Mr. and Mrs. Public School Sabotage

October 27, 2017July 22, 2018 stevenmsinger Accountability, Arne Duncan, Betsy DeVos, Bill Gates, Budget, Campaign Donations, capitalism, Charter Schools, Child Predators, church and state, Civil Rights, Common Core, Compassion, Competency Based Education, Corporate Education "Reform", Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, Obama, Parents, Politics, Prejudice, President, privatization, Racism, Republican, School Choice, School Funding, school segregation, school vouchers, Schools, segregation, Standardized Testing, Teachers, VAM Betsy DeVos, Bill and Melinda Gates, Bill Gates, charter schools, common core, Donald Trump, plutocracy, Politics, Privatize, public schools, sabotage, school vouchers

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America’s public schools are in crisis.

Because people make money when America’s public schools are in crisis.

And who sits atop this mountain of bribery and malfeasance?

Who gives the money that buys the politicians who make the laws that hurt the kids and profits the donors?

It’s none other than Mr. and Mrs. Public School Sabotage!

Systemic underfunding, laissez-faire segregation and privileging privatization – this is what our children face every day.

It’s time we as a nation stop, take a moment – and offer our hearty congratulations to this years most pernicious saboteurs.

And what a year it was for disrupting education!

Charter schools, voucher schools – no one has benefited more from chucking the public school model in the trash in favor of control by corporations and bureaucrats than Betsy DeVos.

Because she’s both a dark money influence peddler AND a government flunky!

A two-for!

She turned complete ignorance and animosity toward public schools into the highest federal government job overseeing education! Her only qualification? CA-CHING!

But coming up right behind Ms. DeVos is this year’s crowned king.

He certainly knows a thing or two about CA-CHING!

It’s Bill Gates!

Progressive philanthropist by day, by night he transforms into the largest single purveyor of palm grease in the nation. No one has turned tax avoidance into influence more than Gates, the money behind the Common Core, evaluating teachers on student test scores and a plethora of irrational, untested ideas that are only considered mainstream because they have literally trillions of dollars behind them.

So there you have it, America! Your Mr. and Mrs. Public School Sabotage!

Let’s take a closer look at these… winners.

DEVOS

As U.S. Secretary of Education, she’s proposed cutting $10 billion in public school funding, announced changes to make it harder for college students to report sexual assaults, and put struggling university students at risk of higher debt payments with changes to student loans.

But that’s child’s play for the billionaire heiress who married into even more money.

Now she’s planning to weaken the rights of students with disabilities.

That’s right – Jason Vorhees, Michael Myers, Freddy Kruger, they all went after those pesky post-graduate teenagers. But none of them had the audacity to go after kids with learning disabilities!

It’s not that DeVos is undoing any laws. She’s erasing decades of government guidance about how the laws are to be interpreted. And though she claims these 72 directives are simply “outdated unnecessary or ineffective,” she’s not replacing them with anything else. They’re just – gone.

Of the 72 guidelines, 63 affect special education and 9 affect student rehabilitation. And these aren’t simply undoing the work of the Obama administration. Some of these regulations have been in place since the 1980s.

The rescinded policies include “Satellite Centers for Independent Living,” “Nondiscrimination on the Basis of Handicap in Programs and Activities Receiving or Benefiting From Federal Financial Assistance,” and “Information on the Provision of Vocational Rehabilitation Services to Individuals With Hearing Loss (Deaf and Hard of Hearing).”

Bah! Who needs all this paperwork?

Parents and students. That’s who.

These guidelines have helped parents of disabled and special education children advocate for their young ones’ rights. Without them, it may be more difficult for parents and teachers to ensure all children are receiving a free and appropriate education.

That’s some seriously stone cold sabotage, Ms. DeVos!

But at least her motivation is obvious to anyone with eyes.

She’s not purposefully making the lives of K-12, special education and college kids more difficult. Well, she is, but she’s not doing it out of spite. She’s doing it because it helps her investment portfolio.

How can she continue to promote charter and voucher schools that don’t provide the same kinds of quality services for special education and disable students as public schools do? She needs to degrade what the public schools provide, thereby making the privatized alternatives more marketable.

How can she keep making money off predatory lenders unless she loosens the rules to allow them more freedom to gorge on student debt? And how can she keep her lucrative job bending the rules in her favor unless she throws some red meat to the racists, misogynists and anti-Semites who helped elect her boss into the Oval Office?

And if kids get hurt, well those aren’t the people she’s looking out for, are they?

She’s only out for the other rich elites like herself making a mint off of our public tax dollars!

It’s almost enough to make you miss Arne Duncan.

Almost…

(Nah. Not really.)

GATES

Bill Gates, on the other hand, is more contrite.

His Common Core initiative has kind of exploded in his face.

No one likes it. NO ONE.

In fact, it was one of the key talking points President Trump used to garner support. The public’s hatred of Democratic plutocracy made them suckers for the Republican variety.

The problem isn’t so much political. It’s economic.

It’s rich people who think they can do whatever they want with the rest of us and our children.

More than anyone else, Gates is guilty of that kind of unexamined, unrepentant hubris.

Yet to hear him talk, after a string of education policy disasters, he’s learned his lesson.

He’s sorry – like a crack addict is after hitting rock bottom. But he’ll somehow find the courage to light up again.

Gates now admits that the approximate $2 billion he spent pushing us to break up large high schools into smaller schools was a bust.

Then he spent $100 million on inBloom, a corporation he financed that would quietly steal student data and sell it to the corporate world. However, that blew up when parents found out and demanded their children be protected.

Oops. His bad?

He also quietly admits that the $80 million he spent pushing for teachers to be evaluated on student test scores was a mistake. However, state, federal and local governments often still insist on enacting it despite all the evidence against it. Teachers have literally committed suicide over these unfair evaluations, but whatever. Bill learned a lesson.

When it comes to Common Core, though, Bill refuses to take his medicine – even to mouth the words.

By any metric, these poor quality uniform academic standards are an abject failure. He spent hundreds of millions of dollars for development and promotion. He influenced trillions of taxpayer dollars to be poured down the drain on it. All to no avail.

Instead, he’s quietly backing away. No explanation. No apology. Just on to something new.

Kind of like: “That didn’t work. Let’s try something else!”

His new plan – spend $1.7 billion over five years to develop new curriculums and networks of schools, use data to drive continuous improvement, and give out grants to high needs schools to do whatever he says.

What’s so frustrating is that Gates shows glimmers of self-awareness.

“It would be great if our education stuff worked, but that we won’t know for probably a decade,” he said during a speech at Harvard in 2014.

But then when he sees it isn’t working, he just doubles down on the same crap.

While he may not be committed to any one policy, Gates is committed to the idea that he knows best. Whatever nonsense bull crap that floats through his mind deserves to be tried out on a national scale.

No asking experts. No asking teachers, parents or students. Just listen to me, Bill Gates, because I’m rich and that makes me better than you.

No, it doesn’t Bill. It makes you just like Betsy DeVos.

So there they are. Mr. and Mrs. Public School Sabotage.

Short may their reign be.

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they made.”

-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Will the REAL Grassroots Activists Please Stand Up – Teachers or School Privatization Lobbyists?

October 12, 2017 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Campaign Donations, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, Election, Election Reform, Labor, Local Control, Network for Public Education, Politics, privatization, Propaganda, Republican, School Choice, School Funding, school vouchers, Schools, Social Justice, Teachers, union busting, Unions, United Opt Out American Federation of Teachers, Bill and Melinda Gates, Center for Education Reform, Charles and David Koch, charter schools, Eli Broad, grassroots, Jeanne Allen, Koch Brothers, Koch Industries, labor, National Education Association, plutocracy, Privatize, public schools, School Choice, school funding, school vouchers, teachers, unions, Walton Family

Everyone claims to be grassroots.

We’re the ordinary people – they say – the Hoi Polloi, the everyday Joes and Janes who make the world go round.

Which is to say we’re NOT the wealthy elite who get what they want simply by buying lawmakers and the political process.

You’d think the plutocrats wouldn’t even bother hiding. After all, it should be pretty obvious who is who.

