirer - and the city's comptroller - reported rampant financial mismanagement and nepotism in the city's charter system. As in other cities, public money was extensively abused in real estate profiteering schemes, as charter school operators used schools as tenants, paying money to themselves to rent their own property. In one particularly classy instance, the charter operator was running a private parking lot on school property. Exorbitant salaries were common for the charter school operators, and some implausibly held fully salaried jobs in multiple schools, billing the city for more than 365 days in a year. At least two Philadelphia charter school operators have pleaded guilty to one such series of frauds - with sentencing scheduled for July - and the Inquirer's investigations may lead to further prosecutions.

Austerity has been a crucial partner for privatisers in the United States, where New Orleans has endured an overhaul similar to Philadelphia's, and school systems in New York and Chicago are suffering a more gradual erosion. Schools are starved of resources. Then the rich and their for-profit companies are brought in as white knights to "save" - or loot, whichever they prefer - the failing systems. In Philadelphia, according to the alternative City Paper, "it has been a long time since the schools had close to adequate funding". Indeed, for years, the state of Pennsylvania fought a lawsuit, filed in 1999, by the city of Philadelphia, its school district and the National Association of Colored People (NAACP), charging the state with racial discrimination: the city's schools, attended largely by poor children of colour, had been systematically under-funded, compared with suburban and rural districts, which are predominantly white.

To be sure, many of Philadelphia's public schools are no place for children, and there is plenty of room for real reform. Unlike in New York City, most middle-class people in Philadelphia don't choose to send their children to inner-city public schools, instead making great financial sacrifices to move to the suburbs. But only in the mad libertarian climate of current US politics could any sensible person believe that the destruction of the city's schools will cure their woes.

In US public schools, privatisation and austerity are presented as solutions to problems largely caused by - wait for it - privatisation and austerity. But these are not solutions at all - just a recipe for more of the same.

Liza Featherstone is the education columnist for The Brooklyn Rail and a contributing writer to The Nation.

===

defund, alternet:

Wall Street's Biggest Heist Yet? How the High Wizards of Finance Gutted Our Schools and Cities

By Pam Martens, AlterNet

Posted on July 17, 2012, Printed on July 21, 2012

http://www.alternet.org/story/156352/wall_street%27s_biggest_heist_yet_how_the_high_wizards_of_finance_gutted_our_schools_and_cities

Wall Street banks have hollowed out our communities with fraudulently sold mortgages and illegal foreclosures and settled the crimes for pennies on the dollar. They’ve set back property records to the early 1900s, skipping the recording of deeds in county registry offices and using their own front called MERS. They lobbied to kill fixed pension plans and then shaved a decade of growth off our 401(K)s with exorbitant fees, rigged research and trading for the house.

When much of Wall Street collapsed in 2008 as a direct result of their corrupt business model, their pals in Washington used the public purse to resuscitate the same corrupt financial model – allowing even greater depositor concentration at JPMorgan and Bank of America through acquisitions of crippled firms.

And now, Wall Street may get away with the biggest heist of the public purse in the history of the world. You know it’s an unprecedented crime when the conservative Economistmagazine sums up the situation with a one word headline: “Banksters.”

It has been widely reported that Libor, the interest rate benchmark that was rigged by a banking cartel, impacted $10 trillion in consumer loans. Libor stands for London Interbank Offered Rate and is supposed to be a reliable reflection of the rate at which banks are lending to each other. Based on the average of that rate, after highs and lows are discarded, the Libor index is used as a key index for setting loan rates around the world, including adjustable rate mortgages, credit card payments and student loans here in the U.S.

But what’s missing from the debate are the most diabolical parts of the scam: how a rigged Libor rate was used to defraud municipalities across America, inflate bank stock prices, and potentially rig futures markets around the world. All while the top U.S. bank regulator dealt with the problem by fiddling with a memo to the Bank of England.

DN: As we discuss the spate of extreme weather in the United States, the author and professor Christian Parenti argues that the Republican-led assault on the public sector will leave states more vulnerable to global warming’s effects. "Another thing that’s missing from these discussions is not just the words 'climate change,' but the words 'public sector,'" Parenti says. "I mean, who’s out there fighting these fires? It’s the public sector, you know?Where do people go when there are these cooling centers? It’s the public sector/SCHOOLS. ... This assault on the public sector must be linked to climate change." We’re also joined by The Guardian’s U.S. environment correspondent Suzanne Goldenberg and by Jeff Masters, director of meteorology at the Weather Underground website. [includes rush transcript] http://www.democracynow.org/2012/7/3/climate_disasters_toll_worsened_by_sustained

Published on Center for Media and Democracy (http://www.prwatch.org)

Home > What Really Happens When Parents Pull the "Parent Trigger?"

What Really Happens When Parents Pull the "Parent Trigger?"

by Will Dooling [1] — July 5, 2012 - 8:16am

Topics: Corporations [2], Education [3]

Projects: ALEC Exposed [4]

By Will Dooling and Brendan Fischer

Democrats at the U.S. Conference of Mayors have recently backed "parent trigger" laws that allow parents to seize control of their public schools and fire the teachers and principal, or privatize the schools -- a policy also supported by the American Legislative Exchange Council [5] (ALEC) and the Heartland Institute [6].

Is the "Parent Trigger" a successful plan for empowering parents and promoting school reform, or is it a vehicle for the private takeover of public schools?

"Parent Revolution" Gives Limited Options

Parent Trigger laws allow parents at any persistently failing school to gather a majority and either fire the principal, fire half of the teachers, or turn it into a private charter school. The laws -- which have been proposed in dozens of states and become law in California, Texas, and Connecticut -- have been embraced by some Democrats and groups that claim to support progressive values, despite claims by some that the laws have the impact of privatizing education.

The Parent Trigger has its roots in the George W. Bush administration's 2001 "No Child Left Behind" plan. That law required schools that consistently failed to show progress on a battery of tests to, after five years, be placed under "restructuring," [7] which could include turning the school over to the state for reorganization or transforming it into a charter school.

