Category Archives: Uncategorized

Yesterday we learned that billionaires have assembled a fund of $725,000 (so far) to defeat Washington state Supreme Court justice Barbara Madsen. The money is being funneled mostly through a group called “Stand for Children.”

Why are the billionaires eager to oust Judge Madsen? She wrote the 6-3 decision in 2015 that declared that charter schools are not public schools under the Washington state constitution and are not eligible to receive public funding devoted solely to democratically governed public schools. For daring to thwart their insistence on charter schools, the billionaires decided that Judge Madsen had to go.

But what is this group “Stand for Children” that is a willing handmaiden to the whims of billionaires who hate public schools?

Peter Greene explains its origins as a social justice organization some 20 years ago, founded by Jonah Edelman, the son of civil rights icon Marian Wright Edelman and equity advocate…

Voters of Washington State, wake up!

The billionaires who have been trying to privatize your public schools are up to their old tricks.

Bill Gates and his pals have been pushing charters schools since the late 1990s. There have been four referenda on charter schools in Washington State. The privatizers lost the first three, but swamped the race with millions in their 2012 campaign and won by a razor-thin margin, defeating the NAACP, teachers, parents, the League of Women Voters, and school board members.

Defenders of public schools sued to stop public money from going to privately managed charter schools. In 2015, Washington’s highest court agreed with them that charters are not common schools, as required by the state constitution, because their boards are not elected. Funding charter schools with public money, the high court ruled, was unconstitutional.

Now the billionaires are running a candidate against state Supreme Court Justice…

Jeff Bryant writes that corporate reformers are feeling nervous these days. As you know, none of their promises has come true anywhere, after 15 years of their strategies. They are uneasy about Hillary Clinton, and their fears have grown deeper since she selected Tim Kaine as her running mate.

If she had chosen Corey Booker, there would be champagne corks popping in the penthouses of reform leaders.

Instead, she picked Kaine, who sent his children to public schools in Richmond and who has never been a supporter of school choice, charters, or high-stakes testing. Nor is his wife Anne Holton, who was Secretary of Education in Virginia until her husband was picked to run for vice-president. Anne Holton’s father, Governor Holton, enrolled his children in Richmond’s public schools, and she went to desegregated schools. Her tenure in office was marked by opposition to charter schools.

He is not as…

When the charter industry decides to expand in your district or state, one thing is certain: Bitter divisiveness will follow, as the night follows the day.

The school board elections become pitched battles between friends of charters and friends of public schools. Parents fight over who goes to charter schools and over resources taken away from public schools to fund charter schools.

One of the most heated school board races this fall will take place in Nashville, where the charter industrial complex has targeted board members who support public schools. The money is pouring in from wealthy contributors to knock out Amy Frogge (a hero of this blog), Will Pinkston, and Jill Speering, all of whom have fought to keep the charter zealots from destroying public education.

The parasitic Stand On Children is handing out big bucks to candidates who prefer charter schools. Rich corporate leaders and right-wingers are funding…

Valerie Strauss interviewed Samuel Abrams, director of the Teachers College, Columbia University, National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education, about his important new book, Education and the Commercial Mindset. The book is an in-depth, beautifully written history of the privatization movement.

Read the interview. It will make you want to read this brilliant book.

Here is one small excerpt:

Abrams: Privatization takes the form of nonprofit as well as for-profit school management, as privatization technically means outsourcing the provision of government services to independent operators, whether nonprofit or for-profit. Insufficient transparency and, thus, accountability can become problems. While nonprofit charter operators must file 990s with the IRS documenting expenses and salaries, for instance, many are less detailed in their reportage than they should be. Moreover, these charters report only indirectly, if at all, to elected school board members.

Yet there are far greater issues with outsourcing school management…

Jane Mayer of The New Yorker magazine interviewed writer Tony Schwartz at his home about his experiences as Donald Trump’s ghostwriter for “The Art of the Deal.”

It is one of the most enlightening articles you will read about Trump.

Last June, as dusk fell outside Tony Schwartz’s sprawling house, on a leafy back road in Riverdale, New York, he pulled out his laptop and caught up with the day’s big news: Donald J. Trump had declared his candidacy for President. As Schwartz watched a video of the speech, he began to feel personally implicated.

Trump, facing a crowd that had gathered in the lobby of Trump Tower, on Fifth Avenue, laid out his qualifications, saying, “We need a leader that wrote ‘The Art of the Deal.’ ” If that was so, Schwartz thought, then he, not Trump, should be running. Schwartz dashed off a tweet: “Many thanks Donald Trump…

A 20-year veteran of the Los Angeles public school district, who is also NBCT, explains the Rafe Esquith situation here. The writer has the nom de plume of Geronimo. I know who he is; I have met him. But I am not telling.

ON RAFE ESQUITH’S SUIT AGAINST LAUSD

Education has been on trial for a long time in Los Angeles.

We have seen it in many forms, most notably in how business interests in education trump pedagogical interests on many fronts…corporate technology, standardized testing, Charter Schools and billionaire influence on public policy.

The Los Angeles Unified School District is misnamed. It is not a “unified” entity. It can be divided in two using hoary Edu-Marxism (apologies, but I beg your indulgence!). There is the 1% at the top of the District apparatus (or apparatchiks) who control and set policy and then there are the actual educators who are supposed…

A comment by a reader responds to the question of whether charters schools are public schools:

The use of the terms “government schools” and “public charter schools” are equally egregious. On June 14th the LA Times informed the public: “Charters are independently operated, free public schools.” The term”public charter school is becoming common usage. There Is No Such Thing as a “Public Charter School.”

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Charters are not public schools. The term “public charter school” was developed by a PR firm to reframe the way we understand schooling in relationship to “public” and to democracy. Any public institution—school, library, zoo—is, at least in theory, funded by 
taxes from all the people in its jurisdiction—local, state and national—and is accountable to those who pay the taxes.

Most public schools are accountable to an elected school board made up of community 
members. Residents of that community have the right to be present…

Al Kennedy, PH.D., of the University of New Orleans contends that it is important to understand the history of public schools in New Orleans. Reformers think they were writing on blank sheet of paper with no history. Not so. The history of white supremacy is the context in which control of the schools must be understood.

He writes:

“Ten years after the flood waters from negligently constructed federal levees inundated New Orleans, public education reformers have unhitched their narrative from the pre-Katrina history of the Crescent City. They cleverly placed the blame for the condition of the schools on the backs of the teachers–and their union. The reformers contend that New Orleans was a “blank sheet of paper” upon which they put in place a successful system of charter schools. Perhaps the reference to the “blank sheet of paper” makes more sense as an effort to paper-over a long and…