When Donald J. Trump was forced to accept uber-right wing “conservative”
Mike Pence as his running mate, it caused concern among some of Trump’s
supporters. But when Trump allowed Pence
to select his domestic agenda cabinet members, concern turned to horror,
especially since America lacks an
opposition party with the now defunct Democratic Party.
Yes, there was the usual yapping and swooning among the
remaining so called “liberal” democrats, but any dissention was watered down
after those same Democrats approved Barack Obama’s public school privatizing stooge
Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education. From
The Black Agenda Report:
Excerpt:
The Obama Education Legacy Part 1 of 3: Obama Appoints Another
Privatizing Stooge Secretary of Education
Back in December 2008, when then
President-elect Barack Obama announced Arne Duncan would be his Education
Secretary, Black Agenda Report asked “Did
Barack Obama Just Appoint an Underqualified Stooge and Privatizer Secretary of
Education?”
We interviewed longtime Chicago
teacher and union activist George Schmidt, who told us Duncan was an old friend of the president-elect with a spotty
resume who'd come to the Chicago Public Schools straight from the mayor's
office where he'd been a budget guy, and
had never taught a day in his life.
Duncan had closed dozens of Chicago schools and replaced them with
charters, often in neighborhoods under pressure from gentrifiers, and fired hundreds of qualified, experienced
and largely black teachers. And Duncan had stripped hundreds of Chicago's
innovative elected local school councils of neighborhood parents and rank and
file teachers, whom reform laws in the 1980s had given veto power over
principals contracts (which were limited to 2 years) and Title One funds of
their power.
The rest is history. Duncan and Obama soon announced their
intention to close and privatize (in their language “turn around”) what
they called “5,000 underperforming public schools” across the country, with the
“underperformance to be mostly indicated
by low scores on standardized tests…
The nation's corporate media conglomerates played a vital role by
popularizing the narrative that public schools were “failing” but not covering
the waves of coercive testing, teacher firings, parent protests and school privatizations unfolding across the
country.
"The national wave of school
closings not national news because our nation's elite, from Wall Street and the hedge fund guys to the chambers of commerce
and the business establishment, from corporate media and all the elite
politicians of both parties from the president down to local mayors and
state legislators are working diligently to privatize public education
as quickly as possible.
They're not stupid. They've done
the polling and the focus groups. They know with dead certainty that the p-word
is massively unpopular, and that
parents, teachers, students and communities aren't clamoring to hand
schools over to greedy profiteers.
Is Betsy DeVos, sister of the owner of the world’s largest
private mercenary army, formerly known as Blackwater, Eric Prince and wife of the
heir to the Ponzi scheme Empire Amway, really any less qualified than Arne
Duncan? So you may ask yourself, how is
it that charter schools are such a cash cow for hedge funds? From Seattle Education:
Excerpt:
Charter schools: “There’s gold in them thar schools!”
How to Get Rich From Public Schools
(Without Actually Educating) There’s gold in them thar schools! Don’t believe me?
When you drive by an inner city
school, it doesn’t exactly look like the Taj Mahal. Does it? Even relatively
upscale suburban schools wouldn’t be mistaken for a house on MTV Cribs. And some of those fly-by night charter schools
look more like prisons than Shangri-La. But I’ve got it on good authority that there’s $1.3 trillion available for
someone who knows how to take it. That
someone is Harold Levy, an expert on how
to get rich through school privatization.
The former chancellor of the New
York City School System has begun a second career managing an investment
company. “For-profit education is one of the largest U.S. investment markets,
currently topping $1.3 trillion in value,” according to the Website for one of
his master classes for rich investors. Wooo-weee!
That’s a lot of money! To put it in
context, that’s more than 10 times the
amount the federal government spends on education per year. And it’s all
yummy profit!
So how do you get your hands on
some of those delicious taxpayer greenbacks? You gotta’ invest. No! I don’t mean increase education budgets
for traditional public schools that can barely make ends meet! I mean invest in
shiny new charter schools. Here’s how it
works. Lend money to a for-profit
company to build a new charter school. If you do it just right, you’re almost guaranteed to double or
triple your money in seven years.
