I went to an education forum at NN yesterday. Jeff Bryant, one of the panelists, charged that “progressives have climbed aboard the bandwagon of a conservative agenda for public schools”.
He singled out the Center for American Progress, which he says is indistinguishable from the American Enterprise Institute on public school issues.
I don’t know how true that charge is, but I think we’d do well if we’d first admit that we have a lot of for-profit charter schools and they’ve been operating long enough to leave a long paper trail. We could look at those schools, and see how the “reform movement” experiments are going, ten years in.
For-profit charter schools have been in operation in Ohio for more than a decade. They are not a thought experiment. They are not an abstract hypothetical. They are not just a topic being batted around at various “reform roundtables”. They have an extensive record of failure. Why we are pretending this is all just in the discussion stage is beyond me. The jury really isn’t still out. In Ohio, the jury came straggling back in years ago, and the verdict isn’t good.
We’ve talked about White Hat Management here before. White Hat is a for-profit charter school that operates in Ohio and Florida virtually without regulation and without any documented success. Former FOX News personality John Kasich isn’t only promoting his campaign donor White Hat, however. He’s now promoting ECOT, another for-profit that is a huge GOP donor, another for-profit with an absolutely horrendous record on actually educating people.
ECOT, The Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, is the 21st largest “district” in the state of Ohio. The state spent $59,978,866 on the school last year – millions of which seem to go directly into the pocket of William Lager, the schools founder.
Lager has returned a lot of that money – hundreds of thousands of dollars just last year! – directly into the campaign coffers of some of his biggest (typically Republican) supporters – including tens of thousands of dollars directly to Speaker of the House Speaker William Batchelder, Ohio Senate President Tom Niehaus and Chief Justice of the Ohio Supreme Court Maureen O’Connor.
Which might explain why this school has been gaining support among Ohio’s Republicans even though it has been sucking hundreds of millions in state funding away from Ohio’s public schools while failing Ohio’s students for nearly a decade.
During the last campaign Kasich said he would push for State takeover of Cleveland Public Schools if they didn’t improve, but ECOT continues to have a lower graduation rate and a lower attendance rate than Cleveland Public Schools. Not only is Kasich not pushing for State takeover of ECOT – he’s promoting the school and of his party’s largest political donors – by speaking at their graduation.
I have this nightmare vision of the future: we’re all 90 years old, we’re begging Congress or a state legislature for a public option in elementary and high school education, we’re counting votes, and coming up short.
arguingwithsignposts
Yep, sounds about right. In some sense, I get that the right wing has been fighting for this free market fairy stuff wrt education since Brown v. Board, since, y’know – melanin-enhanced people and stuff.
ETA: Given all of the above, I really don’t know how you fix public education short of some sort of Robin Hood scheme which levels the playing field between the haves in the ‘burbs and high-end inner city areas and the have-nots everywhere else. And nobody is going to go there.
dr. bloor
The good news is that empires die slowly enough to make plans for your kids to get the hell out. Junior Bloor’s choices will be his own, of course, but he won’t make a decision about college without considering the many benefits of universities in countries where it might be nice to set down roots after graduation.
cathyx
I am having greedy bast-ards overload today. I can’t take another story of moneyed interest winning against the people.
glasnost
I read yglesias quite a bit and am fairly certain he has no sympathy for obvious cons, which this example clearly is.
On the other hand, he’s personally convinced at least me that there are, in fact, many public schools that suck. For a variety of reasons, some of which would be helped by finding ways to break up the student body and intermingle it with other students from different communities, and some of which would probably be helped by some quantifiable metrics of student learning which teachers were accountable for.
I’m pro-union, full stop. But public monopolies often suffer from the similar problems as private monopolies. There’s a long and extensive documented history here – thousands of years of it. I think CAP’s position is that competition in education is good, while the replacement of public schools with less accountable, privatized quack-job potemkin charters is bad. Not all private entities must always and forever be unaccountable and serve as ATMs for the owners. That’s a design problem and a governance problem. There’s nothing special about privatized competition vs. non-profit or public competition. It’s not Jesus, it’s not Satan.
I don’t know if that’s AEI’s position, though I doubt it.
I like public school teachers, but the union in question – understandably but nevertheless – defends a system, not the best possible education process. Exhibit A: Seniority based-layoffs. Total clusterfuck.
Anonne
I feel you, cathyx. I’m so tired of contemplating moving to Europe or Canada.
Dave
I guess what drives me around the bend about charter schools is that there is a perfectly viable alternative: magnet schools. And those are still governed by the same standards and rules as the standard public school system. We have one in Maine (Maine School of Science and Mathematics) that is fantastic.
Instead, these con artists push charter schools which only guarantee that tax dollars will flow into the pockets of private corporations with no guarantee that they will actually educate our children.
