Are you prey to a "choice" stealth campaign

Think public-school teachers are bad and vouchers are good? You may be prey to a well-funded stealth campaign.

In June 1995, the economist Milton Friedman wrote an article for the Washington Post promoting the use of public education funds for private schools as a way to transfer the nation’s public school systems to the private sector. “Vouchers,” he wrote, “are not an end in themselves; they are a means to make a transition from a government to a market system.” The article was republished by “free market” think tanks, including the Cato Institute and the Hoover Institution, with the title “Public Schools: Make Them Private.”

While Friedman has promoted vouchers for decades, most famously in his masterwork Free to Choose, the story of how public funds are actually being transferred to private, often religious, schools is a study in the ability of a few wealthy families, along with a network of right-wing think tanks, to create one of the most successful “astroturf” campaigns money could buy. Rather than openly championing dismantling the public school system, they promote bringing market incentives and competition into education as a way to fix failing schools, particularly in low-income Black and Latino communities.

Even before the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United ruling deregulated campaign finance and unleashed millions in political donations, concentrated wealth has played a role in politics. Now in the limelight for its attacks on unions and the exposure of 800 model bills and documents, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has produced model bills favorable to its corporate and right-wing funders behind closed doors for decades (as In These Times uncovered in 2011)– including school vouchers and tax credit bills.

This concentrated wealth is reaching into America's classrooms state by state, promoting the transfer of public funds to private education through vouchers that allow parents to pay for tuition at private schools with public money. Promoting “school choice” through privately run charter schools doesn’t go far enough for these billionaires. Today, “private school choice” programs, as vouchers are called in the annual report of the Alliance for School Choice, are in place in 13 states and the District of Columbia. In 2011, a year when states across the nation slashed their education budgets, 41 states introduced 145 pieces of private school choice legislation.

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Where the polls stand - 50 days to go

With just 50 days to go until the election, the race for the Presidency appears to have settled into somewhat of a constant, but small lead for the President.

According to Real Clear Politics, the President has a 46 electoral college vote lead, with 110 in toss-up

In Ohio, the President has opened up an average lead of 4.2%

NYT polling analysts at 538 have the President coming down off his convention high and settled into a 305-232 electoral college vote lead

Recent polling in Ohio suggests the President is a 72.1% favorite to win the state

The next major domestic campaign events will be the debates. The Presidential debates take place on October 3rd, October 16th, and October 22nd, with the Vice Presidential debate happening on October 11th.

A narrative path forward for teachers

One of the best responses to the corporate education reformers we've read in a long time.

In every country in the world, poverty impedes educational success. Our biggest education problem is that more of our kids are in poverty than any other developed nation. When America's public school teachers get kids who are well-fed and healthy and live in stable homes with parents who have good jobs, those kids do better in school than any other children in the world.

But a group of people who do not teach (or taught for a short while and not very well) have decided to blame teachers - teachers! - for all the problems in our country. They say that "choice" will save our schools, but the "choice" they offer is between underfunded, crumbling public schools and corporatized, autocratic charter schools that they admit they will never serve all children. These schools cherry-pick their students and then falsely claim they have the secret for success. Their inability to educate all students proves that public schools are not the problem - poverty is. 

Why do these people sell this snake oil? Three reasons:

1) Many of them are looking to make money - a lot of money - off of education. They want to do to our schools what they did to our military, turning them into a bunch of Haliburton Highs.

2) They want to finally and completely break the unions. Once the teachers fall, it's all over for the middle class.

3) They need a scapegoat. Teachers didn't create these problems: the corporate titans of Wall Street did. These plutocrats are now paying a gang of carnival barkers a big bunch of money to blame teachers - teachers! - for the problems they themselves made.

Two Visions

Education historian Diane Ravitch, writing about the Chicago teachers strike, but has lots of relevance across the board

The Chicago Teachers Union has a different vision: it wants smaller classes, more social workers, air-conditioning in the sweltering buildings where summer school is conducted, and a full curriculum, with teachers of arts and foreign languages in every school. Some schools in Chicago have more than forty students in a class, even in kindergarten. There are 160 schools without libraries; more than 40 percent have no teachers of the arts.

What do the teachers want? The main sticking point is the seemingly arcane issue of teacher evaluations. The mayor wants student test scores to count heavily in determining whether a teacher is good (and gets a bonus) or bad (and is fired). The union points to research showing that test-based evaluation is inaccurate and unfair. Chicago is a city of intensely segregated public schools and high levels of youth violence. Teachers know that test scores are influenced not only by their instruction but by what happens outside the classroom.

