Divesting from Public Education Privatizers Resolution at Cal. Federation of Teachers Convention

The California Federation of Teachers will vote this weekend on a resolution to avoid investing in and to divest from companies advocating for and profiting from the privatization of public education.

Taxpayer dollars are diverted from traditional public schools to for-profit charter schools that are usually not held to the same standards of accountability as regular public schools, and diverted to curriculum and software chosen not for its educational value but because a company made donations to elected officials to give them contracts and craft "standards" that create a need for their products.

This movement has so savaged public education that as few as half as many college students are signing up for teacher prep programs and teachers burning out and quitting before retirement are at record highs too.

The debate in the CFT is not whether these companies are harming public education but how best to deal with them: through shareholder activism to change their behavior or simply dumping their stock. Some have argued that simply selling and avoiding their stock won't impact their behavior.

However, for at last the last few decades, the mantra in the corporate world has been "increasing shareholder value." If big institutional investors dump your stock, your stock value might take a hit.

More importantly, another divestment movement scared those in power enough that a presidential candidate condemned it and legislators are trying to figure out how to stop it--the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction movement against Israel. Whether you agree with the goal or not, the movement got the attention of those in power.

If divestment didn't work, Hillary Clinton would not have made attacking it an issue in the election.

At least one privatizer stock is struggling right now, Pearson, who pushes for and profits from the repetitive high-stakes testing and common core.

News of institutional investors planning to sell off might drive their stock even lower, and resistance from the people most familiar with their product might make their board of directors wonder if the take over of public education is worth the hit to their stock price.

If you are in a faculty union in another state, get your union to divest your retirement funds from public education privatizers too.  Educators owning these stocks is like chickens owning stock in KFC.

MUST SEE DOC: Starving the Beast: The Battle to Disrupt & Reform America’s Public Universities

If you work in higher ed and think the only problems we face are fluctuating budgets, this is a must see.

Just as some wealthy individuals, corporations, and hedge funds are trying to remake K-12 public education to divert tax dollars into their own pockets with for profit charter schools, education management companies, repetitive standardized testing, and common core curriculum designed to maximize profits for textbook and testing companies while demonizing teachers and trying to break their unions is in the earlier stages of coming after colleges and universities.

Besides trashing K-12 public education, this corporate driven reform movement is not only driving teachers out of the profession, but dramatically reducing enrollment in education majors--so there aren't enough new teachers to replace those leaving.

If these "reforms" get very far in higher ed, the results could be even more chaotic and dramatic because of the large majority of part time faculty. K-12 teachers might put up with the crap a bit longer because of decent pay and full benefits.

That is not the case for college faculty members who have to patch together a couple of part time jobs to make a living (and still don't get family medical benefits even then).

As someone who started in K-12 and moved to higher ed, I had to make a choice between economic security but little control over what I taught if I stayed in K-12 or economic insecurity but academic freedom if I moved to higher ed. I know people who did the same for the same reasons.

What will happen if most college and university faculty are treated like crap economically AND academically?
Also, an ironic twist on this topic is the supposed superiority of the private sector in getting things done in K-12. In higher ed, whether you go to a public college, a private non-profit, or a private for profit college, you're classes will be taught by the same people.

One of my community college colleagues also teaches the same courses at a fairly well-known private school nearby and I asked him what he does differently for those students. He just laughed and said, "Nothing. They just pay more for it."

If private contractors get involved in delivering public education, taxpayers will pay the same or more, but get less so the contractors can skim a profit.

ARTICLE ON HUFFINGTON POST

another way to BOYCOTT standardized testing & corporate driven education reform

In the face of corporate and sports boycotts, Indiana's governor has scrambled to amend their "Religious Freedom" law that is really intended to allow businesses to refuse to serve the LGBT community, and Arkansas's Republican governor has just announced he will boycott a similar bill when it comes to his desk.

This is no small concession for Republicans.  Distaste for gays and appeals to the religious right are how they drive their base of voters to the polls, especially when their other policies of endless war and free rein to corporate criminals isn't playing so well.