General Stuck
I have the vision of being 90 and scrapping over a little rat meat cooked on a can of sterno beside a smoldering Koch Industry landfill.
mk3872
Awesome, touching story. Did you also take the opportunity to whine and complain about the Obama admin relentlessly during the session? If you didn’t, then I won’t believe this was actually @ NN.
JPL
Michelle Rhee was a good speaker who was able to convince a lot of folks that her way was the best. Although DC schools were able to rid themselves of her, her legacy lives on. Waiting for Superman was a highly acclaimed documentary which I haven’t seen but I heard it painted a bleak picture of our school system.
In our country it’s easy to talk about the public schools that are failing and talk about charter schools that are successful. What is wrong with that statement?
bemused
I just tuned into Free Speech TV and Al Franken is speaking at NN.
toledored
Thanks Kay. Why the Plain Dealer, Blade, etcetera don’t pick this up is a mystery. Have fun in Minnesota. You are fabulous.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
Did he offer any evidence?
I don’t know about you, but I’ll only be 43 in 2012.
WereBear
Then again, why don’t Democrats point to this study every single freakin’ time the subject of charter schools comes up?
Make them defend it!
jake the snake
@ General Stuck
At least you will feel better knowing the person next to you doesn’t have a rat or a can of sterno.
Jeffro
Every time someone, right or left, starts spouting nonsense about charter schools, I refer them to this:
http://credo.stanford.edu/reports/MULTIPLE_CHOICE_CREDO.pdf
In short: 17% of charters perform better than comparable ‘regular’ public schools, and 37% perform worse.
Ghanima Atreides
@Kay
But conservatives cannot win in the long game. All they have are tactics.
There is an emergent body of work on political heritability.
The internet and social media allow the spread of conservative eumemes, but also allow the spread of data.
This is a desperate attempt to indoctrinate youth in the face of the demographic timer. And its going to get much, much uglier in the run up to November 2012.
Youth, browns, blacks, are simply never going to vote republican. The white christian demographic continues to shrink. Conservatives know this.
They are trying to use schools for indoctrination of youth, but they have no power against culture.
For example, Linkin Parc and Transformers 3.
Mashups of Wisdom, Justice, and Love and Irridescent are all over youtube.
How can conservatives fight that?
The death throes of a dying organism are never pretty.
It doesnt mean we shouldn’t fight and fight hard. It means conservatives cannot win. But it will be ugly.
The Wingularity is near.
Gin & Tonic
But they have been. Goldwater was an unelectable wacko right-winger. So he didn’t get elected. BFD. Things have moved so far in the public discourse that in 2012, the 1964 Goldwater would be primaried and lose to a teabagger for being insufficiently pure. You don’t think that’s carried everything with it? Obama, on many issues, is to the right of Nixon and is having difficulties getting those policies past Congress. The conswervatives *have* the long game and have had it for 50 years.
Gin & Tonic
Damn sticky mouse button. Sorry about the double quote.
dr. bloor
Of course, the folks without rats and sternos will be starting grassroots political movements demanding entitlement reforms to cut the General’s rat and sterno benefits.
Barry
Last I heard, ‘Waiting for Superman’ hasn’t aged well. And Rhee turned out to be somebody whose resume was a work of fiction. Oddly enough, those geniuses at the Gates Foundation never thought of checking it. Can’t imagine why :)
Davis X. Machina
@ Dave:
Ask a Maine state legislator where the other two magnet schools provided for by the original legislation are, the humanities and social-sciences magnet, and the fine-and-performing arts magnet.
They won’t be able to tell you, but at least they have an excuse — because of term limits, none of them were around when the legislation passed.
JPL
Barry @ 20, Rhee is still popular in states with whacko governors.
WereBear
Whatever American Conservatism started out as, and whatever keeps people voting for it, what it has become is a straightforward mechanism for funneling tax money into the pockets of the rich.
They don’t even pretend anymore; and that, I hope, will be our salvation. Because the number two thing you don’t do is ever ever tell your “mark” the truth.
But they’ve fallen for the number one pitfall; believing their own lies.
Ohio Mom
I always recommend the Schools Matter site
(http://www.schoolsmatter.info/) to anyone who wants to know more about the movement to dismantle public education. It’s a bit polemical but the information and links are all there.
One point that’s made on that blog regularly is that when you carefully analyze our country’s education stats in relationship to other developed nations’, what stands out is that the US schools that serve the middle-class and above all have stats that are as good or BETTER than those other countries.
What those other countries have that we don’t is very, very low numbers of children in poverty, numbers that are in the low single digits; we have more than 20% of our children in poverty.
Their low test scores pull down the averages and are used by those set on privatizing education to “prove” that our entire educational system is in crisis. What we have is a poverty problem, not that there isn’t tons of other supporting evidence out there that it’s amazing and horrifying that a nation as rich and wealthy as ours tolerates and encourages so much poverty.
