"The Father of Modern School Reform"--Milton Friedman

[Starry Messenger]

Fifty years ago, Milton Friedman introduced the idea of school vouchers. Now he looks back on his legacy.

Nick Gillespie from the December 2005 issue
http://reason.com/archives/2005/12/01/the-father-of-modern-school-re

In 1955 future Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman kick-started modern education reform with an article titled "The Role of Government in Education." Bucking the "general trend in our times toward increasing intervention by the state" in virtually all economic and social activities, Friedman argued that universal vouchers for elementary and secondary schools would usher in an age of educational innovation and experimentation, not only widening the range of options for students and parents but increasing all sorts of positive outcomes.

"Government," wrote Friedman, "preferably local governmental units, would give each child, through his parents, a specified sum to be used solely in paying for his general education; the parents would be free to spend this sum at a school of their own choice, provided it met certain minimum standards laid down by the appropriate governmental unit. Such schools would be conducted under a variety of auspices: by private enterprises operated for profit, nonprofit institutions established by private endowment, religious bodies, and some even by governmental units."

Among other things, Friedman prophesied that an education system based on vouchers would minimize inefficient government spending while giving low-income Americans, who are traditionally stuck in the very worst public schools, a better chance at receiving a good education. Vouchers "would bring a healthy increase in the variety of educational institutions available and in competition among them. Private initiative and enterprise would quicken the pace of progress in this area as it has in so many others. Government would serve its proper function of improving the operation of the invisible hand without substituting the dead hand of bureaucracy."

Milton Friedman: Being wrong is no hindrance when you empower the rich

http://anarchism.pageabode.com/anarcho/milton-friedman

Friedman produced more than his fair share of pain and suffering in the world. His ideas inspired the policies of Reagan as well as Thatcher. His personal invention in Chile ensured that Pinochet placed his ideological followers into leading economic positions where they imposed his ideas onto a terrorised Chilean people. The ironic thing was, wherever his dogmas were applied the exact opposite occurred.

For example, his asserted in "Capitalism and Freedom" that the more capitalist an economy, the more equal it was. When his policies were implemented, inequality has soared to record levels. His great claim was that "inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon," caused by too much money chasing too few goods. Applying his economic dogmas proved beyond doubt that this was not the case. Friedman also gave the intellectual justification for bringing down the post-war Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates. He raised the notion in 1953, but was utterly wrong when he predicted that there would be little volatility under such a system (speculators would go out of business). We have also learned better since then.

The same applies to his grand dogma, "Monetarism," which failed spectacularly when applied in the UK, US and Chile. While few people are now aware of this ideological nonsense, it was once quite the fashion. Faced with stagflation (high unemployment and high inflation), government's looked for answers and Friedman appeared to offer them. The Tories were at the forefront in taking up the Monetarist banner but the 1974-9 Labour government paid lip-service to them as well. For a short while, Monetarism looked set to supplant Keynesianism as the dominant economic philosophy of the industrial world. That this situation even arose in the first place shows how far economics is from a science.

Sadly for Friedman, his Keynesian critics were proven right. Critics like Nicholas Kaldor accurately predicted the failure of Monetarism long before it was applied. The reason why there was a "debate" in the first place was because of the "Bastard" Keynesianism (to use Joan Robinson's phrase) rampant in economics. This was a Keynes made safe for neo-classical economics by Hicks (who, decades later, admitted his mistake). By showing that Keynesian conclusions could not be drawn from neo-classical micro-economics, Friedman exposed the baselessness of the post-war neo-classical "Keynesian" synthesis consensus. However, rather than dump micro-economics the "science" retreated even more into the surreal world of neo-classicalism. Only in such an intellectual context could Friedman be taken seriously.

As an ideologue for capitalism, Friedman sought to show that it was a stable system and sought to exempt capitalism from any systemic responsibility for recessions. He attempted to show that the Great Depression was not a failure of capitalism, but rather of the state. He argued that the monetary authorities in the US and Europe reduced liquidity in the system, thus making a bad situation worse. Sadly, as his critics pointed out, even his own figures did not back this claim up. Equally sadly, no one has bothered to tell his fans. For Friedman's 90th birthday in 2002, Ben Bernanke -- then a Federal Reserve governor, now chairman of the US central bank -- stated that "Regarding the Great Depression, you're right. We did it. We're very sorry

Milton Friedman with disciple Ronald Reagan


Caveat Emptor, kiddies. Capitalism needs to be drowned in the bathtub.

