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Thursday, November 15, 2018

Nellie Bowles: In America’s Schools, the Rich Get Teachers, the Poor Get Computers | Diane Ravitch's blog

Nellie Bowles: In America’s Schools, the Rich Get Teachers, the Poor Get Computers | Diane Ravitch's blog

Nellie Bowles: In America’s Schools, the Rich Get Teachers, the Poor Get Computers



This is a terrific article by Nellie Bowles in the New York Times about the “digital divide.” Amazing that the newspaper of record printed three articles on the same day by the same author, all warning us about the dangers of screen addiction. Remember when public officials worried that rich kids had more access to technology than poor kids? Now, it turns out that students in affluent schools get small classes and experienced teachers, while kids in underfunded schools get technology. Not what was expected.
The parents in Overland Park, Kan., were fed up. They wanted their children off screens, but they needed strength in numbers. First, because no one wants their kid to be the lone weird one without a phone. And second, because taking the phone away from a middle schooler is actually very, very tough.
“We start the meetings by saying, ‘This is hard, we’re in a new frontier, but who is going to help us?’” said Krista Boan, who is leading a Kansas City-based program called START, which stands for Stand Together And Rethink Technology. “We can’t call our moms about this one.”
For the last six months, at night in school libraries across Overland Park, a suburb of Kansas City, Mo., about 150 parents have been meeting to talk about one thing: how to get their children off screens.
It wasn’t long ago that the worry was that rich students would have access to the internet earlier, gaining tech skills and creating Continue reading: Nellie Bowles: In America’s Schools, the Rich Get Teachers, the Poor Get Computers | Diane Ravitch's blog

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IPS Community Coalition victory is proof that ordinary citizens can defeat big money - Network For Public Education

IPS Community Coalition victory is proof that ordinary citizens can defeat big money - Network For Public Education

IPS Community Coalition victory is proof that ordinary citizens can defeat big money



Sending a clear message that the community is fed up with corporate reform, voters in Indianapolis ousted two incumbents on the Indianapolis Public School (IPS) Board, replacing them with opponents of the district’s corporate reform agenda.
First-time candidates Taria Slack and Susan Collins were backed by the IPS Community Coalition (the Indianapolis AROS Chapter) and the local teachers union and ran against incumbents backed by Stand for Children and the Mind Trust, a corporate reform institute. Slack and Collins are vowing to pressure the IPS administration to improve transparency, genuine community collaboration and engagement, and hold the administration accountable.
Indianapolis schools have been under persistent attack by corporate reformers over the past decade, with increasing numbers of charters and public school closings. The district—under the tutelage of the Mind Trust—has also created so-called “Innovation Schools,” which are IPS schools that are handed over to a charter management organization. Innovation Schools have complete autonomy, a school board that is not elected by the public, and receive public funds. Additionally, this structure allows charters under the IPS umbrella to take advantage of district-provided services such as transportation and special education services at no cost.
This victory is proof that ordinary citizens can defeat big money. People power trumps money power. IPS Community Coalition is organized, prepared, and ready to reclaim our schools.
IPS Community Coalition victory is proof that ordinary citizens can defeat big money - Network For Public Education

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Bruce Baker’s New Book on School Finance Develops a Scathing Critique of Charter School Expansion | janresseger

Bruce Baker’s New Book on School Finance Develops a Scathing Critique of Charter School Expansion | janresseger

