If you are in New York, California, Minnesota or any number of other states, you have been bombarded in recent months by a well-funded campaign against teachers’ unions, all in the name of grabbing a piece of the $4.3 billion earmarked for education in the American Relief & Recovery Act, aka the stimulus bill. As the deadline for a second round of competition for the cash approaches on June 1, the battle is intensifying between teachers unions (who represent 25% of America’s sadly depleted labor movement) and an array of corporations bent on squeezing profits out of a hitherto neglected source: school kids.
The so- called "Race to the Top" works like this: the states submit proposals to improve their educational system to the Education Department, and if approved, the Education Department gives the states money to implement the plan. To quote the Washington Post's Ezra Klein, "The goal isn’t just to fund public schools, but to use the promise of federal money in a time of state budgets to empower reformers. The program has garnered bipartisan praise, including a glowing column from David Brooks."
And Brooks saw the real problem that Obama’s plan faced: THE UNIONS.
Their ideas were good, and their speeches were beautiful. But that was never the problem. The real challenge was going to be standing up to the teachers’ unions and the other groups that have undermined nearly every other reform effort.
But did Obama back down from unions like a typical Democrat? Like some typical progressive who felt a debt for the hours and hours they put in fighting to get him elected? Did he worry about the 10% of delegates to the 2008 convention who were teacher union members? Nope.
But, so far, those fears are unjustified. The news is good. In fact, it’s very good. Over the past few days I’ve spoken to people ranging from Bill Gates to Jeb Bush and various education reformers. They are all impressed by how gritty and effective the Obama administration has been in holding the line and inciting real education.
Okay, maybe a policy isn’t all bad just because Republicans like it, right? Maybe David Brooks has a good idea now and then. And after all, haven’t teachers and other public employees gotten an easy ride for too long, what with steady salaries, tenure and pensions those in the private sector can only envy? And aren’t these damned unions just protecting incompetent teachers at the expense of kids?
Yeah...but...
Have you noticed that every time rich folks line up behind a big federal program involving "reform" that somehow they stand to make a bundle of cash? Health Care Reform which leaves insurance companies making a profit and mandates that everybody kick in? The all-volunteer armed forces bravely fighting an escalating war in Afghanistan , who are far too few to be there at all without billions for contractors like Blackwater and Halliburton? (107,000 contractors vs. 78,000 soldiers last month)
Well, that’s what’s happening once again. Obama’s close friend Education Secretary Arne Duncan is in charge of handing out that $4.3 billion, and most of it will go to states who open the door to people who know how to make a buck off schools, i.e. charter school operators. Juan Gonzalez in a New York News column entitled Albany Charter Cash Cow: Big Banks Making a Bundle on New Construction as Schools Bear the Cost details how the charter school game is typically played:
Wealthy investors and major banks have been making windfall profits by using a little-known federal tax break to finance new charter-school construction. The program, the New Markets Tax Credit, is so lucrative that a lender who uses it can almost double his money in seven years.
Operating behind a screen of non-profits, charter school "reformers" in our state capital tap into funding from NCB Capital Impact, a Virginia non-profit into which wealthy investors can place their millions for a comfortable and totally safe return. Those funds then are then disbursed to other supposedly worthy non-profits like the Brighter Choice Foundation which takes crappy old Albany public schools and renovates them into shiny state-of-the art educational showplaces. Then, and this is the beauty of the scheme, the Brighter Choice Foundation, which runs the schools, charges the same schools a hefty rent, and keeps raising it. To take just one example, the Henry Johnson Charter School had the rent for its 31,000-square-foot building skyrocket from $170,000 in 2008 to $560,000 in 2009.
And where does the Henry Johnson School get the money to pay this exorbitant rent? It can’t all just come from skimping on teacher salaries, can it? No, the charter school, just like its despised public counterpart down the street, draws on city and state tax rolls for its money. Of course, this same property used to belong to the city and no rent at all had to be paid. But now that it’s been "improved," it has become a steady cash stream.
The web of non-profit and for-profit entities is as hard to follow as the derivative market used to be before we all realized it was a clever fraud. The only clues as to how these idealistic "reformers" make their money is when their multiple roles in multiple entities can be pinned down. Gonzalez finds one shining example in Tom Carroll, the Brighter Choice Foundation’s vice chairman and one of the authors of the state's charter law when he was in the Pataki administration. He founded two charters, sits on the board of two others and sits on the board of the above-mentioned NCB Capital Impact. (Please don’t confuse the non-profit NCB Capital Impact with its definitely for-profit twin NCB, which is – you guessed it – simply a bank. Just a bank like Goldman Sachs or Citicorp is a bank, but not so big.)
And now, according to Arne Duncan, lucrative operations like this one embody the real secret of education reform. There’s choice, in that parents pick the school. And of course, school directors can choose to reject kids who look like they’ll be trouble or won’t score high on tests. And there is plenty of testing. And yes, there’s "teacher accountability." Teachers have no union and can be fired for any reason whatsoever: actual or assumed incompetence, bad attitudes, odd opinions, general mouthiness, whatever. And states that put a cap on the number of such cash cows do not stand a chance in the Race to the Top contest.
David Dayen at Firedog Lake spelled it out:
I hope we can be honest about what this actually represents: blackmail. It forces states to change their education laws to fit particular notions about how to manage public education in America. And it does so at a time of crippling state budgets, when the Race to the Top funds mean the difference between thousands of teachers laid off or kept on the job, between class sizes expanding or shrinking. Basically, Arne Duncan and the White House are leveraging crisis to make preferred changes in education policy.