[BrklynLiberal]

1. Friedman and Alan Greenspan should both rot in hell for what they helped do to this country

[mod mom]

9. +1

[Canuckistanian]

36. +1

"neoliberalism" or whatever it's being called these days is going down in the history books as as a failure in 20th century progress.

[Starry Messenger]

43. +1000

[donco6]

2. Sad to see the day vouchers are being pushed on DU.

Have we really fallen that far?

[Starry Messenger]

4. Evidently.

I was told that something being called "right-wing" was no real argument against it. I guess the party is "post-wing" now.

[donco6]

6. I just had someone on the other thread saying they're in favor of killing public ed.

Are there really no limits anymore to what you can advocate around here?

[Starry Messenger]

7. I'm afraid to find out.

Are there any right wing sacred cows the Dems haven't taken up for yet? I've lost track of the list.

[proud2BlibKansan]

14. A sock puppet who won't last long

[leftstreet]

3. Capitalism should drown gasping & writhing in agony in the Gulf

K&R

[LooseWilly]

5. One nice thing about capitalism- it'll sell you the bathtub you can use to drown it in...

Thanks for the history lesson. I always knew people spouting Friedman made no sense... now I know it wasn't just the fans getting it wrong, it was the source that was a Capitalism Idolator...

[Starry Messenger]

44. k

[Starry Messenger]

45. k

[Starry Messenger]

46. k

[Starry Messenger]

51. k

[Starry Messenger]

47. k

[Starry Messenger]

8. Milton Friedman did not save Chile

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/mar/03/chile-earthquake

Naomi Klein
March 2010

Ever since deregulation caused a worldwide economic meltdown in September '08 and everyone became a Keynesian again, it hasn't been easy to be a fanatical follower of the late economist Milton Friedman. So widely discredited is his brand of free-market fundamentalism that his admirers have become increasingly desperate to claim ideological victories, however far fetched.

A particularly distasteful case in point. Just two days after Chile was struck by a devastating earthquake, Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens informed his readers that Milton Friedman's "spirit was surely hovering protectively over Chile" because, "thanks largely to him, the country has endured a tragedy that elsewhere would have been an apocalypse … It's not by chance that Chileans were living in houses of brick – and Haitians in houses of straw –when the wolf arrived to try to blow them down."

According to Stephens, the radical free-market policies prescribed to Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet by Milton Friedman and his infamous "Chicago Boys" are the reason Chile is a prosperous nation with "some of the world's strictest building codes."

There is one rather large problem with this theory: Chile's modern seismic building code, drafted to resist earthquakes, was adopted in 1972. That year is enormously significant because it was one year before Pinochet seized power in a bloody US-backed coup. That means that if one person deserves credit for the law, it is not Friedman, or Pinochet, but Salvador Allende, Chile's democratically elected socialist president. (In truth many Chileans deserve credit, since the laws were a response to a history of quakes, and the first law was adopted in the 1930s).

It does seem significant, however, that the law was enacted even in the midst of a crippling economic embargo ("make the economy scream" Richard Nixon famously growled after Allende won the 1970 elections). The code was later updated in the 90s, well after Pinochet and the Chicago Boys were finally out of power and democracy was restored.

[Starry Messenger]

10. Public Schools: Make Them Private

http://www.cato.org/pubs/briefs/bp-023.html

by Milton Friedman

4. Education

<snip>

There is enormous room for improvement in our educational system. Hardly any activity in the United States is technically more backward. We essentially teach children in the same way that we did 200 years ago: one teacher in front of a bunch of kids in a closed room. The availability of computers has changed the situation, but not fundamentally. Computers are being added to public schools, but they are typically not being used in an imaginative and innovative way.

I believe that the only way to make a major improvement in our educational system is through privatization to the point at which a substantial fraction of all educational services is rendered to individuals by private enterprises. Nothing else will destroy or even greatly weaken the power of the current educational establishment--a necessary pre-condition for radical improvement in our educational system. And nothing else will provide the public schools with the competition that will force them to improve in order to hold their clientele.

No one can predict in advance the direction that a truly free-market educational system would take. We know from the experience of every other industry how imaginative competitive free enterprise can be, what new products and services can be introduced, how driven it is to satisfy the customers--that is what we need in education. We know how the telephone industry has been revolutionized by opening it to competition; how fax has begun to undermine the postal monopoly in first-class mail; how UPS, Federal Express and many other private enterprises have transformed package and message delivery and, on the strictly private level, how competition from Japan has transformed the domestic automobile industry.