You’ll want to take advantage of
the New Markets Tax Credit (NMTC),
which began in 2000 at the end of President Bill Clinton’s administration. This will give you a whooping 39 percent
tax credit. But here’s the best part, since it’s money you’re lending, you also get interest on it! And if
that weren’t enough, you can piggyback all kinds of additional federal tax
credits on top of that – things like historic preservation or job creation or
Brownfield’s credits…
But maybe you just aren’t into the
whole hedge fund game. Maybe you’re not the banking and investing type. You can still make oodles of cash off public
schools through real estate. Here’s what
you do – buy up cheap inner city
properties that can be renovated or repurposed for charter schools. Then
when a school privatization firm wants to set up shop in an impoverished city
like Philadelphia, Chicago or Detroit, it needs someone like you to open the
door.
You’ll get to charge the charter corporation rent and – get this –
that’s not price capped! You can charge
whatever you want! As long as you’ve got a good spot and no one else is
trying to beat you to it, charter corporations are willing to pay bookoo bucks
to get their money-making enterprises rolling!.. there
are plenty of examples of charter
schools paying 25, 30 even up to 43 percent of their money just on rental
costs! Ca-Ching!
Democrats and Republicans alike use the example of the New
Orleans as the model of success in turning the entire public school system into
a charter school Shangri-La. From BlackAgenda Report.
Excerpt:
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne
Duncan could not contain his gratitude to Hurricane Katrina, which killed or
permanently displaced much of New Orleans’ Black residents. Other whites
“wondered why they could not have been fortunate enough to have a black population
swept out of town in a matter of days.” Katrina
was welcomed by millions of whites as an opportunity for economic and ethnic
“renewal” – a rationale that would justify genocide.
On August 29, 2005, Hurricane
Katrina struck New Orleans, Louisiana, and the entire Gulf coast. More than 1,800 people died and thousands
more were permanently displaced… But this tragedy for multitudes was a gift to
powerful people who wanted to turn New Orleans into Exhibit A for
neo-liberalism…
In 2005 the ruling elites were over overjoyed because nature gave them the
chance to do what they could not get away with easily. Overnight, New Orleans
lost a huge portion of its poor, black population. The state legislature used the crisis to arbitrarily declare public
schools as “failing” and converted them into charters. They fired 7,500
public school employees who won decisions in lower courts but were undone when
the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear their case. In short, New Orleans became the face of disaster
capitalism and ethnic cleansing.
While millions of people watched in
horror as the levees broke and homes were flooded, some watched with glee and,
as Kristen McQueary of the Tribune
editorial board admits, with envy too. They wondered why they could not have been fortunate enough to have a black
population swept out of town in a matter of days…
She is not alone in longing for
post-apocalyptic disaster capital triumphs. In 2010 her fellow Chicagoan Arne Duncan said that the hurricane was
“the best thing to happen to education in New Orleans.” As education
secretary his goal has been to undo public education as we know it and expand
the control of charter schools throughout the country.
Parents have no rights in the charter school system but that is why
they are desirable to people like Duncan and McQueary. There is no public
input, no permanent employment. This
dystopian hell is perfect in their eyes.
Oh how wonderful those charter schools are, they give
parents a choice. But that choice ends
after their child is enrolled in one of those Apartheid charter schools. From Aljazeera America:
Excerpt:
The resegregation of America’s schools
The Supreme Court ruled 60 years
ago this May 17 in Brown v. Board of Education that “segregation of white and
Negro children in the public schools of a State solely on the basis of race,
pursuant to state laws permitting or requiring such segregation,” is
unconstitutional…
Today, segregation — both racial and economic — remains the core organizational feature of American public education.
In 1980, the typical black student attended a school where 36 percent of
students were white. Today, the average black student attends a school where
only 29 percent are. Many black and Latino students attend schools where nearly
every other student is nonwhite — including in supposed liberal bastions such as
New York and Chicago.
Indeed, New York State’s public schools are the most segregated in the nation,
according to a March report from the Civil Rights Project at the University of
California, Los Angeles. In New York City, 19 of 32 community school districts are less than 10 percent
white. That includes all of the Bronx, two-thirds of Brooklyn and half of
Manhattan…
“Black children are more racially and socioeconomically isolated today
than at any time” since data became available in 1970, Richard Rothstein, a
research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, wrote in a recent report. What’s more, schools attended primarily by
nonwhite and poor children are often
woefully underfunded. Take
Philadelphia… after years of underfunding, is going through a spectacular
collapse in the wake of budget cuts implemented by Republican Gov. Tom Corbett.
Many high schools here are more than 90 percent black. Among the
many things city schools lack are sufficient nurses, counselors, music and art
teachers and libraries. Things are rather different a few miles over the city
line at Lower Merion High School in Ardmore, a leafy suburban town with a median household income of nearly $69,000.
There, the funding is stellar. The student body: 8 percent black…
A self-described reform movement, which calls for expanded charter
schools and evaluating teacher effectiveness
based on test scores, now dominates American public-education policy
debates. It has largely abandoned the civil rights movement’s dream of
integrated schools and instead blames
public management and teachers’ unions for poor students’ troubles.
Notably, the Civil Rights Project study found that 73 percent of New York City charters are “apartheid schools,”
with less than 1 percent white enrollment.
So who is behind these charter schools? Who is reaping the benefits of these
apartheid schools? From Mother Jones:
Excerpt:
Who's Really Behind Campbell Brown's Sneaky Education Outfit?
The former CNN anchor says her
nonprofit seeks to protect kids from predators in the classroom. Its real
agenda may be union-busting.
Early one morning in July, former
CNN anchor Campbell Brown appeared on MSNBC's Morning Joe, pen in hand, notes
fanned out in front of her. Viewers might have mistaken her as a fill-in host,
but Brown had swung by 30 Rock in her new role as a self-styled education reformer, a crusader against sexual deviants in
New York City public schools and the backward unions and bureaucrats
getting in the way of firing them…
Brown was there to plug her new
venture, the Parents' Transparency Project, a nonprofit "watchdog
group" that "favors no party, candidate, or incumbent…" Shortly
after it was launched in June, PTP
trained its sights on the New York mayoral race, asking the candidates to
pledge to change the firing process for school employees accused of sexual
misconduct.
When several Democratic candidates
declined, perhaps fearing they'd upset organized labor, PTP spent $100,000 on a television attack ad questioning whether
six candidates, including Republican Joe Lhota and Democrats Bill de Blasio and
Anthony Weiner, had "the guts to
stand up to the teachers' unions." Before
founding PTP, Brown raised this issue in a Wall Street Journal op-ed in July
2012. But what she failed to disclose
was that her husband, Dan Senor, sits on the board of the New York affiliate
of Students First, an education lobbying group founded by Michelle
Rhee, the controversial former Washington, DC, chancellor.
Rhee made a name for herself as
public enemy No. 1 of the teachers' unions and has become the torchbearer of the charter school movement.
In 2012, her "bipartisan grassroots organization" backed 105 candidates in state races, 88
percent of them Republicans. (Senor was also the spokesman for the
Coalition Provisional Authority following the invasion of Iraq and served as a
foreign policy adviser to Mitt Romney in 2012.)…
But there is much more about PTP that is less than transparent,
including its sources of funding and its overall agenda. As a 501(c)(4)
nonprofit, PTP may keep its donors'
identities secret and spend money in electoral campaigns, so long as
political activity doesn't consume the majority of its time and money.
Despite its nonpartisan billing, Brown's nonprofit used Revolution Agency, a
Republican consulting firm, to produce the mayoral attack ad… Brown failed to disclose that her husband
sits on the board of the New York affiliate of Michelle Rhee's education
lobbying group…
Before Brown left CNN three years
ago, her evening news show carried a memorable tagline: "No bias. No
bull." She can't say the same for
her foray into the education wars.
Well it appears CNN’s Campbell Brown and hubby, Dan Senor have
their snouts firmly planted in the $1.3 trillion dollar charter school
trough. So much for transparency. While
hogs at the trough like Campbell Brown and Dan Senor line their pockets with
taxpayer dollars earmarked for public education, what do the empty shell public
schools look like for those left to fight for education scraps? From the Rutherford Institute:
Excerpt:
In the American police state, you’re either a prisoner (shackled,
controlled, monitored, ordered about, limited in what you can do and say, your
life not your own) or a prison
bureaucrat (police officer, judge, jailer, spy, profiteer, etc.)… Unfortunately, when you’re a child in the
American police state, life is that much worse.
Microcosms of the police state, America’s public schools contain almost
every aspect of the militarized, intolerant, senseless, overcriminalized,
legalistic, surveillance-riddled, totalitarian landscape that plagues those
of us on the “outside.”