California's Parent Trigger law, which passed in 2010 and has become a model for other states, puts the authority to order "restructuring" into the hands of parents. A majority of parents at any school that consistently fails to meet the "No Child Left Behind" benchmarks (or is otherwise ranked in the bottom 20 percent of the state) can directly trigger one of the following three options:

"Turnaround," which effectively fires the principal and half the school staff;
"Transformation," which fires the principal and institutes a variety of "instructional reform strategies" designed to improve the school;
"Restart," which turns management of the school over to a private charter school or charter management operation. The school must serve the same kids for the first few years but then will operate like any other charter.

According to Julie Mead, Professor of Education Leadership and Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin, Parent Trigger laws "suggest to this group of energized parents that one of these things ("Turnaround", "Transformation", or "Restart") is going to work," but "we have no research that any of these models work" to actually make schools better, she said in an interview with the Center for Media and Democracy.

"Schools need reforms," Mead acknowledged, but the limited prescriptions offered by the Parent Trigger in many cases are not the best way to fix a particular school.

Amy Wilkins, President of Education Trust, has expressed concern [8] that for-profit school operators will manipulate Parent Triggers to privatize schools and enrich their shareholders. She notes that in Michigan, the strongest proponents of proposed Parent Trigger legislation are "not the community-based organizations that represent the families stuck in failing schools. Instead, they're the businesses that run 84 percent of the charter schools in the state."

Triggers Pulled, But Fired Blanks

The California law was based on a proposal [9] from Ben Austin, a policy consultant for Green Dot Charter Schools. Austin has since formed a group called Parent Revolution [10], a group that describes itself as "progressive" while pushing parent trigger laws similar to the California model. Connecticut and Texas have passed pared-down versions of the California/Parent Revolution law by excluding the "restart" option that would turn a school over to private control.

Despite having Parent Trigger laws on the books in three states, the "trigger" has never been successfully pulled.

In California, petitioners have only gathered sufficient signatures to enact parent trigger reforms in two districts, but neither petition drive has yet resulted in transforming or "restarting" the schools.

In Compton [11], paid staffers for Parent Revolution circulated petitions to convert the school into a charter, but courts threw out the petitions. In Adelanto [12], a counter-petition effort organized by the school board convinced a large group of parents who originally signed petitions to withdraw their signatures; the battle is still being fought. Some say these fights have led to severe discord in the community [13].

ALEC and Heartland Propose Parent Trigger Bill with "Voucher" Option

The Illinois-based Heartland Institute [6], which has recently come under fire for billboards comparing those who believe in climate change to mass murderers, has embraced the Parent Trigger act and is advocating a more extreme model. In October of 2010, Heartland brought its version of the Parent Trigger Act to ALEC [14], which adopted it as a "model" bill. [15] In contrast with the California/Parent Revolution model, Heartland's bill [16] allows parents to "trigger" a school's reorganization at any time, regardless of whether it is "failing" or performing in the state's bottom 20 percent. Heartland's bill also calls for a "school voucher" option, in which students at a triggered school are provided with "the option to receive a monetary voucher to cover the cost of attendance at any private or other public school."

Parent Revolution says [17] they oppose "voucher" programs that pay for individual students to attend private schools, at the expense of the rest of the community.

Open records requests show that in 2011, Heartland representative Marc Oestreich contacted ALEC members in the Wisconsin legislature with an email offering "to work with you to introduce a Parent Trigger Act in your state." It does not appear that the Heartland/ALEC model has had much traction, in Wisconsin or elsewhere.

However, a similar law, promoted by another right-wing ALEC member, the Goldwater Institute [18], was proposed in Arizona earlier this year. Jonathan Butcher, the institute's education director, cited both Parent Revolution and ALEC as inspiration for Arizona's "Parent Empowerment" bill. Parent Revolution refused to endorse the bill [19] because of its voucher provision.

Parent Trigger: True Reform or Clever Trick?

Despite widespread support from conservatives, several prominent Democrats also support Parent Trigger laws, claiming they empower parents. The push to endorse Parent Trigger legislation [20] at the U.S. Conference of Mayors was led by Democratic mayors, including Mayors Antonio Villaraigosa of Los Angeles, Cory Booker of Newark, and Kevin Johnson of Sacramento [21]. Villaraigosa told Reuters [22]: "Mayors understand at a local level that most parents lack the tools they need to turn their schools around."

However, Diane Ravitch, an education historian and former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education in the first Bush Administration, characterizes [23] Parent Trigger laws as a "clever way to trick parents into seizing control of their schools and handing it over to private corporations."

Ravitch was a supporter of No Child Left Behind and the charter school movement but is now skeptical of both.

She is also skeptical of Parent Revolution, the self-proclaimed "progressive" group. The group claims to be "pro-teacher," "pro-union," and anti-voucher, and focused on empowering parents to improve their schools.

Ravitch, though, notes that the group receives its funding [24] from foundations that have clashed with teachers unions and actively promote voucher programs -- namely, the Wasserman Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation [25], and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation [26]. "If these foundations were truly interested in parent empowerment, surely by now they would have underwritten the community-based parent groups in New York City and Chicago that oppose the closing of their neighborhood schools. But they have not," she recently opined [27] in the New York Times.

Although Parent Revolution claims to be pro-union, Ravitch notes that if they ever succeeded at transforming a public school into a charter school, "the teachers would be fired and then rehired without a union contract. The charter industry is overwhelmingly a non-union sector."

"If a school is struggling, it needs help from district leaders, not a closure notice," Ravitch said. "Collaboration -- not hostile takeovers -- is the most effective way to improve their public schools."

