To Starve the Beast, We Must Drown the Children

Posted at Kenniwick School District Citizens:

Waiting For SuperFraud
By Michael T. Martin

Public schools have to fail. There is no alternative. So give up trying to argue otherwise with facts and logic.
The mockumentary Waiting For Superman made this clear. Funded by millionaires, the movie told the story of some privatized schools in Harlem portrayed as saviors of children otherwise condemned to public schools. Privatized schools mostly funded by hedge fund millionaires on Wall Street. They spent two million dollars to promote the film nationally. Another major film titled “The Lottery” told a similar tale: children in Harlem desperate to escape public schools. Funded by more millionaires.

State Senator Bill Perkins, who represents the people of Harlem, tried to put profit restrictions on these privatized schools. So the millionaires spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to run an opponent against him in the November, 2010, election. The people of Harlem voted overwhelmingly to re-elect Perkins.

One of the supposed heroes in the mockumentary was Michele Rhee, the caustic head of Washington, D.C., schools. She subsequently was the focus of the November, 2010, mayor’s election in D.C., campaigning for the existing mayor who appointed her, promising to resign if he lost. The people of D.C. voted him and her out.

The little people in Harlem and D.C. who see the truth on the ground voted against the millionaires. But the big money people still rate Rhee as a hero and keep pouring money and propaganda into charter schools. Ever wonder why? Brooklyn city councilman Charles Barron laments the situation in New York City: “Our public schools need to be in the control of parents and the community, as opposed to businessmen who see the $23 billion budget as a means to giving no-bid contracts to their cronies.”

In April, 1999, the Wall Street financiers at Merrill Lynch published a 193 page “In-depth Report” titled “The Book of Knowledge, Investing in the Growing Education and Training Industry.” Early in the report they noted: “The K-12 market is the largest segment of the education industry with approximately $360 billion spent annually or over $6,500 per year per child. Despite the size, the K-12 market is the most problematic to invest in today. Entrenched bureaucracies and personal and political interests contribute to the challenges facing this sector.”

Public schools HAVE to fail in order to crack open this egg and give these financiers access to the $360 billion they are after (estimates are that it is around $700 billion today). No matter what logic you use to explain the problems or successes of public education, it will be of no avail: public schools HAVE to fail. Whatever it takes. In a 2007 appellate court decision ruling that Merrill Lynch could not be sued by Enron stockholders for facilitating the fraud of Enron, the dissenting third member of the judicial panel wrote: “The majority immunizes a broad array of undeniably fraudulent conduct from civil liability.”

Big money wants the public schools to fail and they are quite willing to engage in “undeniably fraudulent conduct” to ensure it. One prescient book titled “The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, And The Attack On America’s Public Schools” told the tale back in 1996 but logic and facts won’t stop big money.

Back about the time NCLB was promulgated, Ron Susskind, a New York Times reporter, related a conversation with a senior aide to President George W. Bush in the summer of 2002: “The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore.’”

. . . ..
The overarching thrust of the mockumentary Waiting For Superman is that teachers’ unions are responsible for the faux failure of public schools. That teachers have their own self interest rather than that of children in mind. The teachers’ unions that have been major supporters of the Democratic Party since the Civil Rights era. So the Republican Party will stop at nothing to undermine public education.

After President Clinton was elected in the early 1990s, Reed Hundt, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (1993-97), asked H.W. Bush’s Secretary of Education Bill Bennett to support legislation that would pay for internet access in all classrooms and libraries in the country. “I asked him to support the bill in the crucial stage when we needed Republican allies. He told me he would not help, because he did not want public schools to obtain new funding, new capability, new tools for success. He wanted them, he said, to fail so that they could be replaced with vouchers, charter schools, religious schools, and other forms of private education.”

Grover Norquist, a major political leader in the Republican conservative movement, was asked by writer Ben Adler of The New Republic “How evolution should be taught in public schools.” Norquist responded “The real problem here is that you shouldn’t have government-run schools.” Norquist is better known for his patriotic comment that he wants to shrink the federal government to where he can drown it in a bathtub. His words; somewhat evocative of drowning a child.

So there are powerful forces who will ensure that public schools fail. There is no sense arguing to the contrary, there is over $700 billion to believe otherwise. The same greed by the same people that left the U.S. economy in ruins, with millions of ordinary people unemployed and in bankruptcy, will ensure that the U.S. education system is soon in the same condition. Public education has to fail, because that is “the way the world really works anymore.”

The Real Effects of Corporate Charter Schools on Public Schools

Grover Norquist, whose Center for Tax Reform is prominent among the organizational supporters of Michelle Rhee's Reign of Terror in DC, is also famous for saying, “My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”

In Los Angeles, corporate reformers are doing just that, beginning with the public schools. And they are getting it done with the viral spread of intensely segregated charter boot camps whose per-pupil public expenditure now goes to the corporate charter schools.