One group has barrels full of cash. The other has numbers. However, our laws are written to obscure exactly how much money any one side has. And if you have money, you can use it to buy bodies to line up on your side and “prove” you have numbers.

So when it comes to the American education system, which side truly represents the grassroots – those supporting privatized schools like charter and voucher institutions or those supporting public schools?

It’s kind of a ridiculous question to ask, when you come to think of it.

One side actively lobbies for big business and huge corporations to take over local schools and districts. The other supports neighborhood schools.

One side pushes for schools to be striped of local control and instead to be managed by private equity firms and corporate officers. The other supports democratically elected school boards.

One side demands taxpayer dollars be available as profit that they can pocket and spend on mansions, yachts and jewelry. The other fights for transparency and for all taxpayer funds to be used in the service of educating children.

Which side do you THINK represents the little guy and which represents Goliath? Which side do you THINK represents the Rebel Alliance and which the Galactic Empire?

Come on now!

It’s the public school advocates who represent the common people. They are literally an extension of the masses struggle to reassert control over their lives and our society. Not those looking to raid our public services for fun and profit!

People get kind of upset when you try to do that. So when the villagers show up with torches and pitchforks, it does little good to argue that money equals speech. Better for the aristocrats to disguise themselves in peasant garb.

Enter Jeanne Allen.

She wants to convince you she’s the real underdog grassroots champion.

As Chief Executive Officer and Founder of the Center for Education Reform, she’s spent most of her career lobbying for public schools to be gobbled up by private enterprise.

So when the folks behind a new documentary about school privatization, “Backpack Full of Cash,” had the gall to cast her and her organization as the bad guy, she did what any grassroots activist would – she called the Hollywood Reporter.

Why would anyone be against charter and voucher schools, she whined. They just suck away necessary funds from the already underfunded neighborhood school so that businesspeople can play with your tax money. They just cut services for children and parents while miraculously transforming the savings into yummy profit.

I can’t imagine why anyone is calling her out. Can you?

But perhaps the most pernicious aspect of her argument is monetary.

Allen, the Center for Education Reform and the entire corporate education reform movement are the real grassroots, she says, because they are outspent by the opposition.

By which she means teachers unions. As if the overwhelming majority of parents, students, social scientists, civil rights activists and concerned citizens somehow didn’t count.

But oh well.

“The people praised in the film” (i.e. public school teachers) “get paid from taxpayer dollars,” Allen told the Hollywood Reporter, as if the people the film criticizes (charter and voucher operators) don’t also get paid from the same pot.

“The teachers unions spend $300 million a year on political races. We don’t have that kind of money.”

Is that true?

Are those pushing for corporate control of our schools really unable to match the monetary might of the big bad teachers unions?

Well, first let’s examine the number Allen bandies about as if it were fact.

$300 million. Do teachers unions actually spend that much annually on political races?

It’s doubtful. The entire operating budget for the National Education Association (NEA), the largest teachers union in the country, is only $367 million. And the union does an awful lot besides lobby lawmakers for pro-education public policy. It raises funds for scholarships, conducts professional development workshops, bargains contracts for school employees, files legal action on behalf of teachers to protect their rights, and partners with other education organizations to promote sound educational practices. Political lobbying is an important part of what unions do, but if they spent what they’re accused of spending on it – even if you include other unions like the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) – they couldn’t do the rest of what they do.

It turns out the figure Allen uses is a stale conservative talking point that Poltifact, a non-partisan fact checking Website, rated as false.

It’s based on a funding target the unions had for the 2008 election of which the unions fell short by almost a third. But now right-wingers and anti-labor trolls everywhere are married to that number and quote it as if it were fact.

In the real world, where Fox News talking points aren’t accepted without question, it’s increasingly difficult to determine exactly how much organizations spend on politics. But it’s incredibly doubtful teachers unions have the monetary might attributed to them by corporate school reformers.

And speaking of those who fight on behalf of poor beleaguered corporate America, how much do THEY have to spend fighting public schools?

Well, let’s just take two of their most famous backers – Charles and David Koch.

This duo runs one of the largest privately held companies in the United States: Koch Industries. It is involved in petroleum, chemicals, natural gas, plastics, paper and ranching. In 2013, Forbes said it had an annual revenue of $115 billion.

That’s an incredible amount of resources they can draw on every year when compared to teachers unions. The NEA would have to bring in more than three times its annual revenue to even come close to matching 1% of the Koch’s annual pay.

And do the Kochs spend on politics? You BET they do!

In 2012, alone, they spent at least $407 million on Mitt Romeny’s Presidential campaign! Yes, just that one campaign! They spent more on others! But even if we limit it there, that’s more than even the most absurd estimates of teacher’s unions political spending.

And they’re only two people!

We’re comparing about 3 million members of the NEA, and 1.5 million members of the AFT with two individual human beings.

Even if teachers unions spent $300 million, that only comes to less than $67 per member.

A quick look at Allen’s backers at the Center for Education Reform includes some of the richest people on Earth including: Bill and Melinda Gates, the Walton Family and Eli Broad.

And this woman has the nerve to cry poor in comparison to the big bad teachers!

Herself, she draws a six-figure salary as the organization’s President Emeritus – well more than the overwhelming majority of teachers.

But you’ll still find corporate reformers who contest this analysis with creative accounting. They’ll give you a spreadsheet with hundreds of millions of union dollars laid bare compared with a handful of poor billionaires who just can’t scrape together enough change in the couch cushions. And to do so, they’ll hide the super richs’ donations to super PACs or exclude dark money contributions, etc.

Look, I’m not saying our campaign finance system is perfect. In fact, it’s pretty messed up.

I am the first person to advocate for getting money out of politics. No more defining money as speech. One person, one vote.

But you must realize, the super wealthy don’t want that. More than anything else it would exponentially increase the power of the unions and the middle class from which they come. Not to mention their allies – the parents, students, child advocates, etc.

You really don’t need a detailed analysis of each group’s relative financial worth. You just have to look at who is in each group.

We’re talking the richest 1% of people on the planet backing charter and voucher schools versus teachers, parents, students, college professors, civil rights activists and concerned citizens backing public schools.

Which group do you think truly represents the grassroots?

Which group is an authentic demonstration of the will of the people?

And which is emblematic of the arrogant, hypocritical wealth class demanding we all bow down to the power of their pocketbooks?

You decide.

Donald Trump is a Pathetic Excuse For a Human Being

October 1, 2017October 1, 2017 stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, Donald Trump, Feminism, Politics, President, protest, Racism, Republican, satire, Social Justice, Uncategorized, voting, White Privilege Donald Trump, pathetic, Politics, racism, satire, sexism

I’m not going to pull any punches here.

Donald Trump is not just a bad President.

He’s a bad person.

No. That doesn’t go far enough.

He’s one of the worst people ever to hold public office in this country.

He’s a pathetic excuse for a person. A narcissistic and incurious fool.

Donald Trump is what happens when you spoil a child and he never has to prove his own worth.

He is the fruit of our worship of wealth and the ruling class. He is the lie of trickledown economics. He is what happens when you give someone all the rewards our society has to offer – just for showing up.

But he’s not a racist.

Not really. Not in the strictest sense. That would require some kind of commitment.

Nor is he a sexist. That would require ideology.

Trump doesn’t hate anyone. He doesn’t divide people up into categories. He just loves himself so much that his regard for anyone else seems lacking.

In Trumpland, there are only two personas – himself and everyone else.

And make no mistake – he sees the world as containing only one important personality – Donald J. Trump. Everyone else is subordinate. Even his own family is important only in so much as they reflect him and meet his expectations. (Tiffany Trump, anyone?)

Trump is the sole practitioner of a solitary religion where one individual can serve as both penitent and deity. He writes his own hymns and sings them to himself every morning during golden thrown Twitter church services.

And anyone who dares to deny the fact of his own exceptionality is not good. They’re Bad. Sad.

They get low ratings. Such low ratings. Fake news. Or whatever other nearly monosyllabic criticism his atrophied brain can defecate out of his sloppy mouth.