The private schools that 10 percent of children now attend consist of a few elite schools serving at high cost a tiny fraction of the population, and many mostly parochial nonprofit schools able to compete with government schools by charging low fees made possible by the dedicated services of many of the teachers and subsidies from the sponsoring institutions. These private schools do provide a superior education for a small fraction of the children, but they are not in a position to make innovative changes. For that, we need a much larger and more vigorous private enterprise system.

The problem is how to get from here to there. Vouchers are not an end in themselves; they are a means to make a transition from a government to a market system. The deterioration of our school system and the stratification arising out of the new industrial revolution have made privatization of education far more urgent and important than it was 40 years ago.

[Hannah Bell]

11. the new democrats = the old republicans, & the new republicans = the old birchers?

[Starry Messenger]

13. Friedman Democrats?

:crazy: I have a sharp throbbing pain in my skull today.

[Hannah Bell]

16. neoliberal policy is the number one cause of headaches.

[Starry Messenger]

17. Doing this thread helped. My urge to do violence is waning a bit.

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2003/10/adverse_results.html


Adverse Results for School Vouchers
Arnold Kling

Chang-Tai Hsieh and Miguel Urguiola find evidence that in Chile school vouchers caused schools to compete for the best students rather than compete to deliver better education.


Although statistically insignificant, the point estimates suggest that, if anything, test scores experienced a relative decline in communities where the private sector made greater inroads.


The results of this study would appear to me to suggest that vouchers need to be "progressive," in that higher vouchers should be given to needier students. Progressive vouchers would change the incentives so that schools would compete for needier students, which in turn might create more incentive to compete on quality.

It could be that the majority of early experiments with vouchers are likely to prove disappointing. However, if we learn from successful and unsuccessful experiments and adopt best practices, my guess is that ultimately education systems that adopt vouchers will be superior.

UPDATE: More from Tyler Cowen and from Brad DeLong.

For Discussion. In the Chilean system, poorly-performing public schools were not shut down. How could this explain the authors' results that areas where private schools made larger inroads were not areas in which overall education outcomes improved?

The Capitalists account for this failure thusly:



Will Chile's President Flunk the Test?
by Mary Anastasia O'Grady

http://www.hacer.org/current/Chile27.php

In 1982, Chile introduced a voucher system that allows children to use government funds to attend either public or private schools. The voucher system seeks to improve the quality of education by creating competition for students. Among private-school students, it has worked; test scores are up. But public schools remain disappointing.

The problem is that rather than a full-fledged voucher system, Chile has a quasi-voucher program that distorts the choice and competition effects of vouchers by subsidizing public schools directly. The rationale for the subsidy is fine: Since the cost of educating a poor child is higher than a middle-class child, extra funding is needed to support poor children. But unfortunately, that extra funding does not go into the hands of the student as a tool for choice. Instead, it goes directly to the public schools that the poor children attend. If a poor student wants to go to a private school, he cannot take the subsidy with him.

Claudio Sapelli, a Chicago-trained economist at the Catholic University in Santiago, has studied the distortions of the quasi-voucher system and written a chapter in the book "What America Can Learn From School Choice In Other Countries," (Cato Institute, 2005). On the subject of the "non-portable" funding, he wrote, "schools receive it in the form of supply subsidies, which merely accentuates the dependence of poor students on public schools." In other words, in the absence of making the subsidy portable, neither choice nor competition have had a chance to emerge.

The trouble for Chilean politicians is that the government bureaucracy and teachers' unions are powerful special interests. So although a more competitive system is needed, the incentive to feed the monster bureaucracy may be greater.

That damn teachers' union. Eventually we're just going to have to flush that. It just gets in the way no matter how you try to accommodate it in the "free market". So let's just unhook all that lovely money from the federal honeypot and let the teachers swing in the breeze.

[Confusious]

40. I hate all those labels "neoliberal," "monetarism," etc

Can't we just lump everything he advocated, everything Regan advocated, everything republicans advocate, economically, into one word:

Bullshit economics.

'cause I really don't like wading through shit, and that's what their policies are, and what I feel like I'm doing, when I read about them.

[TheKentuckian]

41. Awesome call

[Starry Messenger]

12. Milton Friedman, American Hero

http://www.roadtothemiddleclass.com/oped213_milton_friedman_american_hero.html

But Friedman’s modest proposal for school vouchers, the idea that government money for education should go to the parents not the school, has provoked such opposition from the education producer interest, the Democrats’ public schoolteacher paymasters, that nothing less than total implosion of the government school monopoly may permit the solution of the central injustice of government education, the utter failure of schools for poor children in inner cities. Nevertheless, Friedman and his wife founded in 1996 the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation to work for school reform.

