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"The conventional wisdom is that the Republicans
are the major culprits in efforts to privatize public
education. However, the Cartel has long supported
a cadre of Democrats who are equal contributors to
some or all of the privatization of public education
initiatives at the local, state, and federal levels."
Click here for links to all parts of this series
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The
Cartel pro-privatization of public education corporations, Wall Street
financial institutions, and conservative wealthy individuals--led by
the Koch Bros. and the Broad, Gates, Walton, Bradley, Arnold and other
Foundations--has created an inter-locking syndicate of surrogates to
advance its agenda.
Unfortunately, public education stakeholders, teachers, and teacher
unions are frequently unaware of and/or unresponsive to the Cartel’s
privatization efforts: systematically increasing the number of charter
school organizations; rapidly expanding the number of charter schools,
virtual charters, and voucher schools; installing Broad Superintendents
Academy (BSA)-trained and/or mentored public school superintendents
(now numbering nearly 200 throughout the nation from diverse racial and
gender backgrounds); raising state and federal funding for charter and
voucher schools; and reducing budgets for traditional public schools in
most of the fifty states.
These initiatives are implemented via Democrat and Republican federal
elected officials, majority and minority Broad public school
superintendents, and a comprehensive marketing and organizing strategy.
Below is a description of the linkages between the proxies in this
scenario which reveals that the Cartel is on the cusp of dismantling
public education unless an aggressive counter effort is developed.
Democrats and Republicans:
The conventional wisdom is that the Republicans are the major culprits
in efforts to privatize public education. However, the Cartel has long
supported a cadre of Democrats who are equal contributors to some or
all of the privatization of public education initiatives at the local,
state, and federal levels. Cory Booker (D-NJ) owes his 2013 election as
New Jersey’s first African American U.S. Senator to the Cartel and its
allies. Starting with his election to the Newark, New Jersey City
Council in 1998 (which it funded), Booker has consistently campaigned
for charter and voucher schools, having made the trip to Milwaukee (the
shrine for school vouchers) in the late 1990s where he was
indoctrinated by the Bradley Foundation under the tutelage of Dr.
Howard Fuller, the Cartel’s primary national spokesperson for its
public school privatization plan.
Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), appointed to the U.S. Senate in 2013 (and
elected in 2014) as the first African American from the South since
Reconstruction, was also funded by the Cartel and likewise champions
public school privatization. (It is interesting, indeed, that the two
African Americans in the U.S. Senate for the first time since
Reconstruction are both pursuing and supporting policies that undermine
public education.) They are joined by fellow Democrats, Sens. Diane
Feinstein (D-CA), Joe Manchin (D-WV), Joe Donnelly (D-IN), and other
Democrats, on a bill by bill basis in concert with the overwhelming
majority of Republican Senators.
Former Congressman Harold Ford, Jr. (D-TN), the key Democratic vote in
the passage of the 2004 Washington, D.C. voucher bill, was funded by
Chris Whittle, founder of the Edison Project, an educational management
company which morphed into a charter school company before going out of
business. The Cartel has elected pro-privatization Republican governors
in thirty-five of the fifty states, including Gov.-elect, Matt Bevin
(R-KY), a week ago. And it has also backed Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) who
has aggressively expanded corporate charter schools and has promoted
the evaluation of teachers via students’ standardized test scores while
reducing public school budgets for student instruction. Elsewhere, the
Democratic-controlled legislature in New Jersey has endorsed pension
and benefits reform at the expense of teachers; increased per capita
funding for charter schools, as well as public subsidies for charter
school construction; and sanctioned teacher evaluation via students’
standardized test scores, enabling Republican Governor Chris Christie
to gain a national reputation for education reform.
This pattern has been replicated in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, New
York, and Wisconsin when Democrats, who collaborated with their
Republican colleagues to privatize public education, were in charge.
These efforts are being buttressed by superintendents who also embrace
transferring public schools and services to the free market.
Broad Superintendents Academy (BSA):
As noted in previous columns, the Cartel through the Broad
Superintendents Academy (BSA) has created its own training facility to
produce superintendents who view public schools as a business and who
endeavor to award large-scale contacts to the private sector for
testing, software, consultants, and personnel who share their views.