Other people’s suffering just doesn’t matter. Puerto Rico, NFL players, people of color unjustly targeted by police, the middle class – none of us matter to him.

Not black people.

Not Hispanics.

Not women.

No one. Literally no lives matter to Trump.

This is a fact borne out by his actions over decades in public life.

It’s no accident that Bret Easton Ellis made Trump the role model of Patrick Bateman, his fictional unhinged everyman businessman protagonist in “American Psycho.”

Trump may not be psychopathic, but he is clearly a solipsist, a sociopath. The outside world is not real to him, and we are not ends in ourselves. We are illusions who only merit if we increase his own self-worth.

Even from a conservative heteronormative viewpoint, men do not represent the possibility of friendship or camaraderie to Trump. They are pawns to be used or adversaries to be avoided.

Women do not represent the possibility of intimacy or understanding. They are pure shape, status and physicality – objects to be ordered, groped, controlled and tabulated.

Likewise, his constituents are important only to the degree that they support him. He has no reciprocal responsibilities toward them. He may have promised to “Make America Great Again,” but to this stunted individual, America, itself, is best represented by one thing – Trump.

He is the poster boy for all that is wrong with our society.

He is petty, unintelligent, and mean. Everything he has was handed to him. In fact, he’d have more if he just held onto it, but he had to try to prove he deserved this stuff so he lost more than what he was given.

And he doesn’t even know how to enjoy what he has.

His wife is a product he bought and modified to his liking. His children are indentured servants made to reflect his brand. He doesn’t even understand how to extract the best flavors from the expensive foods he eats.

He spends most of his time obsessively playing a game that requires wealth as a prerequisite, that isn’t particularly athletic but bestows a certain image on its practitioners. And somehow he must think hitting a little ball with a hooked stick proves – what? Something about him? Maybe it proves his physical prowess, his identity as a man of wealth and privilege?

He is the illusion Gatsby tried to portray to win Daisy – but the only love Trump covets is his own.

He both demonstrates the lie at the heart of the American Dream – that it is possible anymore for any of us to achieve – and that the dream has any inherent value.

Wealth does not make one happy. Look at Trump. He is a miserable son of a bitch. And he would be the first to tell you so if he had even a smidgen of self-reflection.

You can see it on his face in those candid moments when he isn’t talking and talking and talking.

This is a man begging to be told he is doing a good job, but the only opinion he trusts is his own, and that one not even so much.

He is a lost soul telling himself lies he only half believes. He’s an apparition, a ghost, a zombie that never was really alive in the first place.

And we, the people of the United States of America, are gathered here around him in an ever closing circle watching this tin pot dictator getting ever smaller by the hour.

One fine day he will simply disappear. And we’ll all be left staring at the space he left behind.

Perhaps this vanishing act will be accompanied by a “pop,” a “hiss” or just a silence deeper than background static.

And the only question that will remain will be if we’ll all be sucked into the maelstrom of his leaving.

Or if we’ll all shake our heads and wonder…

What the Hell had we just been looking at?

Betsy DeVos Wants Fewer Rights for Rape Survivors & More for Alleged Attackers

September 13, 2017 stevenmsinger Betsy DeVos, Child Predators, Child Safety, Civil Rights, Compassion, Credibility, Donald Trump, Education, Feminism, Obama, Politics, Prejudice, President, Republican, Schools, Teachers Betsy DeVos, Candice Jackson, Civil Rights, Department of Education, Donald Trump, education, public schools, Rape, Republican, Sexual Assault, teachers

As a public school teacher, you see a lot of ugly things.

You see children with bruises under their sleeves. Kids who cringe when your voice gets too loud. Young people traumatized by sexual violence.

Even in middle school.

So when Betsy DeVos decided to take up for alleged rapists while making it harder for survivors of sexual assault to come forward, I took it kind of personally.

Last week, the Secretary of Education for the United States of America blithely announced her plan to no longer require colleges and universities that receive federal funds from prosecuting on-campus sexual assault with the same severity.

Yes. Seriously.

“The prior administration weaponized the Office for Civil Rights to work against schools and against students,” she said at George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia.

“The notion that a school must diminish due process rights to better serve ‘victims’ only creates more victims… If everything is harassment, then nothing is.”

In other words, the billionaire heiress in charge of protecting students’ civil rights thinks there is a power imbalance between rapist and victim. And she’s right. Except that she thinks the alleged rapist is on the losing end of that imbalance.

This may be the most preposterous thing she has ever said. And she’s infamous for saying preposterous things.

In matters of sexual assault, all the power lies with the accuser!?

Has Ms.DeVos ever met a survivor of sexual assault?

I have. I’m sorry to say that I’ve met some while working in our public schools.

To put it bluntly – they were my students.

Little children afraid to go home. Kids with backpacks and cartoon animals on their shirts. Barely teens who kept to themselves, arms locked across their chests. Youngsters who just wanted to stay in class as long as I was staying, who would draw and hum and soak up the least bit of human kindness.

Some of them eventually would confide in me, their teacher. Not that I asked. I would have preferred letting the guidance counselor handle it. I really wasn’t trained for it. But there’s only one thing to do when someone wants to tell you their story – you listen.

And that’s exactly what DeVos is telling us NOT to do.

Don’t listen to accusations of sexual assault unless there is a preponderance of evidence. Start from a position of skepticism and unbelief even so far as making accusers confront their attackers.

After all, it’s the only way to protect from false allegations. As if that were at all common.

Only someone devoid of empathy or intelligence could say such a thing with a straight face – much less present it as a statement of public policy.

Yet DeVos isn’t the only high ranking member of the Education Department voicing it.

Two months ago, Candace Jackson, the official responsible for enforcing campus sexual assault laws for DeVos’ department, told reporters that “90 percent” of sexual assault accusations “fall into the category of ‘we were both drunk,’ ‘we broke up, and six months later I found myself under a Title IX investigation because she just decided that our last sleeping together was not quite right.’”

Jackson, who heads the Department’s Office of Civil Rights, apologized for the statement after public backlash.

But now it’s federal policy!

Like much else from the Trump administration, it flies in the face of the facts.

False accusations do happen, but they are much less frequent than sexual violence. Only between two and ten percent of rape allegations are untrue, according to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center.

Moreover, the same report found that 63 percent of sexual assaults are never even reported to police. Survivors of this heinous crime rarely come forward because of shame, fear and embarrassment.

That’s something I saw first-hand from my students.

They weren’t bragging about an experience they’d lived through. They wanted more than anything to forget it, to ignore what had happened, to get on with their lives. But they just couldn’t. They felt so betrayed, so vulnerable, so guilty, so frightened.

DeVos’ new policy will do nothing to change that. If anything, it will only embolden would-be attackers to attempt more assault – a crime that already affects nearly a quarter of college women.

According to a National Institute of Justice report, 20 percent of young women will become the victim of a “completed or attempted sexual assault” while in college. And more than 6 percent of men will also be assaulted.

We shouldn’t be making it harder for people who have been brutalized to seek justice. The accused should have due process, but that’s what an investigation is. In the rare instance of false allegations, those unduly impugned should be exonerated.

Despite what she says, DeVos’ recent actions have nothing to do with that. Before passing down her decision, she met with “Men’s Rights” groups like the National Coalition for Men – organizations that I can honestly say, as a red blooded American male, certainly don’t speak for me.

This is politics, not any concern for justice. It’s no accident that DeVos serves at the pleasure of a President who was caught on a hot microphone bragging about engaging in sexual assault. It’s no accident that his base includes white supremacists. It’s no accident that his party continually stomps on women’s rights.

If we really wanted to help survivors of sexual assault, we’d take steps to make sure the crime they lived through never happens again. At very least, we could take steps to make it more rare.

Imagine if instead of abstinence only sexual education classes, our children were taught actual facts about human sexuality. Imagine if every child learned the meaning and necessity of consent. No means no. Period.

That could have a real impact on these crimes. Over time, we could create a culture of respect and understanding. That certainly seems a worthier goal for a Secretary of Education than removing support for victims of sexual assault.

As to the handful of students who turned to me for help, I really can’t tell you what happened to them afterwards. In most cases, I don’t know myself.