Public school educators are faced with an ongoing assault on our freedom to teach our students based on our training and experience and are instead being handed a script written by hedge fund managers that conveniently requires that we teach and test and grade using materials that they have invested in and will profit from.  And when the test results are declared a sign of failure, rather than investing more tax dollars in lower student-teacher ratios, social workers, and other programs to make the school a success, those same hedge fund managers demand the school be closed and replaced with a for-profit charter school or turned over to a for profit education management company that they will also profit from.

Needless to say, decent pay and job security for teachers would cut into those profits, so we must be reduced to the equivalent of tour guides, mindlessly parroting the script they write for us, rather than thinking on our feet and tailoring our lessons to what works and doesn't with a particular group of students.

Educators are resisting by refusing to administer the tests, and encouraging parents to opt their children out of the tests, but this recent fiasco in Indiana and Arkansas shows we have another, probably even more powerful tool at our disposal: boycott.

Where teachers and administrators have any say in the buying of textbooks, software, and testing materials, they should block the purchase of those sold by backers of the corporate take over of public education.  If they can't get around the testing requirements, then fight for open source materials developed by teachers themselves that won't give our tax dollars to those trying to privatize our schools.

While K-12 teachers and administrators might have limited flexibility in these matters, they have a potential ally that has almost unlimited flexibility with choice of materials: colleges and universities, especially those with teachers prep programs.

Many of those schools of education that train future teachers have seem a dramatic drop in enrollment because students can see the assault on teachers in the mainstream media and deciding not to dedicate their lives to getting a public beating.

Those who teach future teachers and those students who want to be teachers without being Wall Street's whipping boy might be very eager to take action to save their profession.

Likewise, professors and college instructors in other departments might be surprisingly easy to persuade to join in for a number of reasons:

1. They know their students are being directly screwed by overpriced textbooks that are randomly rearranged and amended every year or two just enough that students can't use an old edition for their classes.
   
   Many instructors already rely on their own handouts and materials available freely online to do without commercial textbooks.  This would simple be an incentive for more to do so.


2. Professors and administrators are increasingly aware that the same investor class that wants to divert tax dollars from K-12 education to their own pockets have their eye on public higher education too, and are devising metrics of failure and even trying to close colleges the way they have K-12 schools.
   
   The hedge fund managers, their foundation, and astroturf citizens groups are even trying to drive the same stake into the heart of higher ed that they've already driven into K-12: common core.


3. Professors don't want to teach at a McCollege any more than K-12 teachers want to teach at a McSchool.


4. The concepts of boycott and divestment are hardly alien to college campuses.  In the 80's,  college students demanded their schools divest from and boycott apartheid South Africa, and today they are demanding divestment from fossil fuels--and getting it.
   
   And while not all will agree with cause, many are calling for a boycott of and divestment from Israel because of their dealings with Palestinians.  It's unsettled the Israeli government enough that they have publicly responded to the movement.

If K-12 and higher ed teachers and administrators realize they face a common enemy they could unite, stop buying these companies products, demand that their retirement funds and school based foundations divest from them, and give our kids back the chance to get a decent public education WITHOUT Wall Street calling the shots AND taking a skim off our tax dollars spend on education.

Pearson, the company at the heart of Common Core, would be a good place to start.

Divest from corporate education reformers like growing fossil fuels divestment

The World Council of Churches announced they're divesting from fossil fuels  and divestment from fossil fuels is a growing movement.  

It's not hard to imagine "fossil fuels" being replaced in this with "corporate-driven education reform."

While we should continue to exert pressure on elected officials, that's a roll of the dice at best given the money the corporate-driven reformers give to politicians, but we could have a greater chance of success going directly after the bottom line of the corporations hoping to profit from privatization and their public images.

The AFT is working on divesting our pension funds from money managers who politically advocate gutting teachers pensions (a clear conflict of interest), and getting our retirement funds to divest more generally from corporate education reformers is worth pursuing. Public colleges and universities should be at least as interested in this as they are in divesting from fossil fuels since the same corrupting Wall Street forces have their sites set on higher education as well, with an equally destructive agenda.

But the divestment from fossil fuels movement is showing an even bigger strategy we should begin pursuing: get universities and colleges to divest their endowments from the privatizers of public education, and convince religious groups like the World Council of Churches to condemn and divest from the corporate education reformers, a movement that makes inequality worse, steals public money meant for educating children and diverts it to corporate profits, and through the abuse of teachers, drives them out of the profession and discourages others from becoming teachers.

