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Billionaire titans take aim at urban school systems
There's a lot of information here, and Grannan nicely shows how across the country, we are in this together.
by Caroline Grannan
There’s a growing chorus protesting the takeover of public school districts by what blogger Jim Horn calls “vulture philanthropists” – the billionaire, non-educator business titans who are bent on imposing their vision for the education of low-income inner-city minorities. That often means obliterating existing schools and replacing them with charter schools run by managers from outside the community.
One of the most sincere, and surprising, of the voices of protest belongs to Diane Ravitch, longtime education commentator who is a fellow at the Hoover Institution (the heart and soul of anti-public-education “reform” advocacy) and former Assistant Secretary of Education in the George H.W. Bush administration.
Writing from New York, where she has become a sharp critic of Michael Bloomberg’s mayoral takeover of the city’s school system, Ravitch declares: “It appears that the Big Money has placed its bets on dismantling public education.”
Today’s highest-profile venture philanthropists are Bill Gates, who needs no introduction; real estate development king Eli Broad; the Walton family of Wal-Mart fame; and Don Fisher, founder of the Gap. “The Billionaire Boys Club,” Ravitch observes, “know what needs to be done, and they don't see the point of listening to such unenlightened types as parents and teachers.”
From the outside it would seem to make sense to just move in and shutter a struggling school and start anew with a different model. On the ground, it may be another story, as school communities are fragmented – some scattered among the new schools, with the most challenged and highest-risk students winding up at the most marginalized of the existing schools.
"Model programs tend to skim off those kids who are already better positioned (thanks to better home environments, greater natural gifts, savvier or better-educated parents, etc.)," writes Sara Mosle in Slate. "Regular public schools are left with a more distilled population of struggling students."
Where I live, in the San Francisco Bay Area, this is falling most heavily on Oakland. My own city, San Francisco, has a fairly high-functioning urban public school system – largely because the city’s astronomical housing prices are pushing the lowest-income (and thus often most-challenged) families out of the city. San Francisco is also a mecca for Asian immigrants, who (overall, on average) tend to be high academic achievers, which strengthens our schools. So while the school district where I live is of little interest to those forces, our neighbors across the bay in Oakland bear the brunt. The Oakland-based Perimeter Primate blog (written by Sharon Higgins, who blogs on change.org as well) has become a valuable source of information and research on the billionaires’ experiments with the beleaguered school district.
A new research paper, The Politics of Venture Philanthropy in CharterSchool Policy and Advocacy, by University of California, Berkeley Associate Prof. Janelle Scott, examines the history and impact of such projects.
“[T]here is in fact a long history of wealthy, mostly White philanthropists funding and shaping the education of African-Americans and other communities of color in the United States – sometimes in ways that opened their access to education and often in ways that restricted it,” Scott writes. She describes schools and other projects created by the Julius Rosenwald Fund: “Although there is no question that these institutions provided opportunities for students that otherwise might not have existed, the schools were also originally organized around specific notions of what African-Americans’ social status should be, usually aligned with training students for industrial and service work.”
The backlash against the 21st-century version of venture philanthropy reveals itself in this account in the Michigan Citizenof “[t]he alliance to completely dismantle the Detroit Public School system, and in this video clip of a fiery New York City Councilman Charles Barron denouncing the push to impose charter schools throughout New York City.
“At some point,” concludes Diane Ravitch, “the music and the upheaval will stop. But when it does, will there still be a public school system? Or will the schools all be run by hedge fund managers, dilettantes, and EMOs [Education Maintenance Organizations]?”
— Caroline Grannan
Change.org
2009-04-12
http://education.change.org/blog/view/billionaire_titans_take_aim_at_urban_school_systems
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
Pages: 380
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