Obama Administration Enables Billionaire Takeover of US Public Schools
With the Walton billionaires doubling down in their efforts to accelerate the charter school industry and with the Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings, throwing in $100 million 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 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 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 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 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 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.
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 Obama Administration Enables Billionaire Takeover of US Public Schools: