Funding for traditional Ohio public schools was the big loser again in the last state budget. Kasich and an army of school reform lobbyists got more charter schools, more reliance on standardized tests, further deregulation to facilitate privatization of our existing public schools and a state-wide expansion of vouchers. A friend is on Michelle Rhee’s lobby shop email list. He has no idea how he got on it. He forwarded an email from Rhee’s Ohio franchise. Here are the reformers celebrating the Ohio budget, a budget that harms every kid who attends a traditional public school:
Ohio has proven itself a national leader when it comes to how we fund our schools. Thanks to the efforts of Governor Kasich, the General Assembly, and StudentsFirst members like you, public school financing will now be fairer and will be linked to real student outcomes.The sweeping legislation that was just signed into law is a huge win for Ohio students, but there is still a lot of work to do to make sure that every child receives an excellent education. We should commend public officials for their hard work and cooperation and encourage them to continue to make important reforms once the legislature is back in session later this summer.Send Governor Kasich and your legislators a note of thanks and encouragement now!By entering your address below, you will be able to send an email directly to your Members of the General Assembly and the Governor. Thank them for their support!
Not surprising to me, this complete disconnect between school reform marketing rhetoric and my local reality of school reform. I have 4 children, 3 are grown and our youngest is 11, so I’ve watched “market based” reform play out in one local school district over the last decade, up close and over time. What school reform means to me is this: funding cuts, encroaching privatization, an insane focus on standardized testing, knee-jerk blaming of local public schools and a complete lack of accountability for the national leaders of the reform “movement”, the same “reformers” who are driving the national agenda and have been driving it for more than a decade. When do traditional public schools benefit from reform? I get that charters and private schools benefit. What about the traditional public schools that 95% of US public school kids actually attend?
What I want is competent stewardship and thoughtful long-term investment in the school system I already had and valued when this “reform” insanity started more than a decade ago. I also want advocates and allies in government who support public schools. Not some abstract, round-table concept of “great schools” but the actual public school my kid attends. That’s what I want. I’m not getting it. I’m getting Milton Friedman’s theories on public schools.
I don’t think I’m alone in this so I was glad to see some polling on it. A labor union commissioned the poll which means it will be dismissed by media and the national reform groups as self interested, but I don’t buy that public school teachers who belong to unions are “self interested” while national reform celebrities and their many, many, many lobbying groups are not. By using this lop-sided credibility metric media and reformers have effectively marginalized anyone who acts as an advocate for a traditional public school system, because we, parents and teachers, support the dreaded “status quo” by supporting our existing school system. I reject that. It’s dumb.
I think about my own work and compare it to what media and national reformers have done to discredit public school teachers and I’m amazed at how misguided and unfair it is. I’m a lawyer and I work some in the juvenile court system. When we have discussions on the juvenile court system here, lawyers and judges who work in the juvenile court system run the show. This, despite the fact that many lawyers bill the county for work (self interested!) and judges are actual public employees (with pensions!) Under the “school reform credibility rubric” lawyers and judges would be dismissed as hacks who seek only to keep their jobs, never mind that we actually work IN juvenile courts, with real live juveniles, every day. I’m here to tell you that would never, ever happen. Judges and lawyers would raise hell. In my darker moments watching this “reform” madness unfold I sometimes wonder if public school teachers are so easily dismissed and marginalized on “school reform” because K-12 public school teachers are 1. middle class and 2. primarily women.
In spite of all the trashing of public schools by media and reformers, you may be shocked to learn that the parents of kids who attend traditional public schools support their local (shudder) “government schools.” Since 95% of US public school kids attend traditional public schools not “choice” schools or the “miracle” charter chains that get all the attention, this polling probably matters if one is interested in the opinions of the not-famous people who use public schools:
*The two biggest problems facing public schools are too much testing and too little funding — both at 32 percent. Third on the list is large class sizes (23 percent), fourth is lack of support for teachers (17 percent) and fifth, poor teacher quality (16 percent).
*Sixty-eight percent of parents are satisfied with their children’s public schools, including 66 percent of parents with children in urban schools and 62 percent of parents with incomes under $50,000.
*Seventy-six percent oppose reduced funding for traditional public schools to increase spending on public charter schools.