In comparing Friedman against his rival economist intellectuals John Kenneth Galbraith and Paul Samuelson one is struck by the poverty of the opposition. Extravagantly lionized in his prime, Galbraith seems today more an entertainer on the liberal improv circuit than a thinker, a man who served up crowd-pleasing one-liners to a generation of liberal readers while successfully representing himself as an iconoclast that challenged “conventional wisdom.” Galbreaith’s theory of “countervailing power” between Big Business and Big Labor in American Capitalism in 1952 proved to be empty rubbish. In fact the reign of Big Business and Big Labor in the early post World War II era, condoned by Big Government, amounted to a conspiracy to loot America’s great manufacturing corporations. His Affluent Society advanced the preposterous notion that a government already grown to imperial grandeur in the 1950s suffered from underfunding in a nation of “private affluence” and “public squalor.”

...

It was not Friedman’s way to pander or to placate liberal opinion. Instead his tireless advocacy plowed a political space in which the economic reforms of the 1980s could take root. To test that notion we can ask the question: Could President Reagan have won the battle to transform the US economy without Friedman’s polemics? The answer is clear. The triumph of Reaganism is unthinkable without Friedman’s contribution.

There is one black mark against Milton Friedman. In the 1970s he gave some lectures on monetary economic policy in Chile. Then he actually met with dictator August Pinochet. For this he was excoriated in the usual places. But the result of his speeches in Chile was that the Pinochet regime implemented a series of landmark economic policies including school vouchers, free trade, and social security privatization that has made Chile the envy of Latin America (See the way that lefties dispute this). Curiously, Friedman’s speeches on economics in socialist countries like China did not provoke similar outrage.

Santiago, Chile

the mothers of Chileans "disappeared" during the Pinochet regime demand to know the whereabouts of their loved ones


Those "lefty whiners".

[Starry Messenger]

15. Lessons Of Chile's Voucher Reform Movement

http://www.rethinkingschools.org/special_reports/voucher_report/v_sosintl.shtml

<snip>
Because low-income parents were less able to add private contributions to the voucher amounts, private schools in Chile were apparently not that interested in doing any better than public schools with lower-income pupils. If the declining scores in Chile's municipal public schools mean anything, it is that increased competition had a negative effect on student achievement, and that the Chilean voucher plan contributed to greater inequality in pupil achievement without improving the overall quality of education.

<snip>

The fourth result was the need to recentralize influence over the educational system once a democratic government was elected in 1990. Under the Pinochet reform, government made no effort to improve the curriculum, the quality of teaching, or the management of education, since this was supposed to happen spontaneously through increased competition among schools vying for students. It did not. Neither did municipalities or most private schools come up with incentives for improving pupil performance. Low-income municipalities were at a special disadvantage because they, even more than other municipalities, lacked the fiscal capacity and resources for school improvement. And as soon as unions were legal again, teachers reorganized themselves, fought for higher salaries, and for the right to representation. Not surprisingly, they focused their demands on the central government, which oversees minimum salaries for both public and private schools.


The lessons for us here in the United States are obvious, but they are not the one that privatization advocates want known. Voucher plans increase inequality without making schools better. Even more significantly, privatization reduces the public effort to improve schooling since it relies on the free market to increase achievement. But the increase never occurs. Private schools may end up producing higher achievement than public schools, but they generally do this by keeping out hard-to-manage pupils, who get concentrated in "last-resort" public schools.

<snip>

Chile had a military dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s that could impose vouchers from above and suppress opposition by force. In a democracy, it takes highly dissatisfied constituencies to produce reforms, even if they are not the ones who ultimately benefit from them. Conservatives have figured out that the most dissatisfied educational constituencies are the poor, and will use them to dismantle public education.

Ironically, the privatization movement in the United States is gaining ground just when pupils from all groups, especially those most at risk, are making significant achievement gains and just when public school reform movements are reaching into inner cities to produce real change. To cite one example: between 1975 and 1989, the difference in average reading proficiency scores between African-American and white 17-year-olds went from 50 points to 21 points, or a gain of about half a standard deviation.

Last Year’s Strike in Santiago

[Starry Messenger]

18. IS PINOCHET DEAD?

http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=2685


Schools in revolt

A year earlier, in March 2006, a million secondary-school students had occupied their schools and taken to the streets, warmly supported by their teachers, parents and the vast majority of the population. School students are affectionately nicknamed pingüinos, and really do look like the Antarctic birds when they flock out of school in their dark blue and white uniforms. Traditionally, some take to the streets every year shortly after the beginning of classes, which in the southern hemisphere start in March. This time, however, in just one week the movement spread from a small bunch of schools to the entire educational system. More significantly, the pingüinos were not just demanding free bus passes and the like, but the abolition of the loce—the national education law.

