Charter Schools Are Just a Way of Channeling Public Funds to the Top 1%

The Corporate Privatization of Public Education

There has been much public praise for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s efforts to reform public education. However, few scholars have engaged substantively and critically with the organization’s work. While the Gates Foundation is the single largest supporter by far of "choice" initiatives particularly with regard to charter school formation, it is pushing public school privatization through a wide array of initiatives and in conjunction with a number of other foundations. What are the implications for a public system as control over educational policy and priority is concentrated under one of the richest people on the planet in ways that foster de-unionization and teacher de-skilling while homogenizing school models and curriculum? The Gates Foundation and the Future of US "Public" Schools addresses this crucial, unanswered question while investigating the relationships between the Gates Foundation and other think tanks, government, and corporate institutions. - How Bill Gates Plans On Privatizing us Public Schools, The Frustrated Teacher, November 22, 2010

September 27, 2010

Calitics - One of the most important trends afoot right now is the move to privatize as many government services as possible.

Billionaires like Bill Gates, along with hedge funds, are pushing an agenda of privatizing public schools, and funding a PR push in support of that cause with films like "Waiting for Superman" and the NBC "Education Nation" that included a panel with the title "Does Education Need a Katrina?".

This trend is fueled by the desire of the richest Americans to seek new income streams. Instead of spending their cash hoard on innovating new products or businesses that can create jobs and lasting economic activity, they're engaged in a process of rent seeking, which has no productive value. By taking tax dollars that currently provide public services and channeling them to the private sector, which contracts to provide the service at lower cost -- and therefore at lower quality -- these wealthy individuals can add new income streams while also blunting any effort to raise their taxes to provide these services.

It's not just schools that are targeted for privatization, however. As the New York Times reports, Santa Clarita has privatized its library -- even though it wasn't forced to by financial considerations:

A $4 million deal to run the three libraries here is a chance for the company to demonstrate that a dose of private management can be good for communities, whatever their financial situation. But in an era when outsourcing is most often an act of budget desperation -- with janitors, police forces and even entire city halls farmed out in one town or another -- the contract in Santa Clarita has touched a deep nerve and begun a round of second-guessing.

Can a municipal service like a library hold so central a place that it should be entrusted to a profit-driven contractor only as a last resort -- and maybe not even then?

"There's this American flag, apple pie thing about libraries," said Frank A. Pezzanite, the outsourcing company's chief executive. He has pledged to save $1 million a year in Santa Clarita, mainly by cutting overhead and replacing unionized employees. "Somehow they have been put in the category of a sacred organization."

In his rather blunt and offensive way, Pezzanite actually lays out the stakes pretty clearly. In a country that has turned pursuit of profit into a civic religion, and that since 1980 has argued that all government activity and policy should be oriented around producing corporate profits, it is indeed an open question whether there is any room left for the concept of the government providing services directly to the people, without having to give an investor a cut.

Public libraries have been operating quite effectively and efficiently for over 100 years. The notion that one would privatize the library just so some company can make money was virtually unheard of, at least in California, for the last century. But that was before the era of Reagan, Schwarzenegger, and Whitman.

The privatizers' method is the same: fire all the employees, regardless of how good at their jobs they are, so the company can replace them with cheaper labor, increasing their profits at the expense of quality services and middle-class wages. It's wealth extraction at its finest, the corporate raider having shifted his target from an '80s manufacturing plant to a '10s library.

Why would Santa Clarita go along with this? It's likely that the council are merely outliers, the first ones to make a highly ideological move that will be quickly taken up by right-wing (and some not so right-wing) councils across the state, demanding privatization to suit their ideological agenda and justified by overblown and misleading concerns about pension costs.

It's true that I have more than a passing interest in this topic, as the husband of someone working at a public library. But it's the bigger principle that really matters here. Public services should be provided for the benefit of the public -- and not for the benefit of some company's bottom line.

When profit becomes the primary motive, all else is sacrificed to it. It's not what most Californians want for their state and their future, but unless we fight back hard, they will privatize everything, and keep the profits while we get stuck with the risks -- and the losses.

Obama’s Neoliberal Stance on Charter Schools

March 21, 2011

Alternet.org - Of the last five presidents, Obama has clearly been the staunchest ally of the school privatization movement. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Our first black president has already clearly established his neoliberal credentials, in expanding Bush’s war on terror into Pakistan, Yemen and Libya and increasing his predecessor’s measly $700 billion in Wall Street bailouts to $12.5 trillion.

In addition to generous increases to charter school funding every year, the Obama administration also included a provision in the 2009 stimulus package forcing states to liberalize and/or expand their charter school programs or miss out in $100 billion in public school stimulus funding.