Karen in GA
Reason no. 247,312 that I’m glad I don’t have kids. Damned reformers doing everything they can to ensure that kids in public schools don’t stand a chance in hell of getting an education.
Chickamin Slam
Bill Gates finally got his charter schools initiative passed last fall. Outspent his opponents by an insane 11 to 1 and still barely passed. He has since decided to “make nice” with the Teacher’s Union since he is now in the catbird’s seat. 50 charter schools to start and more later. Newspapers agreed with his logic that we (Washington State) should be more like the rest of the country in having “Freedoms, choices, … “. This means more money for Bill Gates and his shitty Microsoft education products, spend some speech to gain more later via taxpayer subsidies. What a country!
rikyrah
Thanks for keeping the spotlight on these grifters, Kay
Yatsuno
@Chickamin Slam: Uncle Bill has a big problem. Public education is guaranteed in the state Constitution, which means that his lovely charters have to match state standards or they get squished like grape. I don’t see how he threads that needle.
Kay
@Chickamin Slam:
You’ll have vouchers next. They may be “neovouchers” but you’ll get them. It’s inevitable, and it’s already happening all over. Ain’t no way private and religious schools are going to get cut out of the “choice” business.
El Caganer
I still can’t figure out how I wound up on the StudentsFirst mailing list. There are a lot of educational programs that I’d like to see in schools, but that’s within public schools as we know them, not half-assed, unaccountable charters.
stinger
“if public school teachers are so easily dismissed and marginalized on “school reform” because K-12 public school teachers are 1. middle class and 2. primarily women”
Yes. As a former, non-unionized elementary school teacher, to me the biggest issues are lack of funding and class size, with pointless constant testing a close third. There’s no teacher who doesn’t know, from the first week of class and throughout the semester, how each child is doing in relation to where they should be.
Kay
@stinger:
Parents hate the testing because it’s completely out of control. Unfortunately, large portions of the public think it’s the same as when they went to school, in 1984.
Kay
@Yatsuno:
State constitutions are for people who support “the status quo”. Embrace “creative destruction”, would you?
This is the latest fad. Neovouchers.
Forum Transmitted Disease
I suspect it’s more because they’re overwhelmingly Democrats, and are the last non law-enforcement employees to be 100% unionized. The overlords of the propaganda machine really hate that.
Mnemosyne
Can I put in my own personal rant about schools eliminating PE and recess time in favor of more “teaching to the test”? This is one of my personal hobbyhorses because it’s causing a lot more kids to be diagnosed and given medication for mild cases of ADHD and other attentional issues that would be easily solved by just letting them outdoors for an hour or so.
Even leaving that aside, it’s INSANE to expect small children to be able to sit attentively and quietly for 5 or 6 hours without a chance to run around.
Kay
@Forum Transmitted Disease:
Oh, sure, it was part of the insane media jihad against public employees who crashed the economy. Remember that? How second grade teachers crashed world markets in 2008? You don’t? Well, it was them.
rdldot
It’s not really that hard to figure out why they are doing this. The ultimate goal is to get rid of tax-funded education. Right now they are just peeling away some of the funds, but eventually they will defund all education. Personal responsibility – don’t ya know. Someone had a post about a representative a couple of weeks ago that stated that outright. This is what the goal was all along.
Shakezula
@Yatsuno: The point isn’t to run functioning schools. The point is to extract as much cash as possible and run before the auditors show up.
Emerald
@Yatsuno: The “reformers” thread that needle by squishing public schools like a grape. State standard easily can be revised.
They are enthusiastically stomping even as we speak.
Belafon
@Forum Transmitted Disease: It’s also because teachers are paid via taxes, and the ones who benefit the most from this are the middle class and poor, the ones who get told taxes are evil and don’t completely follow what happens to tax money.
esc
I have a nine month old, and everything about educating him terrifies me. Mountains of homework and standardized tests from an early age, hordes of profiteers at the gates, the lack of physical and creative outlets I had. It all makes me want to vomit.
NickT
@Yatsuno:
Well, he’ll leverage creative synergies and retire at peak clusterfuck leaving Steve “the not very useful idiot” Ballmer to continue his legacy.
