Friday I wrote a post about the wildly unequal funding of organizations promoting progressive education and those on the privatization/”education reform” side. The big bucks are flowing to the privatization crowd, mainly from what Diane Ravitch calls the Billionaire Boys Club, while progressive educators get the little money they have through contributions from small donors and by looking for change under sofa cushions. My case in point was an online education news network being started by ex-CNN and NBC anchor Campbell Brown. She’s got enough money to hire 13 people, including a former editor at Time magazine and a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. Her message is anti-union, anti-tenure, pro-charter and pro-voucher. And she’s not alone. She’s joining a network of well funded organizations that have plenty of money to get out a similar message.
The comments on that post aren’t as wild and wooly as on some of my other posts—things can get pretty heated in Comments Land—but there are a few interesting points I want to respond to. A few people said, maybe the progressive education side isn’t getting as much money because its ideas are tired and unpopular. Wrong. It’s not about which side has the better ideas. It’s about which side is favored by people with lots of money. Money may be speech according to the Supreme Court, but more money flowing to conservative politicians and ideas isn’t a sign that they have the better, or even the more popular, ideas. It’s just a sign of what big money wants.
Someone else’s whole comment was a link to a group called the Progressive Education Network. I assume the point was to spotlight an equivalent organization to those on the privatization side. So I went to the website. Very nice looking, very professional. From the look of things, the group might very well have some big money behind it.
Next I went to the group’s 2013 tax return. Total revenues for the year: $300,000, enough to maybe pay the salaries of 4 or 5 of Campbell Brown’s 13 staffers. The president, secretary, treasurer and 6 directors get no compensation. They’re volunteers. Under expenses on the tax form, there’s no compensation—salaries—listed. Most of the money, $230,000, goes to pay for hotels, speakers, services and lodging/board.
Mainly, the group spends its limited funds to put on conferences for progressive educators to attend, like its upcoming October conference in New York, Access, Equity & Activism: Teaching the Possible. (Among the three featured speakers is Tucson’s own Curtis Acosta who was part of TUSD’s Mexican American Studies program — now Dr. Acosta, by the way.) I’m guessing the major expenses are renting space for the conference and paying the lodging expenses of the presenters.
And that’s the point. Campbell Brown has millions to start a new venture. Jeb Bush’s organization, Foundation for Excellence in Education, brought in $46 million from 2007 through 2014. And they’re just two of many, many organizations large and small, on the national and the state level, working in similar directions and getting lots of money. Progressive education groups run on a shoestring. Many of them only exist due to the efforts of dedicated educators who are used to spending the extra time and going the extra mile for their students and are willing to volunteer more of their time to promote the kind of education they believe in.
AN OBVIOUSLY-I-HATE-CHARTER-SCHOOLS-AS-DO-ALL-PROGRESSIVES NOTE: I’m often accused of hating charter schools, and especially BASIS. Not so. I value all good education, and I support charter schools that are getting the job done. We need more honesty and transparency, financial and educational, from charters, and I tend to focus on those issues since the pro-charter crowd has the money and the megaphone to toot its own horn. But bottom line, good education is good education wherever you find it, school districts, charter schools or private schools. (And for the record, so far as I can remember, in the thousands of words I’ve written about BASIS, I have never criticized the quality of the education it provides.)
That’s true of the Progressive Education Network as well. Its list of partner schools actually runs heavily on the private school side, but it says, “We partner with public, public charter, and independent 501 c3 schools that have a dedication to progressive practice at their core.” Progressives believe in the value and importance of the public education systems which educate the vast majority of our students, but not to the exclusion of other educational options.
This article appears in Jul 2-8, 2015.
David you spend an awful lot of time trying not to criticize TUSD. Change is here, Obama promised it. Don’t let it run you over, grab ahold of it and make progress.
Education looks a lot better in Charters, only if you can cherry pick your students. Low income, poor English, special education, look elsewhere. Charters, self perpetuating Boards, no financial accountability, procure from your brother in laws company with no bids, waiting list cherry picked. Private choice, public funded. Just like the financial system, privatize profits, socialize losses.
Good article, once again, David. One of the big issues that you touch upon is charter school transparency and accountability. The facts are that they are supported by tax payer dollars but we literally don’t know where they spend their money. What is their profit margin? What are people paid? What is their overhead? How do they spend our money? No one knows because they are not subject to the same accounting rules or audits that the public school are!