Center for Media and Democracy �� 520 University Avenue, Suite 260 • Madison, Wisconsin 53703

Phone: 608-260-9713 • Fax: 608-260-9714

Source URL: http://www.prwatch.org/news/2012/07/11612/should-parents-pull-parent-trigger

Links:

[1] http://www.prwatch.org/users/35307/will-dooling

[2] http://www.prwatch.org/topics/corporations

[3] http://www.prwatch.org/topics/education

[4] http://www.prwatch.org/projects/alec-exposed

[5] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=American_Legislative_Exchange_Council

[6] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Heartland_Institute

[7] http://www.educationsector.org/publications/states-evidence-what-it-means-make-adequate-yearly-progress-under-nclb

[8] http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/03/18/hopes-and-fears-for-parent-trigger-laws/make-sure-parents-not-companies-have-power

[9] http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2077564,00.html

[10] http://parentrevolution.org/

[11] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/24/education/24trigger.html?scp=1&sq=parent%20trigger&st=cse

[12] http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jul/14/local/la-me-0714-parent-trigger-20110714

[13] http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/03/18/hopes-and-fears-for-parent-trigger-laws/triggers-create-nothing-but-chaos-and-division

[14] http://www.commoncause.org/atf/cf/%7BFB3C17E2-CDD1-4DF6-92BE-BD4429893665%7D/ed_35daymailing-dc.pdf

[15] http://www.webcitation.org/5yGOUW6Ll

[16] http://heartland.org/policy-documents/model-bill-parent-trigger

[17] http://floridaindependent.com/71543/parent-revolution-defends-controversial-parent-trigger-bill

[18] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Goldwater_Institute

[19] http://azcapitoltimes.com/news/2012/02/20/%E2%80%98parent-empowerment%E2%80%99-bill-has-roots-in-democratic-republican-circles/

[20] http://www.usmayors.org/80thAnnualMeeting/media/proposedresolutions2012.pdf

[21] http://www.pewstates.org/projects/stateline/headlines/mayors-back-parent-trigger-laws-for-drop-out-factories-85899399317

[22] http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/18/us-usa-education-trigger-idUSBRE85H0J620120618

[23] http://wpr.org/webcasting/play-mp3.cfm?FileName=dun120620d.mp3&pagename=/webcasting/audioarchives_display.cfm

[24] http://parentrevolution.org/content/our-funders

[25] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Walton_Family_Foundation

[26] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Bill_and_Melinda_Gates_Foundation

[27] http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/03/18/hopes-and-fears-for-parent-trigger-laws/another-battle-in-the-war-against-public-schools

http://www.prwatch.org/print/11612

ALEC-Inspired Education Bill Helps Fund Loch Ness Monster Truthers In Louisiana

June 26, 2012 2:39 pm ET — Brian Powell

http://politicalcorrection.org/blog/201206260002

From the NYDN (emphasis added):

The Scottish legend of the Loch Ness Monster is suggested as truth in a biology book that a private Christian school in Louisiana is using in its curriculum.

But that's only part of the outrage from critics: Students who are eligible for taxpayer-funded vouchers will be allowed to attend Eternity Christian Academy in Westlake for the 2012-13 school year, according to reports.

The startling claim about Nessie's authenticity is made to bolster creationism within the textbook, the Scotsman newspaper reported Monday. The Loch Ness Monster is described as a type of dinosaur, and if dinosaurs and man co-exist, then presumably there would be holes in the scientific argument for evolution.

[...]

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a Republican, advocated for the voucher plan, telling Reuters, "We are letting parents decide what's best for their children, not government."

The sweeping changes aimed at improving Louisiana's failing public schools are new to the state, but they are not new.

The changes signed into law in April — on teacher effectiveness, tenure and accountability; on charter schools, vouchers and other school-choice tactics; and on systemic changes to early childhood learning — all reflect the strategic thinking of one of the nation's most active conservative public-policy organizations.

Reading Gov. Bobby Jindal's education legislation — passed by the state Legislature in House Bills 974 and 976 and Senate Bill 581 — is akin to reading model bills drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council.

[...]

Whether ALEC, or any other such tax-exempt entity, does "too much lobbying" is a matter of annual scrutiny by the IRS.

Either way, ALEC has plenty of influence. Some say Jindal likely based his education legislation on models drafted by ALEC, which in August 2011 awarded Jindal the Thomas Jefferson Freedom Award for public service.

Kyle Plotkin, a spokesman for the governor, says that was not the case.

Stakes escalated last week when, to the frustration of some lawmakers, the Islamic School of Greater New Orleans applied for federal funds under the voucher program. Republican state Rep. Kenneth Havard objected to the Islamic School's request for 38 government-paid student vouchers, saying he opposed any bill that "will fund Islamic teaching," the Associated Press reports.

"I won't go back home and explain to my people that I supported this," he said.

"It'll be the Church of Scientology next year," Democratic state Rep. Sam Jones told AP.

The Islamic School of Greater New Orleans withdrew its request for vouchers before the bill went to vote.

Kaplan (wa post) lobbying http://truth-out.org/news/item/9317-did-kaplan-lobby-to-deregulate-for-profit-colleges-while-one-of-its-schools-defrauded-students

...The bill was sponsored by North Carolina Republican state Sen. Tom Apodaca and shepherded through the legislature by North Carolina Speaker of the House Thom Tillis. As reported by Truthout, in 2011, Apodaca was a member of the American Legislative Exchange Council's (ALEC) education task force, and Tillis was ALEC's 2011 Legislator of the Year....

USCoC front: Margaret Spellings serves as Executive Vice President of NCF. In this capacity Spellings provides both strategic and ongoing management leadership to the Foundation, including critical support around the Chamber’s American Free Enterprise. Dream Big. campaign. Spellings joined the Chamber in April 2009 as a Senior Advisor to the President and CEO. Before this, Spellings served as Secretary of Education under President George W. Bush. Spellings previously served as Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy, where she aided in the development and passage of the NoChild Left Behind Act. Prior to this, she worked for six years as Senior Advisor to then-Governor Bush, developing and implementing the Governor’s education reforms. She continues to work as the President and CEO of Margaret Spellings and Company, a Washington, D.C.-based strategic and public policy consulting firm.