Bruce Baker’s New Book on School Finance Develops a Scathing Critique of Charter School Expansion
Rutgers University school finance professor, Bruce Baker’s new book, Educational Inequality and School Finance: Why Money Matters for America’s Students, covers the basics—how school finance formulas are supposed to work to ensure that funding for schools is adequate, equitable, and stable.
Baker also carefully refutes some persistent myths—Eric Hanushek’s claim that money doesn’t really make a difference when it comes to raising student achievement, for example, and the contention that public schools’ expenditures have skyrocketed over the decades while achievement as measured by test scores has remained flat.
Baker does an excellent job of demonstrating that far more will be needed for our society appropriately to support school districts segregated not only by race, but also by poverty. The final sections of the book are a little technical. They explain the construction of a more equitable system that would drive enough funding to come closer to what is really needed in school districts serving concentrations of children in poverty.
Baker’s book is especially important for updating a discussion of basic school finance theory to account for today’s realities.  He shows, for example, how the Great Recession undermined adequate and equitable funding of public schools despite that states had formulas in place that were supposed to have protected children and their teachers: “The sharp economic downturn following the collapse of the housing market in 2007-08, and persisting through about 2011, provided state and federal elected officials a pulpit from which to argue that our public school systems must learn how to do more with less… Meanwhile, governors on both sides of the aisle, facing tight budgets and the end of federal aid that had been distributed to temporarily plug state budget holes, ramped up their rhetoric for even deeper cuts to education spending… Notably, the attack on public school funding was driven largely by preferences for conservative tax policies at a time when state budgets experienced unprecedented drops in income and sales tax revenue.” (p. 4)
And for the first time in a school finance book, Baker explores the impact of two decades of Continue reading: Bruce Baker’s New Book on School Finance Develops a Scathing Critique of Charter School Expansion | janresseger
Educational Inequality and School Finance: Why Money Matters for America's Students: Bruce D. Baker: 9781682532423: Amazon.com: Books - https://www.amazon.com/Educational-Inequality-School-Finance-Americas/dp/1682532429


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Idaho Teachers/Staff Dressed as Border Wall and Mexicans Reinstated, Principal Remains Suspended | deutsch29

Idaho Teachers/Staff Dressed as Border Wall and Mexicans Reinstated, Principal Remains Suspended | deutsch29

Idaho Teachers/Staff Dressed as Border Wall and Mexicans Reinstated, Principal Remains Suspended
The 14 Middleton (Idaho) teachers and staff who were placed on paid leave after dressing as the border wall and Mexicans on Halloween purportedly for an after-school “team building exercise” have been released to return to their jobs.
However, the school’s principal remains under investigation.
Middleton Schools superintendent John Middleton offered the following November 07, 2018, press release.
Middleton School District Release
November 7, 2018
Dear Parents, Staff and Community,
The Middleton School District’s internal investigation with teachers and elementary aides who were on administrative leave on November 5th and 6th is complete. Our focus is now one of healing with an opportunity for all of us to grow together as a community. Today we began the re-entry process with training on cultural sensitivity and correspondence with parents, the staff and community. The entire Middleton School District staff is also receiving similar cultural sensitivity training today.
It is important to note that after the district’s review, it has been validated that there is nothing more than love and commitment in the hearts of these teachers and aides. The educators involved chose the profession to work with and educate ALL students and we are confident in their abilities to provide an effective learning environment for every student in the building. It is also noteworthy that the few threats that were made via telephone or on social media were made from out of town and out of state. Police have dealt with these swiftly and none were found to be credible.
We will welcome our teachers and aides back into their classrooms in the Continue reading: Idaho Teachers/Staff Dressed as Border Wall and Mexicans Reinstated, Principal Remains Suspended | deutsch29

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CURMUDGUCATION: Anti-Test, Pro-Computer

CURMUDGUCATION: Anti-Test, Pro-Computer

Anti-Test, Pro-Computer


 Chalkbeat today notes the growing trend of reformster discontent with the Big Standardized Test, a thread which apparently emerged at the latest soiree thrown by the Center for Reinventing Public Education, a group that has pushed ed reform for years.

But intentionally or not, Matt Barnum  also captured part of what is driving this shift.

Some members of the Thinky Tank set (with Jay Greene in the forefront) have been noticing that test results don't seem to really mean anything. But there's another reform group that is sour on testing:

The way we’re doing [assessment] now — that is so time-, age-, grade-based — is really constraining for those innovators that are developing models that will support all kids.

That quote comes from Susan Patrick of The International Association for K-12 Online Learning  (iNACOL), an organization whose bread and butter is tech based education, and which has thrown itself whole-heartedly behind Competency Based Education and Personalized [sic] Learning. Their opposition to the BS Test is signaled by Patrick's quote. If they are going to sell a system that lets students learn whatever whenever at whatever speed they wish, they need to remove the issue if a giant standardized test at the end f the ear.