In each instance, I turned to the authorities to ensure my students received the help they needed.

I hope they got it.

Unlike Ms. DeVos, I put them first.

XQ Live – Desperate School Choice Rebrand After Trump Touched It

September 9, 2017September 12, 2017 stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Bill Gates, capitalism, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Education "Reform", Credibility, Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, Local Control, Media, Parents, Politics, privatization, Propaganda, protest, Racism, Republican, School Choice, School Funding, school vouchers, Schools, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Teachers, Uncategorized Betsy DeVos, celebrities, Common, Corporate Education Reform, corporate school reform, Donald Trump, Jennifer Hudson, Laurene Powell Jobs, philanthrocapitalist, propaganda, rebranding, Samuel L. Jackson, Tom Hanks, Viola Davis, XQ, XQ Live, XQ Superschools Live, Yo-Yo Ma

What do you do when your corporate brand has become repugnant to consumers?

You REBRAND, of course! And that’s exactly what uber-rich widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, paid a boatload of celebrities to do last night all over your TV.

The program was called XQ Superschools Live, and it took over four major networks.

It’s ironic really. Using an almost 100 year old medium to push “schools of the future.” They tweeted and Facebooked all over it, but the focus was on the old boob tube.

Why? Because the audience they wanted wasn’t so much the young. They wanted the old – those deep pocketed investors who might be startled by all the flash and bombast and ask their grandkids if this was “cool.”

It was the most pathetic display of desperation I have ever seen in my life.

If there is any justice, Tom Hanks, Yo-Yo Ma, Samuel L. Jackson, Jennifer Hudson and Common will have to spend the rest of their lives to regain even a fraction of street cred.

They were nothing but a series of singing and dancing sell outs. This was a modern day minstrel show. A bunch of highly paid shills pretending to represent the common folk.

I’m talking raised fists at the end of dance numbers meant to evoke all the power of authentic activists like Black Lives Matter without really having any grassroots support or message.

To be honest, my overwhelming response was pity.

Did anyone really think this was going to connect with an audience?

And speaking of that audience, if you had no idea who XQ or corporate education reform was, you probably watched the screen in bemused confusion. What the heck was this crap? It was platitudes about improving high schools broken up by song and dance numbers. It made the MTV Video Music Awards seem like a college dissertation.

Yet, to the initiated, you could see the subtle nods to privatization and charter schools, the shade thrown on traditional public schools.

Rethink high school?

Sure! Let’s do that! Let’s rethink inequitably funding it. Let’s rethink high stakes standardized testing. Let’s rethink Common Core, stealing local control, teacher autonomy and a host of the kinds of top down bull crap XQ tried obscure while selling an issue of Tiger Beat.

So now that it’s over, what have we learned?

1) Corporate education reformers are THAT desperate to distance themselves from Donald Trump.

His wholehearted endorsement of their agenda has done them serious life threatening damage. He has exposed their racist, privileged, corporatist policies for exactly what they are. No amount of celebrities will replace that in the public consciousness.

2) Rich people cannot set education policy.

Steve Jobs widow may be a very nice lady. But she has no freaking clue about public education. Nor is she honest enough to engage actual classroom teachers in the discussion to find out.

Instead of relying on the billionaires of the world, we should tax them. Then we can afford to fully fund our schools and let the people actually in the classroom decide what’s best for the students in their care. Let parents decide. Let school boards decide. Not a privileged tech philanthrocapitalist.

3) Celebrities will do anything for money.

The things these Hollywood elite prostitutes did last night to sell snake oil would make porn stars blush. I will never look at any of these people the same. Some of them I knew were true believers because of other projects. Heck! As much as I love Common’s new album, he does rap about Corey Booker – so warning there. Viola Davis is an amazing actress but she was in the parent trigger propaganda film “Won’t Back Down.”

Being famous doesn’t mean you know a damn thing. We recognize their faces. We associate them with past roles and characters we loved. We think their political stands are authentic when they are often just a pose. We’ve got to stop respecting these people just because they’re celebrities.

What will the long-term effect of last night’s propaganda be?

I don’t know.

I seriously doubt anyone really bought that. But you know what they say – no one ever went broke betting on the stupidity of the public.

And that’s what this was – a high stakes wager on American gullibility.

After Hurricane Harvey, Will Houston Public Schools be Charterized?

August 29, 2017August 30, 2017 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Compassion, Corporate Education "Reform", Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, Local Control, New Orleans, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, privatization, Republican, School Choice, school closings, School Funding, school segregation, school vouchers, Schools, Standardized Testing, Teachers charter schools, education, Houston, Houston Federation of Teachers, Hurricane Harvey, New Orleans, school vouchers, schools, shock doctrine, Texas

It’s an all too familiar scene in America.

A natural disaster devastates a major metropolitan city.

And then the forces of profit and privatization use the chaos and uncertainty as cover to steal public services and turn them into mechanisms to increase their own bottom line.

That’s what happened to New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. And, if Houston residents aren’t careful, it’s what could happen there in the wake of Hurricane Harvey, which struck this weekend.

Right now the immediate danger is the weather.

The storm has already affected about a quarter of the Texas population, or 6.8 million people in 18 counties. It’s been blamed for at least 8 deaths so far.

Thousands of people have evacuated to rooftops as rushing waters flooded streets and neighborhoods. Many roadways are only navigable by boat, and emergency services are so overtaxed that civilian volunteers have stepped up to help rescue stranded residents. By the time the weather system passes through, Houston could get as much as 50 inches of rain – the highest amount ever recorded in Texas.

U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos was so overwhelmed by the news that she took to Twitter, saying, “Our prayers are with all those in the path of #HurricaneHarvey. @usedgov stands ready to assist impacted schools.”

To which noted liberal commentator Keith Olbermann responded, “The hurricane is going to do less damage to schools than you are, Motherfucker.”

And, if history is any guide, he may not be wrong.

In the aftermath of Katrina, New Orleans lost almost its entire public school system. About 90 percent of the city’s 126 schools were given to the Louisiana Recovery School District, which turned them all into charter schools.

For those uninitiated into the mysteries of corporate education reform, charter schools differ from traditional public schools because they are financed by tax dollars but privately operated. They often are controlled by appointed boards with little to no transparency, and are rife with opportunities for investors to profit through fraud and neglect – opportunities that just aren’t present at traditional districts.

So, in effect, Louisiana state officials elected by the white majority stole control from local school boards elected by the city’s black majority. More than 7,000 teachers most of whom were people of color and had been displaced by the hurricane found themselves replaced by mostly white teachers brought in from other parts of the country.

Now, more than 10 years later, the New Orleans experiment has been shown to be a failure. Scores on standardized tests have improved (kinda), but the curriculum has narrowed, teacher turnover has doubled, disadvantaged and special education students have even fewer resources while schools fight over high achieving children, students spend hours being bused to schools far from their homes, communities have been erased, and parents have less control over how their own tax dollars are spent.

This could be the future for the Houston Independent School District (HISD).

After all, Houston is where the infamous Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) charter school network got its start.

KIPP is known for two things: draconian discipline and high attrition rates. Even those kids who do well there often don’t go on to graduate from college. Two thirds of KIPP students who passed the 8th grade still haven’t achieved a bachelor’s degree 10 years later.

Moreover, its methods aren’t reproducible elsewhere. The one time KIPP tried to take over an existing public school district and apply its approach without skimming the best and brightest off the top, it failed miserably – so much so that KIPP isn’t in the school turnaround business anymore.

Yet, the charter network, one of the largest such chains with 209 schools nationwide, has one of the best propaganda departments in the industry. They pass off inhumanity to children as “rigor” and gloss over inability to teach difficult students as “high standards.”

Will Texas lawmakers be swayed by powerful charter operators to use the current catastrophe as a business opportunity to gobble up the existing school system?

Perhaps. But there are some significant differences between Houston and New Orleans.

For instance, the students served by the New Orleans system a dozen years ago were almost all living below the poverty line. By contrast, Houston has high and low poverty areas. In fact, many neighborhoods cater to upper middle class children.

