Memphis Raising Most Regressive Taxes to Pay for $212 Million Hole Created by Charter Schools

In June we posted on the Gates-SfC plan for school consolidation in Shelby County, which the State report says will cost Shelby County $212,000,000 over the next four years to pay for the segregated charter chain gangs that are being created to contain, separate, and indoctrinate the next generation of the poor in Memphis.

The County solution: raise the sales tax another penny, which will push this most regressive tax (which includes taxing food) to over 10% (TN is #1 in the nation for highest sales tax).  Oh yes, and in the meantime, reduce property taxes so that the immeasurably unfair tax on the poor will be even more so.

Projected take?  About $54 million, which would cover the annual amount estimated by the State  to cover the loss of revenue to fund the new charters.  Meanwhile, the charters under the new State Recovery School District (RSD) (think NOLA) will get to take over the school buildings that are being closed to create charters. 

The corporations that run these charters, then, will have huge advantages over non-RSD schools, so the State, in effect will be the ultimate decider on which of these "market-based solutions" get to thrive as the 21st Century solution to the "white man's burden" in Memphis.

Memphis City politicos did not immediately sign on to the new plan to raise sales taxes.  After all, the poor of Shelby County's poor will pay dearly for the increase, and most of them live in the City. 

It took some problem solving by the Gates people to help Mayor Wharton come up with a rationale for putting the burden of payment on the poor for the new penal pedagogy schools that will behaviorally neuter the poor children of Memphis.  While everyone, including the Shelby County Sheriff, has eyes on the expected increase of revenue from the sales tax increase (someone has to pay for guards in the Memphis Schools), Mayor Wharton says that someone whispered to him that universal pre-K would be coming his way if he signed on to support the increase:

"It was the commitment to universal pre-k in Memphis and Shelby County that sold me," Wharton said. He also referred to pre-k funding from the "philanthropic world," but did not identify those sources.

Of course, there are no details for how the funding would take place for "universal pre-K," or even if it will take place.  No commitment. 

If universal pre-K does happen in Memphis, Gates plans for it be the privatized variety, the same kind that New York was using until corruption and theft caused the state to reconsider how pre-K would be run there.

Chicago Teachers Union Versus Astroturf Billionaires

Billionaires like the Koch Brothers, Betsy DeVos, and Bill Gates fund astroturf tools like Jonah Edelman, Rebecca Nieves Huffman, and Kyle Olson. Working with anti-working class politicians like Rahm Emanuel, these groups and individuals strive to privatize public education, union bust, and profit off the sufferings of the poor. Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) is on the front lines of the battle to save public education, but they are fighting right-wing forces with limitless resources. Their bold actions in the face of overwhelming odds may well be the turning point in the battle to prevent the neoliberal project from eliminating public education nationwide. They need our support, please contribute to the CTU Solidarity Fund.

Here's CTU's introduction to the film:

The Chicago Teachers Union is currently on the front lines of a fight to defend public education. On one side the 30,000 members of the CTU have called for a contract that includes fair compensation, meaningful job security for qualified teachers, smaller class sizes and a better school day with Art, Music, World Language and appropriate staffing levels to help our neediest students.

On the other side, the Chicago Board of Education—which is managed by out of town reformers and Broad Foundation hires with little or no Chicago public school experience—has pushed to add two weeks to the school year and 85 minutes to the school day, eliminate pay increases for seniority, evaluate teachers based on student test scores, and slash many other rights.

Teachers, parents and community supporters in Chicago have fought valiantly—marching, filling auditoriums at hearings and parent meetings, even occupying a school and taking over a school board meeting. Most recently, 98 percent of our members voted to authorize a strike. But now we find ourselves facing new opponents—national education privatizers, backed by some of the nation's wealthiest people. They are running radio ads, increasing press attacks, and mounting a PR campaign to discredit the CTU and the benefits of public education.

Stand on Children's Exec. Dir. Responds to Critique of Memphis Debacle

Diane Ravitch mentioned an earlier post I did on the resegregation plan that the corporate ed boys have put together for the unsuspecting citizens of Memphis and Shelby County, TN; it has set off quite a storm of reaction, particularly from the local and national Standistas.  

With Stand on Children doing the back room political deals for Gates and Broad, the "players" in this Kabuki drama seem to think that their production is flawless and the audience is entranced.  Even Michelle Rhee's ex, TN Commish of Ed Kevin Huffman, showed up in Memphis last week to tout the calmness and deliberate rationality in the Plan presented by what appears to be a Prozac-induced TPC merger commission.  


And of course, keeping everyone on the sunny side are the Standistas with endless amounts of positivity and missionary zeal.  From the collected comments at the Ravitch blog by the loyal followers of Gates and Jonah Edelman, I am getting a sense that these are the Junior Leaguers (from Memphis to Ripley) with a clear social engineering mission to school the urban natives, using the best techniques that corporate America can offer, i. e., apartheid charter schools.   Will Standista members' kids go to these total compliance corporate schools they are planning for urban poor children?  Never.


Here is the the intro to the letter posted by the Executive Director of Stand, Kenya Bradshaw, who is obviously doing a good job of making the middle class ladies of the area feel as if the Gates plan was something of their own design.  Comments interspersed.