And what Arne likes are charter schools, lots of standardized multiple choice testing from big Edu-Business outfits like CTB McGraw Hill, merit pay for teachers based on those test scores, and many other "market solutions" for education. And no unions.
Okay, but don’t we have to do something drastic about education? Aren’t our kids falling way behind other countries? Aren’t the high schools turning out illiterates, for Gods sake! And aren’t those fat-assed union teachers laughing all the way to their ill-deserved fat pensions?
Bu wait a minute! Suppose Arne’s solution of charter schools plus massive multiple choice testing has been tried for 20 years and doesn’t actually work? What if teachers continually pressuring primary school kids to cram for tests in order to beat out the next school and keep their jobs is really not such a good idea?
Well, it just so happens that Diane Ravitch, once one of the most articulate proponents for charters and national testing, has come to see Obama’s plan as a recipe for disaster. In a biting debate with NYC Charter School Center CEO James Merriman (fresh from a stint as exec with anti-union Walmart) on New York’s Channel 1, Ravitch says that charter schools are turning away the neediest students in Harlem, sending them back to overcrowded public schools. And even with their ability to reject so many students, she points to recent studies that charter school academic results are poor.
(Channel 1 video of debate)
Her new book, Death and Life of the Great American School System; How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education presents a convincing case that Obama and Duncan are pushing outmoded ideas on the states that will do nothing but harm to the majority of American schoolchildren.
And on the Huffington Post, Ravitch described how the Race to the Top is a direct continuation of the failed policies of the Bush administration:
No group had greater hopes for President Obama and his promise of change than the nation's teachers. Poll after poll showed that they despised President Bush's "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB) law with its demand for testing, testing, testing. When asked, teachers said that NCLB was driving out everything except reading and math, because they were the only subjects that counted. Science, the arts, history, literature, geography, civics, all gave way to make more time for students to take practice tests in reading and math. In some districts, the time set aside for practice tests consumed hours of every school day.
NCLB was a failure, and not just because teachers didn't like it. Test scores inched up, but no more than they had before NCLB was passed. Scores on college-entrance exams remained stagnant. Just last week, the ACT reported that only 23 percent of the class of 2009 was prepared to earn as much as a C average in college. ACT tests over a million students, not only in reading and math, but also in science and social studies. ACT found that more than three-quarters of this year's graduates -- who were in fifth grade when NCLB was passed -- are not ready for college-level studies.
And what kind of change is Obama asking us to believe in?
Its $4.3 billion "Race to the Top" fund will supposedly promote "innovation." But this money will be used to promote privatization of public education and insist that states use these same pathetic tests to decide which teachers are doing a good job. With the lure of all that money hanging out there to the states, the administration is requiring that they remove all restrictions on the number of privately-managed charter schools that receive public dollars and that they use test results to evaluate teachers.
This is not change that teachers can believe in. These are exactly the same reforms that President George W. Bush and his Secretary Margaret Spellings would have promoted if they had had a sympathetic Congress. They too wanted more charter schools, more merit pay, more testing, and more "accountability" for teachers based on those same low-level tests. But Congress would never have allowed them to do it.
Now that President Obama and Secretary Arne Duncan have become the standard-bearer for the privatization and testing agenda, we hear nothing more about ditching NCLB, except perhaps changing its name. The fundamental features of NCLB remain intact regardless of what they call it.
The real winners here are the edu-entrepreneurs who are running President Obama's so-called "Race to the Top" fund and distributing the billions to other edu-entrepreneurs, who will manage the thousands of new charter schools and make mega-bucks selling test-prep programs to the schools.
Some of you still may not be convinced that Obama, acting through his longtime friend Arne Duncan, is making a very big mistake with the lives of our children. But, unfortunately, he tends to act on the premise that social good can come if government sets policies by acting in combination with profit-making corporations, whether mercenaries in Afghanistan or big insurance companies in health care reform. That same attitude lies behind the disaster in the Gulf, in which BP has been allowed to dither for weeks over the disastrous oil spill, as if a giant corporation could be trusted to take decisive action if it meant sealing off forever a potential source of enormous profits.
Unfortunately, once a public institution like the schools or the armed forces enter into such a partnership, the corporate greed for profits will defeat any effort to promote the social good. Corporations invariably create such a complex web of deceit that the money vanishes and the whole enterprise loses its purpose.
Even worse, Obama does not see labor unions as the foundation for any truly progressive political party. Some of you may share the widespread resentment at unionized teachers and other public employees who are paid well from tax rolls when those in the private sector lose their jobs and their hopes of retirement. As a onetime dissident within the unions, I recognize that teacher union leaderships have lost much of the old spirit of solidarity with all other workers, and too often become self-serving and overly protective of incompetents. But the answer is not to get rid of the last few unions in which workers can experience some semblance of democratic decision making and collective action against the rich and powerful few. The answer is not fewer unions,or none. The answer is more unions - unless we want to forego all voice in the workplace and leave the big decisions to our "betters."
Obama has given his approval to Duncan’s effort to blackmail the states into destroying one of the last bastions of the union movement, and all for the sake of imposing discredited nostrums that will do much to stunt the futures of our public school children. I have never doubted Obama's values and his commitment to doing good for the American people, but in this as in too many other initiatives, he has made the fatal error of believing that his goals can be attained through alliances with a class of people who will always put their own profits first.
Our response, as committed progressives within the Democratic party, must be to oppose in every way we can this misguided effort to turn the schools of America over to same class of profiteers who made such a shambles of our financial system.
A Final Note
If any further proof is needed that the Race to the Top will be a disastrous blow to public education and to organized labor, consider this:
Of all of Obama's initiatives, this is the one that Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and the whole rightwing noise machine has not attacked. And why not? Because it is a perfect fit with their agenda.