Many states, which are already closing schools and laying off teachers, have a cap on charter school formation because they can’t afford further decreases in their public school budget. Many feel the failure of charter schools to improve achievement scores doesn’t justify establishing even more of them, given the additional cuts and sacrifices this would impose on public schools. Many, such as Ohio, have had serious problems (owing to lack of public oversight) with fraud and corruption in privately run charter schools.

However, at present all states without legislation authorizing the formation of charter schools will have to pass it -- and all those with funding caps will have to remove them – or miss out on badly needed stimulus funding.

Arne Duncan’s Record in Chicago

Obama’s appointment of Arne Duncan, former CEO of Chicago Public Schools to head the Dept of Education, suggests states will continue to be under enormous pressure to de-fund public schools -- and that many more will close. While running Chicago schools, Duncan -- in collaboration with Mayor Daley’s office and Chicago’s corporate elite -- pursued an aggressive school privatization agenda. In 2004, this included an attempt to close 20 out of 22 schools in a low income minority neighborhood. The effort was clearly linked to the mayor’s and property developers efforts to “gentrify” the neighborhood -- to force out minority residents and glam up their properties for re-sale to white upper middle class professionals. With all their neighborhood schools closing, low income residents would have no choice but to leave.

Fortunately militant protests by residents stopped the arbitrary school closures. However Duncan then preceded to implement a draconian decree under Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act ordering immediate closure (with no probationary period) of schools where students failed to pass standardized tests. Duncan also made it clear that these schools would immediately be turned over to private charter school operators funded by grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates and WalMart family foundation).

Obama and Arne Duncan

The Role of the Corporate Media

It should also be no surprise that the corporate controlled media is beating the drums for the neoliberal agenda to privatize schools. As Danny Weil outlines in “Corporate School Hype and How It’s Managed,” NPR, CNN, PBS, 20/20 and Oprah Winfrey are all guilty of staging “informercials” promoting school privatization via the formation of charter schools as a solution to the “crisis” in public schools. No pro-public school advocates are invited to challenge the assertions presented, and there is no disclosure of ideological or financial (as in the case of controversial civil rights leader Al Sharpton) ties to right wing think tanks and school privatization proponents (see http://www.counterpunch.org/weil08262009.html).

The Mind Trust: The Celebrity-Corporate-Government Plan to Privatize Indiana Education

March 22, 2011

Fire Dog Lake - When former NBC Today Show co-host Jane Pauley walked out onto a stage in her birth city, Indianapolis, a year ago, some in the audience, including Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett and former mayor Bart Peterson, understood what was behind Pauley’s show of empathy for Indiana’s school children, even though it may have been hidden to those there to see a celebrity.

Pauley spoke with pride of her son Ross—who had just joined the teaching staff of a charter school—and how she heard in Washington about the great things happening in the school reform movement back in her former hometown.

As member of the Board of the Mind Trust, a nonprofit school reform group in Indianapolis which has over $12 million to attack public education, Pauley was there to help sell the corporate privatization of public education. This coming May, in fact, Pauley will even join New York Times’ David Brooks (a “Quiet Revolution” quack) onstage at the Mind Trust’s “Grow What Works: Campaign to Accelerate Education Reform.”

The Mind Trust is the product of President and former Indianapolis Democratic mayor Bart Peterson and CEO David Harris, the mayor’s first Charter School Director in Indianapolis. In 2001, the Indiana legislature passed a charter school law which made Peterson the first mayor to have the authority to charter schools in the country. For their various programs, Harris, Peterson, and the Lilly Endowment-funded Center of Excellence in Leadership of Learning (CELL) at the University of Indianapolis received $11.3 million from the Gates Foundation. To the Indianapolis Charter Schools Facilities Fund, a loan program which operated from 2005 to 2009, the Annie E. Casey Foundation (AECF) added another $1 million.

Bart Peterson is currently the Senior Vice President of Corporate Affairs and Communications for Eli Lilly and Company, the mega-drug company where Mitch Daniels was Senior Vice President before joining the Bush administration. In fact, current or former Lilly members onboard with the Mind Trust include Alecia DeCoudreaux, General Counsel at Lilly USA, Mind Trust President Claire Fiddian-Green, and Anne Shane, Community Development and Education Consultant to the Lilly Endowment, Inc. The Lilly Endowment, the Ruth Lilly Philanthropic Foundation, and the Eli Lilly and Company Foundation all significantly fund the Mind Trust.