On another note, yes, CAP and Yglesias are indeed, “indistinguishable from the American Enterprise Institute on public school issues.” Complicating things for Matt is that not only is his employer anti-public education, his girlfriend is a professional in the field of dismantling public education.
I stopped reading his site regualarly long ago, but every time he wrote on public education, he had many articulate commentors explaining why he was wrong and it was painfully obvious he couldn’t be bothered to either read the comments or to re-consider his opinions when presented with new information. He has many interesting views on things but I don’t think he’s going to have a long shelf life because he doesn’t seem capable of evolving. It’s sad and a waste of a lot of great potential. And rather ironic on the topic of learning and education.
Joel
@ glasnost:
I agree with you (and Yglesias) in principle on this issue. But the reality is that quick fixes and potemkin charters are what’s in, especially when Republicans are in charge. That’s why, at the very least, I regard the charter school movement with extreme skepticism. And, to be honest, the more I hear about it, the more hostile I am to it.
Interestingly, I happen (unnamed) to know someone who is very invested in the charter school movement, and while his motives are not profit-driven, they’re certainly not pure. Let’s just say that he follows that conservative credo of “if it pisses of liberals…”
Ohio Mom
Um, public schools *are* the government. A school system is a form of local government, described in the state consitution just like other forms of local government (e.g., cities, villages, water districts, etc.).
Like other local goverments, there’s an elected representative governing body (the school board) and a defined geographical jurisdiction (the school district). It has to have open records (the exception being personal information about specific students), and open meetings; in short, it’s accountable to the public/citizenry. All things not true of privatized, charter schools (not matter how many times they claim they are a form of “public” school).
That may be the creepiest thing about the privatization movement, that it essentially erases a level of government and replaces it with a private corporation. There’s a word for that, it’s on the tip of my tongue, I think it starts with the letter “f”…
urbanmeemaw
@General Stuck
I have the vision of being 90 and scrapping over a little rat meat cooked on a can of sterno beside a smoldering Koch Industry landfill.
That assumes you’ve been fortunate enough to survive the “Pet Food For Plutocrats” “jobs” program.
General Stuck
urbanmeemaw
LOL, very true.
glasnost
But the reality is that quick fixes and potemkin charters are what’s in, especially when Republicans are in charge.
I don’t really care much about charter schools either way. As someone else said upthread, ‘magnet’ schools perhaps do the similar thing with less room for charlatanism. You could certainly promote competition in public ownership forms and be doing good. Private-sector involvement is arguably superfluous.
Someone else might say: more schools leads to more competition, and given that our political system is a literally unsolvable clusterfuck, and we are never, ever, ever, going to get the funding we need for more schools through public money, we might as well be open to allowing private money to add to the resource pool, under carefully controlled conditions. Which brings me here:
In short: 17% of charters perform better than comparable ‘regular’ public schools, and 37% perform worse.
Right. This implies that there are good private-sector charter schools – 17% of them – with good ideas and a sincere crew, doing things the right way, and then you have twice as many frauds and charlatans, probably overseen by republicans. I think what Yglesias would say would be something like: terminate and punish the bad ones and keep the good ones.
As I said earlier in the post, private sector involvement isn’t necessary or important to the line of thinking. There’s been a lot of crap generated and I respect the idea that private-sector involvement is more trouble than it’s worth.
I personally draw the line at the viewpoint that says Matt Yglesias and CAP is out to fuck over the schoolchildren of america because of their anti-union pathologies. Because of… some highly unverified armchair psychology about what his wife benefits from? Claims like that need fairly ironclad evidence.
Ghanima Atreides
@G&T
but no more. Because no one can put the internet/social media djinni back in the bottle. Consider the demographic timer.
In 1970 the electorate was 90% non-hispanic caucasian. In 2008 the electorate was 72% non-hispanic caucasian. IMHO that is non-reversible trend.
Until now conservatives have been able to scam older less educated voters with free market fantasies and fake egalitarianism. But 50 years of race-baiting and IQ-baiting have resulted in selection for stupid in the conservative base. Just look at the ideological straitjacket the teabaggers are forcing on the current crop of candidates.
Selection against “fancy” college educations results in selection against high cognitive ability. Its non-seperable. Dogwhistle racebaiting results in blacks and browns avoiding conservatives like the plague– they can hear the whistle too.
And culture is immunizing young people against conservative ideology.
A tribe without reps cannot survive.
Ghanima Atreides
My point about Transformers 3…how many kids will see that when it comes out?
Linkin Parc’s song Irridescent is featured in the movie. The same song is youtube linked to Wisdom, Justice and Love, the King sermon in Parc’s last album, A Thousand Sons.
Its a viral memetic, almost like a cultural subliminal.