Divestment would attack what these companies value most: their stock price and profits, and to attract future investors,  the public perception that they are growing, reputable businesses, the latter a reputation that they do not deserve.

Bill Gates renounces key elements of corporate education "reform"

In this Washington Post OpEd, Bill Gates says test scores should at most be PART of how teachers are evaluated, merit pay won't work, and teachers want collaboration not competition with their peers--in essence, he repudiates more than half of the right wing, corporate education "reform" agenda that has been implemented by the Bush administration and now President Obama, his Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, and corporate Democrats like Rahm Emanuel--with disastrous results.

My wife is an elementary school teacher, and because of what these "reformers" have done, she doesn't want any of our children to go to public school.

So we will be paying taxes for schools that we can't send our middle class kids to because wealthy people (who don't send their kids to public schools) have ruined them by dictating how they should be run.

Gates started driving the direction of education reform policy before he knew what the hell he was doing (unless he had a financial angle for himself).

Now he seems to be moving toward what schools, principals, teachers, and UNIONS already figured out a long time ago.

Mr. Gates, protect your legacy as an entrepreneur and philanthropist: admit your mistake and vow to use your money to undo the damage you have done through your demand for repetitive standardized testing, union busting, school closings, and turning over public education to less effective for-profit charter schools and education management companies. Also, join your father in lobbying to get wealthy people like yourself to pay their fair share of taxes, which would go a long way toward helping public education.

In the future, if you want to help education, listen to educators, researchers, parents, and students, instead of trust fund babies and hedge fund managers looking to make a buck off of our kids like so many mortgage back derivatives or pork bellies.

And please send your Washington Post opinion piece to President Obama and Arne Duncan, so they can adjust their policies accordingly.

I certainly will.

  

Bill Gates: A fairer way to evaluate teachers (excerpt)

The fact is, teachers want to be accountable to their students. What the country needs are thoughtfully developed teacher evaluation systems that include multiple measures of performance, such as student surveys, classroom observations by experienced colleagues and student test results.

Of particular concern is the possibility that test results alone will be used to determine a large part of how much teachers get paid. I have talked to many teachers over the past several years, and not one has told me they would be more motivated, or become a better teacher, by competing with other teachers in their school. To the contrary, teachers want an environment based on collaboration, in which they can rely on one another to share lesson plans, get advice and understand what’s working well in other classrooms. Surveys by MetLife and other research of teachers back this up.

Teachers also tell me that while compensation is important, so are factors such as high-quality professional development opportunities, a strong school leader, engaged families and the chance to work with like-minded colleagues.

While there is justification for rewarding teachers based in part on how their students perform, compensation systems should use multiple measures, including classroom observation. In top-performing education systems in other parts of the world, such as Singapore and Shanghai, accomplished teachers earn more by taking on additional responsibilities such as coaching and mentoring other teachers and helping to capture and spread effective teaching techniques. Such systems are a way to attract, retain and reward the best teachers; make great use of their skills; and honor the collaborative nature of work in schools.

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Tell teachers' retirement fund to DIVEST from standardized testing companies

As the teachers rebellion against standardized testing grows, it's time to flex our real muscle: tell the teachers' retirement system to take our money OUT of standardized testing companies. 

The retirement fund just recently set a precedent by divesting from gun companies, but corporate backed education reform is threatening the very existence of public education by buying politicians and policies that benefit Wall Street at the expense of our kids.

We need to make sure they aren't using our money to kill our jobs and our schools. I'm providing contact information for California, but if you post other states in the comments, I'll be glad to add that to the post itself in updates.

In California, you can contact the CALSTRS, our retirement system, board of directors at board@calstrs.com

800-228-5453 • 916-414-5040 (Fax)

P. O. Box 15275 

Sacramento, CA 95851-0275

Feel free to use or modify this brief message:

As a member of CalSTRS, I ask that since you have divested from companies whose guns kill students and teachers, you also divest from the corporations pushing education "reform" that are killing public education so they can cannibalize the corpse. 

Start with those pushing endless repetitive high stakes testing, like Pearson, ETS, and McGraw Hill.

