Let Big Business Save Our Schools and Our Children!

IF YOU'RE INTERESTED IN TRENDS in U. S. education you've probably noticed the push, led by politicians and business leaders on the right, to privatize America's public schools.

The rationale for change goes like this:  We have a "school crisis" in America. Based on test scores from the most recent international comparison, U. S. students rank 14th in reading, 17th in science, and 25th in math. Clearly the schools are failing. This, in turn (or so the right-wing theory goes), is wrecking our economy because U. S. kids can't compete on a world stage with kids in Finland and Japan and South Korea. The underlying problem, according to the right, is that all our teachers belong to evil unions.

What can we do to fix this mess? We bust all the unions and turn schools over to business people to be operated with business efficiency. Business methods are always superior to public sector sloth and waste. Government is never a solution. Government is the problem. Businessmen and women are innovators, engines of wealth creation.

Business people are our newest national heroes.

WELL THEN, LET'S SEE HOW BUSINESS PEOPLE in other fields are doing and try to get some idea where our schools may be heading. Consider the pharmaceutical companies and their methods as a model. No lazy union members here! Just efficiency and innovation and maybe a little tidy profit in the end. 

Oh, and a $3 billion dollar fine for corrupt practices. This week, GlaxoSmithKline, plead guilty to criminal charges, related to illegal promotion of a variety of drugs, including Paxil, a best-selling antidepressant. It was prescribed with increasing regularity, in recent years, for teens and younger children.

Certainly, many doctors were on board. GlaxoSmithKline made sure of that by paying them to attend conferences in exotic locations, lavishing them with expensive gifts to gain their backing. Sales people were paid bonuses according to how many prescriptions they sold and almost everyone involved lived happily ever after. Of course, Paxil had a variety of side effects that the company glossed over or tried to hide from consumers, including a pronounced increase in the risk of suicide among teenagers.

It's not just one company, either. Abbott Laboratories paid a $1.6 billion fine in a similar case; and Johnson & Johnson has set aside $2 billion in anticipation of penalties related to its sales tactics for Risperdal.

In November 2008 The New York Times sounded a note of caution. The use of antipsychotic drugs in children was increasing:  “Powerful antipsychotic medicines are being used far too cavalierly in children, and federal drug regulators must do more to warn doctors of their substantial risks, a panel of federal drug experts said Tuesday.” 

More than 389,000 children, the Times noted, had been treated with Risperdal in 2007, two thirds twelve years of age or younger.  (Zyprexa, Seroquel, Abilify and Geodon were also of concern and use of these drugs had increased fivefold in fifteen years.)

Reporters explained:  “The growing use of the medicines has been driven partly by the sudden popularity of pediatric bipolar disorder.”   

THE LEADING ADVOCATE OF THIS DIAGNOSIS turned out to be Dr. Joseph Biederman, a child psychiatrist at Harvard, a man with the kind of credentials you'd think you could trust. But a Congressional investigation revealed that Biederman had failed to report $1.4 million in outside income from the drug manufacturers. In the meantime, 1,200 children suffered serious health problems after using Risperdal. Thirty-one died, including a 9-year-old who suffered a stroke twelve days after beginning treatment.  

The Times followed up with a series of stories. It seems Dr. Biederman had pushed Johnson & Johnson to fund a research center, which he would head, with one stated goal:  “to move forward the commercial goals of J & J.”  The company (relying on a practice called ghostwriting) prepared a draft summary of a key drug study and Biederman signed it. Presto! Between 1994 and 2003 the diagnosis of pediatric bipolar disorder increased forty-fold. 

Unfortunately, Dr. Biederman and the drug companies had been tap-dancing round the truth. A report in 2002, for example, called for more study of medicines prescribed for children. Without proper data many experts would question the use of such medications, “especially those like neuroleptics, which expose children to potentially serious adverse events.”                                         

“Adverse events” apparently meaning death.

And profits.

DON'T FORGET THOSE PROFITS! Turning our public schools and our children over to business people? It's going to be great.   



P. S. No one seemed to notice that the "school crisis" in America was still limited almost entirely to the poorest inner cities and rural areas.

No one seemed to notice that in the very best public school districts, teachers were also unionized.