Margaret Spellings followed Rod Paige as Secretary of the Department of Education in the second term of the George W. Bush administration. She had previously served as Bush's White House Domestic Policy Adviser. She is also a trustee of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

She is described as "So low-key that most people don't even know she exists, [however] the former Margaret La Montagne has been Bush's alter ego on education issues for more than a decade." [1]

According to her official White House biography, "Prior to her White House appointment, Margaret Spellings worked for six years as Governor George W. Bush's Senior Advisor, with responsibility for developing and implementing the Governor's education policy. Prior to her work in the Texas Governor's Office, Margaret worked as Political Director in President Bush's first successful gubernatorial campaign in 1994. She also worked as Associate Executive Director of the Texas Association of School Boards. Other previous experience includes work for Texas Governor William P. Clements and for members of the Texas House of Representatives. Margaret is a graduate of the University of Houston." [2]

In a January 2007 speech at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Spellings said,

“

Everybody here knows that before this act became law, kids often moved from grade to grade, and nobody knew whether or not they had learned to read, write, add, or subtract. We invested billions of dollars and basically just hoped for the best. The lack of accountability helped create an achievement gap where poor and minority students lagged far behind their peers. Not once in all my travels have I met a parent who didn't want their child learning on grade level now — let alone by 2014. I know I do, and I'm sure every parent in this room agrees.^[citation ^needed]

”

Controversy overseeing student loan programs

On May 10, 2007, Spellings testified before the House Education and Labor Committee responding to criticism from New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo that the Education Department had been "asleep at the switch" in overseeing student loan programs, allowing corruption and conflicts of interest to spread.^[8] Spellings has further gone on record to say that she is disregarding the suggestion by the Inspector General to hold the loan companies accountable for their gaffe.^[9]

Contents[hide]

SourceWatch Resources

Bush's White House Staff

External links

http://www.thenation.com/article/161971/starving-public-schools $ req

Published on Thursday, July 14, 2011 by The Nation

ALEC Exposed: Starving Public Schools

by Julie Underwood

This article is part of aNationseries exposing the American Legislative Exchange Council, in collaboration with the Center For Media and Democracy. John Nichols introduces the series.

Public schools,” ALEC wrote in its 1985 Education Source Book, “meet all of the needs of all of the people without pleasing anyone.” A better system, the organization argued, would “foster educational freedom and quality�� through various forms of privatization: vouchers, tax incentives for sending children to private schools and unregulated private charter schools. Today ALEC calls this “choice”—and vouchers “scholarships”—but it amounts to an ideological mission to defund and redesign public schools.

The first large-scale voucher program, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, was enacted in 1990 following the rubric ALEC provided in 1985. It was championed by then-Governor Tommy Thompson, an early ALEC member, who once said he “loved” ALEC meetings, “because I always found new ideas, and then I’d take them back to Wisconsin, disguise them a little bit, and declare [they were] mine.”

ALEC’s most ambitious and strategic push toward privatizing education came in 2007, through a publication called School Choice and State Constitutions, which proposed a list of programs tailored to each state. That year Georgia passed a version of ALEC’s Special Needs Scholarship Program Act. Most disability organizations strongly oppose special education vouchers—and decades of evidence suggest that such students are better off receiving additional support in public schools. Nonetheless, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Florida, Utah and Indiana have passed versions of their own. Louisiana also passed a version of ALEC’s Parental Choice Scholarship Program Act (renaming it Student Scholarships for Educational Excellence), along with ALEC’s Family Education Tax Credit Program (renamed Tax Deductions for Tuition), which has also been passed by Arizona and Indiana. ALEC’s so-called Great Schools Tax Credit Program Act has been passed by Arizona, Indiana and Oklahoma.

ALEC’s 2010 Report Card on American Education called on members and allies to “Transform the system, don��t tweak it,” likening the group’s current legislative strategy to a game of whack-a-mole: introduce so many pieces of model legislation that there is “no way the person with the mallet [teachers’ unions] can get them all.” ALEC’s agenda includes:

§ Introducing market factors into teaching, through bills like the National Teacher Certification Fairness Act.

§ Privatizing education through vouchers, charters and tax incentives, especially through the Parental Choice Scholarship Program Act and Special Needs Scholarship Program Act, whose many spinoffs encourage the creation of private schools for specific populations: children with autism, children in military families, etc.

§ Increasing student testing and reporting, through more “accountability,” as seen in the Education Accountability Act, Longitudinal Student Growth Act, One-to-One Reading Improvement Act and the Resolution Supporting the Principles of No Child Left Behind.

§ Chipping away at local school districts and school boards, through its 2009 Innovation Schools and School Districts Act and more. Proposals like the Public School Financial Transparency Act and School Board Freedom to Contract Act would allow school districts to outsource auxiliary services.

ALEC is also invested in influencing the educational curriculum. Its 2010 Founding Principles Act would require high school students to take “a semester-long course on the philosophical understandings and the founders’ principles.”

Perhaps the Brookings Institute states the mission most clearly: “Taken seriously, choice is not a system-preserving reform. It is a revolutionary reform that introduces a new system of public education.”

ALEC��s real motivation for dismantling the public education system is ideological—creating a system where schools do not provide for everyone—and profit-driven. The corporate members on its education task force include the Friedman Foundation, Goldwater Institute, Washington Policy Center, National Association of Charter School Authorizers and corporations providing education services, such as Sylvan Learning and the Connections Academy.

From Milton Friedman on, proponents of vouchers have argued that they foster competition and improve students’ learning. But years of research reveal this to be false. Today, students in Milwaukee’s public schools perform as well as or better than those in voucher schools. This is true even though voucher schools have advantages that in theory should make it easier to educate children: fewer students with disabilities; broader rights to select, reject and expel students; and parents who are engaged in their children’s education (at least enough to have actively moved them to the private system). Voucher schools clearly should outperform public schools, but they do not. Nor are they less expensive; often private costs are shifted to taxpayers; a local school district typically pays for transportation, additional education services and administrative expenses. In programs like Milwaukee’s, the actual cost drains funds from the public schools and creates additional charges to taxpayers.

But a deeper crisis emerges when we privatize education. As Benjamin Barber has argued, “public schools are not merely schools for the public, but schools of publicness: institutions where we learn what it means to be a public and start down the road toward common national and civic identity.” What happens to our democracy when we return to an educational system whose access is defined by corporate interests and divided by class, language, ability, race and religion? In a push to free-market education, who pays in the end?