WereBear
Just more of the planned outcome: which is to destroy actual meritocracies.
How is their own George W. Bushes going to become President when they are stupid, poorly raised, and mean as a brush hog? By destroying any possible competition, that’s how!
Our current President would find it hard to rise when they get their way. Which is exactly what they plan.
BGinCHI
And 3. Exhausted from actually working in education instead of talking about it in an abstract way.
BGinCHI
Great post, Kay. This makes my blood boil.
The smartest people are not making the big decisions in education right now.
Yatsuno
@Kay: INORITE??? I mean jeez we even have reproductive rights in there too! What ARE we thinking, not protecting the almighty Wingnut Jeebus and TEH BEBEHS!!! It’s like we don’t care about
profitour kids at all!sherparick
What a huge con the school “reform” movement is. Michelle Rhee herself is now a multi-millionaire. She and a few dozen others who “command” the heights of the corporate for profit or non-profit charter school organizations are being firehosed with billions of tax dollars. They in turn spend a few million on the politicians who have provided them this gravy train such as Kasich. Again, our elite is betraying the country.
The Fat Kate Middleton
From this old teacher: thank you, thank you, thank you. From the very start – from the time the Carnegie Study was released, I’ve abided by one of the most reliable axioms ever: follow the money. This is just one more giant grift to make the MOTU more obscenely rich than ever – and Michelle Rhee is Queen of the Grifters (and I maintain Snowbilly’s got nothing on Michelle).
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Kay: It’s quite depressing, and makes me feel relieved that my only children have 4 legs, so homeschooling will suffice quite well. A friend in the education business once imagined my after school tutoring thusly, should I have kids: ” once you’ve finished your afters chool carrot, apple and almond snack, we’ll start on quantum mechanics.”
Tangentially related, some in KY object to actual science curriculum requirements:
Another gem, from a parent:
The public hearings are not expected to affect the outcome of the decision about whether to send the standards on for legislative approval.
Thanks for letting me vent, Kay. And as always, thanks for keeping this in the forefront.
Forum Transmitted Disease
@WereBear: Our current President never went to a public school in his entire life. This is part of the problem.
decitect
School Reform (2013) is just link Urban Renewal (1965) = just tear down rebuild, and all will be swell = unicorns
they need to be stopped in their tracks, these ‘reformers’/’renewalists’ need to be discredited.
Mike in NC
On a somewhat related note, Republicans are now claiming that their plans to slash food stamps is in the best interests of the moochers and looters who get them, in that it’ll force them to eat better and lose weight. Call it “Tough Love” from the GOP.
Seanly
@Shakezula:
There are times when I wish I had no scruples so I could make a few bucks…
Of course, another option is to follow the lead of that recent Utah legislator and eliminate “forced schooling” altogether – because who doesn’t want to deal with a mass of illiterate and ignorant public? What has widespread education ever done for us?
Lee
I’m not sure how Texas has dodged this bullet. We just shot down the testing mania. The few times they have tried to bring vouchers have gotten shot down.
There is one thing I recently read that I actually kind of like.
One school district is actually letting out of district students attend by paying admission. I thought it an interesting idea.
Article
raven
@WereBear: Bush hog.
gene108
@Forum Transmitted Disease:
There are plenty of states – mostly in the South – where teachers are not unionized.
Though it does not stop people in those states from criticizing the destructive impact of teachers unions in their public schools.
Sort of like how words like “socialism”, in Dena Stewart-Gore’s worldview, have become synonyms for stuff she does not like; the words like “socialism” and “teachers unions” have lost any real meaning for large parts of the public.
raven
George Alexander Louis is the name for those that care.
negative 1
I work for a teachers’ union. Trust me we are not telling our members to hate the ‘reformer’ in charge of the Dept. of Ed. in this state. She has a 6% approval rating. 6%. The right can say it’s because we’re telling teachers to hate her, but at the end of the day they elect the leadership of the union. They hate her all on their own.
edit: typo
negative 1
@Forum Transmitted Disease: Don’t dismiss the second point quite so easily. Among the troglodyte wing of the State elected assembly, there is the perception that teachers are primarily women who are not the primary breadwinners of the house, so if they make less money it won’t harm their families quite as much. Sad but true.