No one noticed that Japan always ranked near the top in education but that the Japanese economy stalled out in the 1990s and hasn't grown since.

And none of the right-wing thinkers bothered to explain how--if schools were failing--we were losing jobs to Mexico and Bangladesh and not Finland and South Korea.
             

Mitt Romney Takes on Teachers' Unions!

I WOULD ARGUE THAT TWO RECENT STORIES ABOUT Mitt Romney and his family have a direct bearing on the subject of U. S. education.

The first focused on Ann Romney's love of horseback riding. The other outlined her husband's first big speech about schools, and the policies he would implement if elected president, to address America's supposed "education crisis." Governor Romney, who once famously said that he loved Michigan because all the trees were "just the right height," wanted his audience to know that when it came to schools, he was less sanguine. Apparently, America's teachers aren't the right height or don't have enough leaves.

In any case, Mr. Romney's main points can be boiled down as follows:

A. teachers' unions are really, really bad (and, by the way, support President Obama)
B. all parents are really, really good (and should vote Republican) and totally committed to their children's education
C. therefore, we can fix everything if we set up more charter schools and have more parent choice
D. ...because, if we didn't already mention it, all parents are really, really good and committed to their children's education
E. and teachers' unions are really, really bad and frankly, most of their members are scumbags
F. so, we should grade all schools; then parents, all good, all committed, can choose schools wisely, and, of course, all parents will choose wisely, because, well...you get the idea
G. and since private enterprise is always good, and because unfettered business cures all ills in all societies, it would be great if we turned public schools over to for-profit companies, which would mean we'd end up with nothing but "A+" schools, because companies could break teachers' unions (which support President Obama)
H. and have we mentioned yet that teachers' unions are responsible for every problem in U. S. public education?

NOW, DON'T GET ME WRONG. In most stories I've read, Governor Romney comes across as a gentleman. He's a devoted husband, good father, regular church goer, a good human being. Ann Romney seems like a likeable, lovely woman. But it would be stretching the truth beyond recognition to assert that people like the Romneys understand the kind of  realities that confront families farther down the economic scale, teachers who work with children of those families, public school teachers, in general, or the issues that most affect America's public schools as we enter the coming election season.

Indeed, like so many others who claim to want to fix the public schools, Mr. Romney's family long ago decided that the public schools weren't quite good enough for their son and sent him off to an elite prep school at the end of seventh grade. So Mitt never had to walk down a high school hallway, in some city, say Detroit, and rub elbows with any gang members. Not many homeless kids could afford tuition at Cranbrook School, where young Romney was insulated from contact with society's less fortunate individuals. And you can bet he wasn't hanging around with classmates who came to school hungry in the morning, or who went home to neighborhoods crawling with drug abusers at night.

The problem now, when Mr. Romney talks education, is that his isolation from reality is complete. He and his loved ones live in rarified air, and Mrs. Romney, for example, is able to indulge her love of horses. She competes in riding events at an elite level. She has a dressage tutor, who helps her with form, a top man in his field, so successful he has been known to serve guests at his riding school from $4,000 bottles of wine. In fact, on their tax returns for 2010, the Romneys were able to claim a $77,000 loss related to part ownership of a horse named Rafalca.

That's more money than most families see in a year.

Meanwhile, Mitt and Ann's four sons, raised in a home where they had every possible advantage, including good parents, fared well in school. But a recent study by John Hopkins University tells us that not all students come from the same kind of homes. Instead, 15% of U. S. students have problems with chronic absenteeism.

That is:  they miss 10% of all class time, or more.

I taught in a fine district until I retired. But I could explain to Mr. and Mrs. Romney, rather quickly, that not all parents are good, no matter how fine the district. Not all parents are like them, or like Mr. and Mrs. Obama, or the majority of moms and dads I met. I had Abe in class one year. Abe was absent or tardy 107 times in a 180-day school year. When he did arrive, often late, for first period history, I had trouble educating him not because I was a member of a teachers' union, but because Abe had a devil of a time staying awake. I remember once when he told me his mother let him play video games until four a.m. the night before.

