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Some people think that Kaya Henderson is the Chancellor of the D.C. public schools. Think again. The real chancellor is a very wealthy woman named Katherine Bradley. She is married to a media mogul (The Atlantic), and she is very very interested in the public schools. She is quite certain she knows how to fix them. She works closely with the Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and the Graham family that used to own the Washington Post. She is a power in D.C. politics. All decisions about the future of the schools must be cleared by her. You know by now that she believes in free-markets and privatization.

Katherine Bradley is a symbol of the erosion of democracy in our society. She has no obvious qualifications to make decisions about the future of public education. Being rich is not a qualification. I don’t know for sure, but I would…

University of Rochester (New York) education professor David Hursh has a new book coming out on November 23, 2015: The End of Public Schools: The Corporate Reform Agenda to Privatize Education (Routledge).

(The Kindle version is already available on Amazon.com. Moreover, this flyer from Routledge includes information on a 20 percent discount.)

  David Hursh

Hursh’s The End of Public Schools is divided into five chapters:

Chapter 1: The Demise of the Public in Public Schools

Chapter 2: Understanding the Rise of Neoliberal Policies

Chapter 3: Governor Cuomo and the Neoliberal Attack on Public Schools, Teachers, and Unions

Chapter 4: The Gates Foundation, Pearson, and Arne Duncan

Chapter 5: Manufactured and Real Crises: Rethinking Education and Capitalism

In this post, I offer a glimpse into each chapter via thought-provoking excerpts that attest to the overall quality of Hursh’s book. (Note: In-text citations removed for ease of presentation.)

From Chapter…

In an earlier post, one of our readers asked whether it was appropriate for the United States Department of Education to endorse commercial products. The product that won plaudits from federal officials, paid for with our tax dollars, is called Edgenuity. As you might expect, it is a computer program that replaces teacher-student interaction. The U.S. ED wants to solve the high cost of teachers by funding Teach for America and technology that replaces teachers.

Is Edgenuity a great product? Evidently not.

A blogger described what happened when his school district adopted Edgenuity.

He writes:

Students have expressed quiet and loud frustration; parents have also complained. To find compromise and rest the restless, a Digital Learning Committee was formed consisting of teachers, students, and concerned parents. Complaints center around concerns surrounding the implementation, the quality of education, student/computer over-use, and lack of teacher/student interaction. Some students are not only unhappy…

The University of Louisville’s Grawemeyer Award in Education is a major honor for a book. This year’s winners wrote an important book that shows that education alone does not overcome poverty. The implication is that society must have social and economic policies that reduce poverty in addition to providing equal educational opportunity. In 2015, the award went to Andrew Hargreaves and Michael Fullan for their book, Professional Capital: Transforming Teaching in Every School; in 2014, I received the award for The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education; in 2013, Pasi Sahlberg received it for his book Finnish Lessons. The judges have good taste and very high standards!

LOUISVILLE, Ky., Dec. 2, 2015 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — Those born into poverty are unlikely to escape it—even if they have access to better opportunities through education. That’s a key conclusion drawn by…

Jonathan Pelto warns that the innocent-sounding group “Students for Education Reform” is actually a front for the hedge funders’ “Democrats for Education Reform.”Not many student-led groups have a budget in excess of $7 million. DFER is one of the richest and most insidious of the privatizers. Like all reformer groups, the name is intended to confuse the public about the purpose of the organization, which is to privatize public schools, not to reform them.

Pelto writes:

Dedicated to promoting the privatization of public education, more taxpayer funds for privately owned, but publicly funded charter schools, the Common Core, the Common Core testing scheme and a host of anti-teacher initiatives, Students for Education Reform, Inc. (SFER) was created in late 2009, according to their narrative, by a couple of undergraduate students at Princeton University.

Claiming to have over 100 chapters across the country, the “student run” advocacy group has, as of…

“Social Impact Bonds,” which are a bonanza for financial investors like Goldman Sachs, is included in the new ESSA that passed the House yesterday. All efforts to strip it out must concentrate on your senators.

The matter appears in Title I, Part D, Section 4108, page 485.

Title IV, A.

And in a section called “Safe and Healthy Students.”

Social Impact Bonds are defined on page 797 as “Pay for Success.” Investors are paid off when a student is not referred to special education.

This business of profiteering in public education can only be stopped by electing people to office who will fight it.

Pat Toomey is obsessed with child predators in our public schools.

When I came to Washington, D.C., this summer to visit 
the U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania, he was lobbying to get his “Passing the Trash” bill included in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA).

His proposed legislation – now part of the Senate version of the ESEA – would ban school districts from helping known pedophiles from finding teaching jobs at different schools. Toomey is hopeful the provision will remain in the final version of the law that eventually will reach President Obama’s desk.

I met with his education aide who cheerily told me her job was to comb through the nation’s newspapers everyday and count the number of teachers accused of acting inappropriately with children. I’d mention issues like inequitable funding, standardized testing and Common Core. She’d solemnly quote back the number she’d found in her…

Ever wonder who is the supplying the money behind the privatization of public schools?

It is a long list, and it starts with the U.S. Department of Education. Every year since 1992?, your taxpayer dollars have been used to open schools that drain resources from your public schools while selecting the students they want. If your state has charters, you can expect that they will lobby the legislature for more charters. They will close their schools, hire buses, and send students, teachers, and parents to the State Capitol, all dressed in matching T-shirts, to demand more charters. Since the children are already enrolled in a charter and can’t attend more than one, they are being used to advance the financial interests of charter chains, which want to expand.

The big foundations support the growth of the charter industry: the Walton Family Foundation has put more than $1 billion into charters…