 In other words, the old approach to ed reform is cramping the style of reform 2.0. The 2.0 version is pointed firmly at the unbundling of education so that stdents can acquire their competencies and proficiencies and badges wherever and whenever and from whomever. This shift has the double advantage of a sort of ju-jitsu move-- people who are busy running away from the BS Test can be ushered straight into the Competency Based Proficiency Personalized tent. Reform 1.0 has become a marketing tool for Reform 2.0

It's worth noting that even some of the reformsters themselves haven't caught on yet. The repeated complaints about testing at the event drew this bemused quote from Sandy Kress, one of the creators of No Child Left Behind and therefor one of the fathers of the test-centered education Continue reading: CURMUDGUCATION: Anti-Test, Pro-Computer




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Wednesday, November 14, 2018

School shootings have fueled a $2.7 billion school safety industry. What makes kids safer? - Washington Post

School shootings have fueled a $2.7 billion school safety industry. What makes kids safer? - Washington Post

Armored school doors, bulletproof whiteboards and secret snipers

Billions are being spent to protect children from school shootings.

Does any of it work?

Image result for Armored school doors, bulletproof whiteboards and secret snipers Billions are being spent to protect children from school shootings.
he expo had finally begun, and now hundreds of school administrators streamed into a sprawling, chandeliered ballroom where entrepreneurs awaited, each eager to explain why their product, above all others, was the one worth buying.
Waiters in white button-downs poured glasses of chardonnay and served meatballs wrapped with bacon. In one corner, guests posed with colorful boas and silly hats at a photo booth as a band played Jimmy Buffett covers to the rhythm of a steel drum. For a moment, the festive summer scene, in a hotel 10 miles from Walt Disney World, masked what had brought them all there.
This was the thriving business of campus safety, an industry fueled by an overwhelmingly American form of violence: school shootings.
At one booth, two gray-haired men were selling a 300-pound ballistic whiteboard — adorned with adorable animal illustrations and pocked with five bullet holes — that cost more than $2,900.
Image result for Armored school doors, bulletproof whiteboards school shootings.
“What we want to do is just to give the kids, the teachers, a chance,” one of them said.
“So they can buy a few minutes,” the other added.
Elsewhere at the July conference, vendors peddled tourniquets and pepper-ball guns, facial-recognition software and a security proposal that would turn former Special Operations officers into undercover teachers. Threaded into every pitch, just five months after a Parkland, Fla., massacre, was the implication that their product or service would make students safer — that, if purchased, it might save a life.
What few of the salespeople could offer, however, was proof.
Although school security has grown into a $2.7 billion market — an estimate that does not account for the billions more spent on armed campus police officers — little research has been done on which safety measures do and do not protect students from gun violence. Earlier this fall, The Washington Post sent surveys to every school in its database that had endured a shooting of some kind since the 2012 killings of 20 first-graders in Newtown, Conn., which prompted a surge of security spending by districts across the country. Continue reading: School shootings have fueled a $2.7 billion school safety industry. What makes kids safer? - Washington Post

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Is America’s Romance with Charter Schools Fading Despite Gobs of Political Money from Its Promoters? | janresseger

Is America’s Romance with Charter Schools Fading Despite Gobs of Political Money from Its Promoters? | janresseger

Is America’s Romance with Charter Schools Fading Despite Gobs of Political Money from Its Promoters?
Last week’s election produced a couple of significant indicators that the public may be growing weary of charter schools.  At the same time the public seems increasingly aware that adequately funded public schools may be a better way to help the children our society has left behind.  This is despite an enormous political investment by wealthy investors in the future of the charter school movement.
Consider the race for California Superintendent of Public Instruction. Last month for The Intercept, Rachel M. Cohen explained what this highly contentious, non-partisan race between charter proponent Marshall Tuck and his opponent Tony Thurmond has really been all about: “The California charter school lobby is testing its influence in the race for Superintendent of Public Instruction, turning an election for a somewhat obscure statewide position into a notably expensive battle.  More than $50 million has flown into the contest between two Democrats for a nonpartisan office with little statutory power.  For perspective, this is more money raised than in any U.S. House race this cycle and most Senate races, not to mention every other race in California, save for the governor’s. The race, largely understood as a proxy war for the future of California charter schools, is the second attempt by the state’s charter school lobby to demonstrate its influence…. The candidates, Marshall Tuck and Tony Thurmond, both insist that the race is about far more than charters, which currently enroll 10 percent of the state’s 6.2 million public school students, though they admit they hold different visions for the publicly funded, privately managed schools. That’s something their funders also acutely recognize.”
On election night, Marshall Tuck, the former president of Green Dot Charters and an advocate for expanding California’s already huge charter sector, was ahead by 86,000 votes. But as mail-in and absentee ballot have been counted, Thurmond has progressively caught up. By Saturday night, EdSource reported, Marshall Tuck was still ahead by 38,251 out of 6,934,591 votes counted by that time. However, by yesterday morning, the California Secretary of State was reporting Tony Thurmond had pulled ahead with a 3,500 vote lead. By last evening, each candidate had cornered roughly 50 percent of the vote, with a tiny 1,808 vote margin for Continue reading: Is America’s Romance with Charter Schools Fading Despite Gobs of Political Money from Its Promoters? | janresseger