Julie Underwood, JD, PhD, is dean of the School of Education and a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She was previously the general counsel of the National School Boards Association. The opinions are her own and do not necessarily reflect those of the University of Wisconsin.

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. Is an ALEC Member

by Rebekah Wilce [1] — May 25, 2012 - 8:32am

Topics: Corporations [2], Education [3]

Projects: ALEC Exposed [4]

With Fox personalities defending the American Legislative Exchange Council [5] (ALEC) and the Wall Street Journal publishing editorials criticizing its detractors (including the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), by name), some have wondered whether or not Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation [6], which owns Fox News [7], the Wall Street Journal [8], and many broadcast licenses, is an ALEC member [9].

Yes, News Corp. is an ALEC member. It has funded ALEC operations.

Documents obtained and released by Common Cause show that News Corp. was a member [10] of ALEC's Telecommunications and Information Technology Task Force [11] as of April 2010. Adam Peshek, who staffs ALEC's Education Task Force [12], told [13] Education Week that News Corp. has been a member of both ALEC's Education Task Force and Communications and Technology Task Force [14] since January 2012. However, the public does not have complete records indicating when News Corp. first started supporting ALEC or the duration of its involvement on these two task forces or other ALEC task forces, if any, in 2011 and prior years. (The Common Cause documents begin in 2010, and ALEC has stopped circulating its task force member list even to other task force members.)

News Corp.'s News of the World Phone-Hacking Scandal

Rupert MurdochNews Corp. also owned News of the World, the tabloid that closed its doors in the wake of the UK phone-hacking scandal. Rebekah Brooks, the former chief executive of News International, the British newspaper subsidiary of News Corp., has been charged with attempting to conceal evidence [15] in the case. Her husband and four close associates have also been charged.

Rupert Murdoch and his son James, the former executive chairman of News International, have not been charged but testified together before a UK Parliamentary committee. James Murdoch stepped down from his position as chairman of News International in February 2012 before it folded, and in April 2012 he also resigned as chairman of the board of broadcaster BSkyB. James Murdoch has testified three times before Parliamentary committees, most recently in April 2012, when he again "blamed his subordinates for keeping him ill-informed about the extent of hacking at newspapers then under his control," according to [16] the New York Times.

Emails released in April 2012 also indicate collaboration [17] between a News Corp. lobbyist and the office of Culture Minister Jeremy Hunt, who would have made the decision on News Corp.'s bid for BSkyB. This expanded the focus of the investigation to the political influence of News Corp. UK Prime Minister James Cameron has been a close friend of Rebekah and Charlie Brooks. James Murdoch attended Christmas Dinner with Cameron and the Brookses in 2010 [18].

In July 2011, the US Department of Justice said it had spoken to the UK's Serious Fraud Office about how to investigate claims that News Corp.'s News of the World title had paid police for information. According to [19] the BBC, "The US Department of Justice's interest in News Corp. stems from the fact that its headquarters are in New York, but its shares are listed in both the US and Australia. It is illegal for any US company to pay bribes to overseas officials, under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act."

The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977 was introduced in the U.S. Senate by Senator William Proxmire from Wisconsin and prohibits bribing any foreign official for business gain. Multinational corporations involved in ALEC and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce [20] are working to carve out major exceptions in the law to make it harder to enforce [21].

News Corp.'s New Interest in Privatizing Education

When News Corp. acquired Wireless Generation, a for-profit online education, software, and testing corporation, for $360 million in cash [22] in 2010, Rupert Murdoch called the for-profit K-12 education industry [23] "a $500 billion sector in the US alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed." A few weeks before the closing of the deal, News Corp. hired Joel Klein, then the chancellor of New York City schools, to run its education division.

University of Arizona education professor Kenneth Goodman suspects that Murdoch is bringing his conservative ideology to his education ventures: "They'd like everything to be privatized," he told [24] Mother Jones last year.

Notably, in the summer of 2011, New York state considered a $27 million contract with Wireless Generation to track student performance. The New York teachers' unions objected to this outsourcing. "It is especially troubling that Wireless Generation will be tasked with creating a centralized database for personal student information even as its parent company, News Corporation, stands accused of engaging in illegal news-gathering tactics," representatives from the state and New York City teachers' unions wrote [25]. The state decided against the contract, citing "vendor responsibility issues involving the parent company of Wireless Generation."

About a year after the purchase of Wireless Generation, in September 2011, Murdoch was the keynote speaker [26] at former Florida governor Jeb Bush's education "reform" summit. Jeb Bush is the Chairman of the Foundation for Excellence in Education [27], an ALEC member organization that hosted the summit.

According to [25] Mother Jones, Murdoch's "speech to a collection of conservative ed reformers, state legislators, and educators is just the latest step in Murdoch's quiet march into the business of education, which has been somewhat eclipsed by the phone-hacking scandal besieging his media empire." MoJo reported that his agenda in the "business of education" seems to be to divert taxpayer dollars away from public schools into for-profit education outfits, including online schools, private charter schools, and homeschooling services.

In the months following that gathering, Murdoch also donated to ex-DC school chancellor Michelle Rhee's new group, StudentsFirst, which according to The Nation "has pledged to spend more than $1 billion to bring for-profit schools, including virtual education, to the entire country by electing reform-friendly candidates and hiring top-notch state lobbyists." At an earlier Media Institute [28] awards dinner in Washington shortly before he bought a financial stake in privatizing education through purchasing Wireless Generation, Murdoch called Rhee [29] a "bona fide reformer."

News Corp. and the ALEC Education Agenda

Although ALEC's new staffer for its Education Task Force [12] told the press that News Corp. became a private sector member of that task force just four months ago, the prior task force staffer, David Myslinski, told [13] Education Week that the fact that News Corp.'s new subsidiary, Wireless Generation, had previously been an ALEC member (from 2007 to 2009, according to a Wireless Generation spokesperson) could have led the subsidiary to being listed mistakenly on the Education Task Force meeting agenda as a new member in place of its parent, News Corp.