Yatsuno
@raven: Interesting choice. The last George lost the colonies.*
*I think. I don’t recall another after the Mad King.
Kay
@gene108:
Rhee does it all the time. So does the NYTimes. They frame every single dissent from reform as “teachers unions vs sainted reformers”
Why doesn’t the damn New York Times know that teachers in southern states aren’t union members? Rhee is lying. What’s their excuse? I am honesty curious. Have they all been brainwashed by Bloomberg? The entire country is not DC and NY. There are other parts.
Yatsuno
@Kay:
Not to the Village, which is Rhee’s true audience. She’s not pleading to the common folk, she’s selling her goods to the Very Serious People who wonk at the major newspapers and attend Sally’s soirees at night. The Village then takes union thugs in schools and makes that The Narrative, peace be upon it. And The Narrative cannot be violated or questioned.
Mnemosyne
@Yatsuno:
Nope. Will’s great-grandfather was George VI — Colin Firth played him in The King’s Speech, which is probably about as good a film about speech therapy as you’re ever going to see.
The other Georges were George IV (aka the Prince Regent), son of George III; and George V, Will’s great-great-grandfather.
rda909
@Forum Transmitted Disease: Uh, yes he did.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noelani_Elementary_School
And what is your point anyway? President Obama has been increasing funding for public schools and expanding programs, and consistently promoting the need to support them more and more, and all in the face of a traitorous Republican party trying to do the exact opposite every step of the way.
raven
@Yatsuno: Liz’s daddy. “The King’s Speech”/
NickT
@Kay:
Why does the New York Times publish Douthat’s ignorant slop? The guy doesn’t even know the history of his own church, never mind grasping any part of modern American reality. All the NYT does is promote ignorance, while smugly pontificating along tediously moralistic lines.
Forum Transmitted Disease
@gene108: I get that. It was “communist” when I was a small child; not one in a thousand people could have told you what a communist was, but by God they were evil and must be stopped. The only difference is that today when someone uses the term “socialist” – once again, not one in a thousand know what that term actually means – I know they are just puking back up some Fox propaganda and that I can safely ignore pretty much everything they have to say.
Yatsuno
@Mnemosyne: @raven: Yeah, I just wasn’t sure and not really in a position to research it. Grazie.
Mnemosyne
@Yatsuno:
YOU SKIPPED A COLIN FIRTH MOVIE!?
You are dead to me now. Good day, sir. I said, good day!
NickT
@Mnemosyne:
He also likes Taylor Swift, which makes him one of history’s greatest monsters.
Kay
@rda909:
He really hasn’t. If your state didn’t follow Duncan’s free market reforms, your state didn’t get Race to the Top money. The competitive system Duncan has set up favors wealthy districts and charters backed by billionaires, because a rural public school district like mine doesn’t have the resources to write grants that compete with the money people. I just watched them try to get a grant for an after-school program. They’re not going to get it. Our school board is elected. They’re regular people. It’s an engineer and a retired teacher and small business people. Are they supposed to compete for grants with the Gates Foundation? How are we supposed to do this? We’re spending all our money on “reform” mandates, and our wingnut governor hates public schools. You tell me. Tell me how to compete with Mayor Bloomberg, from my kitchen table. I don’t want to be accused of supporting the “status quo”.
quannlace
I just can’t stop thinking about those cantaloupe thighs!
Forum Transmitted Disease
@NickT: You answered your own question. The outlier at the Times is not Douchehat, it’s Krugman.
NickT
@Kay:
I think Mark 4:25 sums up our current education policy rather well:
Kay
@NickT:
They wrote an editorial about reform in Tennessee that was laugh out loud funny.
It was basically: “we don’t care what it is, but we back it, because we’re reformers”
Do they have any idea how disruptive this is to ordinary public school districts? WTF? Fire all the local people and close the public school? Oh, that’s sure to bring about excellence! Do they not know that children live somewhere? They’re not attending boarding school. They walk past the boarded-up school. Their parents used to work there.
NickT
@Forum Transmitted Disease:
I very seldom bother to look at anything outside Krugman where the NYT is concerned. I am sick of badly-written slop masquerading as news. I did think of proposing Krugman as the latest appellation for The Cat Without A Name. There’s a certain whiskery intelligence that they both possess.