It’s doubtful that parents from more affluent neighborhoods would put up with losing local control and all that goes with it. Their political and economic power would probably stop any wholesale charterization of the district. That’s why KIPP schools – and in fact most charter schools – are nearly nonexistent in wealthy neighborhoods.

However, there are plenty of community schools serving high poverty populations suffering from systemic disinvestment and neglect that could be in danger of just such “reforms.” In fact, many of those are exactly the ones that have been worst hit by flooding and weather damage. At least 10 consistently struggling schools could find themselves targeted for the New Orleans treatment. The state and federal government could withhold relief funding on the condition these schools give up their elected school boards and embrace the kind of Wild West, laissez-faire, free market deregulation that charter schools bring.

The Republican controlled state legislature already has a law on the books to swipe local control from struggling districts and turn them into charters. It’s a blatant threat to takeover entire districts like HISD if certain schools within the district don’t improve standardized test scores and other measures favored by corporate education reformers.

Hurricane damage could become a pretext to empowering state lawmakers to expedite this process. Perhaps they might even ask local school boards to give up control of their struggling schools in exchange for leaving alone the more affluent white schools.

I had the pleasure of visiting Houston a year ago for the United Opt Out Education and Civil Rights Summit. There I met with parents, students, concerned community members and representatives of the local teachers union – the Houston Federation of Teachers.

They helped me understand that Texas has a unique perspective on school choice.

For instance, they aren’t generally too fond of school vouchers.

This session a Tea Party favored voucher initiative was squashed by more moderate Republicans. In fact, in Texas even religious leaders don’t like vouchers. This is surprising because the program usually allows tax dollars to be used at private or parochial schools. An organization, Pastors for Texas Children, has been particularly vocal about supporting public education over BOTH vouchers and charters.

However, this is the land of former Gov. George W. Bush, one of the biggest charter cheerleaders in the country. His party broadly supports charter schools, yet the Texas legislature has struggled to increase them.

Last year, Gov. Greg Abbott and Lieutenant Gov. Dan Patrick made a big push to increase charter schools across the state. In an unusual move, state House Speaker Joe Straus refused to bring the bill to the floor for a vote. Straus held the issue hostage because he couldn’t get support for a new school funding formula.

It should be noted that all of these players are Republicans. Democrats are a minority with the ability to impact policy almost not at all.

DeVos and the Trump administration are unquestionably supportive of voucher and charter school expansion.

It’s still too early to tell if the state and/or federal government will take a page from the Shock Doctrine playbook and use Harvey as a distraction to embolden their agenda.

One can only hope that voters have learned the lessons from Katrina and Louisiana.

Otherwise, over time a manmade disaster could once again eclipse the damage done by a natural one.

Special Thanks to Zakary Rodriguez for help navigating the Texas education scene.

Dear White Supremacists: There Will Be No Race War

August 13, 2017 stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, Accountability, Civil Rights, Compassion, Credibility, Donald Trump, Eugenics, Guns, Hate Crimes, immigration, nonviolence, Police, Politics, Prejudice, protest, Racism, Republican, segregation, Social Justice, White Fragility, White Privilege, Whiteness Alt Right, anti-racism, anti-semitism, Charlottesville Virginia, Civil Rights, dehumanization, human rights, KKK, Nazi, Politics, prejudice, protest, Race, race war, racism, Virginia, white supremacist

This one goes out to all the white boys.

No.

Not ALL the white boys.

Just the ones who think being “white” and being a “boy” means the world owes them something.

Cause I’m white, too, and I know it doesn’t make me any better than anyone else.

But not you.

You think your lack of pigmentation is a special sign of your supremacy. As if being pale was synonymous for God’s chosen.

Well let me tell you something, white boy. God didn’t choose you. You did.

What you take for superiority is just a misguided attempt at self-esteem.

I’m a snowflake? YOU’RE the snowflake. Same color. Same consistency. In the first warm breeze, you’ll melt.

I’m talking to YOU, white boy. All of you.

All those melanin-starved faces wearing matching eggshell t-shirts and fat-ass khakis.

All those brave, young men holding Tiki torches and an inflated sense of self worth.

All the protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, so fearless they can spray mace on those they disagree with, so bold they can throw punches so long as they know the police won’t hold them accountable, so courageous they can drive a car into unarmed counter-protestors, so brave that they can’t even call themselves what they are: Nazis, the Klan, white supremacists.

You hide behind “Alt Right” as if the rest of us can’t figure out who you really are.

Surprise! We see you!

We see your twisted lips, scrunched eyes and flaring nostrils. Your hood-starved heads and sweat-gelled haircuts. Your hate warped faces spouting reheated leftovers from WWII.

My grandparents fought people like you.

They dressed in army green and hopped the ocean to pound people like you into the ground.

They took your goose-stepping forebears and blasted them into bits. They buried your intellectual precursors under the ashes of their eternal Reich.

And for my grandfathers’ sacrifice, I rarely had to deal with people like you, myself. Not outright.

It’s not that people like you didn’t exist. Your attitudes and beliefs still percolated just beneath the surface of so many frustrated white boys.

The difference was that they were too smart to actually give voice to the darkness in their hearts.

It didn’t stop them from acting on it. They just wouldn’t admit why.

Segregation, red lining, broken windows policing, and a plethora of others. It was all polite, all deniable, all just the colorblind way we do things around here.

But that doesn’t really work anymore, does it?

Times are changing.

The face of America is changing. And it’s increasingly brown.

It’s got curly hair and unexpected features. It’s fed by different foods and nourished by different beliefs and customs. And it’s often called by a name that doesn’t derive from Europe.

People are starting to speak up. They’re starting to call you out.

And you don’t like it.

More than that you’re scared. Terrified.

It’s all going to end. The lie you told yourself about being special.

So you huddle together with others just like you, shivering and crying and blowing snot onto each others shoulders pretending that it’s a rally for white pride. It’s really just the world’s biggest pity party for boys too scared to be men and own up.

You’re brave when you’re in numbers, aren’t you? With numbers or with a gun.

Then you can say whatever you want. You can pretend whatever racial fantasy will protect your fragile little egos.

You’ll whine and boast and imagine you’re winning some kind of war for survival. But we know what you’re really doing.

You’re on your knees. You’re begging for a confrontation.

You’ll do anything to provoke it.

It’s your only hope.

Push them. Prod them. Insult them until they fight.

Bring them down to your level.

Prove your moral superiority by stoking a race war.

Because you can battle human bodies, but you can’t stop ideas.

You can’t triumph over equality, empathy and love.

You can’t stop the tick of time. You can just hope to reset the clock.

Well, I’ve got bad news for you.

There will be no race war.

Not now. Not ever.

Oh, there may be fighting.

You’ll try to make it happen. But it won’t be white vs. black.

It won’t be race vs. race.

It will be your minority of cowards and fools vs. the majority of the rest of us.

Do you really think people like me will fight on your side?

Do you think I’ll stand by you just because the shade of my epidermis matches yours?

Hell No!

I’ll fight with my black brothers and sisters if it comes to it.

I’ll fight on the side of equality, fairness and love.

I’ll do like my grandfathers and smash you into the ground. We all will.

But I’d rather not fight at all.

There need be no violence.

And there won’t be.

Unless you force it.

You see, you can’t make a race war happen.

All you can do is unite the rest of us against you.

Why Won’t Republicans Repeal Common Core?

August 12, 2017 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, capitalism, Charter Schools, Child Predators, church and state, Civil Rights, Common Core, Corporate Education "Reform", Data, Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, Healthcare, Local Control, PA Core, Pennsylvania, Politics, privatization, Racism, Republican, School Choice, School Funding, school vouchers, Schools, Standardized Testing, standards, Teachers Betsy DeVos, charter schools, common core, Donald Trump, high stakes testing, Jeb Bush, Politics, public schools, School Choice, school vouchers, standardized testing, teachers, teaching

It was a constant refrain from Donald Trump on the stump.

He was going to repeal Common Core. How did we know? He kept repeating it over-and-over.

“We’re cutting Common Core. We’re getting rid of Common Core,” he said during a debate in Detroit.

