"Educational Entrepreneurship" is an enormously powerful nation-wide effort to sub-contract educational administration, curriculum, and professional development services in low-income public school districts to private for-profit partners, after districts are taken over under NCLB. Mass Insight is a leader in this drive, and you can view its proposal to coordinate the takeover process for its partners in a report on its website. They are explicit, in their report, that their eventual target is to take over the entire public education system and run it, free of "bureaucratic interference."
Another powerful player is New Schools Venture Fund, which has just added former Mass. Education Board chairman Jim Peyser to its partners; The Gates Foundation is a backer, and the Harvard Business School now offers MBA classes in
Educational Entrepreneurship.
The eventual for-profit providers of services are located under several layers of interlocking "advocacy" organizations, with a conscious strategy of leveraging investment of public and private money to promote the takeover. Texas, Massachusetts, and California are epicenters of the project, where Republican governors have built Education Boards dominated by adherents. An example of a "partner" might be K-12 Inc, which went public last week with a stock offering that raised $108 million, according to the current issue of Education Week.
The rationale for forcing public schools to consume these private services is that the services are "research-based" and have proven their effectiveness. A problem is that the research is often biased or distorted by researchers with hidden agendas. In many cases, especially in Texas, it was fabricated outright [she means Reading First]. Most activity has been in math and reading, since those are the high-stakes targets of NCLB. But as concern has risen over the condition of science instruction, vast amounts of money have been appropriated to improve it, and entrepreneurial attention has now focused on science education.
As you may know [remember this was originally sent to other teachers], the federal "What Works" clearinghouse has failed to recommend very many marketed educational programs as showing "research-based" effectiveness.
In the current effort to create a follow-up reading commission to get approval for more programs, many public-interest advocacy groups function as lobbyists for partner programs.
A favorite way to profiteer as well as to consolidate control is to force dumbed-down, "standards based," for-profit professional development programs on teachers in urban districts. Texas is exporting these. I am convinced the only way to save my students or science teaching is to bring the whole monster down.
If anything, the forced drop-out situation is worse now [compared to the background article before the blockquote] because of the structure of the AYP requirements under the NCLB law. With the requirement that every school's test scores continually increase toward 240 ("proficiency"), even a kid who would pass the test and graduate from high school is a score suppressor. My students have cried when they came to me to turn in their chemistry text and be signed out to Alternative Ed; then they disappeared from my roster and the school system, and didn't even get counted as dropouts somehow. We have been putting our little girls out onto the street with less than a 10th grade education to leverage our MCAS scores. Our graduation rate hovers in the 50-60% range, but we report 0%-5% dropout rates. I promise you I have been fighting it with all my heart every day, and the only reason I still have a job is teacher tenure.
It may change this year (or not), because our Alternative Ed has been "taken over" by the same Board of Education and private education reform consultants who have been showering my district with awards for our supposedly rising test scores. [This may make it harder to use the alternative Ed to disappear students] If we do succeed in increasing the number of 10th graders who make it through to the test in my school, the MCAS average will undoubtedly fall. So, who is circling over our heads waiting to pick off the urban schools when NCLB finally brings them down? What is Education Reform? Briefly, it is a for-profit "solution" to the problems Ed Reform consultants cause, while they dominate school boards under cover of "non-profit" advocacy groups (with their hidden for-profit partners). Here is an example.
Nobody can seem to take an aim at the real enemy, who hide behind a dizzy profusion of glossy websites linked to "social capital" and "venture philanthropy" at one end and "market strategy" and profits at the other. They are all over the Education Departments, "leveraging" this and "leveraging" that. The flow of corporate venture philanthropy to its ideological partners becomes an overwhelming tool to shape opinion and policy.
I think I've found a way to get some traction against the real perpetrators of these outrageous and cowardly education policies: We can demand transparency and accountability. We do have some allies - Deval Patrick has appointed Ruth Kaplan to the Board of Education in my own state, and there is an organization of scientists centered at MIT who have not been and cannot be bought off or scared away. You can meet them through the Parents Care website.
Exxon has given a $250 million "gift" to improve AP science instruction (the NSMI), and it is being distributed to leverage the take-over of public school science by hucksters. The FAQ for applicants for funding, on the NSMI website, includes the question,
what if there is no suitable non-profit recipient? The answers include the information that a for-profit can only be a cooperating partner, and MUST CREATE a non-profit entity to receive the funds. Demonstrating your political connections in your own state, especially with the governor's office, will also help your application. You will even find helpful links to create your own tax-exempt non-profit.
We have to reframe the "accountability" debate, and get terms like huckster and for-profit and leveraged take-over out into public consciousness. Is it possible that internet savvy people could discover the identity of for-profit entities currently awarded contracts by their own state and local school boards? The kick back schemes by Reading First never would have been investigated unless competitors complained. Can somebody please advocate for the actual children? Low-income districts with low graduation rates are crucially vulnerable. The data base from the 2007 Gates Foundation Diplomas Count report will help you find them in your state.
My alarm goes off at 5:30 every morning. I dress professionally, and go into a low-income public school building and teach chemistry all day until, frankly, I can barely stand up. Somebody else needs to expose the Board of Education. Maybe you could help, or maybe you know somebody who wants to.