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Tuesday, November 13, 2018

Ignore the charter school think-tank crowd - CommonWealth Magazine

Ignore the charter school think-tank crowd - CommonWealth Magazine

Ignore the charter school think-tank crowd

We don’t need and can't afford charter school expansion in New Bedford


YOU ARE AN EDUCATION RESEARCHER sent to discover best practices in urban schools so that you can replicate them to create results for more kids—kids who you believe are trapped in mediocre schools. You look at three exemplar schools to scale up:
School A has 336 students and rates in the state’s 85th accountability percentile, a measure now used to aggregate a school’s performance on MCAS relative to other schools in the state. This school made 95 percent improvement toward its own goals, such as increasing the percentage of students who score advanced or proficient on statewide exams, or improving attendance rates. Remarkably, 46 percent of this school’s students have a first language other than English, and 75 percent are considered economically disadvantaged. The school has been named a School of Recognition by the state, among only 50 others.
School B has 730 students and rates in the state’s 59th accountability percentile and made 83 percent improvement toward its targets. The school is home to specialized classrooms designed to serve students with severe behavioral and developmental delays, and 27 percent of the school’s students have disabilities, 44 percent are economically disadvantaged, and 21 percent have a first language other than English.
School C has 413 students and rates in the state’s 38th accountability percentile and made 47 percent improvement toward its targets. At the school, 23 percent of the students have a first language other than English, and 58 percent come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds.
If you had to make the call on which school to expand by 300 percent – to double- or triple-down on – I suspect you would favor schools A and B, New Bedford district public schools Congdon and Pulaski, respectively, over School C, Alma del Mar Charter School, the school actually proposing such an extraordinary expansion.
The New Bedford district public schools have a plethora of higher performing schools. Not just Pulaski and Congdon, but 10 of New Bedford’s elementary schools finished higher in accountability ranking than Alma del Mar, more than half of the city’s primary schools. On improvement toward targets, 18 of the district’s 23 schools exceed Alma’s 47 percent improvement rate. And among those performing worse than Alma? The city’s other two charters: Global Learning and City on a Hill. The district educates a higher percentage of English language learners, students with disabilities, and economically disadvantaged students and has schools soaring past Alma nonetheless.
Why siphon from the most successful of New Bedford’s schools, which outperform charters with Continue reading: Ignore the charter school think-tank crowd - CommonWealth Magazine


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More on the Public Purpose of Our Public Schools and the Role of Public Governance | janresseger

More on the Public Purpose of Our Public Schools and the Role of Public Governance | janresseger