“Common Core is a total disaster. We can’t let it continue,” he said in a campaign ad.

But then, he did a complete 180:

“We are going to do some things special. Okay. Are you ready? Common Core we’re going to keep.”

What!?

It didn’t go down so well with his supporters. He was literally booed. So he took to Twitter with the following:

“I was referring to the fact that Jeb Bush wants to keep common core.”

Uh, okay?

So what’s his position now? Someone asked him about it in New Hampshire. His response:

“I didn’t know Common Core was so complicated. Isn’t this ridiculous?”

On that we can agree.

But it really doesn’t matter.

POWER TO THE STATES

Whether Trump supports Common Core or not, he’s actually kind of powerless to do anything about it.

Republicans have been arguing for years that the federal government can’t tell the states what they should be teaching. That’s the crux of opposition, and the newly reauthorized federal law governing K-12 schools, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), underlines it.

The power is unequivocally in the hands of governors and state legislatures.

The states control which academic standards their public schools are supposed to subscribe to or not. And since the beginning of 2017, the states are overwhelmingly in Republican control.

There are 98 partisan state legislative chambers in the United States. Republicans dominate 67 of them. In fact, the GOP controls both legislative chambers in 32 states – the most it has in the party’s history! And in 24 of those states, Republicans also run the show in the Governor’s mansion – the trifecta!

In short, despite any limits on Presidential power, the GOP has never been in a better position to get rid of Common Core.

If Republicans truly wanted to repeal it, they could do so tomorrow, and there’s zero Democrats could do about it in almost half of the country.

Yet, Republicans don’t.

They haven’t.

And they don’t seem in any rush to put it on their agenda in the future.

Which brings me to a serious question any critic of Common Core has to answer: WHY!?

Republicans say they hate Common Core.

They have the power to get rid of it.

Why don’t they do it?

THE STATE OF COMMON CORE

Despite any comments to the contrary, any blathering talking head nonsense from media pundits, the facts remain the same.

Common Core is still the law of the land in 36 states and the District of Columbia.

Sure, some legislatures have changed the name and made nominal revisions (Hello, Pennsylvania!) but they’re still essentially the same standards applied in the same way. The Common Core’s own Website doesn’t distinguish between states that have the standards outright and those where they have been slightly revised or renamed.

Specifically, nine states have announced plans to rewrite or replace the standards, but in the majority of these cases, they have resulted merely in slight revisions. Only Missouri, Oklahoma, and Tennessee appear to have created significantly different standards, according to Education Week.

So what’s the hold up?

MAIN OBJECTIONS TO THE CORE

Full disclosure: I am not a Republican. I am the farthest thing you could find to a Republican. But on this one issue we agree.

No, I don’t think Common Core will make your child gay or indoctrinate kids into a far left worldview or any of a number of bizarre, crackpot criticisms you might hear from mentally ill pundits being exploited by far right media conglomerates. Nor am I opposed simply to undo any signature legislative achievements of our first black President.

But I do think there are several rational reasons to be against Common Core. The standards were written almost exclusively by representatives of the standardized testing industry with input from very few practicing classroom teachers and zero child psychologists. They have never been tested and proven effective. In many cases, they are developmentally inappropriate. They were adopted non-democratically. And – perhaps worst of all – they commit schools to the failed educational management technique of test-and-punish.

THAT’S why I’m against Common Core.

But it really doesn’t matter.

Even if people like Glenn Beck and I disagree on the reasons why, we both agree on the course of action – repeal Common Core.

Yet the incumbent batch of GOP lawmakers across the country are letting us both down.

If one has to be beaten by Republicans, at least let them accomplish the things that have bipartisan support. That includes repealing Common Core.

Though the media likes to characterize this as a conservative issue, it’s not just Republicans who want to get rid of the Core. Regardless of politics, most people dislike the standards. They aren’t popular with adults. They aren’t popular with children. And most tellingly, they aren’t popular with classroom teachers.

According to the most recent Education Next poll, less than half of all Americans, 49%, favor the policy. In partisan terms, that’s 37% of Republicans and 57% of Democrats. And that support has been steadily dropping every year – by 20 points for Republicans and seven for Democrats since 2013.

And among teachers, the drop is even more dramatic. Only 40% now favor the Core. That’s a drop of 36 points among those who know the standards best!

POLITICAL PARALLELS

So let’s get rid of them.

For once I’m with Trump.

But the legislatures just won’t do it.

In some ways, this shares parallels with the healthcare debate.

Before going forward, let me just say that I am NOT in favor of repealing Obamacare and going back to the previous system. Nor am I in favor of repealing without a replacement or any of the so-called “skinny” plans put forth by the GOP.

I think we need single payer healthcare. Medicare for all.

But be that as it may. The debate offers us a similar example from the federal level.

Republicans say they hate Obamacare yet despite the fact that Democrats can do nothing to stop them, they refuse to repeal it.

In this case, the reason is obvious – they have nothing with which to replace it.

After all these years, they can’t come up with a plan that will improve upon the one already in place.

But this isn’t the case at the state level when it comes to Common Core.

Each and every state had a set of academic standards before Common Core. In most cases, these standards were actually far superior.

All the legislatures would have to do is reinstate them.

Pennsylvania’s standards were particularly reasonable, flexible yet grade appropriate and comprehensive.

We could go back to them tomorrow.

But we don’t.

Why?

It’s that same question again.

What is holding us back?

STANDARDIZED TESTING

Here’s my theory: it’s the testing.

One of the most frustrating things for Common Core critics is when apologists say they hate standardized testing but love Common Core.

The two are inextricably interlinked. You can’t have Common Core without the testing. That is the whole point of the standards – to tell districts what to focus on because those things will be on the federally mandated high stakes standardized tests.

If states repeal Common Core, what happens to these tests?

Before adopting the Core, each state had a test aligned to its own specific standards. Even where some states had the same tests, their standards were significantly similar to allow this. In any case, most states that have adopted the Core have had to buy new, more difficult tests.

Sure, we could all go back to the tests we used to give, but this would present certain problems.

First, many states were taking tests that were already being aligned with Common Core before they officially adopted it. If they got rid of the standards, they couldn’t go back to the old tests because they’re already Common Core specific.

In theory, they could ask to reinstate older versions of the test that aren’t Common Core aligned. However, in practice for some states, this might necessitate the creation of yet another batch of new tests.

However, in many states like Pennsylvania, this wouldn’t be an issue. Before the Core, they had their own tests based on state specific standards. There’s really no reason why they couldn’t dust off these old tests and put them back into circulation.

The problem is that this would require politicians to justify the millions of dollars (at least $7 billion nationally) they wasted on the new tests, new workbooks, new textbooks, etc.

Lawmakers would have to own their mistakes.

They’d have to say, “My bad!”

And most of them aren’t about to do that.

Of course, there is a third option: they could undo the high stakes testing altogether. They could characterize this not as a misstep but a reform.

According to the ESSA, all states have to give federally mandated standardized tests from grades 3-8 and once in high school.

But what exactly those tests look like is debatable.

The federal government is supposed to give them leeway in this matter. What better way for the Trump administration and Betsy DeVos to demonstrate their commitment to local control than by approving accountability plans that don’t include standardized testing?

States could substitute student projects, classroom grades, internships, even community service for this mandate.

I’m sure if lawmakers were really serious about getting rid of Common Core, they could figure out a way to make this work. It would just require a commitment to patching up the massive hole in our school funding system where the standardized testing industry has been sucking away tax dollars that could be better used elsewhere – like in the actual act of teaching students!

THE CYNICAL INTERPRETATION

Which brings me to perhaps the most cynical interpretation of the data.

Republicans may be avoiding the Common Core issue because their opposition up to now was simply disingenuous partisan infighting. They could be craven servants to the testing industry. Or – and this is the worst case scenario – they could have another endgame in mind entirely.

Whenever the issue is brought up these days – whenever ANY educational issue is brought up – the Trump administration almost always pivots to school choice.