The loce was promulgated by Pinochet on his last day in office in 1990, and remains the basic framework that has spurred a continuing privatization of the school system. No democratic government has so far dared to challenge it: Bachelet’s educational programme has merely called for more kindergartens, as if everything else was all right—which is very far from the case. The dismantling of the public system, enforced quite brutally by the dictatorship and continuing at a lesser pace under loce, has resulted in a reduction of over 700,000 primary and secondary students since 1974, about a quarter of the then total. The pupils who have deserted the public system have migrated to private schools, created with the lure of public subsidies. Efforts by democratic governments since 1990 to restore public expenditure on education, which was cut in half by the dictatorship, have been ineffective in stopping this process: the public system continues to lose tens of thousands of pupils each year. Today, half of all students are in private schools and universities, and families disburse half the total fees—the corresponding figures for oecd countries are respectively 19 and 8 per cent. The resulting poor quality, social segmentation, and inequity of the privatized educational system are so severe that they prompted the student protests and the overhaul of the system that is now under way.

When asked what the solution might be, over 70 per cent of Chileans answer that schools should return to the Ministry of Education. Many of them remember that by the end of the 1960s the state had built up a decent public system, with relatively high coverage at all levels of education. Most Chileans sent their children there at no cost to the families. Overall, the impact of neoliberal policies has reduced the total proportion of students in both public and private institutions in relation to the entire population, from 30 per cent in 1974 down to 25 per cent in 1990, and up only to 27 per cent today. If falling birth rates have made it possible today to attain full coverage at primary and secondary levels, the country has fallen seriously behind at tertiary level, where coverage, although now growing, is still only 32 per cent of the age group. The figure is double this in neighbouring Argentina and Uruguay, and even higher in developed countries—South Korea attaining a record 98 per cent coverage. Significantly, tertiary education for the upper-income fifth of the Chilean population, many of whom study in the new private universities, also reaches above 70 per cent.

The recent reform has abolished loce and replaced it with a framework law that recognizes the right of citizens to an education of good quality. In addition, it re-establishes in part the capacity of the state to regulate the education system. New funding has been announced that should raise public expenditure on education from about 3.5 per cent of gdp in 2007 to 4 per cent in 2008—in the early 1970s, Chile had allocated 7 per cent of gdp to this purpose. However, most of this increase will supplement funds distributed on a per pupil base through the loce-inspired voucher system; the value of vouchers for poor students, most of whom are in public schools, will be raised more than the rest. An additional us$100 million has also been assigned to improving the public schools, to be distributed on a budget basis. It should be noted that loce prohibited the state from funding its own schools over and above the vouchers. This was considered ‘unfair competition’ with private schools, which received the same vouchers; of course, no such prohibition was applied to the latter. Details of the partial reconstruction of the national public-school system remain to be announced. This system, built up over a century, was dismantled by Pinochet, with schools turned over to municipalities that in most cases still lack both the expertise and the funds to administer them properly.

[Gormy Cuss]

19. K & R

[Starry Messenger]

20. School Vouchers and Privitization

by Danny K. Weil

http://books.google.com/books?id=W3GvVIBBV60C&lpg=PA167&ots=8FzGNvL5lk&dq=pinochet%20vouchers&pg=PA168#v=onepage&q=pinochet%20vouchers&f=false

[SoCalDem]

21. Just rich folks making decisions for the "little people" below

and people wonder why it didn't "work"?

Anytime someone with power over your money, tells you something is for your own good...........run !

[Starry Messenger]

22. And they are selling it as "empowerment of the poor".

The free market truly has no shame.

[Solly Mack]

23. k/r

[Ardent15]

24. K and R

nt

[Starry Messenger]

25. Charter schools and the road to private school vouchers

http://dailycensored.com/2010/02/28/charter-schools-and-the-road-to-private-school-vouchers/

Written by Danny Weil Education Feb 28, 2010
Charter Schools: It’s all about market share and yes, vouchers

Remember the ‘voucher’ movement? I do, I wrote a book on it some ten years ago as it swept the nation as rightwing bad breath has a tendency to do. “Choice” then, as now, was the favorite word of the sophists that tried to sell it like carnival barkers to the public. Milwaukee tried it; so did some other cities. Researchers, authors, think tank inhabitants, and policy wonks all broke into high speed to embrace this Milton Friedman theory of economics. It was Friedman who proposed the idea more than fifty years or so ago.