From the moment a child enters one of the nation’s 98,000 public
schools to the moment she graduates, she will be exposed to a steady diet
of draconian zero tolerance policies that criminalize
childish behavior, overreaching anti-bullying statutes that criminalize
speech, school resource officers (police) tasked with disciplining and/or
arresting so-called “disorderly” students, standardized
testing that emphasizes rote answers over critical thinking…
If your child is fortunate enough
to survive his encounter with the public schools, you should count yourself
fortunate. Most students are not so
lucky. By the time the average young person in America finishes their public
school education, nearly one out of every three of them will have been
arrested.
More than 3 million students are
suspended or expelled from schools every year, often for minor misbehavior,
such as “disruptive behavior” or “insubordination…” For instance, a Virginia
sixth grader, the son of two school
teachers and a member of the school’s gifted program, was suspended for a year
after school officials found a leaf (likely a maple leaf) in his backpack that
they suspected was marijuana.
Despite the fact that the leaf in question was not marijuana (a fact
that officials knew almost immediately), the 11-year-old was still kicked out
of school, charged with marijuana possession in juvenile court, enrolled in
an alternative school away from his friends, subjected to twice-daily searches
for drugs, and forced to be evaluated for substance abuse problems…
It’s not just look-alike drugs that
can get a student in trouble under school zero tolerance policies. Look-alike weapons (toy guns—even
Lego-sized ones, hand-drawn pictures of
guns, pencils twirled in a “threatening” manner, imaginary bows and arrows,
even fingers positioned like guns) can also land a student in detention.
Thanks to a combination of media hype, political pandering and
financial incentives, the use of armed police officers to patrol school
hallways has risen dramatically in the years since the Columbine school
shooting... Funded by the U.S. Department of Justice,
these school resource officers
(SROs) have become de facto wardens
in the elementary, middle and high schools, doling out their own brand of justice to the so-called “criminals”
in their midst with the help of tasers,
pepperspray, batons and brute force…
Indeed, the transformation of
hometown police departments into
extensions of the military has been mirrored in the public schools, where
school police have been gifted with high-powered M16 rifles, MRAP armored
vehicles, grenade launchers, and other military gear. One Texas school district
even boasts its own 12-member SWAT team…
The term “school-to-prison
pipeline” refers to a phenomenon in which children who are suspended or
expelled from school have a greater likelihood of ending up in jail… As if it weren’t bad enough that the nation’s
schools have come to resemble prisons, the government
is also contracting with private prisons to lock up our young people for
behavior that once would have merited a stern lecture.
So with all the bipartisan theft of taxpayer dollars from
the public school system to fund the cash cow charter school system, what is
the up side? Better education? Better teachers? Better results? From Steve Lendman:
Excerpt:
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos
Long ago, inner city kids like
myself had wonderful public schools with dedicated teachers, preparing us for
higher education when even top colleges and universities were affordable. No longer. Bush's No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Obama's Race to the Top (RTTT) wrecked public education the way it used to be…
NCLB leaves most kids behind. RTTT is a race to the bottom. Both
agendas reflect schemes to destroy a nearly four century tradition. Public schools in America don’t teach.
They’re institutions of intimidation and totalitarian control. They produce uneducated youths unprepared
for the adult world they’re about to enter - most facing a working lifetime
of rotten jobs with poverty wages along with few or no benefits.
No wonder many end up in prison,
America’s most vulnerable, mostly people of color, abused throughout the
nation’s sordid history. Can US primary
and secondary education get worse? Instead
of appointing an eminent educator, Trump chose the billionaire sister of
Blackwater USA Eric Prince, Betsy Devos…
In late November, Trump nominated
her to serve as education secretary. On January 31, she cleared the Senate
Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions
on a party-line vote. On February 7,
the Senate deadlocked on her nomination 50 - 50 with two Republicans voting
nay. Vice President Pence broke the tie,
confirming her as Trump’s education secretary.
While Democrats feign outrage, and Republicans declare Trump
deserves the cabinet he wants one thing is for certain, the confirmation of
Betsy DeVos as Education Secretary is just another day in the life. Our politicians are just preserving the juggernaut
crafted by both Democrats and Republicans.
The real losers are the American people and their children, for us it’s “school’s
out.”
By Patricia Baeten
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