Unaccredited, largely staffed by non-educators, and the brainchild of
billionaire industrialist, Eli Broad, who serves as the Cartel’s
minister of education, the BSA has used its resources and the influence
of the Cartel to strategically select and place majority and minority
males and females in large and small school districts, targeting urban
districts, to carry out its program.
The BSA has also aligned itself with superintendent search firms and
has co-opted school boards to position its graduates as the last two
finalists for superintendent in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Trenton,
Newark, and Camden, New Jersey; Wake County, North Carolina; Prince
Georges County and Baltimore City, Maryland; and a host of smaller
school districts. In other words, Broad and the Cartel have been able
to manipulate and compromise the superintendent search process without
being caught. However, last summer, after the Montgomery County,
Maryland School Board had offered the superintendency to Andrew
Houlihan, who served as chief academic officer (deputy superintendent)
to Dr. Terry Grier, superintendent of the Houston Independent School
District (HISD), and is a Broad acolyte. After a group of local African
American leaders and the local NEA affiliate made Houlihan’s Broad
connection public, and their intense opposition to his appointment, he
decline to accept the job; the school board then agreed to reopen the
search. But far too often, public education stakeholders are oblivious
to the fact that their district has been taken over by a BSA surrogate
until after s/he has begun to disassemble it. Montclair and Highland
Park, NJ; Chicago, IL (twice); Rochester, NY; Charlotte, NC; New
Orleans, LA; Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego, CA; Milwaukee,
WI; Cleveland, OH; and numerous other districts have been victims of
Broad seizures since 2000. And tens of billions of public dollars have
been shifted into private hands, utilizing slick advertising and
organizing schemes.
Marketing and Organizing Strategies:
The Cartel has supported public school privatization via comprehensive
ground and print and broadcast media tactics: door-to-door canvassing
of low-income parents to recruit them to enroll their children in
voucher and charter schools, sponsoring neighborhood forums and socials
for inner city residents in which traditional public schools are
negatively contrasted with their private-sector counterparts,
generating questionable research studies that allege, without
third-party verification, that students enrolled in voucher and charter
schools have higher academic outcomes than those in traditional public
schools, and the affirmation of these findings by columnist and
straight news reporters in national and regional newspapers: The New
York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, the Los
Angeles Times, and the Chicago Tribune.
One research example is the detailed study of the KIPP Charter Network
by Gary Miron, et. al., a Fellow of the National Education Policy
Center (NEPC), that revealed that forty percent of African American
males were counseled and/or pushed out of KIPP charters between grades
6 and 8, dispelling the myth, purveyed by KIPP and its supporters, that
KIPP has unparalled success in educating black and other students of
color. In addition, anchors and contributors on the major cable
networks, Fox News (Juan Williams, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, etc.);
CNN (Dr. Steve Perry, S.E. Cupp, Don Lemon, etc.); and MSNBC (Joe
Scarborough, Harold Ford, Chris Matthews, Eugene Robinson, Jonathan
Alter, etc.) have also championed public school privatization as the
solution to the challenges of public education.
Thus, the Cartel and its allies are continually bombarding the general
population with positive messages about public school privatization
from both liberal and conservative perspectives. Although the majority
of the U.S. population has historically backed public education, the
constant barrage of the alleged merits of school privatization is
gradually shifting support to the latter. Public education
stakeholders, teachers, and teacher unions are not effectively making
the case for the survival of public education. They are not
consistently reaching out to their natural constituencies with a
counter-argument and advocacy against the Cartel and its surrogates.
Additional Cartel proxies working to privatize public education will be
examined next week.
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BlackCommentator.com Columnist, Dr. Walter C. Farrell, Jr., PhD, MSPH, is a Fellow of
the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) at the University of
Colorado-Boulder and has written widely on vouchers, charter schools,
and public school privatization. He has appeared on the Today Show with
Matt Lauer and National Public Radio’s The Connection to discuss public
school privatization, and he has lectured to parent, teacher, and union
groups throughout the nation. Contact Dr. Farrell.
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 is published every Thursday |
Executive Editor:
David A. Love, JD |
Managing Editor:
Nancy Littlefield, MBA |
Publisher:
Peter Gamble |
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