Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > Obama Administration Enables Billionaire Takeover of America's Public
Schools
________________________________________
Obama Administration Enables Billionaire Takeover of America's Public
Schools
By Dustin Beilke [1] / AlterNet [2]
January 20, 2016
With the Walton billionaires doubling down [3] in their efforts to
accelerate the charter school industry and with the Netflix CEO, Reed
Hastings, throwing in $100 million [4] to privatize traditional public
schools, one might think that the U.S. Department of Education would be a
major line of defense for America's public schools educating the most
underserved students or even a bold investor in sustainable community
schools that are truly public.
One would be wrong.
The U.S. Department of Education, as with the education agencies of many
states, has been co-opted by the spending frenzy of the billionaire class.
It's not just the Waltons and Hastings using their fortunes to undermine
public education: Eli Broad has pledged nearly a half billion [5] dollars to
privatize the public schools of Los Angeles. They are mounting a radical--or
really a reactionary--effort to remake public schools into private
enterprises, and charters are a key component of the transition the
billionaires seek.
And editorial decisions by many in the press have aided and abetted this
effort.
For example, the Walton family's press release about its new spending-which
comes on top of the nearly $200 million they already spend on education
"reform" each year-was widely reported, while the federal budget deal
allocated $330 million [6] more for charters was barely covered. The federal
expansion of funding comes in the face of numerous scandals involving poor
test results from so-called virtual charter schools and the documentation of
more than $200 million of fraud and waste [7] of taxpayer money by charter
school operators.
But the billionaires' star power garnered coverage and repetition of the
"reform" talking points, despite the manifest evidence of the failures
[8]of many charter school experiments.
It's not just the press.
This movement that touts "choice"--as a more appealing frame than the
"destruction" of truly public schools governed by local democracy--has been
embraced by politicians who need financial support from billionaires to win
their elections. And, increasingly, these political leaders have been
followed into a variant of "public service" by cadres of school reform
staffers and charter school cheerleaders who advance private interests.
A recent PowerPoint presentation [9] created by the U.S. Department of
Education (ED) underscores how complete that take-over is, after the federal
government has itself spent billions in American tax dollars building up and
buttressing the charter school industry.
Its 25-slide PowerPoint document, "The U.S. Department of Education's
Charter Schools Program Overview," is an uncritical PR document embracing a
magical idea of charter schools.
While it is unclear what audience the department was targeting, it clearly
shows how ED has become a propagandist for charter schools--despite the
mountain of fraud and failure that investigators and bloggers have
documented [10].
Some of the slides are comical to the point of parody. One enthusiastically
asks, "Do states with the highest-performing charter schools receive [State
Educational Agency] funding?" With 38 states receiving this funding, should
it be surprising that some of them have some schools that test better than
other charter schools that also receive funding?
Another slide says, "As of SY 2011-12, CSP-Funded Schools Serve a Similar
Percentage of Students and Disabilities and Limited English Proficient
Students as Traditional Schools," and then shows four lonely bar graphs.
Nine percent of the students at Charter School Program-funded schools have
disabilities and 11 percent at "traditional schools" do. Are percentages
ever really "similar"? And can't the department's PowerPoint writers find a
less defensive way to say, "Sometimes charter schools accept students with
disabilities"?
With 20 years of data to draw from, many charter schools have failed and
closed [11] as the Center for Media and Democracy has noted, and many others
have not been shown to boost student achievement [12]. But as the industry
has grown under federal funding, so has its lobbying muscle (largely at
taxpayer expense). With each passing year the enthusiasm for charters
increases among right-wing and libertarian school privatization advocates
along with many of the reporters and pundits who rely on this
heavily-bankrolled industry for quotes and claims.
Charter schools are supported by taxpayer dollars but exempt [13] from many
of the requirements and standards of truly public schools due to the way its
architects created them through legislation peddled by the American
Legislative Exchange Council [14] (ALEC). Sometimes they are not governed by
elected school boards and there is very little oversight [15] concerning how
they educate students or spend the money they get from the government.
Charters divert billions of taxpayer dollars from public schools and have
been frequently exposed as fraudulent and wasteful [16]. As CMD's lengthy
investigation into charter school spending found, an undisclosed number of
schools receiving millions in federal funds, cumulatively, have closed or
never even opened [13]. ED's PowerPoint does not tackle these thorny issues.
Instead, the very first slide of the ED PowerPoint asks, "What is the
purpose and history of the U.S. Department of Education's Charter Schools
Program?" It turns out that "evaluating the effects of public charter
schools" is only the second of "four statutory purposes."
The other three, apparently independent of the effects the schools have, are
1) "Providing financial assistance for the planning, program design and
initial implementation," and 3) "Expanding the number of high-quality
charter schools available to students across the United States," and 4)
"Encouraging states to provide support to charter schools for facilities
planning."
In other words, once ED evaluates "the effects" of charter schools and finds
that they do not help students or that they collectively weaken the state of
public education in general, it still has a duty to fund them, create more
of them, and get states to fund them. That explains a lot.
Slide number 4 reveals that the ED's Charter School Program has provided
more than $3.3 billion to "fund the start-up, replication and expansion of
public charter schools."
Very interesting.
CMD was unable to extract this number from DOE despite inquiries and Freedom
of Information Act (FOIA) requests since 2014. Ultimately, CMD calculated
the amount at more than $3.3 billion [17](not adjusted for inflation)
earlier in 2015, and more than $3.7 billion with the latest round of
spending.
In October 2015, after waiting for incomplete answers from ED and state
agencies, CMD published "Charter School Black Hole [15]," a special
investigation of federal charter school spending and its links to ALEC.
Two months later, on Christmas Eve 2015, ED released a list [11] of the
charter schools that had received federal funding since 2006. The list was
incomplete, the dollar figures were still unclear, and everyone knows that
you release information on Christmas Eve because you don't want anyone to
see it. Still, it was something.
Now, it turns out, ED may have been tracking this information all along. The
$3.3 billion it identifies is pretty close to the $3.3 billion CMD initially
found after painstakingly combing through more than two decades of
congressional appropriations. If you were a ED PowerPoint writer you might
even call these numbers "similar." (Based on new appropriations by Congress,
CMD has noted that the current tally is more than $3.7 billion [13].)
What is far too similar is the extent to which the Department of Education's
charter school agenda matches that of the anti-education, pro-privatization
movement that funds and promotes so much of the misinformation about public
education.
This movement already gets all the support it needs from the Waltons, the
Koch brothers, the DeVos family, Bill and Melinda Gates, and tech
billionaires.
Let's put the taxpayers' money to better use.
Dustin Beilke is a freelance writer who has written hundreds of articles for
publications such as Newsday, Salon.com, The Nation, The Progressive, In
These Times, Mother Jones, The Capital Times, Isthmus, The Shepherd-Express,
Madison Magazine, Milwaukee Magazine, and The Onion.
Share on Facebook Share
Share on Twitter Tweet
Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx'. [18]
[19]
________________________________________
Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/education/obama-administration-enables-billionaire-t
akeover-americas-public-schools
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/dustin-beilke
[2] http://alternet.org
[3]
http://www.insidephilanthropy.com/home/2016/1/13/how-walton-is-doubling-down
-on-charter-schools.html
[4]
http://www.salon.com/2016/01/17/netflix_founder_drops_100_milli_on_the_silic
on_valley_led_crusade_to_destroy_our_public_schools_partner/
[5]
http://dianeravitch.net/2015/09/22/los-angeles-times-reveals-eli-broads-490-
million-plan-to-expand-privatization-in-l-a/
[6]
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/campaign-k-12/2015/12/education_spending_slat
ed_for_.html
[7]
http://populardemocracy.org/news/report-millions-dollars-fraud-waste-found-c
harter-school-sector
[8] http://www.alternet.org/charter-schools-are-mired-fraud-and-failure
[9] http://www.prwatch.org/files/oii_csp_datasetppt20151223.pdf
[10]
http://www.prwatch.org/news/2016/01/13009/k12-inc-tries-pivot-virtual-school
-failures
[11]
http://www.prwatch.org/news/2016/01/13015/education-department-releases-list
-federally-funded-charter-schools-though-incomplete
[12]
http://www.salon.com/2016/01/09/were_onto_the_phony_education_reformers_char
ter_school_charlatans_and_faux_reformers_take_it_on_the_chin/
[13] http://www.prwatch.org/charter-school-black-hole
[14] http://www.alecexposed.org/
[15]
http://www.prwatch.org/files/new_charter_school_black_hole_report_oct_21_201
5.pdf
[16]
http://populardemocracy.org/sites/default/files/Charter-Schools-National-Rep
ort_rev2.pdf
[17]
http://www.prwatch.org/news/2015/04/12799/new-documents-show-how-federal-tax
payer-money-wasted-charter-schools
[18] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on Obama Administration
Enables Billionaire Takeover of America's Public Schools
[19] http://www.alternet.org/
[20] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > Obama Administration Enables Billionaire Takeover of America's Public
Schools
Obama Administration Enables Billionaire Takeover of America's Public
Schools
By Dustin Beilke [1] / AlterNet [2]
January 20, 2016
With the Walton billionaires doubling down [3] in their efforts to
accelerate the charter school industry and with the Netflix CEO, Reed
Hastings, throwing in $100 million [4] to privatize traditional public
schools, one might think that the U.S. Department of Education would be a
major line of defense for America's public schools educating the most
underserved students or even a bold investor in sustainable community
schools that are truly public.
