Some Corporate Reformers Described: but Many are Hidden

Mercedes Schneider,
Pam Vogel is the education program director of the nonprofit Media Matters. She has been with Media Matters since August 2015. Her previous experience includes four months in 2014 as an intern in the office of Vice President Joe Biden. For another six months in 2014, Vogel interned at the Clinton Foundation. Vogel graduated from Whitesboro High School (NY) in 2008; Vasser College in 2012, and Teachers College in 2014.

On April 27, 2016, Vogel published this piece for Media Matters, entitled, “Here Are The Corporations And Right-Wing Funders Backing The Education Reform Movement: A Guide To The Funders Behind A Tangled Network Of Advocacy, Research, Media, And Profiteering That’s Taking Over Public Education.”

Now, from the title, it sounds like Vogel’s piece is exhaustive — “a guide to the funders.” However, as one continues reading, one finds this summation:

Media Matters outlines the many overlapping connections in an echo chamber of education privatization advocacy groups, think tanks, and media outlets that are increasingly funded by a handful of conservative billionaires and for-profit education companies — often without proper disclosure.

Interestingly enough, Vogel’s “many overlapping connections” fails to include the Big Three corporate-reform-purchasing philanthropies: Gates, Walton, and Broad.

Amazing.

But she does include such notable names as the Scaife Foundations, Thomas A Roe Foundation, and Adolph Coors Foundation. (Tongue in cheek, my friends. Tongue in cheek.)

Also remarkable is that Vogel includes the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, which has received to date $2.6 million from the Gates Foundation just to remain in existence (i.e., for “general operating support”). She also includes Stand for Children (to date, $17 million from Gates). Still, Vogel omits Gates.

Corporate educational "reformers"

Corporate “ Reformers” Andrew Ross Sorkin. NYTimes.  

Beginning with the Carnegies and the Rockefellers, billionaires have long seen the nation’s education as a willing cause for their philanthropy — and, with it, their own ideas about how students should learn. The latest crop of billionaires, however, has tended to take the line that fixing our broken educational system is the key to unlocking our stagnant economy. Whether it’s hedge-fund managers like Paul Tudor Jones (who has given tens of millions to support charter schools) or industrialists like Eli Broad (who has backed “blended learning” programs that feature enhanced technology), these philanthropists have generally espoused the idea that education should operate more like a business. (The Walton Foundation, backed by the family that founded Walmart, has taken this idea to new heights: It has spent more than $1 billion supporting various charter schools and voucher programs that seek to establish alternatives to the current public-school system.) Often these patrons want to restructure the system to make it more efficient, utilizing the latest technology and management philosophies to turn out a new generation of employable students.

Fight Back to protect public education

EduShyster interviews Barbara Madeloni, the recently elected president of the 110,000 member Massachusetts Teachers Association, and she warns that we either fight for public education or we will lose it.

A former high school teacher, Madeloni was teaching teachers at the University of Massachusetts-Amerst, and she and her students refused to participate in edTPA. As she puts it, “The students with whom I was working didn’t want to submit videos of themselves teaching to Pearson. They didn’t want their work as student teachers to be reduced to a number on a rubric by people who didn’t know them, and 67 of 68 students ultimately refused to send their work.” Madeloni told the story to Michael Winerip of the New York Times; ten days after his story appeared, she was fired. (Winerip, a superb education writer, was later reassigned to cover “Boomers,” and the Times eliminated its weekly education column. Winerip rattled cages every Monday.)

Edushyster asks Madeloni what we can do to fight back against the reformers attacking teachers and public education.

Persistent Educational Inequality

An excellent video explanation by Dr. Wayne Au

"Recolonizing Our Classrooms: 
The Race and Class Hypocrisy of Corporate Education Reform"

VIEW THE VIDEO STREAM:

http://distance-ed.fullerton.edu/bbpresentations/Diversity_Forum_11-20-2013/player.html

His talk starts at 27 minutes. 

How our public schools became a threat.

How our Public Schools Became a 'Communist Threat'

By Paul Buchheit

Heartland Institute President Joseph Bast called the public school system a "socialist regime." Michelle Rhee cautions us against commending students for their 'participation' in sports and other activities.
Privatizers believe that any form of working together as a community is anti-American. To them, individual achievement is all that matters. They're now applying their winner-take-all profit motive to our children.

We're Sliding Backwards, Towards "Separate and Unequal"

In 1954, the Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. the Board of Education seemed to place our country on the right track. Chief Justice Earl Warren said that education "is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms." Thurgood Marshall insisted on "the right of every American to an equal start in life."

What do parents want from schools ?

by Jeff Bryant

A mantra recited by those who pride themselves as adherents to a movement known as “education reform” is that for too long policies governing public schools have favored “the adults” in the system at the expense of children. This rhetoric has framed any objections that classroom teachers may have to new education policies as being overly concerned about teachers’ interests and being negligent of the students.

That rhetorical positioning has been used by political lobbying groups promoting themselves as putting “students first”  (Michelle Rhee) and taking a “stand for children” in order to claim a higher moral ground. These organizations assert that teachers who object to the continued degradation of their working conditions are really being selfish and inattentive to the needs of the students in the public education system.

However, there’s always been a group of adults who’ve been imbued with the power to understand best what students in public schools really need.Parents, legend has it, occupy a sacrosanct position of having an exclusive right to determine the education destination of their offspring.

The whole idea that parents should have a “choice” over where their children attend school is deeply grounded in the notion that parents know best about the education destinations of their youngsters. And school districts have been called “government monopolies” that are opposed to the “free choice” all parents should have in a “market-based” system.

Michelle Rhee Flunks Bill Maher's Test

Video located by the new website. BadAss teacher.  http://www.badassteacher.org