In my professional career as a civil engineer (bridge and roadway design) I worked as a private consultant for state DOT’s. I was always audited. Our salaries were reviewed and denied if someone deemed them to high. Our profit margins were controlled, our overhead was carefully scrutinized. All because we were using taxpayer dollars.
So how come private, for profit charter schools get a pass?
No one is planning to give you a few million to start an education news network because no one will get rich off of your ideas.
David: I think we need to distinguish between progressive EDUCATIONAL PRACTICES, such as those introduced by people like John Dewey, founder of the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, and progressive POLITICS.
To defend adequate funding for universal public schooling may well be politically progressive. However, in what senses can we reasonably argue that our largest local public school district — for which you frequently serve as an apologist — is successfully implementing authentically progressive EDUCATIONAL PRACTICES? In what senses is this district successfully opposing policies and practices introduced by corporate reformers?
I’ll give you one specific example of an area where it seems to me educational practices and policies are not moving in a “progressive” direction in TUSD. I’m not a fan of the Basis model — I’m not going to go into the reasons why here — but I will say this: from what I know of the school, there’s no sense in which their educational methods could be called “progressive.” The fact that TUSD’s University High School seems currently to be morphing into an AP test results and rankings factory like Basis raises questions about whether those making the policy decisions in TUSD have a genuine commitment to progressive educational practices — or whether they have the means at their disposal to successfully resist the various forces arrayed against public schools being allowed to implement progressive educational ideas. When University High School was founded it was founded as “Special Projects” — an authentically “progressive” place where bright students could engage in independent exploration and original research under the guidance of faculty mentors. Now the focus is distinctly on increasing the number of students taking AP courses and scoring high on AP exams. The option of taking non-AP courses to meet graduation requirements is being phased out. The “writing” taught seems intended largely to enable students to produce the kinds of short-essay answers to which AP exam graders assign high scores. It seems to me that those who don’t see anything wrong with this trajectory — from what UHS was at its founding to what it is becoming now — can’t call themselves “progressives” in the “educational methods” sense of the term, as opposed to the “political ideology” sense of the term. Asking for UHS (and TUSD, and other public districts) to receive more funding is POLITICALLY progressive. Asking for TUSD schools to use educational practices that challenge students to develop their creativity and critical thinking skills — rather than just requiring them to take and score well on standardized tests — is EDUCATIONALLY progressive.
If you are looking in Tucson for “reservoirs of best practices” in progressive education i.e. the sort of training in critical thinking, learning by doing, and “education for democracy” progressive educators have been known to champion — you will find more of them in privates (e.g. Green Fields, Tucson Waldorf) and charters (e.g. Hermosa Montessori) than you will find them in any public district. If we’re in favor of having institutions that can serve as local “lab schools” for progressive practices in the classroom, it will be in our best interests not to put these schools out of business. Since 2008 changed the economic landscape, it has become the case that many of the private schools employing “progressive” methods could not stay afloat without the need-based financial aid programs that responsible use of tax credits enable. As for the charters, those I know best could not add responsible Special Ed programs without significant changes to the funding and regulatory structures under which they currently operate. To ask it of them without a change in those structures is not realistic — it is, in effect, a way of undermining them.
We should certainly fund our public schools better — AND resist their invasion by corporate profiteers and the testing industry better — but when addressing the charter sector and the use of tax credits to fund need-based financial aid programs in the private sector, I hope we can learn to separate the wheat from the chaff. If we don’t, there may not be any local institutions left where we can see uniform implementation of progressive educational principles — an implementation neither fettered nor lamed by the “skill and drill” and “teach to the test” and “the standards are on the board” type of instruction that has been forced into our public schools by disastrously misguided and punitive federal policies. If we ever reach a point at which we’re allowed to stop “teaching to the test” in in our public schools, we might want to take a look at some of the practices utilized in our local progressive charters and privates and figure out how to once again implement them more broadly in our public district schools.
Education is big business and many of the lobby vultures represent businesses trying to sell to the school systems. Where do they start? At the national level and then work down? Everything from the books to the desks to the school buses, selling to the public schools is a multi billion dollar business with each group going after the taxpayer dollar. I agree with you about the transparency which should extend to the public schools as well.