That is simply going to become part of growing up for a generation of American kids. Conservatives can fight culture all they want, but it won’t do a damn bit of good in the end.
But its going to get real ugly in the run-up to 2012. This might be the last chance for conservatives to demographically capture the WH.
Distributed Jesusland™ can only win locally anymore already.
The Wingularity is near.
Ghanima Atreides
Heres a Disney mashup of MLK and Linkin.
How can conservatives fight that?
How can conservatives fight youtube and facebook and the demographic timer?
Ghanima Atreides
@glasnost
Yglesias is libertarian. He is basically out to fuck over anyone not in his tribe in the stealthiest way he can.
Its called the Libertarian Reacharound.
Barry
Matt is a guy who will allege to know *all* sorts of stuff, but not so much when it comes down knowing what the right has been doing for the past 40 years, and linking it to what they’re doing now. I guess that a Poli Sci/Philosopy dual major from Harvard comes with some very specific blind spots.
And glastnost? People have been reading for a bit, noticing his, uh, ‘blind spots’, and matching those up to his situation. Two things I’ve come to believe over my life are that (a) people’s beliefs will adjust to their incentives and social situation,and the (b) yes, otherwise decent people will push horrific and destructive policies, as long as they don’t have to confront the actual damage in person.
Barry
JPL – June 18, 2011 | 11:16 am · Link
“Barry @ 20, Rhee is still popular in states with whacko governors.”
Oh, yea. Wingnut welfare and the fact that she’s a useful face and forked tounge to con money out of people. She’ll never want for a comfortable life.
Ohio Mom
The purpose of a magnet school is not competition among schools, it is meeting the needs of students in the particular public school system providing the magnet school(s). Might be hard to believe, but meeting the needs of students is sorta a main purpose of public schools.
The need might be serving the very gifted, which for example, is what two long-time magnet schools of my hometown, Bronx Science and the HS of Music & Art, do. The need might be encouraging economic and racial integration; this goal inspired a whole raft of magnet schools in my adopted hometown, Cincinnati, back in the 1990s.
In my current school district, one elementary school has a special program for kids on IEPs for emotional disturbances, and another elementary school has a lab classroom for children with severe autism. It’s not because the schools are in some sort of competition, it’s because these children are best served by specialists and there are economies of scale in housing each program in a single location.
Marc
Charter schools can be just fine; the issue is with *for profit* charter schools, or online charter schools, which are frequently simple frauds.
Charters or magnets can be ways to experiment within the public school system. Letting people give themselves corporate schools on the public dime is very different. That’s why it’s useful to actually make distinctions between the two, which are frequently lost in topics like this.
One substantive point: Yglesias is useless on this topic. Take a breezy point from above: “senority-based firing” as being bad. Do you want to know why teacher unions want this? Because you can fire all of your experienced teachers, even if they’re better dollar for dollar with the kids, and replace them with inexperienced teachers at a fraction of the cost. There is both a human and a pedagogic cost to this. We’re not all cogs in some soulless neoliberal paradise, and I’ll make no apologies for protecting senior teachers.
People like Matt, who have lived an entire life of privilege, are clueless about why anyone might want job security, or might choose a path different from the type favored by an arrogant young man.
jcgrim
CAP is the Democratic Party’s neoliberal think-tank that promotes junk science and propaganda under the guise of education-reform. None of CAP’s or Yglesais recommendations are recommended by any independent research in teaching and learning. Waiting for Superman was funded by the privatizers and promoted by the dilettantes Gates, Broads, and Waltons to bash public schools and unions.
Bush’s No Child Left behind and Obama’s Race to the Top are privatization schemes to funnel public money to Wall Street. Check out the investors in charter schools http://us2.campaign-archive.com/?u=cfb5b3dae0d0b7da2e949d8d1&id=078f7efb22&e=2e4c6c94e1 (note: Wireless Generation is Rupert Murdoch’s education company)
Schools Matter is the definitive blog on all things reform http://www.schoolsmatter.info/
For the truth behind Waiting for Superman go to:
http://www.notwaitingforsuperman.org/
A grassroots group of NYCity Parents and teachers made a film to fight the hedge funders, real estate investors, etc, and spread the truth behind the destruction of public schools. Order a copy free here:
http://gemnyc.org/
Read Diane Ravitch’s book: The Death and Life of the Great American Public School System for an in depth history of US education reforms over the past 40 years.
jcgrim
For more info on for-profit charter schools and a compilation of scandals including misuse of funds, tampering with grades, attendance, testing.
http://charterschoolscandals.blogspot.com/
stuckinred
Yea, why bother with this FDL bashing:
“Obama Libya War Powers Debate: Obama’s Lawyers Are Worse Than Bush’s, Glenn Greenwald Says”
bob
I say Pepsi. Partial credit for me!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HK0BMaUMmGw
Groening. Rhymes with “complaining”.