One would be wrong.
The U.S. Department of Education, as with the education agencies of many
states, has been co-opted by the spending frenzy of the billionaire class.
It's not just the Waltons and Hastings using their fortunes to undermine
public education: Eli Broad has pledged nearly a half billion [5] dollars to
privatize the public schools of Los Angeles. They are mounting a radical--or
really a reactionary--effort to remake public schools into private
enterprises, and charters are a key component of the transition the
billionaires seek.
And editorial decisions by many in the press have aided and abetted this
effort.
For example, the Walton family's press release about its new spending-which
comes on top of the nearly $200 million they already spend on education
"reform" each year-was widely reported, while the federal budget deal
allocated $330 million [6] more for charters was barely covered. The federal
expansion of funding comes in the face of numerous scandals involving poor
test results from so-called virtual charter schools and the documentation of
more than $200 million of fraud and waste [7] of taxpayer money by charter
school operators.
But the billionaires' star power garnered coverage and repetition of the
"reform" talking points, despite the manifest evidence of the failures [8]of
many charter school experiments.
It's not just the press.
This movement that touts "choice"--as a more appealing frame than the
"destruction" of truly public schools governed by local democracy--has been
embraced by politicians who need financial support from billionaires to win
their elections. And, increasingly, these political leaders have been
followed into a variant of "public service" by cadres of school reform
staffers and charter school cheerleaders who advance private interests.
A recent PowerPoint presentation [9] created by the U.S. Department of
Education (ED) underscores how complete that take-over is, after the federal
government has itself spent billions in American tax dollars building up and
buttressing the charter school industry.
Its 25-slide PowerPoint document, "The U.S. Department of Education's
Charter Schools Program Overview," is an uncritical PR document embracing a
magical idea of charter schools.
While it is unclear what audience the department was targeting, it clearly
shows how ED has become a propagandist for charter schools--despite the
mountain of fraud and failure that investigators and bloggers have
documented [10].
Some of the slides are comical to the point of parody. One enthusiastically
asks, "Do states with the highest-performing charter schools receive [State
Educational Agency] funding?" With 38 states receiving this funding, should
it be surprising that some of them have some schools that test better than
other charter schools that also receive funding?
Another slide says, "As of SY 2011-12, CSP-Funded Schools Serve a Similar
Percentage of Students and Disabilities and Limited English Proficient
Students as Traditional Schools," and then shows four lonely bar graphs.
Nine percent of the students at Charter School Program-funded schools have
disabilities and 11 percent at "traditional schools" do. Are percentages
ever really "similar"? And can't the department's PowerPoint writers find a
less defensive way to say, "Sometimes charter schools accept students with
disabilities"?
With 20 years of data to draw from, many charter schools have failed and
closed [11] as the Center for Media and Democracy has noted, and many others
have not been shown to boost student achievement [12]. But as the industry
has grown under federal funding, so has its lobbying muscle (largely at
taxpayer expense). With each passing year the enthusiasm for charters
increases among right-wing and libertarian school privatization advocates
along with many of the reporters and pundits who rely on this
heavily-bankrolled industry for quotes and claims.
Charter schools are supported by taxpayer dollars but exempt [13] from many
of the requirements and standards of truly public schools due to the way its
architects created them through legislation peddled by the American
Legislative Exchange Council [14] (ALEC). Sometimes they are not governed by
elected school boards and there is very little oversight [15] concerning how
they educate students or spend the money they get from the government.
Charters divert billions of taxpayer dollars from public schools and have
been frequently exposed as fraudulent and wasteful [16]. As CMD's lengthy
investigation into charter school spending found, an undisclosed number of
schools receiving millions in federal funds, cumulatively, have closed or
never even opened [13]. ED's PowerPoint does not tackle these thorny issues.
Instead, the very first slide of the ED PowerPoint asks, "What is the
purpose and history of the U.S. Department of Education's Charter Schools
Program?" It turns out that "evaluating the effects of public charter
schools" is only the second of "four statutory purposes."