So, Abe's mother wasn't an Ann Romney. She wasn't like the mothers Mitt Romney has in mind when he talks about fixing U. S. education. Abe's mom soon added several lines to her goofy parent resume when she came down to school to pick up her older son, who happened to be getting suspended for fighting, and got into a battle with our school resource officer, leading to her own arrest.

THIS MAN, ROMNEY, WHO WANTS TO BE PRESIDENT, who says he knows how to fix the schools, sees the world through the green-tinted glasses of the top 1%. My wife, a speech therapist, still working in the public schools, could reveal grimmer truths. She once worked with a child with severe emotional disorders who lived in a rusted out automobile with Uncle Buster, a regular marijuana user, but still his best option, because mom and dad were long gone from the family photo. She worked with a nine-year-old boy, a victim of sexual abuse by his father, who had what medical people call encopresis, or leakage from the anus, around partially-formed stool, a common problem in cases of abuse. So he had accidents at his desk almost every day. On yet another occasion a mother "interested" in her child's education came to school to see the principal. Mom was carrying a butcher knife and said she was "tired of being followed." Then she chased the principal down the hall, out of the building, and across the parking lot.

It's not just anecdotal evidence Mr. Romney might consider. Take Chicago, where in 2010, the average student missed 26 days of instruction. We know that tens of thousands of teens in the Windy City belong to gangs; and in one twelve-month period 245 school-age kids were killed or wounded in gang-related violence.

What solution does the Governor offer for that?

Let's grade schools!

Mr. Romney might even pick up a newspaper and see what he could discover. It's never hard to find sad examples, of parents who fail; but here's one of my "favorites," a story I stumbled across in 2008, involving a Pennsylvania mom named Elizabeth Ann Fox. Ms. Fox was charged with child endangerment after leaving two sons, ages 4 and 2, home alone for hours. Police were notified when the boys managed to crawl out a bedroom window. One officer entered the home but was driven back immediately by the overpowering smell of garbage and human feces, which littered the kitchen floor. A second officer located mom--at a fast food restaurant, of all places--where she was enjoying a hamburger and a shake.

Mr. Romney ought to try to work those kind of examples into his next speech about what must be done to fix America's schools.

In the end, Governor Romney is blind to all the ugliness, because he travels only in circes of wealth and privilege. Or perhaps, because he hopes to score political points, he doesn't care to look for any ugliness.

Too bad, too, because we know there are 1.6 million homeless children in the United States today. We know that in 2010 more than 70% of black children were born to single mothers. We know on certain Indian reservations poverty, depression and hard drinking add up to mean that one in four children will be born with fetal alcohol syndrome. We know that here in Ohio, one out of every ten children in Scioto County, where illegal use of painkillers has spread like plague, is born with illegal drugs in their blood streams. And we know that at any given moment, 1.5 million American children have a parent in prison.

If Romney and the critics wanted to see the full picture they wouldn't stop there. What about parents who kill their children? Even these stories are not hard to find; and nothing Mr. Romney has to offer, so far, when he talks about education, would ever do the unluckiest children in our society the slightest bit of good. Consider one example, out of many, a case from West Palm Beach, Florida. It involves Jorge Barahona, accused of murdering his stepdaughter, Nubia, and for the attempted murder of Victor, his ten-year-old son. The boy showed evidence of prior injuries: broken collarbone, broken arm, burn scars on buttocks and abdomen, rope marks on wrists. Emily Rodriguez, Victor's first grade teacher, later told reporters she remembered how Nubia used to visit her class at the end of the day to see how her brother was doing.

Does Mr. Romney really believe the key here would be to focus on Rodriquez because she's in a teachers' union?

YET, THERE THE GOVERNOR WAS, telling an audience last week:  "Wouldn't it be great if we could look back on the last four years with confidence that the [school] crisis had been confronted and we'd turned the corner toward a brighter future?"

Nope. The problems won't go away. Blame it on President Obama. And blame his evil allies, the teachers' unions.

They just can't seem to alter harsh realities.

I am pleased to say that this post was viewed almost 13,000 times on AddictingInfo.Org.

Teachers are getting fed up with all the attacks we face.

Mitt Romney and a whole lot of others who criticize us have no clue.