The strike has national significance because it concerns policies endorsed by the current administration; it also raises issues found all over the country. Not only in Chicago but in other cities, teachers insist that their students need smaller classes and a balanced curriculum. Reformers want more privately-managed charter schools, even though they typically get the same results as public schools. Charter schools are a favorite of the right because almost 90 percent of them are non-union. Teachers want job protection so that they will not be fired for capricious reasons and have academic freedom to teach controversial issues and books. Reformers want to strip teachers of any job protections.

Encounrage you to read the whole piece, here.

Invest in Public Education

Think Tank, Policy Matters Ohio, recently released a report titled "State of Working Ohio 2012. The Report has many interesting findings, but we wanted to parse out 2 of the major ones, especially as it related to education and working people.

Education pays, but Ohio isn’t passing that test. Over the past generation Ohioans have dramatically increased their education levels. This is a good thing, because compensation at lower education levels is shrinking. But other states are investing much more and reaping bigger rewards. And in the most recent state budget, we cut both K-12 and universities, keeping our students back.

Instead we should invest in education, from pre-K through college and beyond.

The graph below highlights this findings and recommendation

This becomes especially important, given the news we reported on just a few days ago, namely, the new school year bringing yet more cuts. This short-sighted policy by the Governor was highlighted by an editorial in the Plain Dealer

Ohio's economic prospects depend on a well-educated work force -- hard to achieve when budget cuts force schools to lay off teachers and shorten the school day.
[…]
Gov. John Kasich, whose administration is working on a long-delayed revamp of the state's school-funding formula, should make sure his approach offers extra money and other incentives to superintendents and school boards willing to create efficiencies through radical restructuring, as in Cleveland, or via mergers or the sharing of services or personnel with other districts.

Which brings us to the second finding and recommendation that the Policy Matters report includes

Unions give workers leverage and a voice. Aggressive employer anti-union practices and public policy that discourages organizing have taken their toll. As unions have eroded, so have worker wages and benefits and family well being. States with the lowest levels of unionization have the worst wages, states that combine union friendliness and education investments do best. Ohio voters spoke loud and clear last year in retaining collective bargaining rights for public sector workers.

Ohio should retain and expand policies that help workers organize and preserve a collective voice.

The differences are quite stark

Destroying collective bargaining was another misguided policy choice made by the Governor. Unlike his radical defunding of education however, voters were able to overturn and repeal his union busting efforts.

The evidence is in abundance - we need to strengthen the middle class by investing in public education, the results will lead to a strong more vibrant Ohio.

Many costs to attendance investigation

The farce that has become the investigation into the school attendance erasures gained a price tag yesterday

Ohio’s Auditor said on Monday that his staff has spent 7,000 hours and more than $140,000 on an investigating into whether Columbus City Schools officials manipulated attendance records.

That price tag is certain to climb as it became obvious that the investigation has barely begun

Ohio Auditor Dave Yost was hoping to wrap up his investigation into attendance rigging at schools statewide well before the November elections.

It looks like that won’t happen.

Many Ohioans will be asked to vote on school levies this fall, and schools worry that uncertainty surrounding accusations of falsified attendance data may hurt their chances at the polls. But state Auditor Yost says he may not complete his investigation until the new year.

You'll notice from the articles and TV pieces we have linked to here, words like "rigging" and "scandal" being thrown around, despite any widespread evidence to date that anything like that has happened. This is a problem when one considers the number of school that are a potential target of the Auditors investigation

Ohio officials looking into potential tampering with school attendance numbers are focusing on 100 schools around the state.

The state auditor’s office tells The Dayton Daily News that investigators are concentrating on schools that have raised concerns based on data that shows they had a high number of student withdrawals.

A great many of those schools are going to be found totally innocent of any kinds of untoward data manipulation, and as the Fordham Foundation points out, even the innocent are being harmed.

Less than one month ago...

Releasing Ohio’s school report cards this month simply wouldn’t be fair, the state’s education leaders have decided.

They'll vote on changing that decision today...

Releasing delayed state report cards on school progress won't hamper an investigation into potential tampering with school attendance numbers, Ohio's state auditor told education leaders Monday.

Time the knee-jerk decision making ended, and some calm contemplation began.