For instance, here’s Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway during an interview with Jake Tapper on CNN.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos “will get on with the business of executing on the president’s vision for education,” Conway said. “He’s made very clear all throughout the campaign and as president he wants to repeal Common Core, he doesn’t think that federal standards are better than local and parental control…And that children should not be restricted in terms of education opportunities just by their ZIP code, just by where they live. We’ve got to look at homeschooling, and charter schools, and school choice and other alternatives for certain students.”

It’s possible that today’s Republicans at both the state and federal level aren’t concerned with repealing Common Core because it’s irrelevant to their ultimate goal – repealing the very notion of public education.

If every school or almost every school was a charter, voucher or homeschool, Common Core would be a moot point.

After all, choice schools don’t have to follow most regulations. That could include using the Core.

This is especially true at voucher schools and homeschools. They can do pretty much whatever they please in most states. If they don’t want to use Common Core, the states have little power (as yet) to force them to do so. Of course accepting tax-payer funding does open them up to being regulated in the future if the political winds change.

On the other hand, charter schools often allegedly do use Common Core, but regulations are so lax with so few measures to hold them accountable for anything in most states that whether they’re actually using the standards and to what extent is anyone’s guess. Unscrupulous charter operators could conceivably forgo the standards regardless of state mandates with little fear of being found out or contradicted.

This may be the ultimate selling point for school choice. Almost anything goes. It could certainly allow schools to circumvent Common Core, just as it allows them to circumvent civil rights protections, fiscal responsibility, democratic local control – really any kind of protections to ensure taxpayer money is being spent responsibly and kids are actually being educated.

In short, it hammers a nail with a bazooka. Yet conservative lawmakers may only be concerned with who’s selling the bazooka and not who gets hit by the shrapnel.

For a long time now, education policy has been about where the money is, and that is unequivocally behind school choice. What these policies lack in public support they make up for in sugar daddies. Billionaires on both sides of the aisle have been pouring cash into these efforts for years.

Just imagine! Anyone with the backing can start a school and pocket as much of the tax dollars originally meant to educate kids but now transformed into sweet, sweet profit!

In fact, the point behind high stakes testing was primarily to undercut support for public schools. It was to “prove” our schools were failing and needed to be replaced with charter and voucher schools. But once we’ve gotten rid of public schools, the testing won’t be as necessary.

It will become just another revenue stream in a multitudinous school system where education only has meaning in how much it can profitize students and enrich investors.

That may be the true endgame for policymakers.

Common Core is just one of a number of schemes they’re pushing to take advantage of the country’s fastest growing revenue stream: our children.

CONCLUSIONS

THIS is why lawmakers – both Republican and Democrat – won’t get rid of Common Core.

They are bought and sold employees of Wall Street and Corporate America.

Too many people are making a fortune off the backs of our children – charter and voucher school investors, book publishers, software companies, test manufacturers, private prison corporations! They aren’t about to let their profits take a nosedive by allowing their paid agents in the legislature to turn off the gravy train.

THAT’S why Republicans haven’t ended Common Core.

That’s why they never will.

Pity the Corporate School Reformers

August 4, 2017 stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, Accountability, Betsy DeVos, bloggers, Campbell Brown, capitalism, Charter Schools, Child Predators, church and state, Civil Rights, Common Core, Corporate Education "Reform", Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, Eugenics, immigration, Local Control, NAACP, Obama, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, President, privatization, Propaganda, Racism, Republican, School Choice, School Funding, school segregation, school vouchers, Schools, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Teachers, White Allies Betsy DeVos, charter schools, Corporate Education Reform, corporate school reform, Donald Trump, education, Education Post, neoliberal, Politics, School Choice, school vouchers, standardized testing

It’s gotta’ be tough to be a corporate school reformer these days.

Betsy DeVos is Education Secretary. Donald Trump is President. Their entire Koch Brothers-funded, ALEC-written agenda is national policy.

But their stripes are showing – big time.

The NAACP has turned against their school privatization schemes. The Journey for Justice Alliance is having none of it. The Movement for Black Lives is skeptical. Even their trusty neoliberal Democratic allies are seeking to put some distance between them.

And it’s making them look… sad.

You’d think they’d have much to celebrate. Their policies are right up there with voter disenfranchisement, the Muslim ban and building a wall.

Charter schools – YES! Voucher schools – YES! Public schools – NO.

High stakes testing is going gangbusters pushed by the federal government with little interference from the states.

Common Core is in almost every school while the most state legislatures do about it is consider giving it a name change.

And in every district serving students of color and the poor, budgets are being slashed to pieces to make room for another juicy tax cut for the rich.

They’ve taken George W. Bush’s education vision – which neoliberal Barack Obama increased – and somehow found a way to double-triple down on it!

They should be dancing in the streets. But somehow they just don’t feel like dancing.

What’s wrong, Michelle Rhee and Campbell Brown? Is that a tear I see in Peter Cunningham’s eye?

Perhaps they’ve seen the error of their ways. Maybe after all this time, they’ve finally realized all children deserve a robust, authentic education, not just the market-driven chance of – maybe – a quality education.

But no.

It’s not that.

It’s the way the Trump administration is going about it.

You see, he’s being – gulp – honest.

He’s actually saying what he means. He’s throwing back the curtain exposing all the racist, classist, capitalist motivations behind corporate education reform.

Even when he lies – which is often – he’s no good at it. His real motives are plain as the weave on his head.

Under Obama, they could do almost the same things, but at least Barack would apologize for it. He’d clothe it in the language of civil rights and make it sound all noble. He’d excuse systemic inequality as the deserved results of competition.

But Trump!? He’s championing all their favorite causes while tweeting skepticism about the very concept of civil rights, ignoring poverty as fake news and just making an all out ass of himself and everyone with whom he associates.

That’s YOU, corporate education reformers.

That’s you. And you’re being forced to own it.

I almost pity you.

What a dark world you must inhabit. To take these sinister schemes that brutalize children and actually believe in them!

Take charter schools.

Imagine sincerely believing that poor black kids deserve to go to schools that aren’t controlled by school boards but instead by unelected bureaucrats. Imagine thinking the color of your skin should determine whether you have a say in your child’s education. White folks get to elect the people running their schools, but not black folks. And you know what, it’s for their own good, say the reformers!

Imagine thinking that the amount of melanin in your skin should determine whether your schools are transparent or not – whether they’re required to have open records, open meetings, even whether they have to follow the same safety protocols and regulations as traditional public schools!

WHITE SCHOOLS – not for profit, spend the budget all on the students. BLACK SCHOOLS – CA-CHING! CA-CHING!

And when it comes to voucher schools, imagine selling a tax cut to a wealthy family as if it somehow benefited poor folks. Letting the Walton’s pocket a few thousand from their kids exclusive private school tuition doesn’t help Ma and Pa Six Pack. Nor does offering a discount to the kind of parochial schools that brainwash kids into thinking that evolution is evil, climate change is a Chinese conspiracy, and slavery was just God’s will.

It’s the difference between trying to sell a glossy fraud like KIPP’s charter school network and an obvious one like the President’s Trump University.

But now everyone sees they’re essentially the same.

No wonder these faux reformers look so down.

Imagine pushing standardized tests as if they were a technological breakthrough. They’ve been around since at least China’s Han Dynasty (206 BC – 220 AD). If that’s cutting edge, I think you’ll like my new APP. It’s called The Wheel!

In America, standardized tests have been around since the 1910s where they were a leading feature of the eugenicist movement. They were a tool to “prove” the racial imperfection of black and brown people and the superiority of whites. Imagine demanding something like that as a civil right!

I couldn’t do it with a straight face. But they did!

And it worked! For a little while.

Now their whole pyramid scheme is just too damn clear. Make the kids take unfair, biased tests that will show how few resources poor black kids get and then use that as a justification for giving them fewer resources, closing their schools and privatizing them. No one’s even tried a scam that blatant since Bernie Madoff went to prison!

What do they have to gain by all this? Money.

Standardized testing is a multi-billion dollar industry. School privatization is a multi-billion dollar industry. If you can find a way to suck up federal, state and local tax dollars meant to educate children and divert that into your private bank account, well you’ve just struck it rich!