ExxonMobil Announces Commitment to Fixing U. S. Education

IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN IT yet check out ExxonMobil's commerical on YouTube announcing support for America’s teachers and the company’s commitment to fixing what ails American education.  

I know, if you’re like me, your first reaction is probably, “Who better to understand the needs of children than oil executives?” 

It’s a slick thirty seconds, focusing on the dismal ranking of U. S. students in math compared to kids from around the world. You see a row of nations, white outlines on a blue background. (I believe it’s meant to hint at a patriotic theme.) The outlines are anatomically correct but not to scale. So you have South Korea first in math. Finland is second; but you might not realize Finland is smaller than Montana. It’s not much of a “threat” to America’s standing in the world with 5.4 million people. And don’t get me started on Belgium (8th), Estonia (11th) or Slovenia (14th). 

It only takes thirteen seconds—and then the camera draws back to reveal a long line of white countries, with the USA in red (again that red, white and blue theme) way back at the end of the line, in 25th, out of thirty-odd nations.

That's right:  Luxembourg!!!!
My god! What if they invade?

Adding insult to injury, and proving that the U.S. is pretty much screwed and tattooed if we don’t act soon, whose kids do you think come in just ahead of ours? Luxembourg! We’re behind Luxembourg, 24th, a country smaller than Rhode Island. 

So, why does this commercial bother me? Why should it bother all public school teachers? Hey, ExxonMobil wants to help. How can that be bad? 

The problem is it paints a far bleaker picture than we should see. It implies that if we don’t fix public schools and don’t let corporations help, we’re pretty much crap-out-of-luck, economically speaking.

It’s a subtle message; but businesses like to imply that America’s schools are failing, because if the schools are failing it’s not their fault when the U. S. economy is struggling. 

“I didn’t spill that oil in the Gulf,” so to speak. “Teachers did it.” 

IF THAT SOUNDS STUPID it’s no different than the logic that underpins most of the “school crisis” clamor in this country.

Why do we need more charter schools, more standardized testing, more privatization in education? Well: because we’re getting killed economically.

Seriously? By Finland?

Isn’t it disingenuous to imply that America is doomed because we’re 25^th in math? Is it a problem that Luxembourg is beating us? 

Iceland is 12^th in math (see list for 2010 provided). Icelanders have recently watched their nation go into bankruptcy. Mexico is 34^th. That doesn’t stop Ford Motors from shipping engine assembly jobs south of the border. 

If you’re old enough to remember the paranoia that swept the United States in the 80s, you may recall that Japan was going to dominate the future—because Japanese schools were turning out superior “products.” And then you might begin to wonder if there isn’t something else at work to explain America’s economic decline besides how the nation’s math teachers are doing. It might just be that education isn’t the key to growth. Japan has lost 1/3rd of its factory jobs in the last twenty-five years and the Japanese economy hasn’t grown at all in two decades. Apparently, it hasn’t helped to be fourth in math. 

When it comes right down to it, it’s time to quit crying about the failure of U. S. education and consider a few numbers that truly matter:  “22,” for one. That’s the average pay, per day, in China, a college graduate can expect to make at FoxConn, which makes iPads for Apple. In fact, what a dream world we would live in if only we could convince our young, just coming out of Yale, or Tulane, or Ohio State, saddled with an average of $25,000 in tuition loan debt, to work for $22 per day. Think of all the jobs we could bring back to America if we could pull off a trick like that! 

Maybe there’s more, in 2013, to what ails the nation’s economy than the “failure” of a few teachers who teach math.  

Maybe when you take a closer look, the real problem is corporate accounting. 



P. S. IT MIGHT BE WORTH REMINDING CRITICS of public schools that the international comparison of 15-year-old students in 2010 focused on kids from sixty-five nations, with ours finishing 14^th in reading and 17th in science. 

That’s not great.  

It’s not Mayan-level cultural disintegration either.

If you found this post interesting, I poke all kinds of holes in the anti-teacher logic in my book. I explain what good teachers can do, which is much, but also outline the kinds of problems we inevitably face.

NOW AVAILABLE ON AMAZON.

"School Crisis?" Maybe it's an "Office Tower Crisis?"