July 3, 2012 at 10:00 amDear Mrs. Ravitch,
My name is Kenya Bradshaw, I am the TN Executive Director of Stand For Children. First let me thank you and Jim Horn for your analysis of the Transition Plan that the Transition Planning Commission developed for the Merger of Memphis and Shelby County Schools although I disagree with your attempt to use one data point as an attempt to showcase the flaws in the plan. I believe that you both should highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the plan and let us know. But to call out one item lacks journalistic integrity and does not offer a fair prospective [sic] to the people who read your blogs. To do an in depth analysis of the process I would urge you to read the over 10,000 pages of documents every member poured [sic] through or read the transcripts of the over 400 hours worth of meetings. I would also ask that you research the history behind how this happened and read Professor Daniel Keil’s report on schools in Memphis and Dr. Marcus Polhman’s recent book on education in our county then come visit Memphis. 

Really, Ms. Bradshaw?  10,000 pages of documents every member read?  Hmm.  

So I am wondering why my review of the strengths and weaknesses should be submitted for your review, even if I were to write one.  The plan is done, as it has been done for some time, even as the TPC was going around the county doing one-time meetings in all those communities that are now trying desperately to create their own school systems so that they can keep them in public hands.  So my writing a detailed review, and your reading it, would just be more wasted time.

I did, indeed, check out Dr. Polhmann, whose book based his study of consolidations in TN is called Opportunity Lost: The Convergence of Race and Poverty in the Memphis City Schools.  Most troubling about what I read by Dr. Pohlmann was this paragraph from his abstract of the book (my bolds):

In his 1944 inaugural address, Franklin Roosevelt stated that his goal was “to make a country in which no one is left out.” That same general principle would appear to lie beneath the notion of “No Child Left Behind.” It is society’s duty to educate every child, not just provide education. It is hard to argue that this is not an amiable egalitarian goal. A sad truth, however, is that some children come to school in such a state of academic disrepair that there may be little the public schools can do for them by that point.

Hmm.  Could this explain why the TPC plan is more attuned to improving the standing of corporate ed reformers and their business interests than improving learning opportunities for kids who they believe to be destined for failure, regardless?  


From what I can tell, Pohlmann, a political scientist, bases many of his social and educational assumptions a limited reading of Christopher Jenck's interpretation of James Coleman's research of 1966, without ever reading Coleman.   What both Pohlmann and Jencks missed was the core finding by Coleman related to the power of social capital that is created and shared when poor kids go to school and have classes with middle class kids.  Poor kids' achievement goes way up, and middle class kids are not negatively affected.  Coleman spent the rest of his life trying to get people to understand that what matters most to student achievement is SES and who you go to school with.


Pohlmann, following Jencks, focuses almost exclusively on the part of Coleman's finding that focused on the powerful effects of home life and poverty.  If Pohlmann had looked at another consolidated school system on the other side of the mountain from Knoxville, he would have found Wake County, which consciously integrated their county and city schools starting in 2000 based on socioeconomic status and achievement levels. That story is documented in Gerald Grant's book, Hope and despair in the American city: Why there are no bad schools in Raleigh.  Shelby Co./Memphis could do the same thing if they had not been hijacked by the charter industry and the Billionaire Boys Club.

Pohlmann does have the following recommendations in his abstract, most of which the Standistas and the Gates Boys have ignored:

We can, however, begin to address those conditions which contribute to severe educational disadvantage, many of which appear to be poverty-related. For Horatio Alger’s Ragged Janes and Tattered Toms to have equal opportunity in 21st century Memphis, there will need to be a multi-faceted approach that focuses on the earliest possible intervention in poor children’s lives, while at the same time both directly and indirectly reducing inter-generational poverty. Such conclusions are not new. The Memphis branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) recommended many of these reforms in a 1988 report to Judge Robert McCrae. Their recommendations included early childhood programs, smaller classes, year-round schooling, enhanced teacher preparation, school consolidation, and using school buildings for child care, social services, and adult education. Such an approach will come with a considerable national, state, and local price tag. Nonetheless, each element we adopt, however small, will move us in the direction supported by the best available research.

I also had a look at the work of Daniel Keil, a legal scholar who has written in glowing terms on the charterizing of NOLA Schools in the wake of Katrina:  

The progress of public education in New Orleans is important beyond the boundaries of Orleans Parish. Post-Katrina New Orleans serves as the pivotal proving ground for the use of increased choice and charter schools to provide more equitable access to quality education. With 61% of New Orleans public school students enrolled in 51 charter schools (both numbers by far the highest in the nation), post-Katrina New Orleans represents an opportunity for the choice movement to demonstrate success on a large scale. Success in New Orleans will lead to broader choice in struggling urban districts across the country. Conversely, failure to deliver improved access to quality education will reverse the current upward trajectory of the choice movement.
....
If reformers in New Orleans are able to focus on the goal of increasing access to quality educational opportunities, then the chance created out of the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina will not be wasted. It would be beautifully ironic if, thanks in part to a hurricane, the schools in the city whose segregated railcars gave us Plessy v. Ferguson could finally deliver on that elusive promise of Brown to provide more equitable access to quality educational opportunities. 

Got it.  So did you all down there use any educational research, scholarship, or educational experience to provide data for this plan?  So far as I can see, the two academic sources you cite are not educators or ed researchers and likely have never been in a public school of Memphis or Shelby County?

In terms of  your invitation, I would love to have interview you the next time I come to Memphis, which will be in the Fall.  Thank you for the invitation.

Jim Horn