In Current US, We Reward the Liars and the Corrupt - First They Steal Your Schools: Charter Schools and Disaster Capitalism (How the Nazis Enforced Their Regime?)

The first thing that impressed me (negatively) about the Obama regime was the choice of Arne Duncan, a Chicago-based advocate of anti-union charter schools (privatization) as Education Secretary. The whole idea of someone like this at the top of the US education pyramid spun my head around (reminding me of the need for a US political exorcist).

The second thing was all the ex-Goldman Sachs proles (shades - so to speak - of Hank Paulson's "socialism" of bankers' debts!).

And the third nail in the casket was Bob Rubin's boys, Geithner and Summers (and you already know my opinion of these crass minions).

Why Does the US Chamber of Commerce Want to Train or Replace Your Elected School Board, If They Haven't Already?

Wed, 02/27/2013

 

By BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

 

A key role in the elite drive to privatize public education is being played by privately owned school “accreditation” agencies, which are immune from public scrutiny, and under the absolute thrall of pro-privatization forces like the US Chamber of Commerce and the Broad Foundation. Are you hearing stories in local corporate media about your school board being “dysfunctional” and your school systems accreditation threatened? It could mean the US Chamber of Commerce and the Broad Foundation just want to replace them.

 

There's a not-so-secret campaign underway to privatize public education, an effort that is making unprecedented progress under the administration of Barack Obama. How is such a thing possible? Public education is supposedly a matter of local government, in the hands of thousands of school boards across the country, most of them chosen by local voters?

The representatives of corporations, billionaires, Wall Street speculators, along with their right wing foundations and political tentacles like the US Chamber of Commerce, all of whom aim to privatize education have been allowed to embed themselves in the supposedly impartial processes which evaluate and accredit schools and school systems.

 From these completely unaccountable positions, they are able to create convenient “crises” at will by making spurious and anonymous accusations against elected local school board members, and threatening to withdraw the accreditation of individual schools and entire districts. When such threats are made, a mayor or governor can appoint extra school board members or as in Georgia this week, replace school board members the voters have chosen with his own pro-privatization flunkies.

Here's how it works.

The federal Department of Education is forbidden to tell local school districts precisely what they can and cannot do or teach. But the Department of Education officially recognizes privately owned and operated “accreditation agencies” to decide whether a school, a school board or a school system are up to snuff. There are 6 of these accreditation agencies covering the 50 states, and three of these covering more than 20 states are under the umbrella of something called Advanc-Ed [2]. Being “private” and not-fpr-profit that Advanc-Ed's processes, educational policies, judgment calls and the rest are completely immune to public scrutiny.
 

Advanc-Ed's director of public information told Black Agenda Report on the phone that it was entirely funded by the nominal dues paid by school systems for the privilege of accreditation, and that those dues largely paid for its professional development activities, training education leaders, which meant principals, administrators, school board members, interested public officials, and probably members of local business communities who wanted to be more involved in local educational policies.

A little digging into the content of some of Advanc-Ed's professional development work revealed a number of other players. A typical one is the Center For Reform of School Systems [3], a not for profit largely funded by the deep pockets of a longtime major advocate of school privatization, the Eli Broad Foundation. CRSS also appears to be deeply involved in the US Chamber of Commerce [4]'s push to “influence” the boards of education in cities across the country.
 

The Obama administration has allowed these unaccountable forces unprecedented access to federal levers of power. It was the Broad Foundation's consultants, along with the Walton Family and Gates and others, who actually wrote Race To The Top's voluminous guidelines, as well as many of the state level proposals that won the lion's share of funds under the program.
 

If you live in the metro Atlanta media market you've been bombarded with corporate media news coverage the last month or two of a looming crisis in the school system of suburban (and majority black) Dekalb County, pop. 700,000. The crisis is that the accrediting agency the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, part of Advanc-Ed, is threatening to withdraw accreditation for the county's entire school system.

You can pay careful attention to daily corporate media stories of the crisis for weeks on end without ever hearing what the specific accusations against the board members are. You hear that the board members just don't work together, that they fuss and fight, that they doze off in public meetings, that they may have hired relatives or mismanaged funds, but that they should just step down for the good of the children.

The reason news stories can't be any more specific about the accusations that threaten the accreditation of a large county school system is that Advanc-Ed's own report, based largely on anonymous sources, is just as vague, trivial and non-specific. Check it out here [5].
 