The other three, apparently independent of the effects the schools have, are
1) "Providing financial assistance for the planning, program design and
initial implementation," and 3) "Expanding the number of high-quality
charter schools available to students across the United States," and 4)
"Encouraging states to provide support to charter schools for facilities
planning."
In other words, once ED evaluates "the effects" of charter schools and finds
that they do not help students or that they collectively weaken the state of
public education in general, it still has a duty to fund them, create more
of them, and get states to fund them. That explains a lot.
Slide number 4 reveals that the ED's Charter School Program has provided
more than $3.3 billion to "fund the start-up, replication and expansion of
public charter schools."
Very interesting.
CMD was unable to extract this number from DOE despite inquiries and Freedom
of Information Act (FOIA) requests since 2014. Ultimately, CMD calculated
the amount at more than $3.3 billion [17](not adjusted for inflation)
earlier in 2015, and more than $3.7 billion with the latest round of
spending.
In October 2015, after waiting for incomplete answers from ED and state
agencies, CMD published "Charter School Black Hole [15]," a special
investigation of federal charter school spending and its links to ALEC.
Two months later, on Christmas Eve 2015, ED released a list [11] of the
charter schools that had received federal funding since 2006. The list was
incomplete, the dollar figures were still unclear, and everyone knows that
you release information on Christmas Eve because you don't want anyone to
see it. Still, it was something.
Now, it turns out, ED may have been tracking this information all along. The
$3.3 billion it identifies is pretty close to the $3.3 billion CMD initially
found after painstakingly combing through more than two decades of
congressional appropriations. If you were a ED PowerPoint writer you might
even call these numbers "similar." (Based on new appropriations by Congress,
CMD has noted that the current tally is more than $3.7 billion [13].)
What is far too similar is the extent to which the Department of Education's
charter school agenda matches that of the anti-education, pro-privatization
movement that funds and promotes so much of the misinformation about public
education.
This movement already gets all the support it needs from the Waltons, the
Koch brothers, the DeVos family, Bill and Melinda Gates, and tech
billionaires.
Let's put the taxpayers' money to better use.
Dustin Beilke is a freelance writer who has written hundreds of articles for
publications such as Newsday, Salon.com, The Nation, The Progressive, In
These Times, Mother Jones, The Capital Times, Isthmus, The Shepherd-Express,
Madison Magazine, Milwaukee Magazine, and The Onion.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx'. [18]
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.[19]
Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/education/obama-administration-enables-billionaire-t
akeover-americas-public-schools
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/dustin-beilke
[2] http://alternet.org
[3]
http://www.insidephilanthropy.com/home/2016/1/13/how-walton-is-doubling-down
-on-charter-schools.html
[4]
http://www.salon.com/2016/01/17/netflix_founder_drops_100_milli_on_the_silic
on_valley_led_crusade_to_destroy_our_public_schools_partner/
[5]
http://dianeravitch.net/2015/09/22/los-angeles-times-reveals-eli-broads-490-
million-plan-to-expand-privatization-in-l-a/
[6]
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/campaign-k-12/2015/12/education_spending_slat
ed_for_.html
[7]
http://populardemocracy.org/news/report-millions-dollars-fraud-waste-found-c
harter-school-sector
[8] http://www.alternet.org/charter-schools-are-mired-fraud-and-failure
[9] http://www.prwatch.org/files/oii_csp_datasetppt20151223.pdf
[10]
http://www.prwatch.org/news/2016/01/13009/k12-inc-tries-pivot-virtual-school
-failures
[11]
http://www.prwatch.org/news/2016/01/13015/education-department-releases-list
-federally-funded-charter-schools-though-incomplete
[12]
http://www.salon.com/2016/01/09/were_onto_the_phony_education_reformers_char
ter_school_charlatans_and_faux_reformers_take_it_on_the_chin/
[13] http://www.prwatch.org/charter-school-black-hole
[14] http://www.alecexposed.org/
[15]
http://www.prwatch.org/files/new_charter_school_black_hole_report_oct_21_201
5.pdf
[16]
http://populardemocracy.org/sites/default/files/Charter-Schools-National-Rep
ort_rev2.pdf
[17]
http://www.prwatch.org/news/2015/04/12799/new-documents-show-how-federal-tax
payer-money-wasted-charter-schools
[18] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on Obama Administration
Enables Billionaire Takeover of America's Public Schools
[19] http://www.alternet.org/
[20] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