More on the Public Purpose of Our Public Schools and the Role of Public Governance
There has recently been a debate among guest writers in Valerie Strauss’s “Answer Sheet” column in the Washington Post. The Network for Public Education’s  Carol Burris and Diane Ravitch published a defense of public governance of public schools, a column which critiqued a new report from the Learning Policy Institute.  The Learning Policy Institute’s Linda Darling-Hammond responded with a defense of the Learning Policy Institute’s report, which defends school choice including privately governed and operated charter schools. Finally Diane Ravitch and Carol Burris responded to Darling-Hammond’s response. This blog weighed in here last week.
As it happens, Stanford University emeritus professor of education, David Labaree enhances this conversation with a new column on the public purpose of public education at Phi Delta Kappan: “We Americans tend to talk about public schooling as though we know what that term means.  But in the complex educational landscape of the 21st century… it’s becoming less and less obvious….”
A spoiler: There is no equivocation in Labaree’s analysis.  He is a strong supporter of public education, and he worries that by prizing the personal and individualistic benefit of education, our society may have lost sight of our schools’ public purpose: “A public good is one that benefits all members of the community, whether or not they contribute to its upkeep or make use of it personally.  In contrast, private goods benefit individuals, serving only those people who take advantage of them. Thus, schooling is a public good to the extent that it helps everyone (including people who don’t have children in school). And schooling is a private good to the extent that it provides individuals with knowledge, skills, and credentials they can use to distinguish themselves from other people and get ahead in life.”
Labaree traces the history of public education through the 19th and early 20th centuries, but More on the Public Purpose of Our Public Schools and the Role of Public Governance | janresseger
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Big Education Ape: Linda Darling-Hammond vs. Linda-Darling Hammond – How a Once Great Educator Got Lost Among the Corporate Stooges | gadflyonthewallblog - http://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2018/11/linda-darling-hammond-vs-linda-darling.html

janresseger  - https://wp.me/3JgEc


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Monday, November 12, 2018

Linda Darling-Hammond vs. Linda-Darling Hammond – How a Once Great Educator Got Lost Among the Corporate Stooges | gadflyonthewallblog

Linda Darling-Hammond vs. Linda-Darling Hammond – How a Once Great Educator Got Lost Among the Corporate Stooges | gadflyonthewallblog

Linda Darling-Hammond vs. Linda-Darling Hammond – How a Once Great Educator Got Lost Among the Corporate Stooges

Linda Darling-Hammond is one of my education heroes.
Perhaps that’s why her recent article in the Washington Post hurts so much.
In it, she and her think tank buddies slam education advocates Diane Ravitch and Carrol Burris for worrying about who governs schools – as if governance had nothing to do with quality education for children.
I’d expect something like that from Bill Gates.
But not Hammond!

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She’s not a know-nothing privatization flunky. She’s not a billionaire who thinks hording a bunch of money makes him an authority on every kind of human endeavor.
She’s a bona fide expert on teacher preparation and equity.
She founded the Center for Opportunity Policy in Education at Stanford University, where she is professor emeritus.
And she was the head of Barrack Obama’s education policy working group in 2008 when he was running for President.
In fact, she was the reasons many educators thought Obama was going to be a breath of fresh air for our schools and students. Everyone thought she was a lock for Education Secretary should Hope and Change win the day. But when he won, he Continue reading: Linda Darling-Hammond vs. Linda-Darling Hammond – How a Once Great Educator Got Lost Among the Corporate Stooges | gadflyonthewallblog



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Billionaires, Not Voters, Are Deciding Elections | PopularResistance.Org

Billionaires, Not Voters, Are Deciding Elections | PopularResistance.Org

BILLIONAIRES, NOT VOTERS, ARE DECIDING ELECTIONS


The recent midterm elections offered an opportunity for America’s moneyed elites to spend their ridiculous wealth on a catalog of their favorite causes and candidates. We are locked in a vicious cycle, where billionaires continue to amass wealth due to policies their influence has bought, which in turn enrich them with even more resources with which to shift the American polity in their favor.
Part of the problem is that billionaires’ control over our democracy is largely invisible. As a recent study by The Guardian showed, high-profile wealthy elites like Warren Buffett or Bill Gates are anomalies. To that point, “[M]ost of the wealthiest US billionaires have made substantial financial contributions—amounting to hundreds of thousands of reported dollars annually, in addition to any undisclosed ‘dark money’ contributions—to conservative Republican candidates and officials who favor the very unpopular step of cutting rather than expanding social security benefits,” write the report’s authors. “Yet, over the 10-year period we have studied, 97% of the wealthiest billionaires have said nothing at all about social security policy.”