Forum Transmitted Disease
@rda909: I’ve tried writing about three rebuttals and have given up. It’s like trying to climb an Everest of stupidity in flip-flops. I’ll simply say this: you cannot possibly be serious. Every word you’ve written save for “President” is directly contradicted by the facts.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Kay:
You’re not thinking like a power broker, here Kay. Of course there aren’t “other parts.” Silly Ohio lawyer lady.
NickT
@Kay:
What gets to me about the standardized testing malarkey is that you couldn’t find a better way to bore both students and teachers senseless. No-one with any creative spark or passion is going to endure that endless, numbing round of chair-polishing futility. The end result will be stunted minds for the children and only the most drone-like and desperate of people as teachers. What a glorious achievement that will be. Until the next Great Eduleap Forward, that is.
Yatsuno
@Mnemosyne: My Netflix subscription lapsed. I r chastened.
@NickT: Heh. Took someone long enough to notice.
Barry
@Yatsuno: “Uncle Bill has a big problem. Public education is guaranteed in the state Constitution, which means that his lovely charters have to match state standards or they get squished like grape. I don’t see how he threads that needle. ”
Easy – fraudulent measurement, or changing the standards.
schrodinger's cat
@Kay: NYT does not care for accuracy it seems, and should rename itself Epic Fail Times.
NickT
@Yatsuno:
Oh we noticed. We are Pseudonymous. We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us.
NickT
@schrodinger’s cat:
I kinda like Neo-Yokel Twerpocracy for NYT.
schrodinger's cat
@NickT: Not everyone with whiskers is smart, especially if they are a Punditubbie.
raven
@quannlace: Calves. If it were thighs it would be Earl Campbell. . . Skoal Brother.
Southern Beale
Michelle Rhee has strong Tennessee connections. Her ex-husband is our Commissioner of Education. Back in the spring there was a big kerfuffle when she kept referring to herself as a “public school mom” but it turned out one of her kids attended the very hoity-toity private all-girls school Harpeth Hall (past alumni include Reese Witherspoon and Amy Grant).
Anyway, Huffman’s latest genius move is to say that special ed kids need to take the same standardized TCAP test as everyone else because “we need to stop lying to them.” Which is just so fucking ignorant and ridiculous.
I fucking hate these people.
Kay
@NickT:
My youngest is (generally) cheerful and social and stoic and he likes school. My sister teases me that he’s the “much-loved youngest child”. She’s the oldest in my huge family and I’m toward the youngest, so there may be some bitterness there. Anyway. I can’t agree with him that the constant standardized tests suck (although they all hate them and are bored by them) because he trusts the adults at his school, and I don’t want to undermine them. It isn’t their fault, anyway! They’d never do this to him, given their druthers! They’re being coerced.
Paul in KY
@Yatsuno: The boy’s great grandfather was the beloved George VI.
schrodinger's cat
@raven:I wonder whether they are also the fans of our latest George?
rda909
@Kay: The overall funding for public education has gone up most, if not all years President Obama has been in office. If Republicans had their way, or sadly even many Democrats, those trends would be going in the opposite direction.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/10/obama-budget-education_n_3053564.html
Yes, I’m not a fan of Arne Duncan and I despise the giant scam of charter schools, but that grift has been building for several decades and is funded by literally the richest people on earth. To expect President Obama to single-handily change that steamroller in a few years is not reasonable, and unfortunately this unreasonable standard also has been applied to President Obama by the supposed liberal base on so many other issues.
President Obama is not the problem here. He’s our ally in this fight. As I’ve been doing for years now and on so many issues, I’ve been trying to get my liberal friends and relatives to FOCUS on the real problems, and stop falling into the “divide and conquer” traps set by the media and Republicans that get people dejected and eating their own. To truly improve public schools in America, one of the best things all of us can do right now is make sure we win local school board races across the country and especially the 2014 midterms so President Obama has a rational Congress to work with on this issue.
Michele C.
I don’t have two-legged kids either, but it’s actually going to be crappy for all of us if the kids now get a crappy education and then we need them to keep up infrastructure, take care of our public health, invent new things that make all our lives better, get jobs that are better than McDonalds, etc.