THE NEWS HAS BEEN FULL OF STORIES lately about the “school crisis” in America, about how the terrible public schools are undermining the U. S. economy. And I admit I’m scared. The American Dream is being poisoned, strangled and drowned—and it’s all the work of those evil teachers and their evil unions.

Or so the narrative goes.

Look at the international rankings if you require proof. Students from Finland stand #1 in reading and math. Worse still, America is getting its academic brains beat out by Iceland and Denmark and...my god...Liechtenstein.

So what do we know?  Clearly, we have a “school crisis.” You have to be blind, deaf, dumb, and probably lame, with receding hair, and fifty pounds overweight, not to realize that only business methods introduced in American education can stop the hemorrhaging of jobs to Indonesia and China and Bangladesh...and ...uh...What the hell?

We aren’t losing jobs to Liechtenstein.

Maybe we don’t have a “school crisis;” maybe what we really have is an “office tower crisis.”

Maybe our problem is greedy corporations and not teachers’ unions at all.

But I digress.

Are we really losing jobs to Indonesia because
the schools there are better?

THINK ABOUT THE VERY PHRASE:  “school crisis.” It’s like saying the building is the problem.

In the same vein, then, could we say a terrible sports team has an “arena crisis?” Imagine that you could take two NBA teams, the Charlotte Bobcats (with a 7-41 record) and the Chicago Bulls (41-11) and tell them to switch places where they play.

Would that change of address turn the Bobcats into Bulls?

That’s the same level of shallow thinking we see when critics insist we have a “school crisis” and promise that we will see miraculous results if we remove students from “failing” public schools and send them off to charter institutions.

Especially, business-run charter institutions. 

When U. S. shoe manufacturers lost out to competition
with the Chinese, was that a result of some "school crisis?"
Or was it workers willing to work for a few dollars per day?

It’s surprising, really, that charter schools in general, haven’t been faring better, because they start with real advantages that have nothing to do with superior business methods or acumen.

You open up a charter school and you set certain parameters, which regular public schools cannot. You say, for example, we will take students by lottery, because we only have so many seats. If a hundred kids apply from the regular schools you know right away that those hundred have parents who pay attention and go to the trouble to apply.

You still haven’t addressed the most insoluble problems of our society. The insoluble problem is child #101, who hasn’t seen his father in five years, whose mother is a meth head. Mom isn’t going to apply for anything school-related, because mom isn’t worth a shit. So her child suffers every single night and every single day. That means child #101 remains behind in the regular public school and we continue to hear about the “school crisis” when what we’re dealing with is actually a “house crisis,” to use an equally inapt term.

I READ RECENTLY ABOUT A NEW YORK CHARTER SCHOOL which held a “getting-to-know you” session for parents and children to begin the school year. Attendance was mandatory and rules were clearly explained. If a student caused serious discipline problems, both student and parent would be required to attend Saturday morning sessions to address the matter. At that point, several parents took their children and left the building.

A similar story out of Chicago notes that Noble Schools, a for-profit charter operation, assign students demerits for all rules infractions. Twelve demerits means a child has to go to a special Saturday class to address behavior issues and pay $120 for materials.

If that doesn’t solve the problem and another round of special classes is needed that’s another $120.

What happens to those New York kids whose parents won’t back up the charter school on discipline, or those Chicago kids whose parents can’t pay, or won’t, or when the child, himself, refuses to reform?

At that point, such children trudge back down the street to the regular public schools, and re-enroll. Their problems are still the same.

Critics call this a “school crisis.”

THE CRITICS ARE FOOLS.

Governor Kasich and the Business Model in Education Perfected

      
IF YOU LISTEN TO THE EXPERTS TALK (people who almost never actually teach) about how to “fix” America’s “failing” schools, you notice certain terms are accepted without question. Inner-city schools, where graduation rates are low, are “dropout factories.” 

CNN does a series on education and repeats the phrase “school crisis” so often you think the End Times are coming. 

And if you turn in to Fox News you hear Hannity and O’Reilly and Beck (when he’s not busy weeping) talking sagely about saving public education by following the “business model.”

If we’re going to go in this direction, as Governor Kasich here in Ohio and Scott Walker in Wisconsin and Chris Christie in New Jersey seem to want, it might be important to know what this means. Are we talking business-like efficiency? Or profit above all? Or do you mean that schools should copy business morality?  