As an educator, I do not want to invest in businesses that corrupt our public education policy for the financial gain of a few. 

I look forward to hearing your plan of action on this.

You can also tell your union to demand that CalSTRS divest from corporate education reform companies, starting with testing companies.  Just change the message slightly:

As a member of CFT (or CTA) I ask that since CalSTRS has divested from companies whose guns kill students and teachers, I ask that you direct CalSTRS to also divest from the corporations pushing education "reform" that are killing public education so they can cannibalize the corpse.  

Start with those pushing endless repetitive high stakes testing, like Pearson, ETS, and McGraw Hill. 

As an educator, I do not want to invest in businesses that corrupt our public education policy for the financial gain of a few. 

I look forward to hearing your plan of action on this. 

In the AFT, you can contact: 

Gary Ravani
K-12 Council President
cfteck12@aol.com
Administrative Office
California Federation of Teachers
2550 North Hollywood Way, Suite 400
Burbank, CA 91505
818-843-8226, Fax 818-843-4662

If you are in CFT but not a K-12 teacher, contact:

Joshua Pechthalt, President
jpechthalt@cft.org

In the CTA: 

President Dean Vogel
E-mail: dvogel@cta.org
P.O. Box 921
1705 Murchison Drive
Burlingame, CA 94011-0921
Phone: (650) 552-5307
FAX: (650) 552-5007 

Check back later for a proposal on what we could do WITHOUT testing companies that would also save states a lot of money.

59 Schools' Parents Boycott Field Tests for High-Stakes Exams, demanding more teaching less testing

Too many Democrats are on the same side as Republicans on this issue, and these parents have figured out one of the ugly reasons why: constant redundant testing puts money in the pockets of testing companies which they then use to buy politicians to require more testing.

These parents bypassed the politicians and went directly to the source of the problem: they protested at the testing company.

Like the Occupy Movement, to get action to stop education "reform" that is destroying our public schools so for-profit charter and management companies can take over, we need to go to the source, the companies buying the corrupt politicians.

Pearson might make a good test case. Since it's clear even many Democrats are ignoring good policy on this educators have a simple way they can effect change themselves: Whenever they have an individual choice of textbooks or materials or are involved in purchasing decisions for their schools, districts, or even states, they should refuse to consider Pearson, and send them a brief letter saying why. Pearson also does a substantial business in college textbooks, so higher ed instructors can cut them off too.

Over time, educators should figure out which textbook, software, and other companies are pushing for these policies, and boycott them until education decisions are back in the hands of educators and those who put kids ahead of profits.

Parents across New York City and New York State, fed up with high-stakes and excessive standardized testing in public education, are boycotting the “stand-alone” field tests scheduled for middle and elementary schools this week. And many are joining a protest at the headquarters of Pearson, the state’s for-profit test development contractor, to demonstrate their anger as well.

From June 5th to June 12th , children across the state are being forced to give up learning time solely to serve the research purposes of billion-dollar test publisher Pearson, which has a $32 million contract with the New York State Education Department. But parents in 59 schools – an unprecedented number – are fighting back by refusing to allow their children to take these field tests.

In support, the Chancellor’s Parent Advisory Council (CPAC) passed a resolution on May 31 endorsing the boycott and urging all parents to opt their children out of the field tests. The Community Education Councils (CECs) of District 3 in Manhattan (Upper West Side) and District 20 (Bay Ridge, Dyker Heights, Borough Park, Kensington) in Brooklyn passed similar resolutions.

“All this testing is out of control,” says Dani Gonzalez, a Bronx parent who is protesting at today’s demonstration. “Real learning happens when children can explore and experiment and do projects, when they can read books and discuss them. All this testing is crowding real learning out of the classroom. My children can’t learn when all they do is prepare for tests and take tests.”

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Wall St wants to privatize public community COLLEGES too

One of the reasons I like teaching community college instead of high school (which I had a credential to do) is the greater freedom to teach the way I think is best for my students and the relative freedom from attempts to kill the institution and let Wall Street jackals feed on the corpse--which is exactly what is going on with K-12, with the narrowing of the curriculum, repetitive testing to prove failure, mass firings to break unions, and ultimately, contracting public education out to private, for profit education management companies and charter schools.