As CMD has reported [30], ALEC's education agenda encompasses a more than 20-year effort to privatize public education through an ever-expanding network of school voucher systems, which divert taxpayer dollars away from public schools to private schools. ALEC bills also divert public funds into private charter schools or for-profit internet school corporations. ALEC bills also allow public and for-profit schools to loosen standards for teachers and administrators, change the education plans for students with physical disabilities and special educational needs, escape the protections of collective bargaining agreements, and aid other pet causes such as diverting tax dollars to subsidize schools focused on the right-wing political and religious indoctrination of students. Learn more about ALEC's education agenda in The Nation here [31].

News Corp. and the ALEC Communications Agenda

ALEC's news education staffer, Peshek, said that News Corp. also joined the Communications and Technology Task Force [14] in January 2012. However, records obtained by Common Cause show that News Corp.'s Senior Vice President, Bill Guidera, attended ALEC's April 2010 Spring Task Force Summit [10] in St. Louis, Missouri, as a member of what was then called the Telecommunications and Information Technology Task Force [11]. The reason for this discrepancy between documentary evidence and ALEC's recent public statements about this is not known.

At the meeting April 2010 meeting attended by Guidera, the task force hosted a panel on the Federal Communications Commission's National Broadband Plan. The Reason Foundation [32]'s Steve Titch, the National Cable and Telecommunications Association [33]'s (NCTA's) Rick Cimerman, and AT&T [34]'s Hank Hultquist discussed the National Broadband Plan. Intuit [35]'s Jim Ruda presented on and introduced a proposed "Resolution on Government Tax Preparation & Electronic Filing." The resolution was approved by the legislative and private sector members of the task force. (Intuit subsequently dropped ALEC this spring in the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting and other controversial information about ALECs agenda and operations, as documented by CMD/ALECexposed.)

Additionally, NetChoice [36]'s Braden Cox discussed the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which relates to requirements for law enforcement access to internet and other online or stored records. And Rep. John Evans (R-PA) discussed legal penalties and approaches to the problem of "sexting," sexually explicit communications on cell phones by teens. NetChoice also introduced a proposed "Resolution Opposing the Expansion of the Federal Trade Commission's Rulemaking Authority." The resolution was approved by the task force's private sector and public sector members.

News Corp. is a multinational, multi-platform media conglomerate. The ALEC Communications and Technology Task Force [14], on which News Corp. has a seat, has long had a far-reaching agenda to deregulate the communications industry and has opposed key protections of the public's airwaves for ordinary citizens, such as "net neutrality" and the "Fairness Doctrine." However, News Corp.'s particular business interests in the jurisdiction of this ALEC task force are not fully known.

The Rush to Dump ALEC

16 corporations have announced they have cut ties to ALEC [37] in recent weeks, including Amazon.com, Scantron Corporation, Kaplan Higher Education, Procter & Gamble, YUM! Brands, Blue Cross Blue Shield, American Traffic Solutions, Reed Elsevier, Arizona Public Service, Mars, Wendy's, McDonald's, Intuit, Kraft Foods, PepsiCo, and Coca-Cola. Four non-profits -- including Lumina Foundation for Education, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA), the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS), and the Gates Foundation -- have cut ties to ALEC, bringing the total number of ALEC private sector members who have left to 19. In addition, 54 state legislators [38] have also left ALEC in the past two months.

Color of Change, along with CMD, Common Cause, People for the American Way, and others are now asking Amazon, State Farm, AT&T, and Johnson & Johnson to cut ties with ALEC [39].

Center for Media and Democracy • 520 University Avenue, Suite 260 �� Madison, Wisconsin 53703

Phone: 608-260-9713��• Fax: 608-260-9714

Source URL: http://www.prwatch.org/news/2012/05/11531/rupert-murdochs-news-corp-alec-member

Links:

[1] http://www.prwatch.org/users/35294/rebekah-wilce

[2] http://www.prwatch.org/topics/corporations

[3] http://www.prwatch.org/topics/education

[4] http://www.prwatch.org/projects/alec-exposed

[5] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=American_Legislative_Exchange_Council

[6] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=News_Corporation

[7] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Fox_News

[8] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Wall_Street_Journal

[9] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=ALEC_Corporations

[10] http://www.commoncause.org/atf/cf/%7BFB3C17E2-CDD1-4DF6-92BE-BD4429893665%7D/telecommunications_&_information_technology_35-day_mailing%20San%20Diego.pdf

[11] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Telecommunications_and_Information_Technology_Task_Force

[12] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Education_Task_Force

[13] http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/marketplacek12/2012/05/news%20corp_wireless_alec.html

[14] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Communications_and_Technology_Task_Force

[15] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/16/world/europe/rebekah-brooks-to-learn-if-she-will-face-charges.html

[16] http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/james_r_murdoch/index.html?8qa

[17] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/25/world/europe/murdoch-case-shifts-its-focus-to-jeremy-hunt.html?hp

[18] http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/davidhughes/100152840/that-christmas-dinner-with-the-brookses-may-come-back-to-haunt-david-cameron/

[19] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-14181119

[20] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=U.S._Chamber_of_Commerce

[21] http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jul/14/hacking-murdoch-paid-us-lobbyists

[22] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/24/nyregion/24newscorp.html

[23] http://www.thenation.com/article/164651/how-online-learning-companies-bought-americas-schools?page=full

[24] http://www.alternet.org/education/152516/what_does_rupert_murdoch_want_with_america's_schools/?page=2

[25] http://www.alternet.org/education/152516/what_does_rupert_murdoch_want_with_america's_schools/

[26] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/rupert-murdoch-giving-keynote-at-jeb-bushs-ed-reform-summit/2011/09/20/gIQAry9cjK_blog.html

[27] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Foundation_for_Excellence_in_Education

[28] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Media_Institute

[29] http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2010/10/06/murdoch-urges-overhaul-of-big-city-public-schools/

[30] http://www.prwatch.org/news/2012/02/11272/alec-education-academy-launches-island-resort

[31] http://www.thenation.com/article/161971/starving-public-schools

[32] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Reason_Foundation

[33] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=National_Cable_and_Telecommunications_Association

[34] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=AT%26T

[35] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Intuit

[36] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=NetChoice

[37] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Corporations_Who_Have_Cut_Ties_to_ALEC