Do we copy, for example, British Petroleum?  

True: it would take effort to blow up an entire school and sink it in the Gulf of Mexico, killing eleven teachers in the process, but cutting corners on safety and spreading toxic waste would be an interesting “business model” in education. 

The possibilities are endless. You might copy the tobacco companies, which insisted for decades that their products weren’t harming anyone. Teachers could pitch product like companies selling male-enhancement pills. School districts could start paying $473 million to lobbyists to get laws and breaks they want from the legislature, just like the finance, insurance and real estate industries did in 2010. 

Oh, wait:  White Hat Management, the largest for-profit charter school operator in Ohio has already been accused of bribing public officials and corrupt financial practices. Probably makes Governor Kasich, an old Lehman Brothers hand, get misty-eyed for the “good old days” when he and his friends were derailing the U. S. economy. 

Cincinnati Bengals Business Model?

If nothing else, there’s always the National Football League, one of the most successful business models in America today. It might be wise to study their play book. Why not, for example, charge students “seat licenses” before they sit down in our classes? Is that what we mean? Why not stop students from bringing their own food into the cafeteria and sell hot dogs in the lunch-room for $4.50. Meanwhile, shut off the water fountains and charge kids for bottled water.

 

That way you can be like Mike Brown and the Cincinnati Bengals and put out a crappy product and still make a fortune.  

IF SCHOOLS ARE GOING TO FOLLOW THIS PATHWAY how will it work in the end? Schools don’t have a chance of making a profit on handicapped kids. So, do we deny entry based on pre-existing conditions, like health insurance giants? Do we follow the tactics of the banking industry? You issue students debit cards to buy paper, pens, and pencils. Say:  the child needs a mechanical pencil to complete a math exam. His account is short on funds. He uses his debit card, pays 49¢ for the pencil, and the school charges $38 for an overdraft fee.

The airlines are another source of inspiration. We tell kids:  “You want to bring that book bag on this bus? It’s going to cost you $25 extra.” And that’s only one way! Oh: and you want to change your class schedule? We’re going to have to charge a $150 booking fee. 

We want schools to cut administrative costs. Let’s use HMO’s as a guide. We start routing phone calls from parents through press 1, press 7, press 6, press 4, press 1, press 5, get put on hold, get disconnected, and start all over again. Finally, mom or dad reaches someone with a foreign accent. 

Consider the case of Pennsylvania Judge Mark A. Ciaverella, Jr., if you want to know what might go wrong as we privatize schools and run them for profit. Judge Ciavarella was found guilty in February, 2011, on a dozen charges, including money laundering and racketeering in a $2.8 million dollar scheme to funnel juveniles into two privately-owned prisons.  

In what prosecutors labeled a “cash for kids” scam, each young defendant was seen as a unit of profit and the more prisoners the judge “produced” the more prison owners profited.  

Ciavarella received $1 million in kickbacks, and sentenced thousands of youths to jail, including one high school girl who earned three months behind bars after creating a Web page spoofing an assistant principal. Another teen went to jail for stealing a jar of nutmeg. 

A second judge involved took a plea deal, as did the builder of one of the detention facilities, and 6,000 juvenile records had to be expunged. 

In the end, the best example might be for-profit colleges like the University of Phoenix—where we can actually study how the business-as-education model works. These kinds of schools enroll 12% of higher education students in the United States. Those students receive nearly a quarter of all federal student aid, which accounts for more than 80% of revenue at for-profit colleges. Unfortunately, many students who attend for-profit colleges graduate with no marketable skills and make up nearly half of all federal student loan defaults.  

If Republicans law makers have their way, perhaps we can go back in time to the good old days. Let companies that run schools make teachers live in company-owned homes in company-run towns. (There won’t be any teachers unions to stand in the way.) When companies perfect the system they can pay teachers in scrip, like coal mining companies used to pay workers in the 20s, and that scrip would only be good at the company store.  

You total up the bill at the end of the month—groceries, rent, utilities—and what do you know? The teacher owes the company money or ends up with only a few pennies. 

IF YOU ASK GOVERNOR KASICH or the shills at Fox News the system at that point is perfected.