The midterm races in California saw several examples of the insidious ways in which the billionaire class made its mark on democracy, most notably in the defeat of Proposition 10, the state ordinance that would have expanded local governments’ jurisdiction over rent control. Several years ago, Wall Street hedge fund managers began scooping up rental properties and foreclosed homes in Los Angeles. According to journalist David Dayen, “Hedge funds, private equity firms and the biggest banks have raised massive amounts of capital to buy distressed or foreclosed single-family homes, often in bulk, at bargain prices.” He added, “It’s the next Wall Street gold rush, with all the warning signs of a renewed speculative bubble.”
So it should have come as no surprise that those same firms spent millions to protect their investments from returning lower profits in their fight against Prop 10. Sadly, Californians bought the corporate propaganda hook, line and sinker, and voted it down by a whopping 61.7 percent, saying “no” to rent control. (Incidentally, the opposition to rent control was also bizarrely funded in part by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Association.)
Also in California, billionaires bankrolled the campaign of Marshall Tuck, a corporate candidate for school superintendent who strongly supports the privatization of schools. The race between Tuck and his union-backed rival, Tony Thurmond, broke records for the millions of dollars that the candidates raised and the tens of millions that flowed in from outside groups—a shocking Continue reading: Billionaires, Not Voters, Are Deciding Elections | PopularResistance.Org



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New Governors Pritzker and Newsom Set Up For Their ReadyNation Gold Rush – Wrench in the Gears

New Governors Pritzker and Newsom Set Up For Their ReadyNation Gold Rush – Wrench in the Gears
New Governors Pritzker and Newsom Set Up For Their ReadyNation Gold Rush
This past week will go down as an auspicious one for social impact investors and a foreboding one for the targets of their interventions: toddlers, job seekers, the unhoused, and those with mental illness. On November 1, 2018 corporate executives, military officers, athletes, and faith leaders converged on New York City to discuss the impending transformation of early childhood into a global investment market. Five days later JB Pritzker became the Democratic governor of Illinois, and former San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom became the Democratic governor of California.
JB Pritzker: Impact Investor As Governor
JB Pritkzer, a billionaire heir to the Hyatt family fortune and backer of the first two early childhood social impact bonds in the US, was not on the recent ReadyNation conference program in New York City as he was in the final push of his campaign to oust Republican Bruce Rauner from the Governorship of Illinois. For over a decade, Pritzker’s Children’s Initiative has financed the work of ReadyNation’s Robert Dugger and University of Chicago Economist James Heckman.
Pritzker money paid for the creation of the Heckman Equation, a tool kit promising a 7-10% annual rate of return to investors in early childhood education, up to 13% if health factors were built into the intervention. The tool kit targets very young children ages 0 to 3, identifying “success” metrics for character training, which were felt to have more potential for “growth” than cognitive achievement or IQ. Heckman and a cadre of researchers have since plowed considerable resources into devising tools, many digital, that supposedly measure social-emotional competencies, particularly Big Five “OCEAN” character traits: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.
Pritzker and Heckman made the rounds, promoting outcomes-based pre-k impact investing to community foundations and institutional investors for quite a few years. In October the complicit NEA (National Education Association) spoke positively of Pritzker’s 5-point, two-generation early childhood education plan, which would allocate $95 million for pre-k expansion in the first year alone. The Annie E. Casey Foundation of Baltimore has been advancing this “two-generation” approach, which hinges on the adoption of vastly expanded integrated data systems.
Interoperable data is a priority for impact investors, because they expect to track impact metrics across multiple interventions to claim “credit” for ALL possible outcomes so they can extract as much profit as possible. It is fitting that the Casey Foundation would be a prominent voice advancing data-interoperability given their funding and organizational leadership are tied Continue reading: New Governors Pritzker and Newsom Set Up For Their ReadyNation Gold Rush – Wrench in the Gears
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Impossible to Regulate Deregulated Charter Schools | Dissident Voice

Impossible to Regulate Deregulated Charter Schools | Dissident Voice

Impossible to Regulate Deregulated Charter Schools

Regulations have to do with what is allowed and what is not allowed. They establish what an individual, organization, or business can or cannot do. Regulations shape behaviors, actions, conduct, aims, and outcomes.
Regulations are often used in self-serving ways by different factions of the rich to benefit themselves while disadvantaging other wealthy competitors. Those with the most political-economic power hold sway and fashion regulations as they alone see fit. As in other spheres of capitalist life, “might makes right.” Power, not reason or principles, dominates affairs. The main point is that regulations, like laws and policies, are always political. They have a class character to them. Regulations are not neutral or above class interests because we do not live in a classless society.
The main question is who is creating or eliminating regulations and for what aims? The key issue is not whether regulations are “good” or “bad”, per se, or how many or how few there are, but which one of the two major classes in society do they serve? Regulations are a tool of class warfare. There is a big difference, for example, between capital-centered regulations verses human-centered regulations. The former serve the wealthy few who dominate society while the latter serve the common good.