"The California Charter Schools Association, a union of privatizers casts a moneyed eye at vouchers

By Robert Skeels

<snip>

You’d think that the overarching goal of the California Charter Schools Association would be to contribute to the social fabric by providing a quality education to all the students its member schools serve, but instead it’s all about market share. To wit:

“Ultimately the Association gauges its success by tracking the growth in the number of children attending high-quality charter schools in California.” — Rick Piercy (Board Chair CCSA 2009) <1>

This imperative of increasing market share — an imperative shared by all the billionaire backers <2> of charters, pressing through their proxies like Ben Austin — is ultimately aimed at union busting and bankrupting public school systems. AEI’s Andy Smarick, Ben Austin and Marco Petruzzi’s reactionary ideological muse, writes the following in a far right wing journal sponsored by the Hoover Institution and Fordham Institute.

“As chartering increases its market share in a city, the district will come under growing financial pressure. The district, despite educating fewer and fewer students, will still require a large administrative staff to process payroll and benefits, administer federal programs, and oversee special education. With a lopsided adult-to-student ratio, the district’s per-pupil costs will skyrocket.” <3>

<snip>

‘In the long run, charter schools are being strategically used to pave the way for vouchers. The voucher advocates, who are very powerful and funded by right-wing foundations and families, recognize that the word voucher has been successfully discredited by enlightened Americans who believe in the public sector. So they’ve resorted to two strategies. First, they no longer use the word “vouchers.” They’ve adopted the seemingly benign phrase “school choice,” but they are still voucher advocates.’ – Jonathan Kozol <4>"

[Ardent15]

27. Language

Morning in America



Kind and gentle



Don't stop thinking about tomorrow



Compassionate conservatism

http://www.insidesocal.com/outinhollywood/,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,gwbush.jpg

And of course...CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IN (TM)

[Starry Messenger]

28. "The Wave of The Future"

http://educationnext.org/wave-of-the-future/

Why charter schools should replace failing urban schools


By Andy Smarick

Winter 2008 / Vol. 8, No. 1

Clearly we can’t expect the political process to swiftly bring about charter districts in all of America’s big cities. However, if charter advocates carefully target specific systems with an exacting strategy, the current policy environment will allow them to create examples of a new, high-performing system of public education in urban America.

Here, in short, is one roadmap for chartering’s way forward: First, commit to drastically increasing the charter market share in a few select communities until it is the dominant system and the district is reduced to a secondary provider. The target should be 75 percent. Second, choose the target communities wisely. Each should begin with a solid charter base (at least 5 percent market share), a policy environment that will enable growth (fair funding, nondistrict authorizers, and no legislated caps), and a favorable political environment (friendly elected officials and editorial boards, a positive experience with charters to date, and unorganized opposition). For example, in New York a concerted effort could be made to site in Albany or Buffalo a large percentage of the 100 new charters allowed under the raised cap. Other potentially fertile districts include Denver, Detroit, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, New Orleans, Oakland, and Washington, D.C.

Third, secure proven operators to open new schools. To the greatest extent possible, growth should be driven by replicating successful local charters and recruiting high-performing operators from other areas (see Figure 2). Fourth, engage key allies like Teach For America, New Leaders for New Schools, and national and local foundations to ensure the effort has the human and financial capital needed. Last, commit to rigorously assessing charter performance in each community and working with authorizers to close the charters that fail to significantly improve student achievement.

<snip>

As chartering increases its market share in a city, the district will come under growing financial pressure. The district, despite educating fewer and fewer students, will still require a large administrative staff to process payroll and benefits, administer federal programs, and oversee special education. With a lopsided adult-to-student ratio, the district’s per-pupil costs will skyrocket.

At some point along the district’s path from monopoly provider to financially unsustainable marginal player, the city’s investors and stakeholders—taxpayers, foundations, business leaders, elected officials, and editorial boards—are likely to demand fundamental change. That is, eventually the financial crisis will become a political crisis. If the district has progressive leadership, one of two best-case scenarios may result. The district could voluntarily begin the shift to an authorizer, developing a new relationship with its schools and reworking its administrative structure to meet the new conditions. Or, believing the organization is unable to make this change, the district could gradually transfer its schools to an established authorizer.

This the Blueprint, a gradual starving out and destruction of one of the best institutions this country has produced. It's all here in black and white, folks, no ambiguous language. The die is cast. This is the face of "education reform". It is no secret, it is no conspiracy theory, it is no "pet issue". It's a fucking WAR!