What is usually left unsaid by the reformers is their jewel in the crown, charter schools, only 17% produce better results than public schools and 37% do worse. That's even less impressive when you consider the advantage they have in being able to boot kids with behavior problems, and that typically, it takes a motivated, involved parent to get their kid into a charter in the first place.

And yet our politicians, including our Democratic president, keep selling this as if it's the cure for cancer.

Now it looks like that shitstorm is coming to community colleges too. Sadly, two salvos came the supposedly progressive bastion of Santa Monica, first from one of our state legislators, then Santa Monica College itself. Both wanted to set up a second tier of completely unsubsidized to tuition, in the case of legislation, by making a provision for private contractors to administer the classes through the college extension--a backdoor privatization of college the way charter schools are being used in K-12.

Apparently, a similar push happened a couple of years ago with for profit college scam factory Kaplan trying take over a share of California community college classes.

This article uses "despicable" way too much, but it's a good intro to what's going on:

Santa Monica College students fight privatization: Anti-privatization conference held for 112 Community Colleges serving 260,000 students in the State of California

If this kind of privatization had taken place before I went to college, I'd have five times my current $100K in student loans, and my student loan payments would be most of my salary.

Faculty and students, that's not the future I want for us. Start tracking this issue and looking for ways to fight back.

The attack on K-12 education is much farther along, and the results are not pretty.

3 ways education spending could IMMEDIATELY help create jobs

As the president and Congress discuss how to create jobs, they seem to be circling around a lot of the usual ideas: tax cuts for businesses that hire, subsidies and incentives for green energy, and building contracts for infrastructure and the like.

What we haven't heard much about is DIRECT government action to create jobs. The problem with creating public jobs for things like renewable energy is it could conceivably compete with private sector businesses already doing the same thing. This would not be the case if education were used to both remove some workers from the job force and create additional jobs.

The quickest fix would be to change the structure of college financial aid, so more kids could go to college full time. I teach community college and most of my students have to work full time to pay their way through school, which means they will be lucky to get their bachelor degree by thirty. If those kids (and older students) got enough financial aid to go to school full time, they would free up low end jobs for others.

We could also create jobs by hiring more K-12 teachers to dramatically reduce class size, especially in poorer communities. Even a crappy teacher can do a passable job if the class is small enough, and even the best teacher will struggle if a class is too big. We could also hire more classroom aides to help teachers, and people to provide after school programs to keep kids out of trouble. That would not only creat jobs but pay more dividends in the long run than the right wing "education reform" snake oil of merit pay and privatized charter schools.

The third way to create jobs with education is less obvious. At community colleges, the vast majority of instructors are part time, have no job security, receive few or no benefits, and are paid as little as a quarter as much as their full time peers. To a lesser but still significant degree, the same thing happens at four year public universities. Consequently, two things happen that distort the academic labor market:

1. Part time faculty teach more classes to make up for low pay or have a second job in the private sector.
   


2. Full time faculty are pressured to teach more than a full time load so administrators can get the maximum value for the benefit dollars they are forced to spend on the lucky few.
   

Here in California, colleges have the added incentive of being allowed to pay these full time faculty LESS than their regular pay for these extra class (the opposite of the usual overtime rules requiring "time and a half" pay)

A slight change in these labor practices would create more academic jobs:

• Require that three-quarters of college faculty be full time and/or all facutly be paid on one pay scale, so part time faculty teach fewer classes (freeing some up for someone else to teach) or quit their jobs in the private sector (freeing them up so someone else can be hired).

• Ban full time faculty from teaching more than a full time load, freeing up their excess classes for someone else to teach (and giving them more time to be available to students).

The federal government could cause these changes with both a carrot and stick--the carrot of funding for the extra full time positions, and the stick of making federal funding contingent on adopting these labor practices.

President Obama announced a community college initiative last summer that would spend money on buildings, technology, and online curriculum, but the jobs effect of all of those would be temporary at best. The real change has to be how the instructors who show up to teach in those shiny new buildings but don't know how they will pay their rent at the end of the semester are treated.

All three of these would do our country more good than any contract to build a road or bridge, or a tax cut that will just be used to sock more money away in a Cayman Islands account.