Corporate shaping of public education

Got Dough? Public School Reform in the Age of Venture Philanthropy
Joanne Barkan, Dissent Magazine: "The cost of K-12 public schooling in the United States comes to well over $500 billion per year. So, how much influence could anyone in the private sector exert by controlling just a few billion dollars of that immense sum? Decisive influence, it turns out. A few billion dollars in private foundation money, strategically invested every year for a decade, has sufficed to define the national debate on education; sustain a crusade for a set of mostly ill-conceived reforms; and determine public policy at the local, state, and national levels. In the domain of venture philanthropy - where donors decide what social transformation they want to engineer and then design and fund projects to implement their vision - investing in education yields great bang for the buck."
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Charters raid money from tax payers

by Michael Hirsch

They said charters would offer needed competition to community schools, but they didn’t say the competition would be about public dollars.  Last week Albany Times Union reported on the city’s Albany Leadership Charter High School for Girls “asking for $15 million in tax-free public financing to buy the brand-new charter high school for girls built by the Brighter Choice Foundation.”
Here’s the cute part. The nonprofit Brighter Choice Foundation, which runs all 11 charter schools in Albany and  erected the building at a cost of some $10.1 million, is directing its Charter Facilities Finance Fund to ask the city to back its selling tax-exempt bonds to investors so it can  buy the school building and — are you ready for this? — lease it back to Brighter Choice.

Forget about whether the deal sounds dodgy, because it does. If the deal also sounds a bit familiar, it may be because Thomas Carroll, the prime mover behind the Brighter Choice charter schools, has been profiting from a similarly questionable real estate tax loophole for the past several years, a story exposed earlier this year by Juan Gonzalez in the Daily News.
Critics say Carroll’s latest charter real estate trick runs counter to the purpose of the city providing tax free bonds, which is to jump-start job creation and promote economic development. No jobs will be created here; the school is already up and running. Where’s the public benefit in financing a project that’s already completed?



The paper cites Brighter Choice Chairman Chris Bender’s bright expectation that the high school’s sale would “replenish the revolving line of credit” it holds with the Walton Family Foundation, the charity run by the family that owns the nonpareil union-busting Wal-Mart.
As the paper notes, that cozy arrangement “could create another potentially controversial scenario in which Brighter Choice is essentially using the proceeds from the sale of tax-free bonds to bolster the account from which it builds new schools to compete with the city school district.”
Supporters say the school does create jobs —some two dozen new ones — but that’s denied by an Albany schools spokesperson who says it’s more a case of job shifting than job creation, given that 200 public school staff members, including 100 teachers, were laid off in the last two school years.
We should note that Carroll, the little man on the charter school stair, is the honcho behind School Performance Inc., which in turn runs the  Charter Facilities Finance Fund that wants to make deal for the city.
His adventures in education aren’t restricted to the state’s snow belt.  President of the charter-flacking Foundation for Education Reform & Accountability, Carroll is also president of the Empire Foundation and CHANGE-NY, both far-right-of-center organizations that mask conservative ideology as fiscal prudence. Ripping off Albany’s tax base must be the new style in protecting the public’s dollars.
On paper, charter schools can be useful experimental nonprofit projects offering urban students small classes and intimate surroundings in schools run by teachers, parents and community leaders -- and in schools covered by a union contract. Successes, especially in the charter school industry's claim to closing the shameful achievement gap between white students and children of color-- could then be imported into community public school curricula and pedagogy. Fine in theory. That's not how it works in practice. Charters are frequently run by for-profit operators who cream students out of district- or municipally run schools and either refuse to admit special education and English language learners or steer them away in the case of school lottery winners -- all in order to boost their statewide test scores -- while keeping unions out and teachers as at-will employees (though fresh organizing successes are changing that union-free picture, at least incrementally). Actually existing charter schools don't as a rule militate to increase the public pot of dollars going to education. In too many cases, they instead drain money from the community schools and --devilishly-- serve sizably as investment opportunities in land and in various for-profit urban redevelopment schemes by hedge fund managers and other Wall Street speculators. The attacks on public sector unions that are ongoing in every state and territory, which are sold as budget-tightening measures and common-sense economies, are all about privatizing education and other public services, and the bulk of vocal charter school supporters are union haters. These attacks are first-rank union issues.
Michael Hirsch is a staff reporter for New York Teacher newspaper.

The Death of Public Education ?

Lack of money is killing our schools

By Derrick Z. Jackson

April 6, 2010– +

THE NEWS says we are watching the death of public education before our eyes. Detroit is closing more than 40 schools, Kansas City wants to close more than 40 percent of its school buildings. Other cities have been closing schools over the last decade. Boston avoided closings in its most recent budget deliberations, but still must slash custodial staff and postpone building repairs.

It is no secret that American education is at a great divide, unrivaled in most of the developed world. The United States spends $9,800 per public primary and secondary education student, which is technically high by global standards.

But meanwhile, children of the wealthy are being trained at private schools at more than triple the expenditures. In the Boston area, day school tuition rates are closing in on $35,000.

Our investment in public school teachers is paltry for the wealthiest country in the world. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the United States ranks in some measures behind England, Italy, Japan, Scotland and way behind Germany in starting teacher pay. The average expenditure on college students in the United States amounts to $24,400 per college student, two and a half times more than the $9,800 per-pupil spending in the public schools.

Beneath the numbers is the resegregation of children on the basis of class, race and immigration status. Prison spending soared so much, that by 2007, five states spent as much or more on corrections than on higher education, according to the Pew Center on the States.

In monetary terms, we have given up on millions of children. “I don’t think necessarily that public education is dead, but certain parts of it are dying,’’ said Linda Darling-Hammond, a Stanford University professor who headed President Barack Obama’s education transition team. “The programs of the 1960s and 1970s that helped make education more equitable were mostly eliminated in the 1980s and never put back.

“We’re disinvesting in a significant way. With the huge decline in America of manual labor jobs that are being off-shored or digitalized, the vast majority of jobs are knowledge based. If we do not invest that way, we really can’t survive as a nation. To deeply underfund public education as we are doing does not make any sense.’’

Author of the 2009 book, “The Flat World and Education,’’ Darling-Hammond says neither poverty, nor the diverse nature of the American population are excuses not to educate everyone. Several countries were behind the United States decades ago in education and now have passed us.

She cites the example of Korea, which “in the space of one generation . . . moved from a nation that educated less than a quarter of its citizens through high school to one that now ranks third in college-educated adults.’’

She noted how Singapore, where 80 percent of families live in public housing, was tops in the world in fourth-grade and eighth-grade math assessments in 2003. “When children leave the tiny, spare apartments they occupy in high-rises throughout the city,’’ she wrote of Singapore, “they arrive at colorful, airy school buildings where student artwork, papers, projects, and awards are displayed throughout, libraries and classrooms are well-stocked, instructional technology is plentiful, and teachers are well trained.’’

It is enough to make one consider whether America needs to start from scratch. Whatever we are doing, it is not working. For instance, Darling-Hammond said Obama has an education platform that could rival the last serious education president, whom she considers to be Lyndon Johnson, but “to date has not squarely embraced the idea of equity. He did a great job coming out of the box on higher education, but inequity in elementary and secondary education is continuing to widen.’’

Johnson once said you cannot “take a person who for years has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others.’ ’’ Today millions of American children once again need our help to get to the starting line.

Derrick Z. Jackson can be reached at jackson@globe.com.

The Boston Globe. http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2010/04/06/the_death_of_public_education/