Financial Elite Set Their Sights on the Vast Wealth of the U.S. Public School System

The Corporate Takeover of Education

As cash-strapped school districts lay off teachers and close campuses, publicly-funded charter schools are flourishing and altering the landscape of public education. Despite a painful economic downturn, the charter school movement is expanding rapidly across the country with support from the Obama administration, wealthy donors such as Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey, and the highly publicized documentary "Waiting for Superman." - Charter Schools Expand with Public, Private Money, Associated Press, January 21, 2011

March 4, 2011

AP - ...Obama has called for fresh spending on education in the 2012 budget he unveiled last month, saying that improving America's schools isn't an area where the government can cut back, even as Congress looks for ways to reduce spending and bring down the nation's mounting deficit.

The Obama administration is trying to turn around the nation's 5,000 lowest-performing public schools with a nearly $4 billion infusion to the School Improvement Grant program. Schools awarded grants must choose one of four intervention models:

1. Closure;
2. Reopening as a charter;
3. Replacing the principal and a majority of the staff; and
4. Hiring a new principal while providing further teacher development and learning time.

The president said he would be traveling the country throughout March to talk to parents, students and teachers about his vision for educational change. For his first setting, he chose Miami Central Senior High School, which was beset by problems and labeled a failure for years before starting to transform its ways.

"You came together to turn this school around, and I think the rest of us can learn something from that," Obama said.

Miami Central is one of hundreds of low-performing schools across the nation that have received federal turnaround money.

Later, as he raised money for Democrats in his first fundraising foray this year, Obama's rhetoric was largely restrained as he kept up the bipartisan theme he tried to set earlier in the day. He urged the Democratic crowd to keep the best interests of America, not the party, in mind when tackling pressing issues like education.

"It doesn't have to be an ideological battle," Obama told a crowd at the Fontainebleau resort in Miami Beach. "Commonsense can prevail."

Still, the president couldn't resist taking a swipe at Florida's ardently conservative Gov. Rick Scott, who just rebuffed the White House by turning down billions in federal funding for high-speed rail, a pet project of the president's.

"We could use some faster trains," the president said. As the crowd cheered, Obama added, "That, by the way, has bipartisan support, I understand, here in the great state of Florida."

Despite the dispute, Scott had greeted Obama with a handshake and a smile on the tarmac when the president arrived in Miami on Air Force One.

The Corporate Surge Against Public Schools

Originally Published on March 5, 2008

Jack Gerson and Steven Miller - It’s more than a year since we wrote “Exterminating Public Education" in response to the "Tough Choices or Tough Times" report of the National Commission on Skills in the Workplace.

That report, funded in large part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and signed by a bipartisan collection of prominent politicians, businesspeople, and urban school superintendents, called for a series of measures including:

1. Replacing public schools with what the report called "contract schools," which would be charter schools writ large;


2. Eliminating nearly all the powers of local school boards—their role would be to write and sign the authorizing agreements for the “contract schools;


3. Eliminating teacher pensions and slashing health benefits; and


4. Forcing all 10th graders to take a high school exit examination based on 12th grade skills, and terminating the education of those who failed (i.e., throwing millions of students out into the streets as they turn 16).

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Bill Gates: How Teacher Development Could Revolutionize Our Schools

The federal, state, and local revenue contributions for public education for 2009–10 are estimated at $60.4 billion, $268.8 billion, and $260.1 billion, respectively, totaling $589.3 billion. - National Education Association (NEA), Rankings of the States 2009 and Estimates of School Statistics 2010, December 2009

February 28, 2011

Bill Gates - As the nation's governors gather in Washington for their annual meeting, they are grappling with more than state budget deficits. They're confronting deep education deficits as well.

Over the past four decades, the per-student cost of running our K-12 schools has more than doubled, while our student achievement has remained virtually flat. Meanwhile, other countries have raced ahead. The same pattern holds for higher education. Spending has climbed, but our percentage of college graduates has dropped compared with other countries.

To build a dynamic 21st-century economy and offer every American a high-quality education, we need to flip the curve. For more than 30 years, spending has risen while performance stayed relatively flat. Now we need to raise performance without spending a lot more.

When you need more achievement for less money, you have to change the way you spend. This year, the governors are launching "Complete to Compete," a program to help colleges get more value for the money they spend. It will develop metrics to show which colleges graduate more students for less money, so we can see what works and what doesn't.

In K-12, we know more about what works.

We know that of all the variables under a school's control, the single most decisive factor in student achievement is excellent teaching. It is astonishing what great teachers can do for their students.

Yet compared with the countries that outperform us in education, we do very little to measure, develop and reward excellent teaching. We have been expecting teachers to be effective without giving them feedback and training.

To flip the curve, we have to identify great teachers, find out what makes them so effective and transfer those skills to others so more students can enjoy top teachers and high achievement.

To this end, our foundation is working with nearly 3,000 teachers in seven urban school districts to develop fair and reliable measures of teacher effectiveness that are tied to gains in student achievement. Research teams are analyzing videos of more than 13,000 lessons -- focusing on classes that showed big student gains so it can be understood how the teachers did it. At the same time, teachers are watching their own videos to see what they need to do to improve their practice.

Our goal is a new approach to development and evaluation that teachers endorse and that helps all teachers improve.

The value of measuring effectiveness is clear when you compare teachers to members of other professions -- farmers, engineers, computer programmers, even athletes. These professionals are more advanced than their predecessors -- because they have clear indicators of excellence, their success depends on performance and they eagerly learn from the best.

The same advances haven't been made in teaching because we haven't built a system to measure and promote excellence. Instead, we have poured money into proxies, things we hoped would have an impact on student achievement. The United States spends $50 billion a year on automatic salary increases based on teacher seniority. It's reasonable to suppose that teachers who have served longer are more effective, but the evidence says that's not true. After the first few years, seniority seems to have no effect on student achievement.

Another standard feature of school budgets is a bump in pay for advanced degrees. Such raises have almost no impact on achievement, but every year they cost $15 billion that would help students more if spent in other ways.

Perhaps the most expensive assumption embedded in school budgets -- and one of the most unchallenged -- is the view that reducing class size is the best way to improve student achievement. This belief has driven school budget increases for more than 50 years. U.S. schools have almost twice as many teachers per student as they did in 1960, yet achievement is roughly the same.

What should policymakers do? One approach is to get more students in front of top teachers by identifying the top 25 percent of teachers and asking them to take on four or five more students. Part of the savings could then be used to give the top teachers a raise. (In a 2008 survey funded by the Gates Foundation, 83 percent of teachers said they would be happy to teach more students for more pay.) The rest of the savings could go toward improving teacher support and evaluation systems, to help more teachers become great.

Compared with other countries, America has spent more and achieved less. If there's any good news in that, it's that we've had a chance to see what works and what doesn't. That sets the stage for a big change that everyone knows we need: building exceptional teacher personnel systems that identify great teaching, reward it and help every teacher get better.

It's the thing we've been missing, and it can turn our schools around.