[Starry Messenger]

38. Interesting footnote

The asshole who wrote this paper is New Jersey's brand spanking new Deputy Commissioner of their Dept. of Ed. as of last week.

http://www.njpsa.org/agr/news.cfm?newsid=758

Andy Smarick To Assume Role as NJDOE Deputy Commissioner

May 26, 2010

Andy Smarick, currently a visiting fellow with the Fordham Institute and Ed-blogger, announced May 25 that he will be joining the New Jersey Department of Education as Deputy Commisioner this summer.

According to Smarick’s blog, he'll work as the lone deputy under Commissioner Bret Schundler. He will officially start his new role sometime this summer.

In his blog announcement Smarick noted, “New Jersey has a new governor who believes deeply in choice and accountability, and he’s committed to reforming his state’s K-12 system. The state commissioner is of the same mind, hoping to tackle school finance, teacher quality, and much more. I’m especially excited to get to lend a hand to the effort to improve Newark’s schools. The city has a set of superb charter organizations, a remarkably strong nonprofit support infrastructure, and a hard-charging mayor.”

Smarick, a former education department official under President George W. Bush, cemented his role in the D.C. education wonk world with his writings on Race to the Top and turning around low-performing schools.

Mr. Smarick served as Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Office of Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development at the U.S. Department of Education where he helped manage the Department's research, budget, and policy functions. From 2007 to 2008, Smarick served at the White House in the Domestic Policy Council, working primarily on K-12 and higher education issues. Prior positions include: Chief Operating Officer for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, legislative assistant to a Member of the U.S. House of Representatives, and aide to members of the Maryland state legislature.

Sorry New Jersey. You are fucked.

[amborin]

26. his stance living on in Obama's Economics Advisor Larry Summers

[Starry Messenger]

29. And Arne Duncan

Probably more, too.

[Starry Messenger]

30. A Transformed System

http://educationnext.org/wave-of-the-future/


More of the wave of the future:

Charter advocates should strive to have every urban public school be a charter. That is, each school should have significant control over its curriculum, methods, budget, staff, and calendar. Each school should have a contract that spells out its mission and measurable objectives, including guaranteeing that all students achieve proficiency in basic skills. Each school should be held accountable by an approved public body.

“Charter” will no longer be seen as an adjective, a way to describe a type of school, but as a verb, an orderly and sensible process for developing, replicating, operating, overseeing, and closing schools. The system would be fluid, self-improving, and driven by parents and public authority, ensuring the system uses the best of market and government forces. Schools that couldn’t attract families would close, as would those that ran afoul of authorizers for academic, financial, or management failures. School start-ups, both the number and their characteristics, would reflect the needs of communities and the interests of students, but would also be tightly regulated to generate a high probability of school success.

So, while the government’s role would still be significant, it would no longer operate the city’s entire portfolio of public schools. Instead, it would take on a role similar to the FAA’s role in monitoring the airline industry or a health department’s monitoring of restaurants. Today, we take airline safety for granted and make our choices based on service, connections, and so on. Similarly, we know all restaurants have fire exits and meet food safety standards, so we choose based on our tastes and schedules. A well-regulated chartered school system could guarantee that all public schools were providing a safe, high-quality education and properly managing operations, thereby allowing families to choose a school based on other criteria.

The government’s substantial oversight role in guaranteeing safety and quality would differentiate a charter system from a universal voucher program. To many, a voucher system would undesirably blur the lines between church and state, add the profit motive to schooling, remove the “public” from K–12 education, and leave too much to the vicissitudes of the market. By contrast, in a chartered system, public schools would be nonreligious, managed by nonprofits, overseen by a public authority, and held to clear performance standards.

But a chartered system would capitalize on market forces largely absent from district systems, such as constant innovation, competition, and replication. Replication is arguably the most valuable. Chartering has not only created some of America’s finest schools, it has enabled their leaders to identify the characteristics that made those schools so remarkable and then develop systems for creating additional, equally successful schools. In addition to well-known charter management organizations like KIPP, Achievement First, and Uncommon Schools, new ones continue to emerge: Green Dot, High Tech High, Aspire, Noble Street, IDEA, and more. Major funders like the Charter School Growth Fund and NewSchools Venture Fund are helping other high-performing charters expand as well.

Every school. They want the whole thing. That was published two years ago. You can check MadFloridian's journal for the freaky shit done by the "schools" named in the last paragraph there. Don't be fooled by "school choice". The only choice you will get will be Coke© or Pepsi©.

[maryf]

32. and every teacher should be

chained to her desk, with an iv drip of the school's choosing...
K&R

[Starry Messenger]

33. And totally stripped of any professional status.

Just a faceless service job. But also, a perky miracle worker. I guess kind of like the airline hostesses of education if they are going to extend the FAA/airline scenario to schools. How fun! :sarcasm:

[maryf]

34. Who needs professional status...

when kids will also be chained to computers!! Distance learning may well free us to just help kids work their monitors!! Hey, I like the idea of a French Maid outfit, myself!!!