As this strategy gains steam, the old canards that were used to justify more charter schools are, each day, becoming more transparently false in their claims. Almost quaint, you could say:

• Charter schools will be free to experiment with innovative curricula whose successes will spread into the public schools, thus improving instruction for all. The most prominent innovation that is spreading among and beyond the urban charters is the bare-knuckled "no excuses" total compliance model of schooling that has raised test scores at the KIPP sects and the KIPP knock-offs, where 40-50 percent of 5th graders never make it to 8th grade. The constant weeding out of the weak and recalcitrant is a closely managed not-so-secret fact that the media ignore, and the inflated test scores among the KIPP survivors becomes the only part of the story worth telling. If this "choice" chain gang model, however, were used in public schools which cannot weed the weak as KIPP does, the dropout rate could soar to 60 or 70 percent, easily, by high school. And never mind for now the massive teacher turnover (18 to 49 percent per year) at the KIPPs, thus requiring a constant infusion by white Teach for America missionaries.

• Charter schools will force public schools to become better in order to attract more "market share." Sound good, but this is another market myth that is even more mythical in the context of schools. When public schools in LA or anywhere else lose students, they lose the thousands of dollars that go with each of those children to educate them. The result is a drop of public school enrollment that will mean increased financial pressures on the LAUSD, which will mean fewer teachers, larger classes, scarcer resources, reduced support services, and the further weakening of public support as the system is less able to respond to the needs of students.

The results, of course, follow the corporate ed reformer road map laid out by Andy Smarick:

First, commit to drastically increasing the charter market share in a few select communities until it is the dominant system and the district is reduced to a secondary provider . . . . As chartering increases its market share in a city, the district will come under growing financial pressure. The district, despite educating fewer and fewer students, will still require a large administrative staff to process payroll and benefits, administer federal programs, and oversee special education. With a lopsided adult-to-student ratio, the district's per-pupil costs will skyrocket.

At some point along the district's path from monopoly provider to financially unsustainable marginal player, the city's investors and stakeholders--taxpayers, foundations, business leaders, elected officials, and editorial boards--are likely to demand fundamental change. That is, eventually the financial crisis will become a political crisis. If the district has progressive leadership, one of two best-case scenarios may result. The district could voluntarily begin the shift to an authorizer, developing a new relationship with its schools and reworking its administrative structure to meet the new conditions. Or, believing the organization is unable to make this change, the district could gradually transfer its schools to an established authorizer.

As if to emphasize the fact that this emerging reality is something the media does not care to think too much about, the LA Times had this short short the other day on what is truly happening to LA schools and other urban systems that have been targeted by the Oligarchs and their henchmen who run the U. S. Department of Education:

November 4, 2009 | 6:00 am
Enrollment in traditional Los Angeles-area public schools has declined this fall, even as the number of students enrolled in charter schools has exploded, according to just-released data.

The drop at traditional schools is slightly more than 3%, with enrollment falling to 617,798 students. The number of students at independent charters is up nearly 19%, to 60,643 students. More students attend charter schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District than in any other district in the country.

Charter schools operate like their own school districts, with control over most of the funding generated by their students. With the opening of new charters in the Los Angeles area, the enrollment shift was not entirely unexpected, but it nonetheless has broad implications for the nation's second-largest school system. When the district sheds students, it also loses the funds that accompany them, which puts pressure on a district budget with built-in costs for services and facilities.

Fewer students ultimately result in staff reductions --- over and above those already caused by the state budget crisis.

Even if the charter students are added in, district enrollment is down 1.4% from last year, continuing a recent trend. The latest numbers are culled from an annual survey called “norm day,” which is important for setting staffing levels at schools as well as determining future funding.

-- Howard Blume

Grover Norquist's Outfit Helping to Back Rhee Astroturf Group

This reminder to get out the anti-union, anti-public troops in support of Michelle Rhee is posted at Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform website:

From Todd Hollenbeck on Tuesday, October 27, 2009 4:21 PM
With everyone focused on health care and stopping evil invisible gases, we must stop and remember the immortal words of Helen Lovejoy, “Oh, won’t somebody please think of the children!” Well, Helen, that somebody is DC School Reform Now, they are thinking of the children.

This Thursday, October 29, 2009 at 9am, DC School Reform Now will be holding a demonstration on the steps of the Wilson Building (1350 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW) prior to a City Counsel meeting with Mayor Fenty and Chancellor Rhee. They will be supporting the efforts of Chancellor Rhee and others on the City Counsel to improve DC public school standards through merit pay for teachers, renegotiating union contracts, and firing all teachers and rehiring only the best. These reforms have met with resistance from the teacher’s union which is desperate to keep its power at the expense of the schools and children.

If you are in the DC area, we encourage you to attend and show your support. They also ask that you sign their petition located here. Even if you are not a DC resident you can sign the petition to show your support for better public schools based on merit not on union power.

This demonstration should be an inspiration for others across the country to stand up and demand school reform in all school districts.