[38] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Legislators_Who_Have_Cut_Ties_to_ALEC

[39] http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/632/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=10002

ED indiana u prof plucker. china: you're racing to our old model" while we going for yours as fast as we can 211

chinese student hi test low ability, #1 barrier to progress, but now can extrap and apply

TX textbooks took out TJ b/c deist, CRM down but rise of right up; only way to under FF is Bible pov

800 sci petiton support evol, pat selves on back for standing up to "experts"

less than 1/2 2 or 4yr schools grad

b2 dereg univ; fla gov rick scott wants to do k12 219

indisty lobby sally stroup appt b2 asst sec of post sec for Dod, big growth b/c of fed st loan $ Apollo got 1.1B tax $ 9% to operatins, rest profit?!

big 3 dropout rate 50-100% 220 ESI COCO patr acts

EDUCATION

koch $ to alec, esp gw

http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/campaigns/global-warming-and-energy/polluterwatch/koch-industries/american-legislative-exchange/

onday, Aug 23, 2010 12:30 PM UTC

The creeping threat of backdoor privatization

Bit by bit, financial responsibility for some of the most important public services is being passed on to you

By Alyssa Battistoni

It has come to this: Parents are now being asked to send their children to school with their own toilet paper. And not just toilet paper, but all sorts of basic items that schools themselves used to provide for kids. It’s all part of a disturbing trend,**highlighted by the New York Times**last week, of cash-strapped public schools — their budgets eviscerated by state cutbacks — shifting more and more financial responsibility onto parents.

Privatization meant transferring responsibility for entire programs or functions to the private sector. But with the drastic budget cuts that states have been forced to make, responsibility for public services and programs is literally being forced into private hands one roll of toilet paper at a time. We’ve entered the era of backdoor privatization.

��

On the surface, these stop-gap measures don’t seem unreasonable. After all, it’s hardly new for parents in well-off school districts to chip in for supplies, music classes and even teacher’s salaries in an effort to minimize the effect of school budget cuts on their children. What is new, though, is the extent to which families are being asked to contribute basic items. This may be too much to ask of parents who are struggling to pay their own bills — especially since they’ve already paid taxes that are supposed to support the public school system.

Nor is backdoor privatization a phenomenon limited to local schools.

Public university systems are increasingly emulating private universities by turning to wealthy alumni for donations — even as tuition rises because**some legislators**see hiking it as a way to raise money for their fungible state budget items.

**Missouri**,**Georgia**, and**Arizona**have been forced to slash their transit budgets and services, leaving hundreds of thousands without a way to get to their jobs, or to a doctor, or school. This has forced thousands of people**to revert**to private modes of transportation.

Many states have also cut funding for fire and police departments, resulting in**slower emergency response times**and**diminished crime investigation**. Fire department cuts have exacerbated the trend in wildfire-prone areas (among those who can afford it) of hiring private firefighting companies to protect homes, heralding a return to the 19th-century practice in which private firefighting companies raced each other to put out blazes and collect their reward.

Some towns have even started to**shut off street lights**to save money on electricity bills.

This backdoor privatization diminishes the quantity and quality of the services available to the general public while nurturing the growth of a parallel profit-making infrastructure for those who can afford supplementary services.

Presumably, such budget cuts are temporary, a product of the recession. But it’s not hard to imagine a future in which, say, ever-strapped state and local governments decide to follow**the private sector’s lead**in taking advantage of new “efficiencies.” In fact, some schools are already**refraining**from hiring needed teachers despite receiving federal dollars to help tide them over for the year. And even temporary cuts can do a lot of damage: Public transportation reductions, for example, can force people to give up jobs that require them to commute to work.

Certainly, some budget cuts are necessary in difficult economic times. But when we decide it’s better to turn off street lights and shut down bus lines than to**raise**taxes on the rich,**reduce**charitable tax deductions, or**create**a value-added tax, we are deciding that the quality and availability of the public goods should be determined by the amount individuals can pay — and not the amount a rich nation can afford. It’s a choice that undermines not only our claim that we value “ordinary Americans” as equals but also our ability to produce the healthy, educated, productive population on which our future prosperity depends.

The best-case scenario is that the impact of these cuts will help people understand just what their tax dollars are paying for and spur greater consciousness about the relationship between public spending and public goods. Now that shortages of teachers and books are spreading to suburbia, we’ll decide that shortfalls in education funding are unacceptable after all.

The worst-case scenario, though, is that reduced public spending on essential goods and services will continue to hollow out our infrastructure and reduce our capacity to meet the needs of most Americans. And that rather than have a real conversation about which public goods we consider essential and what we’re willing to do to pay for them, we’ll gradually starve core programs until working- and middle-class Americans grow accustomed to a lower standard of living while better-off Americans pay out of pocket for benefits that everyone once enjoyed.

Here’s hoping for a wake-up call.

Alyssa Battistoni writes about the environment and politics from Seattle.

**===**

**http://schoolingintheownershipsociety.blogspot.com/**

===

Sally L. Stroup was sworn in as assistant secretary for postsecondary education on March 20, 2002. As assistant secretary, she serves as the principal adviser to U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings on all matters related to postsecondary education. In this capacity, Stroup coordinates Department programs relating to financial assistance for eligible students enrolled in higher education institutions and recommends policies to recruit and prepare disadvantaged students to enroll and complete postsecondary education programs.

The Office of Postsecondary Education (OPE) administers programs to promote academic success of disadvantaged students and to strengthen the capacity of colleges and universities that serve a high percentage of disadvantaged students. OPE also directs international education programs, as well as the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education, which provides grants to colleges and universities to promote reform, innovation, and improvement in postsecondary education.

Because of her background in the student aid industry and in Congress, former Secretary Rod Paige noted that Stroup's "wealth of experience on issues and policy relating to postsecondary education," make her uniquely qualified for this leadership position.

