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"High-performing charters have attained
their results by methodically getting rid
of the most difficult to teach students and
that, overall, based on third-party assessments,
traditional public schools perform as well as
charters although they do not have the same
options to create a student population
with a lower risk of failure."
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The
Koch Bros., key leaders of a Cartel of corporate, foundation, and Wall
Street financial institutions, have been getting positive press of late
and very kind words from President Barack Obama with whom they are
collaborating to reform the U.S criminal justice system. In his
historic visit to an Oklahoma federal prison and his November 2nd
stopover at a Newark, New Jersey drug treatment facility to meet with
inmates and patients to discuss improvements for the criminal justice
system, President Obama went out of his way to praise the efforts of
Koch Industries. During the past year, Mark Holden, Koch Industries
legal counsel, and Valerie Jarrett, President Obama’s closest advisor,
have teamed up to advance a joint criminal justice agenda. However, the
Obama-Koch Bros. partnership, despite the public acrimony leading up to
and during Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign, has persisted since Koch
Bros. and Cartel representatives handed Obama, his chief of staff, Rahm
Emanuel, and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, the fully-developed
Race to the Top (RTTT) legislation on January 29, 2009. RTTT was
designed to move public schools and services into the private sector
via privately-managed charter schools, publicly-funded private school
vouchers, and the aggressive privatizing of services traditionally
provided by the public schools (e.g., teacher and administrator
development, teacher evaluation, provision of substitute teachers and
clerical staff, etc.) As these practices have escalated, so has the
corruption of public school superintendents, many of whom are
associated with the Broad Superintendents Academy in Los Angeles,
California as students, mentees, and/or scholars in residence. Eli
Broad, a member of the Cartel, and in effect, its minister of
education, created the academy to foster his view that K-12 education
should be run as a business. As a result, the amount of fraud has
increased dramatically, especially in the nation’s school systems that
are disproportionately populated by students of color.
Most recently, Dr. Barbara Byrd-Bennett, former superintendent of the
Chicago Public Schools (CPS), was indicted and pleaded guilty to
rigging a scheme involving $23 million of CPS contracts for the SUPES
Academy and a sister company, Synesi Associates (whose specialty is the
training of principals), in anticipation of getting a 10 percent
kickback. Ongoing investigations have indicated that Byrd-Bennet
engaged in similar practices during administrative stints in Detroit,
Michigan where she was hired by Dr. Robert Bobb, the district CEO, as
the chief academic and accountability officer, and in Cleveland, Ohio
where she served as superintendent. The controversy has enveloped
superintendents S. Dallas Dance in Baltimore, Maryland; Stephen Murley
in Iowa City, Iowa; and Kelvin Adams in St. Louis, Missouri, all of
whom have served as SUPES consultants after awarding no-bid contracts
to the company. Other school districts that have given SUPES contracts
and have had their top officials work for the organization include
Huntsville, Alabama; Rochester, New York; Prince Georges County,
Maryland; and Washoe County, Nevada. Earlier, Dr. Andre Hornsby, former
superintendent of the Prince Georges County, Maryland Public Schools,
was indicted and served prison time for receiving kickbacks from
LeapFrog Enterprises, Inc. a technology vendor; the late Dr. Beverly
Hall, superintendent of the Atlanta, Georgia Public Schools was
indicted for manipulating and falsifying students’ standardized test
score data from which she received upwards of $500,000 in bonus
compensation; and her fellow colleagues, the late Dr. Arlene Ackerman,
former Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Public Schools Superintendent and
Michelle Rhee, former Chancellor of the Washington, D.C. Public Schools
were accused of similar testing offenses (but escaped indictment). Hall
and Ackerman were praised, during funeral eulogies, as guardians and
saviors of children of color during their service as superintendents of
San Francisco, California and Washington, D.C. (Ackerman) and Newark,
New Jersey (Hall). A field analysis of their performance revealed that
they did very little educationally for the children in their charge. In
addition, there are dozens of other school superintendents from Los
Angeles, California to Houston, Texas to Camden, New Jersey who have
also been involved in questionable contracting schemes.
At the same time, charter school operators have pursued unethical, and
perhaps illegal, practices to ensure high student achievement outcomes.
Last week, the New York Times reported that Eva Moskowitz, founder of
Success Academy, New York City’s largest charter school
network, that enrolls mostly black and Hispanic students who perform
much better on state tests than the citywide averages, had
systematically pushed out/expelled/counseled out the most challenging
students in order to keep its test scores up. The principal of one of
the network’s schools identified sixteen students that he said were a
threat to his turnaround plans and implemented the following strategies
to get rid of them: parents were told that the school was not right for
their children and that they should withdraw, targeted students were
repeatedly suspended for minor infractions, and parents received
multiple daily phone calls and frequent requests for early pick-up of
their children from school. This harassment made parents’ lives
difficult and contributed to their decisions to leave the Success
Academy network, often with the belief that they and their children had
failed the school rather than that the school had failed them. Critics
of Success Academy and other charter schools have consistently made the
case that high-performing charters have attained their results by
methodically getting rid of the most difficult to teach students and
that, overall, based on third-party assessments, traditional public
schools perform as well as charters although they do not have the same
options to create a student population with a lower risk of failure.
Even more interesting is the fact that the city and state education
agencies that fund these charter schools are not required to keep
records of the number of students who leave charter schools and return
to the traditional public schools that they left. Furthermore, when
these students transition, it is usually shortly after the charter
schools have received payment for their enrollment, thus enabling the
charters to benefit from the funding they leave behind. Meanwhile, the
public schools have to absorb these returning students without any
additional revenue for their instruction. The Obama Administration and
education secretary, Arne Duncan, have turned a blind eye toward these
charter school practices, and the attendant corruption by privatization
advocates, while ramping up the number of charter schools with loose
oversight throughout the nation, and unequivocally claiming that
charters are the salvation of public education. Charter management
organizations (CMOs) have raked in billions during Obama’s tenure,
making K-12 education the newest corporate profit center. This is the
face of their alleged transformation of public education.
As mentioned earlier, the Koch Bros. are also working with the Obama
Administration to change the criminal justice system, another major
component of the public sector, which has long been a corporate target,
from juvenile facilities to maximum security prisons. Mass
incarceration has increasingly become a corporatized entity, yielding
billions of dollars in annual profits. It appears that criminal justice
reform is following the pattern of success that we are witnessing in
the privatization of public schools. Restructuring of the public sector
has been the mantra of both Democrats and Republicans, alike, as
increasingly larger amounts of public dollars are moved into private
hands. The Koch Bros. and the Cartel are on all sides of the emerging
corporate takeover of the public sector and are rapidly moving into
higher education to supposedly make it more efficient. Corruption and
ethical lapses are replete in these privatized incursions into
education and criminal justice systems and have generated no
substantial improvements for K-12 students or their incarcerated
neighbors, relatives, and friends. Sadly, the primary victims of this
transformation of public education and the public sector are low-income
blacks and Hispanics who are already suffering from the vicissitudes of
social and economic inequality.
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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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