Regulations and regulators have, of course, frequently failed to block many “bad behaviors” and problems. Regulation does not always work. Regulation does not automatically guarantee quality or progress. A major example of the failure of regulations and regulators is the Wall Street engineered economic crash of 2008 that has left most economies in awful shape for the last 10 years—with no real and sustainable improvement in sight. Indeed, it appears that there is no returning to even substandard pre-2008 economic levels. Multiple regulatory agencies that have been around for decades did not prevent this still-unfolding economic catastrophe that the mainstream media keeps trying to downplay.
In today’s context, having no regulations (deregulation) guarantees chaos, anarchy, and violence—key features of the “free market.” A rules-free environment ensures that only the “strongest” and “fittest” “survive” within the “free market” while the majority keeps losing. Deregulation has little to do with “accountability,” “innovation,” or prosperity and security for all.
Since the late 1970s deregulation has been a major feature of the neoliberal antisocial offensive of the rich to counter the inevitable falling rate of profit under capitalism. Governments at home and abroad have been wreaking havoc in their societies as a result of phony austerity agendas launched to save the rich. Deregulation goes hand in hand with privatization, a major form of which is contracting. Deregulating public agencies and enterprises (e.g., education) allows for greater privatization, often through contracting and public-private “partnerships.” This capital-centered arrangement always increases the wealth of private interests and diminishes the wealth of the public. It is not a “win-win” situation.
Neoliberal ideology insists that the rich not be constrained or regulated in any Continue reading: Impossible to Regulate Deregulated Charter Schools | Dissident Voice



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Inside Philanthropy: Billionaires Buying Political Support for Charter Schools, or, Democracy for Sale | Diane Ravitch's blog

Inside Philanthropy: Billionaires Buying Political Support for Charter Schools, or, Democracy for Sale | Diane Ravitch's blog

Inside Philanthropy: Billionaires Buying Political Support for Charter Schools, or, Democracy for Sale

The veil is beginning to fall away from the billionaire-funded charter activity. There are no grassroots in this billionaire-driven “movement.” It is all about money. Without the billionaires’ money, the demand and the supply would dry up.
Inside Philanthropy looks at the funding behind Marshall Tuck, and the article assumes he has won. But millions of votes remain uncounted in California and the contest is not yet decided. At last count, the candidates were less than one percentage point apart. We will have to wait to see who wins the contest between Big Money and teachers.

On the eve of the election, spending for this election had risen to $50 million. The total is likely to be even higher when final reporting is in.
The apparent winner of the contest, Marshall Tuck, is the former president of Green Dot, a charter school network. He wants to expand charters in a state that already leads the nation in the number of such schools. The other candidate, Tony Thurmond, argued for putting the brakes on charters to address issues of transparency and accountability.
Tuck ran unsuccessfully for the same office in 2014 in a race that cost $30 million. In both cases, Tuck outspent his opponent. This year, his campaign had raised $28.5 million by election day.
The money has come from a who’s who of charter school backers and K-12 philanthropists, including Eli Broad, Reed Hastings, Lynn Schusterman, Julian Robertson, Laurene Powell Jobs, Laura and John Arnold, Dan Loeb, Michael Bloomberg and his daughter Emma, and three Waltons: Carrie Walton Penner, Alice Walton, and Jim Walton. 


Among Tuck’s biggest backers was Helen Schwab, wife of the finance billionaire Charles Schwab, who gave $2 million to EdVoice for the Kids PAC, which managed independent campaign committees for Tuck; Arthur Rock, the venture capitalist, gave $3 million to EdVoice, while Doris Fisher gave over $3 million. Along with the Schwabs, Fisher has been a huge Continue reading: Inside Philanthropy: Billionaires Buying Political Support for Charter Schools, or, Democracy for Sale | Diane Ravitch's blog
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