Before joining the Department, Stroup served as the director of industry and government affairs for the Apollo Group Inc./University of Phoenix. From 1993 to 2001, she was a professional staff member for the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce. As a committee staff member, she played a key legislative role in the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act Amendments of 1998. From 1981 to 1993, Stroup was with the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency, one of the largest, full-service financial aid organizations in the nation. First serving as a staff attorney, Stroup rose to senior staff attorney and then to senior vice president of legal services and chief counsel.

Born in Harrisburg, Pa., Stroup grew up in nearby Gratz. She is a graduate of Indiana University of Pennsylvania and Loyola University School of Law in New Orleans.

also scantron

related?**Richard L. Stroup**- Professor of Economics, Montana State University indep inst

Years have been spent developing and promoting schemes to privatize public education. The**report**"Voucher Veneer: the Deeper Agenda to Privatize Public Education" by People For the American Way (PFAW), quotes Joseph Bast, President and CEO of the Koch/Scaife/Walton-funded Heartland Institute,

"The complete privatization of schooling might be desirable, but this objective is politically impossible for the time being. Vouchers are a type of reform that is possible now, and would put us on the path to further privatization."

**http://www.talk2action.org/story/2011/4/20/232844/831**

The Koch brothers have more than $42 billion to make public policy out of their anti-government ideology, andto remake our nation.*

The Koch brothers founded Americans for Prosperity and have contributed more than $5 million to its political coffers. Americans for Prosperity, in turn, contributed to organizations that financially influenced a community school board election.

That's right: the Koch brothers are involving themselves, through their wealth-backed political apparatus, in local schools

Americans for Prosperity allied with groups in North Carolina with the sole purpose of building a new majority on the school board in and around Raleigh. The Koch apparatus was trying to rewrite the social contract that made the Wake County school system a magnet for teachers and families and the surrounding communities prosper.

Each campus was its own melting pot where students could build meaningful relationships and find their niche. Advanced courses and after school activities gave tens of thousands of children a path to higher education and a shot at success.

Many families in the community attributed local prosperity and harmony to the way the school district assigned students to schools.

That policy came under siege from the Koch brothers who, through Americans for Prosperity, indirectly supported school board candidates who campaigned on reversing the busing for diversity program. The outside involvement made a school board election into the most divisive race since the 1970s.

The Koch brothers and outside influence provided the script for the Koch-supported candidates. They campaigned to end "forced busing" and promise to enact a "neighborhood schools" mandate.

Do those phrases ring a bell? Using the same language Gov. George Wallace used in the 60s,And they had the Koch brothers and Americans for Prosperity's full support.*

This is a new example of the Koch brothers' so-called extreme free market ideology. It's an incredible window into the brothers' disdain for public service and government protection in general.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-greenwald/want-to-see-how-the-kochs_b_926829.html?view=print&comm_ref=false

VOUCHERS

ALEC-Inspired Education Bill Helps Fund Loch Ness Monster Truthers In Louisiana

Changing Laws Providing for Public Education

The Disturbing Link Between ADHD and Conservative Education Reform

North Carolina Becomes the Front Line of a Brutal Corporate Assault on Education Raging in America

Cashing in on Kids: 139 ALEC Bills in 2013 Promote a Private, For-Profit Education Model

ALEC Vouchers Transfer Taxpayer Money to Private and Religious Schools

ALEC Education Bills Undermine Free, Universal Public Education

ALEC Corporations Reap the Rewards

Ideological Interests Lift the ALEC Agenda

Average Americans Pay the Price....http://www.prwatch.org/node/12175

Former Indiana Superintendent, Lauded by ALEC and Education Privatizers, Cheats on School Grading Formula for Top Donor

"This will be a HUGE problem for us"

Indiana Has No Campaign Contribution Limits

How Common is Cheating?

Scott Walker, GOP Slip ALEC Education Agenda Into Wisconsin Budget

"Won't Back Down" Film Pushes ALEC Parent Trigger Proposal

Hollywood Fiction vs. the Facts on Parent Trigger

ALEC Spreads Parent Trigger Nationwide

Parent Trigger "A Clever Way to Trick Parents"?

Philip Anschutz, Right-Wing Billionaire, Owns Production Company

Rupert Murdoch, Media Mogul and Owner of Education Testing Company, Distributes Film

Michelle Rhee, Former D.C. Chancellor of Schools, Pushes Parent Trigger

Reform or Russian Roulette?

Hippies Demonized in Louisiana Voucher School Textbook

When Billionaires Become Educational Experts

Early Corporate Influence

Philanthropy and Business Roundtables

Venture Philanthropy

Notes

Tags:

How Online Learning Companies Bought America's Schools

ALEC Spreads Parent Trigger Nationwide

Parent Trigger “A Clever Way to Trick Parents”?

Philip Anschutz, Right-Wing Billionaire, Owns Production Company

Rupert Murdoch, Media Mogul and Owner of Education Testing Company, Distributes Film

Reform or Russian Roulette?

Striking Teachers, Parents Join Forces to Oppose "Corporate" Education Model in Chicago http://www.democracynow.org/2012/9/10/striking_teachers_parents_join_forces_to

Bobby Jindal School Voucher System Blasted As 'Destruction Of Education' By Religious Group

Wall Street's Biggest Heist Yet? How the High Wizards of Finance Gutted Our Schools and Cities

By Pam Martens, AlterNet

What Really Happens When Parents Pull the "Parent Trigger?"

"Parent Revolution" Gives Limited Options

Triggers Pulled, But Fired Blanks

ALEC and Heartland Propose Parent Trigger Bill with "Voucher" Option

Parent Trigger: True Reform or Clever Trick?

ALEC-Inspired Education Bill Helps Fund Loch Ness Monster Truthers In Louisiana

Controversy overseeing student loan programs

SourceWatch Resources

External links

Documents

Articles & Commentary

ALEC Exposed: Starving Public Schools

ALEC Exposed: Starving Public Schools

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. Is an ALEC Member

News Corp.'s News of the World Phone-Hacking Scandal

News Corp.'s New Interest in Privatizing Education

News Corp. and the ALEC Education Agenda

News Corp. and the ALEC Communications Agenda

The Rush to Dump ALEC

The creeping threat of backdoor privatization

Bit by bit, financial responsibility for some of the most important public services is being passed on to you