[Starry Messenger]

37. You think they'll let us pick out the outfit?

Hmm. I've always been partial to this one:

[marmar]

31. His rancid legacy lives on.......

nt

[Starry Messenger]

39. A couple of folks needed a refresher course. n/t

[Odin2005]

35. He was a HORRIBLE excuse of a human being.

[TheKentuckian]

42. K&R for the damn truth

After a few times of falling for the same scams and lies you have to believe folks want to fall for them. A lot of Democrats (maybe most now) are just pre-shrub Republicans without the depending on the Southern Strategy.

[Starry Messenger]

48. The Promise of Vouchers

http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/resources/part7/chapter20/friedman-promise-vouchers


Milton Friedman, Wall Street Journal, December 5, 2005

Most New Orleans schools are in ruins, as are the homes of the children who have attended them. The children are now scattered all over the country. This is a tragedy. It is also an opportunity to radically reform the educational system.

The schools that were destroyed were not serving their students well. As Chris Kinnan writes, "The New Orleans public-school system has been failing its kids for years. Fully 73 of its more than 120 schools are considered to be 'failing' according to the state's educational accountability standards." ("Vouchers for New Orleans," National Review Online, Sept. 15, 2005.)

New Orleans schools were failing for the same reason that schools are failing in other large cities, because the schools are owned and operated by the government. Government decides what is to be produced and who is to consume its products, generally assigning students to schools by their residence. The only recourse of dissatisfied parents is to change their residence or give up the government subsidy and pay for their children's schooling twice, once in taxes and once in tuition. This top-down organization works no better in the U.S. than it did in the Soviet Union or East Germany.

Rather than simply rebuild the destroyed schools, Louisiana, which has taken over the New Orleans school system, should take this opportunity to empower the consumers, i.e., the students, by providing parents with vouchers of substantial size, say three-quarters of per- pupil spending in government schools, usable only for educational expenses. Parents would then be free to choose the schooling they considered best for their children. This would introduce competition, which is missing from the present system. It would be a move to a bottom-up organization, which has proved so successful in the rest of our society.

To make competition effective, Louisiana should provide a favorable climate for new entrants, whether they be parochial, non-profit or for-profit. As part of doing so it should make clear that the vouchers are not an emergency expedient that will be terminated once the emergency is over, but are a permanent reform.

http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/excerpt

The Shock Doctrine: An Excerpt From the Introduction

He was speaking quietly, but an older man in line in front of us overheard and whipped around. "What is wrong with these people in Baton Rouge? This isn't an opportunity. It's a goddamned tragedy. Are they blind?" A mother with two kids chimed in. "No, they're not blind, they're evil. They see just fine."

One of those who saw opportunity in the floodwaters of New Orleans was the late Milton Friedman, grand guru of unfettered capitalism and credited with writing the rulebook for the contemporary, hyper-mobile global economy. Ninety-three years old and in failing health, "Uncle Miltie", as he was known to his followers, found the strength to write an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal three months after the levees broke. "Most New Orleans schools are in ruins," Friedman observed, "as are the homes of the children who have attended them. The children are now scattered all over the country. This is a tragedy. It is also an opportunity."

Friedman's radical idea was that instead of spending a portion of the billions of dollars in reconstruction money on rebuilding and improving New Orleans' existing public school system, the government should provide families with vouchers, which they could spend at private institutions.

In sharp contrast to the glacial pace with which the levees were repaired and the electricity grid brought back online, the auctioning-off of New Orleans' school system took place with military speed and precision. Within 19 months, with most of the city's poor residents still in exile, New Orleans' public school system had been almost completely replaced by privately run charter schools.

The Friedmanite American Enterprise Institute enthused that "Katrina accomplished in a day ... what Louisiana school reformers couldn't do after years of trying". Public school teachers, meanwhile, were calling Friedman's plan "an educational land grab". I call these orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities, "disaster capitalism".

[MadHound]

49. To try and label the arch predatory capitalist as an education reformer is wrong on so many levels

Educators actually care about students, about children. Friedman only cared about making obscene amounts of money and power and getting public acclaimed for doing so, no matter how much death and destruction he caused.

[Starry Messenger]

50. I completely agree.

There are a few newbies who seemed to want to pour old wine into new bottles. I wanted to remind the class that ideas have origins and that we are not fooled. "School Choice" is right wing bullshit.