The accusations may be flimsy, but nothing has to be proven in a court of law. Their purpose is to justify provoking the useful crisis that disaster capitalism requires on the educational front to replace the board members and carry out policies that locally elected officials would not dare dream of.

In the last couple years, Georgia's notoriously corrupt legislature has passed laws allowing the state governor, much in the pattern of Michigan, to replace duly elected local school board members with his own appointees, and just yesterday, the governor did just that, suspending 6 of 9 school board members in the state's third largest school district after appointing a black Democrat flunky with no classroom bona fides whatsoever as county school superintendent.

Last year, the same breathless accusations about “not working together” bad manners and infighting were enough for the accreditation agency to threaten the city of Atlanta's public schools with loss of accreditation unless they went along with the wishes of its CEO, former BP executive Erroll Clark.

Clark also lacks any classroom experience, and once said in public that he learned all he needed to know about managing a large school district while on the board of BP. Atlanta's accreditation is still on probation. The year before, accreditation agencies sparked a year-long crisis by threatening the accreditation of another large majority black metro Atlanta county, Clayton.
 

It doesn't just happen in Georgia. The US Chamber of Commerce, the Broad Foundation and other privatizers, in league with the Obama administration are trying the same thing in Seattle [6], and elsewhere around the country. If you hear chatter on corporate media about your local elected school board being “dysfunctional,” you're probably looking at a tentacle of the same beast working your own backyard. Beware. It doesn't mean your current elected school board is a paragon of educational virtue. It does mean that they're probably in the cross-hairs, maybe because they've dragged their feet on implementing this or that pro-charter or pro-privatization measure, maybe just because when the privatization goodies flow to the connected they are on the wrong team.
 

Essentially we have allowed privatizers, and not for profit bodies funded directly and indirectly by the privatizers to embed themselves in, to actually become the “authorities” which “certify” our school sysems. Neat trick.

Our public Department of Education sanctions them, and they do what DOE is legally prohibited from doing ---- take the stick to school systems to force the adoption of high stakes testing, common core, and related “run the school like a business” strategies, and ultimately, privatization.
 

It's time to take the discussion out of shallow waters like whether school closings are “racist” or not [7], and call the real names and frames of what's happening and how it's made to happen. We won't rescue public education, we have no hope of stemming the wave of high-stakes testing and privatization without killing these corrupt private accreditation agencies, and substituting some transparent, fair and bottom-up system of accrediting schools and school systems.

Congress did not approve Race To The Top, and its attendant wave of teacher firings, school closings and the like. But it's federal policy and it's happening. Lots of Obama apologists excuse his supposed inability to get good things done with the claim that Republicans in the Congress and the media block him.

But the lack of a majority in Congress hasn't stopped him from doing some perfectly horrible things, like Race To The Top.

The role of privately owned, pro-privatization entities in school accreditation is an object lesson in how the most powerful office in the world can reach around Congress if it wants to, and enforce its will (and the will of the charter school sugar daddies) upon hundreds of local boards of education and hundreds of poor communities across the country. It's time to stand up and enforce some will of our own.

Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report. A longtime Chicagoan, he now lives in exile near Marietta GA, where he is a state committee member of the Georgia Green party and a partner in a tech firm. Contact him via this site's contact [8]page, or at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.

Sunday, Feb 24, 2013

Charter Schools and Disaster Capitalism

 Friedmanites have created a market-based system of charter schools in Chicago, forcing many public schools to close 

By Kenzo Shibata 

In public policy circles, crises are called “focusing events” — bringing to light a particular failing in government policy.  They require government agencies to switch rapidly into crisis mode to implement solutions. Creating the crisis itself is more novel.

The right-wing, free market vision of University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman informed the blueprint for the rapid privatization of municipal services throughout the world due in no small part to what author Naomi Klein calls “Disaster Capitalism.” Friedman wrote in his 1982 treatise Capitalism and Freedom, “When [a] crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around”

In Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine, she explains how immediately after Hurricane Katrina, Friedman used the decimation of New Orleans’ infrastructure to push for charter schools, a market-based policy preference of Friedman acolytes. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was the CEO of Chicago Public Schools at the time, and later described Hurricane Katrina as “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans.” Duncan is of the liberal wing of the free market project and a major supporter of charter schools.

There aren’t any hurricanes in the Midwest, so how can proponents of privatization like Mayor Rahm Emanuel sell off schools to the highest bidder?

They create a crisis. 