I get it that this “meritocracy” wants to end their taxes paying for the non-rich to get any education and that they love taking all that money (e.g., Rhee), but for f**k’s sake!
Chris
@Forum Transmitted Disease:
Anyone who uses the word “socialism” like it has any relevance in America, let alone post 1980 America, can be safely assumed to be a mindless toolbag who can’t tell shit from peanut butter.
Hoodie
@rda909: The bigger point is that, irrespective of what Obama does, he’s largely irrelevant because state and local governments control education and that’s where the Kochs and other enemies of public ed are spending their money. Here in NC, the GOP legislature just passed a budget creating a voucher system, cutting teacher and teacher assistant positions, freezing teacher salary increases, and eliminating tenure. We’re now scraping the bottom as far as teacher compensation and benefits. These assholes are raping and pillaging Visigoths, so to worry about what Obama and Arne Duncan are doing is a bit misplaced. Yeah, they lend some inappropriate credibility to what the GOP is doing, but I doubt it makes much of a difference. You have to hope the GOP strategy is dumb in the long term, because people may quickly realize their kids will get fucked in the free-market nirvana the GOP envisions, and that includes a lot of self-identified “middle class” folks. People tend to pay more attention when it comes to their kids, and that’s probably why past Republicans tended to more favorable to public education than the current knuckledraggers.
gene108
@rda909:
Funding the Dept of Education isn’t the issue.
NCLB pushed more money into Federal education spending than at anytime since LBJ was President.(reworded for clarity)NCLB marked the largest Federal increase in spending for education since LBJ was President.
It is what that money is getting used for and who is benefiting from the increased funding that is at issue.
We’re spending more money foolishly and not helping those who need it most.
rda909
@Forum Transmitted Disease: Hilarious. Yes, that little detail of being “President” and keeping McCain, Palin, Rmoney and Ryan out of the White House.
Public school funding has gone up most if not every year President Obama has been in office. That’s a simple fact. I haven’t contradicted myself at all. You’re the one who has been wrong in claiming President Obama never attended public school, and also claiming everything I typed is “directly contradicted by the facts.”
I don’t think charter schools should get a penny of public dollars. My mother and many other relatives are unionized public school teachers going back decades. I’ve been trying to stop the billionaire-backed charter school steamroller for years and reverse the trends. President Obama is helping do that, and he cannot do it by himself and can only do so much against this massive machine in eight years, and with the most obstructionist Congress in the history of the United States for much of those eight years. I trust you’ll be out there working on campaigns for your local school board races, and the 2014 midterms to make sure we have more public school supporting politicians with power, just as I have always done and will continue to do my entire life.
rda909
@Hoodie: Agreed.
Kay
@rda909:
Obama appointed Duncan and he keeps him on. Arne Duncan had to be shamed into defending Philadelphia public schools. Two public school advocates wrote him a letter and he finally released a wishy-washy letter. He can’t even bring himself to say he supports public schools. He says he’s an “agnostic” on education, and he wants “great” schools.
Public schools are being defunded all over the country. All Duncan talks about is Common Core. His home city of Chicago is imploding! Philadelphia is on life-support. He supposedly “reformed” Chicago schools 10 years ago. What happened?
We’re losing our art teacher here and kids now pay for sports. I don’t give a shit about his new testing regime. I’m all reformed out.
We need an advocate for the existing public school system in this country, because that’s where 95% of the kids are. We don’t need people who are “agnostic” on public schools. WTF does that even mean? Why can’t Duncan talk? He speaks in slogans, like a CEO.
I support and supported Obama, but he is making a terrible mistake on on public schools. It isn’t a political issue yet for Democrats, but it will be. I am not going to lose the universal public school system and replace it with Duncan’s “portfolio” of privatized schools. It will end up like the health care system, and middle class and poor people will lose.
rda909
@gene108: Of course how it is spent is critical. I was simply rebutting this idea the President Obama is an enemy of public schools with some basic numbers.