Racism pays, folks! Prejudice pays! Because the majority doesn’t mind so much when you take advantage of the underprivileged. That’s why they’re underprivileged in the first place!

And when people like me speak out against them, the best they can do are Ad hominem attacks – you’re too white to question policy affecting black people, or your friends are black but (somehow) not black enough. Today I actually read a response to an article I wrote that came down to these insightful criticisms – Nu-uh! And How dare you! Which we can add to their response to criticisms that charter schools increase segregation – I know you are but what am I?

The folks at the Education Post, a propaganda network passing off most of this nonsense as if it were legitimate news and funded by $12 million from the Broads, the Waltons and other usual suspects, they must really be desperate.

They’ve sold their souls to the Devil and may not even get a good return on the investment.

You see, they’re betting that by the time the Trump zeppelin explodes, their policies will be irreversible.

The problem is that he’s been extremely ineffective. He’s pushing their agenda, but isn’t getting much done.

And with multiple new scandals everyday and increasing calls for impeachment, time is running out.

It’s enough to stoke pity in the hardest of hearts.

Sure these folks have sold out our children for thirty pieces of silver, but they’re still people, after all.

They deserve our empathy, kindness, pity.

Well almost.

School Voucher Industry Strikes Back: We’re Segregated!? No, You’re Segregated!

July 25, 2017 stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, Accountability, AFT, Betsy DeVos, Budget, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, Labor, NEA, Obama, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, privatization, Propaganda, Racism, Republican, School Choice, School Funding, school segregation, school vouchers, Schools, segregation, Social Justice, Supreme Court, Teachers, Unions, White Privilege American Federation of Teachers, Betsy DeVos, charter schools, Lily Eskelsen Garcia, National Education Association, Peter Cunningham, Randi Weingarten, School Choice, school segregation, school vouchers, schools, segregation, Social Justice, teachers, unions

In what must count as another new low in American discourse, the school voucher industry is striking back against claims that their products lead to greater segregation of students.

Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), had the audacity to voice the truth:

“Make no mistake: This use of privatization, coupled with disinvestment are only slightly more polite cousins of segregation,” she said a week ago during a speech at the AFT’s yearly convention.

To which school privatization mouthpieces quickly countered with the truth:

“If vouchers are the polite cousins of segregation, then most urban school districts are segregation’s direct descendants. The vast majority of our urban public school districts are segregated because of white flight and neighborhood neglect.”

This was from a statement by Kevin Chavous, founding board member of the American Federation for Children, the school privatization advocacy group that Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos used to lead.

So there you have it.

A nation of more than 325 million people, with a more than 241-year history reduced to – I Know You Are But What Am I?

The sad fact is that they’re both right.

School vouchers do lead to increased segregation (and so do charter schools, by the way, the method preferred by corporate Democrats). But many traditional public schools are, in fact, deeply segregated both racially and economically.

Does that mean that both systems – privatized and public – are equally at fault? Does it mean that both somehow get a pass for reprehensible behavior?

No and no.

First, we must explain why segregation is bad.

Peter Cunningham, former assistant secretary for communications and outreach at the Education Department under Obama, wagged his finger at Weingarten on the privatization propaganda Website, the 74.

He called out Weingarten’s hypocrisy, which takes some cojones for a man who only last year pondered aloud and in public whether segregation was really such a bad thing.

He had this to say last September:

“Maybe the fight’s not worth it. It’s a good thing; we all think integration is good. But it’s been a long fight, we’ve had middling success. At the same time, we have lots and lots of schools filled with kids of one race, one background, that are doing great. It’s a good question.”

Funny, isn’t it?

He calls out Weingarten because of public school segregation but defends charter schools because their segregation is somehow just swell.

Keep in mind. Cunningham is the executive director of the Education Post, a well-funded charter school public relations firm that packages its advertisements, propaganda and apologias as journalism. And he’s not about to poop where he eats.

So, yes, Mr. Cunningham, segregation is worth fighting.

When you have schools made up mostly of minority and/or economically disadvantaged students, it makes it easier to provide fewer resources and less funding to those children while sending the lion’s share to the white and wealthy.

That’s why in Brown v. Board the U.S. Supreme Court struck down “Separate but Equal” – because when races are kept separate, their schools are rarely equal.

This game of excusing one system based on the deficiencies of the other is pure sophistry.

You can’t defend voucher and charter schools from being segregated by reference to public school segregation. Nor can you ignore public school segregation by reference to the same at privatized schools.

They’re both bad, and they both need fixing.

To be fair, Weingarten seems to tacitly admit this about public schools.

She acknowledges the disinvestment in public education, how public schools have been systemically undermined by politicians and lobbyists, many of them advocating for privatized schools, so that they could use this disinvestment as an excuse for their own for-profit education schemes.

“…no amount of facts or evidence will sway voucher proponents from their agenda to starve public schools to the breaking point, then criticize their deficiencies and let the market handle the rest, all in the name of choice,” she said in a statement.

The fact of the matter is this: public schools have become more segregated not because teachers or administrators want it, but because of local, state and federal law; a series of subsequent Supreme Court decisions allowing it within district boundaries; the continuation of racist redlining in the loan and insurance industry; and the xenophobia of wealthy and middle class whites who prefer their kids be educated separately from those they consider undesirable.

These policies could be changed. The system could be fixed. All it would take is the will to do it.

Charter and vouchers schools, on the other hand, will never solve the problem of segregation, because they have turned that problem into a “solution.”

Schools serving poor and minority students aren’t getting the proper resources. So they propose further segregating them.

That’s a terrible idea. It’s like escaping from a leaky cruise ship by jumping into a leaky lifeboat. You’ll sink in both, but the lifeboat will sink quicker.

Yes, our public schools are segregated by race and class and therefore poor and minority students receive inequitable funding and resources. Charters and vouchers cannot possibly remedy that. They will always make it worse. Only a robust and integrated public school system can be truly equitable. A system that deifies choice cannot combat racism if it is freely chosen.

What Weingarten is getting at is this: if we want to help the nation’s children – all of the nation’s children – we must support and reform public schools.

We must also acknowledge that many of the problems of systemic disinvestment are caused by those who want to privatize in the first place.

We have let the wolf write our education policy. It should be no shock that his solution isn’t to build more houses of bricks but to process our little piggies into bacon.

Full disclosure: I am no fan of Weingarten.

I recently called for both her and National Education Association (NEA) President Lily Eskelsen Garcia to voluntarily step down because of undemocratic practices and mismanagement in both teachers unions.

However, I’ll stand up for her when she’s right, and in this instance, she is.

If anything, maybe she should have included charter schools in her criticism. I laid into her in June for writing an op-ed with Jonah Edelman, an anti-union activist, specifically praising charter schools over vouchers.

But I get it. Now that some charter school teachers have unionized and joined the AFT, she’s stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Frankly, it makes her ineffective in speaking out on this matter. I have nothing against charter school teachers. I know, personally, several very good educators who work at charter schools. In this job market, sometimes you have to take what you can get. However, the sad fact of the matter is that by their very structure, charter schools are inferior to public schools. They are less democratic, less transparent, less accountable and more easily subject to fraud and abuse of children. That’s not to say all charters are guilty of this, but just by being a charter school and being subject to the deregulated rules governing them, they are more susceptible to these errors than their traditional public school brethren.

But, of course, the same can be said of voucher schools. It’s just that you can’t criticize one privatization scheme without also criticizing the other.

Perhaps the biggest mistake Weingarten made was in glossing over the worst abuses of public schools. If she was going to call out the segregation at voucher schools, she also should have explicitly called it out at public schools.

But that’s something even our first black President Barack Obama refused to do. You’d think he’d make that a priority for his administration, but instead he favored the same school privatization schemes that just made it worse.

Currently, you’ll find no political party that actively champions integration. Democrats will give it more lip service than Republicans, but both parties either ignore it in practice or actively work against it.

The only use they have for it is as a club with which to hit the other side when issues like this come up.

You’re segregated!

No, YOU’RE segregated!

And so we are all lead over the cliff by partisans and fools.

gadflyonthewallblog

"To sting people and whip them into a fury, all in the service of truth."

Donald Trump