can be clearly seen in a biting column this morning by Gail Collins in The New York Times. In Reading, ’Riting and Revenues she takes us through what is happening in Ohio and in Texas. In the former, the State House
approved legislation that would allow for-profit businesses to open up their own taxpayer-financed charter schools.
The bill would also reduce oversight. Collins implies that no one will take credit for inserting the provisions into the legislation.
But consider this:
It got a rave review in The Columbus Dispatch from an op-ed contributor named Thomas Needles, who cheered legislators for trying to end the “drip-drop of wrongheaded regulation” of charter schools.
. Collins informs us that Needles is a consultant for White Hat, a chain of for-profit charter schools with a dubious track record. She focuses on how poorly their students do on test scores. One could find a lot of other problems, including the fact that White Hat has been sued by the boards of the charters it operates, and that it refuses to disclose to those board how it spends the money it receives to manage the schools. Try googling White Hat and you will find a lot of troubling material.
But Texas is worse.
For example, Collins tells us that when the Federal Government began demanding a certified teacher in every classroom
Texas was among the states that responded by creating alternative certification programs, some of which have requirements slightly less rigorous than those for the trainers at neighborhood gyms. Most of the new teachers in Texas — particularly at schools in poor neighborhoods — come from alternative certification programs.
And the requirements of those alternative certification programs do not include any actual teaching. None.
To get an alternative teaching certificate in Texas you need to take coursework and have 30 hours of “field-based” experience, 15 of which can be spent watching videos.
According to State Rep. Mike Villareal of San Antonio, the other 15 can be acquired by by chaperoning field trips.
I have been critical of the approach of Teach for America, which provides only 5 weeks of training before placing students in classrooms under its contracts. At least TFA requires some of that time be spent actually teaching practice classes. Not enough, but worlds more than what is possible in Texas.
Villareal is, as Collins notes, a man whose legislative proposals have this uncanny ability to let people realize how ridiculous things are becoming in his state. He came to her attention now because he proposed that at least a few days of practice teaching be required before people got their own classrooms. Previously he suggested that the content of sex education courses be required to be medically accurate. Funny, but somehow the state legislature dominated by right-wing Republicans was not inclined to move forward on either bill.
Vernon Reaser is the president of Texas Teachers, the largest of the state’s alt-cert companies. He is enthusiastic over the opportunities that for-profit companies have obtained in the alternative certification world - they charge $4,195 and advertise for teacher candidates on bill boards. He is also critical of the Villareal's proposal to require practice teaching. Collins quotes him saying
“Practice teachers in front of kids that aren’t practice learning!”
As if that is supposed to be witty and thus dismiss the criticisms.
Read Collins. Pass her column on. Understand that the two states, Ohio and Texas, are symptomatic of what is happening.
We are destroying meaningful education for poor children - mainly of color - by the insistence upon privatization.
Let's be clear. Once you introduce the profit motive, that outweighs any concern for the well-being of the students who get placed in those schools.
Originally the extensive charterization of New Orleans schools was intended to be a temporary phase at least this much - currently they operate independently of local supervision, but were supposed to revert to local control. Just resigned State Superintendent of Public Instruction Paul Pastorek rammed through a provision allowing the operators of charter schools to determine if they wanted to go back under local control. I think you can imagine the outcome. It was only when he tried to expand the approach to some of the suburban districts that the pushback was sufficient to force him to resign. And that pushback was as much dependent upon Pastorek's abrasive personality as it was on real educational concern.
We are in the process of destroying the future of this country. The deliberate subversion of good public education is the leading edge. What is happening with schools will quickly metastasize into other areas of public service. After all, we have already privatized a large portion of garbage collection and recycling. Down the road we will see municipal water supplies privatized - that is already happening overseas. In Wisconsin Governor Walker originally exempted police and fire from his attacks on public service employee unions, but now there is a bill that would remove their right to collectively bargain on things like health care.
This larger context is an important reason to pay attention to what right-wing Republicans - and unfortunately some nominal Democrats who support much of a similar agenda - are attempting to do to public schools.
From my perspective, what we are doing to the young people who get subjected to these schools should be sufficient reason to have people turning to the streets.
And oh by the way, some of us will also point directly at the Obama administration. If you are insisting upon expansion of chartering without requiring controls for quality, things like White Hat will be the tip of the iceberg. If you allow federal mandates for quality teachers to be changed to benefit Teach For America - remember, the administration did not object to Tom Harkin changing the law so that TFAers were considered highly qualified under NCLB after the 9th Circuit had ruled they were not - then things like Texas Teachers will become more commonplace.
Some of us are turning to the streets, at least as part of our response. Because atrocities like those cited by Collins are only the tip of the iceberg of what is happening, many of us have committed to the Save Our Schools March and National Call to Action at the end of July.
Collins begins her column by lampooning the Florida legislature, which went after droopy drawers, increasing penalties for exposing one's underwear. She returns to that idea in her final lines:
When we all started clamoring for more investment in education, I don’t think we envisioned it going into corporate profits. We have seen the future, and the good news is that the kids in Florida will be wearing belts
Republicans and their fellow travelers are willing to micromanage things that offend them. Ripping off the public, whether it is on Wall Street or in the privatization of schools, apparently does not offend them. So they are willing to give those ripping us off free reign, with no supervision.
When it is our mortgages and our pensions, we hurt financially. When it is the schools to educate our young people, we will hurt financially down the line, but we abandon what should be a moral commitment to all our people.
Read the Collins. Pass it on. I am not alone in trying to draw your attention to what is happening.
It is not YET too late to stop what is happening. Not yet, but it is not dissimilar from the rapid increase of CO2 in the atmosphere. We are ever closer to a tipping point.
Thanks for reading.