I agree that tax dollars going to charter programs is a big problem, but again though, I feel the charter school grifters have infiltrated probably all levels of government over the past couple of decades, so I suspect President Obama has to compromise with them to get any of the things he wants as well, such as this:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/02/14/read-obamas-pre-k-plan/
School issues though are especially impacted by local politics, so people should really be focused on their local school systems more than anything regarding these issues.
dollared
@Kay: Hi Kay, thanks for keeping the focus on this. I’m in Washington, so I’m watching the Gatesfest up front (including being longtime friends with a committed REAL reformer who is now on the Charter Schools State Board and just posted to Facebook her dawning realization that she doesn’t talk to a single person who doesn’t have a profit motive in the discussion).
Couple of things: first of all, vouchers are less of a concern in Washington because statistically speaking there are no Catholics. I’m from the Wisconsin Catholic School system and Walker’s focus on vouchers is 100% driven by resentful Catholics.
Second, did you see this great post by (of all people) Matt Yglesias about how summers off are a huge gap for poor families and drives inequality in educational outcomes? I’ve got two happy kids running from camp to camp this summer so this really is real for me. Clearly the solution for this is summer school/camps for the school lunch crowd, but like pre-k, it would cost, you know, money. http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2013/07/summer_learning_loss_summer_vacation_hurts_kids_in_school_and_is_especially.html
Kay
@rda909:
Duncan intervened in DC to campaign for Michelle Rhee. Actually stumped with her. He just this week intervened when local people in Bridgeport CT tried to throw one of his “reformers” out on his ass, because he’s destroying their public school system.
What he WON’T do is act as an advocate for traditional public schools. He was in Michigan last month fawning all over Snyder. Snyder has gutted education funding and is privatizing whole districts. Arne Duncan is there singing his praises.
dollared
@Kay: Amen! Add this to the list of “Things about Obama that can only be explained by assuming he reads Tom Friedman to get his hard data.”
Kay
@dollared:
It’s happening in Philadelphia, too. I saw that Catholic schools lost 30k kids to charters, and I knew “vouchers are coming!”
I’m curious what Democrats who are reformers say now, because vouchers were the “line in the sand!” they would not cross. Hah!
I knew it was bullshit. When you get in bed with the Milton Friedmanites, vouchers are inevitable. We’ll have the dogmatic pure Friedmanites and the “squishy” Friedmanites on education. “Choice!”
Bostondreams
If school funding was tied to “real outcomes”, then charters ought to be getting LESS money in the budget because they are hardly better and in some cases worse that traditional public schools. The majority of the research supports this.
joan grim
@rda909:
I’m sorry to report but Obama & Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top are as bad if not worse than NCLB. RttT doubled down on testing and extended the punishments to teachers & principals. It mandates doubling the number of charter schools & requires handing “failed” (e.g., by invalid test scores) schools over to third party vendors. It’s a recipe for corruption.
Duncan had the gall to say Katrina was the best thing that ever happened to New Orleans public schools. He’s been an utter disaster as Sec of Education. Look at Chicago for the road map and you’ll see Duncan’s privatization scam replicated all over the country, financed by Gates, Eli Broad, The Waltons of Walmart, The Joyce Foundation and hedge funders in Democrats for Education Reform (DFER.) There is verly little distance between the Republican & Democrats re: public school privatization.
In fall, 2012, Chicago faced the largest teacher’s strike in 25 yrs under Obama & Duncan’s BFF Rahm.
If you want to know the real brains challenging Rahm & Duncan, watch the brave Karen Lewis- President of Chicago Teacher’s Union refuse to back down to the billionaire bullies:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QGPIrD6Z_4
And Chris Hedges on the “reptilian mayor of Chicago” and the implications of the entire country if we sell off our public schools:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfLL8ZACwKU
rda909
@Kay: For me politics at that level is about stopping then reversing trends as much as possible. President Obama has talked at length about this with the “steering the ocean liner” analogy. Healthcare, foreign policy, financial reforms, and so on are all places where he has stopped or at least slowed the horrendous trends that were building over decades, and in many he has been able to reverse the trends in a much better direction. I will say that public education has been the area I’ve been least pleased with, especially having Duncan there, but even there, I think it’s at least gotten better than when Bush and Republicans controlled it. I do think he would get even more done without dealing with the most obstructionist Congress in history, so that’s why winning the 2014 midterms are so crucial.