Mind Trust’s Board of Directors is stacked with other Indiana corporate leaders. It includes Indianapolis Power and Light Company (IPALCO) CEO Ann Murtlow, who previously worked as an AES Corporation liaison at the same time Mitch Daniels was an IPALCO board member, then joined IPALCO in 2002 (for the AES-IPALCO connections to charter school scandals, see my article here). Murtlow is also on the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago’s Board of Directors, a member of the Board of Directors of Greater Indianapolis Chamber of Commerce, and now the Senior Vice Chair of the Mind Trust.

Through its Venture Fund and with help from the Lilly Endowment, in 2008 the Mind Trust spent $2 million to recruit Teach for America to Indiana. Nationally, Teach for America has been under much scrutiny, and the Indiana branch is also drowning in controversy. Tina Bennett (the wife of Tony, Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction) recently quit her job as assistant director of Teach for America at Marian University, a Catholic school that was awarded $500,000 from the Indiana government to train future school principals, even though many other more qualified universities applied and were denied. Daniel J. Elsener, Marian’s president, also serves on the Indiana State Board of Education. When asked to comment on his wife’s many conflicts of interests with charter schools, Tony Bennett, in April, arrogantly told a South Bend School Corporation audience:

“I see no conflict. I invite choice.”

He, however, had no comment on the recent corruptions in Dennis Bakke’s Imagine Schools.

School Choice is indeed the buzzword of another Mind Trust recruit, Stand for Children. Originating in Portland, Oregon, Stand for Children used $242,300 from the Mind Trust and $150,000 from the Joyce Foundation to sweep into Indiana and lobby for Senate Bill 1, the legislation which makes it easier to fire teachers and make annual teacher evaluations based primarily on student performance, or the ISTEP test.

As Steve Hinnefeld has noted, Stand for Children lists the Indiana Public Charter Schools Association address for its office and has “two high-priced Statehouse lobbyists and a ton of positive publicity courtesy of Indianapolis Star columnist Matthew Tully.” Linda Erlinger, Stand for Children’s executive director in Indiana, previously served as Development Director with Teach for America and as Manager of Applications of Research with the Chicago Panel on School Policy. Thus, it is not surprising that Arne Duncan lauds Stand for Children in a Mind Trust press release.

True to the conservative-corporate propaganda plan, another Mind Trust spin-off, Teach Plus, recruits young teachers, trains them to question seniority in the teaching profession, and pits them against older, more experienced teachers who, instead of being criticized, should be looked up to and learned from. Started by Mind Trust Education Entrepreneur Fellow Celine Coggin (who was nominated by Paul Reville, Massachusetts Secretary of Education and charter “Innovation Schools” advancer), Teach Plus hires people to write studies claiming that once the governor closes down low-performing schools in Indiana, lazy senior teachers will replace the jobs of younger ones at other public schools in the district, what they refer to as the “Domino Effect.” In their anti-seniority attack, they have $4 million from the Gates Foundation to infiltrate six cities over three years, including Boston. The Teach Plus fellows in Indianapolis also focus on “advancing a reform agenda based on improving teacher evaluation and staffing policies,” or to press for an agenda where teachers are based primarily on how well their students do on the state ISTEP test.

Proudly, the Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction has no qualms about promoting the Mind Trust’s Fellowship program which led to Teach Plus. In his March 21, 2011, bulk-email to teachers and others, Bennett includes a link to apply for one of the group’s Education Entrepreneur Fellowships. Along with members of the Mind Trust, Bennett has even hyped the Broad and Gates funded anti-public education film, Waiting for Superman, in an interview with Inside Indiana Business’s Gerry Dick.

With Bennett, business, the Indy Star, and a former NBC Today Show anchor on board, the Mind Trust and Teach Plus aren’t having problems landing gigs, either. Last year, Indianapolis charter school teacher James Larson appeared on the heavily Broad and Gates Foundation-funded Today Show’s Education Nation. Larson was a Teach Plus Indianapolis Teaching Policy Fellow. In his discussion of this, Larson writes:

The first thing Siri and Marcus [founders of Charles A. Tindley Accelerated School in Indianapolis, where Larson teaches) told me in my job interview is that Tindley teachers are held accountable -- not only by parents and students, but also by the administrators themselves.

You would think that would be typical of all schools, but unfortunately it’s not. Too many teachers are simply allowed to close their doors when the bell rings. Too many administrators close their doors, too.

Larson graduated from DePauw in 2005 (as did Siri and Marcus, at some point) and started at Tindley in 2008, so he’s not seen much of what teachers and administrators do in the public schools in Indiana, if anything. Whether he is being duped into buying the argument for privatization of public schools or he is a part of the scheme is hard to tell. Let’s just hope others don’t fall in line.

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