Each year, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) projects a billion dollar deficit. The announcement grabs headlines and the Board of Education announces that they must make serious cuts. These cutbacks are never at the top. The Board cuts education programs, after-school activities, and forces more classroom costs onto its employees.

School closings are announced tangentially to the deficit announcement. In years past, the manufactured budget crisis was used as an excuse to lay off teachers. People were fired, class sizes swelled to epic proportions and — after the budget was reconciled – CPS miraculously found a surplus. This past year’s final audited budget showed a surplus of $344 million.

The Chicago Board of Education announced that it must close “underutilized” schools and consolidate students into “receiving schools” to save the district from the projected deficit. The Board argues that some schools simply do not enroll enough students to stay open. A local teacher and parent published ten questions to Chicago Public Schools regarding how much can actually be saved by closing these schools. The Board’s responses revolved around the idea that previous administrations have let the problem get so bad they must act fast and close these schools or else the district will fall over a fiscal cliff – sorry wrong manufactured crisis – but you get the idea. 

So now we have a crisis. Schools closed and students shifted around the city. Many of them may have to cross gang territories to get to their receiving schools. School violence spikes. As Rahm Emanuel said in 2008, “You never want a good crisis to go to waste.” 

If only there were a solution “lying around” to attach to this crisis. 

At the end of 2012, the Chicago Board of Education approved additional charter schools. The Walton Family Foundation provided seed money for some of these schools. Charter school proliferation can take part of the blame for schools being “underutilized,” as they draw students from other schools, but the Board’s metric for calculating utilization is also suspect.

Charter schools become the “solution” lying around for parents who want to keep their students close to home in a school that will not be closed the following year. Many charter schools have been infused with additional resources, making their facilities look shiny and new. 

Parents, through the market-based “choice” system (which is revered by Friedmanites) may enroll their children in these new schools. That is unless their children have special needs, are learning English, or are simply bad at taking tests. Reuters recently published a report that showed how charter schools “cream” students to get the kids they want.

Charter schools that invest heavily in public relations campaigns and receive positive press, but when stacked against magnet schools, which are public schools (staffed by union teachers) with barriers to access, they do not outperform.

Students with special needs, limited English proficiency, or without a regular place to call home are forced to fight over limited resources in the public schools.

This scene is playing out at school closing hearings held by CPS, underwritten by the Walton Family Foundation. School communities are forced to make the case for keeping their schools open. At a recent meeting on Chicago’s north side, schools that take in homeless students from the blighted Uptown community were pitted against schools with programs that address special needs. Some observers likened the scene to the young adult novel-turned filmThe Hunger Games where children are forced to fight to the death for the amusement of the 1%.

In real-life, our rulers don’t bother to stick around and watch the fruits of their policy. But they’re more than happy to benefit. The Chicago elites’ charter schools are self-perpetuating gifts. The recent UNO Charter School Scandal shows how people connected to charters can dole out contracts to friends and family. The UNO network was the recent recipient of $98 million in state aid to build more schools. 

The head of UNO, Juan Rangel was co-chair of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s election campaign. Members of Rangel’s organization are now in the business of installing Illinois state representatives, the very people who hold the purse strings of these state grants. This is the face of the new municipal political machine.

Charter operators push back on any efforts of their staffs to unionize. When public schools close and charters open, teachers unions become weaker. Teachers unions are democratic institutions with ties to the communities they serve.  When the public is disempowered, the small patronage army of the mayor becomes more entrenched.
The sale of public schools to charter operators cannot be done slowly. The fast pace of crisis management obscures the graft from the public. UNO specifically needs to operate under these crisis management conditions.

UNO operates under $67,800,000 in outstanding debt. The $98 million state gift cannot be used to pay back this debt because it has been earmarked for capital projects, namely building or improving schools.  The only way to keep the UNO patronage train rolling is by continuously expanding and opening schools, with construction contractors serving as potential allies come election time.

The free-market think tank American Enterprise Institute recently praised this particular brand of charter school. The use of patronage in government hiring was a major argument Friedmanites used for privatizing public services. 

AEI praises UNO’s “assimilationist” philosophy of teaching immigrant youth so perhaps AEI finds more merit in diluting non-European cultures than in ending patronage. I’m not exactly sure where that fits into the free market orthodoxy, but then again the contradictions in the philosophy far from end there.

Friedmanites often criticize redistributive policies as “picking winners and losers.” From the manufactured schools crisis to the market-based solution of charter schools, it appears that the “free market” model picks winners and losers; the winners being the politically connected and the losers being the rest of us.