Mnemosyne
@dollared:
My extremely good public school district had awesome summer school that I looked forward to every year because they offered a lot of fun classes that you wouldn’t get during the school year, like doing round-table reads of Oscar Wilde plays. Of course, I was in a mostly-white, upper-class suburb, so they didn’t mind spending money on “summer enrichment” for students.
My fear would be that “reformers” would turn summer schools into another “teach to the test” opportunity without letting kids try to grow and expand during that break.
rda909
@Kay: Well Rhee is one of the most odious people on the planet, and I didn’t know about that or those other things. Look, I’ll never be defending Duncan, and the fact he’s still there is tough to take for an Obot such as myself.
Craig
Thanks Kay. Excellent post.
rda909
@joan grim: Again, I’m a proud Obot, but this is one of the issues I’ve been most troubled about. There have been some good things happening too, so I choose to focus on those and try to build upon those to make it better. Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House after the 2014 midterms will help do this, and that’s my focus right now, along with my local school board races.
Captain C
@Yatsuno: I think Mad George (III)’s son was also named George. And, IIRC, the one during World War II may have been George also (and I feel like I missed one).
Bendal
That article could be written verbatim for North Carolina, just substitute “NC” for “Ohio” and “McCrory” for “Kasich” and you’d have it right. The NC budget includes all of that and more; firing assistant teachers in elementary schools and increasing class sizes, dumping taxpayer money into charter and private schools, etc, etc. It’s as if the conservatives in all these states are discussing how to rape their states with each other (or are being directed by another group, like ALEC).
Kay
@joan grim:
Boy, have they misrepresented her. I was expecting a “union thug”, which would be fine, I’m fond of union thugs, but she’s nothing like how she was portrayed. I saw her on Chris Hayes. She’s calm and precise and determined, not at all bullying.
She should be the mayor of Chicago. Give that a try.
Jim Pharo
“I’m here to tell you that would never, ever happen.”
Um, no. It may seem that way to you, but the dismantlers are on their way, even to you. Your profession, like doctors, teachers, and so many others, are all headed to the same fate: human robots who do as they’re told.
If you think the judges can keep the “management consultants” at bay forever, you’re deluding yourself. They’re coming.
Fake Irishman
@gene108:
Right. Most of those states when they passed Right-to-Work legislation in the 1950s added on legislation making it illegal for teachers to collectively bargain period. (Texas, NC, Virginia are all on this list) In most other southern states (Mississippi and Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, Arkansas) there aren’t any laws preventing teachers from collectively bargaining, but there are no laws guaranteeing that right, so school districts just don’t negotiate. Teachers do still have unions in some cases — organizing drives have been relatively successful in places like Texas, but they don’t have access to the funds the statutory rights they do in other states.
Kay
@Jim Pharo:
Oh, I’m sure. I don’t think we’re profitable enough here :)
There simply aren’t enough of us. They did privatize the jail, but they didn’t privatize the juvenile detention facility, yet. I read the other day that the food is so bad in privatized jails that the inmates won’t eat it, so they buy food from the privatized jail commissary.
Cha ching! They’re getting paid twice! I mean, Jesus. Is there no shame?
keestadoll
I just love how the very notion of a charter school is castigated piecemeal in here. Same thinking that castigates mainline public schools on the “other” side. A few have noted that this is a fight to be won or lost on the local level. I would urge any interested in seeing how this actually plays out to go to an article posted last year in our local paper. Just google “Charter School Rift, North Coast Journal.”
Ben
@Kay:
Paul Vallas (Duncan’s predecessor as CPS head) is the current Bridgeport head, right?
Logan
@Yatsuno: The current Queen’s father was George VI and his was George V. Of course, I’m just a public school teacher (AP European and other histories). :)
Collin Firth portrayed the last King George in The King’s Speech.
Logan
@Bendal: The teachers here in NC, including myself, are so dispirited that they don’t know what to do. I switched counties last year and my tenure did not go with me and I wound up being railroaded and forced to “resign” because I taught the kids vs entertaining them and giving them high grades when they didn’t deserve them.
This is where NC is headed next year where the whim of a parent or bitter AP (my case) can end a 15 year career like that. We are going to be stuck with overworked and overstressed 25 year olds trying to teach until they can run away screaming.