The Charter-Schooling Racket.

There are some charter schools that are doing good work, but these are the exception, not the rule. The fact of the matter is that the charter schools movement serves first and foremost as a front for the privitization of education—the placement of educational infrastructure into the hands of profiteers, industrialists, finance capitalists and loan sharks.

This article, which appeared recently in the New York Times, describes a case in point:

When the energy executive Dennis Bakke retired with a fortune from the AES Corporation, [get a load of the AES Corporation's Web site!—cft] the company he co-founded, he and his wife, Eileen, decided to direct their attention and money to education. [E]ager to experiment with applying business strategies and discipline to public schools[, t]he Bakkes became part of the nation’s new crop of education entrepreneurs, founding a commercial charter school company called Imagine Schools[,] now the largest commercial manager of charter schools in the country.

Here's a(n ineffective) public relationsy photograph of the Bakkes 'interacting' with the low-income students in one of the schools 'managed' by Imagine Schools:

As education expert Patricia Burch states in an article on the dark and clandestine market forces that are unleashing the worldwide privatization of education and that are misleadingly portraying this widespread, government-coordinated profiteering racket in terms of the benefits of parental "consumer choice" or of the putative benefits of "market competition" upon educational quality, among the reasons that this cynical ploy works is because

we tend to equate the public sector with large bureaucracy and the private sector with more efficient, flexible and network-oriented forms of organization. In fact, the providers now “trading” in the new education market place are situated squarely in the same institutional environment as schools. In broad strokes, this institutional frame reflects embedded routines and rituals for the organization of schooling.

This institutional template for schooling can have a conservative influence on schools and keep reform ideas from becoming or achieving anything new. In this context, rather than breaking the mold, private firms in the education market can end up reproducing the worst practices of public schooling, offering low-income students “more of the same” and at significant cost.  [Access article here.]

Returning to the Times article, we see that the Bakkes epitomize the ways in which the puppet-masters of the charter-schooling racket uses this notion of 'marketization' as a means by which to justify enriching themselves—tax free—to the detriment and even ruin of the urban children they are supposed to be helping:

Because public money is used, most states grant charters to run such schools only to nonprofit groups with the expectation that they will exercise the same independent oversight that public school boards do. Some are run locally. Some bring in nonprofit management chains. And a number use commercial management companies like Imagine.

But regulators in some states have found that Imagine has elbowed the charter holders out of virtually all school decision making — hiring and firing principals and staff members, controlling and profiting from school real estate, and retaining fees under contracts that often guarantee Imagine’s management in perpetuity.

The arrangements, they say, allow Imagine to use public money with little oversight. “Under either charter law or traditional nonprofit law, there really is no way an entity should end up on both sides of business transactions,” said Marc Dean Millot, publisher of the report K-12 Leads and a former president of the National Charter Schools Alliance, a trade association, now defunct, for the charter school movement.

“Imagine works to dominate the board of the charter holder, and then it does a deal with the board it dominates — and that cannot be an arm’s length transaction,” he said.

Such concerns have thwarted efforts by Imagine to open a school in Florida, threaten to stall its push into Texas, and have ended its business with a school in Georgia and another in New York, as well as other states.

Imagine is not shy about the way it wields its power, which it calls essential to its governing philosophy. “Imagine Schools operates the entire school, and is not a consultant or management company,” its Web site says. “All principals, teachers, and staff are Imagine Schools people. The Imagine Schools culture is meant to permeate every aspect of the school’s life.”

Mrs. Bakke, who is paid $100,000 as vice president of education at Imagine, says it works in “close partnership” with the boards of the schools it manages. “The governing boards are definitely in charge, but they look to us, frankly, because as you know, nonprofit boards are well meaning but don’t always have the experience and expertise running the schools,” she said in an interview.

She said that she and her husband, who is paid $200,000 as the company’s chief executive, sank $155 million into Imagine and that they were able to run schools efficiently. “We offer a great deal for communities and for taxpayers,” Mrs. Bakke said, “because we’re providing education at less than what a traditional school is spending.”

She says the company should be judged by its educational results, not its business and financial arrangements. 

 And if that doesn't sound sketchy enough for you, read on:

Mrs. Bakke said her company “is operated as a not-for-profit.” But Imagine is not a nonprofit group, and it has so far failed to gain status as a charity from the I.R.S.

Imagine applied for federal tax exemption in 2005 and has repeatedly said approval is imminent. It typically takes four to six months for such approvals. “We’re not sure why it’s taking so long,” said Mrs. Bakke, who is 56. “We suspect it’s because we’re trailblazers in a sense, and they haven’t had an application quite like this.”

The I.R.S., as is its policy, declined to comment. 

And how about the relationship of Imagine Schools to individual schools and their boards of directors? Read on:

In Texas, parents trying to open a charter school for elementary school students thought that Imagine was going too far.

“Imagine did a few things that indicated they thought the charter belonged to them, which was not our understanding at all,” said Karelei Munn, who is part of a group working to establish a charter school in Georgetown, Tex., near Austin. “We were looking to control our board, and they were looking to control our board.”

Ms. Munn and other members of the group holding the charter broke their ties with Imagine and are trying to form a school on their own.

Regulators in Texas have been slow to approve a second Imagine school, citing concerns that include an e-mail message from Mr. Bakke to the company’s senior staff members that was reported on by The St. Louis Post-Dispatch last fall. In the message, dated Sept. 4, 2008, Mr. Bakke cautioned his executives against giving boards of schools the “misconception” that they “are responsible for making big decisions about budget matters, school policies, hiring of the principal and dozens of other matters.”

Instead, he wrote, “It is our school, our money and our risk, not theirs.”

Mr. Bakke, who is 64, suggested requiring board members to sign undated letters of resignation or limiting board terms to a single year.

In a statement after the e-mail message was disclosed, Mr. Bakke apologized to board members “who felt offended or maligned,” saying he had “overstated my personal frustration in ensuring that the dedicated, caring people who hold the seats of charter governing boards at Imagine Schools understand and support our mission and operating philosophy.”

As Texas continues its consideration, the e-mail message helped upend Imagine’s plans to open a school in the Hillsborough County School District in Florida, which encompasses Tampa.

“That e-mail was very, very bad for them,” said Jenna Hodgens, the local supervisor of charter schools. “All the things we had been questioning, things about control of the school, he answered in his own words.”

The Hillsborough school board rejected the application in December. “Charter schools are not private schools, they are public schools and are governed as such,” said Susan Valdes, who heads the board. “Some, though, are starting to forget that — and they’re getting away with it. But not here.”

And that's only the beginning. I highly recommend reading the entire article, in order to learn about the nature of the Bakkes' company and its shady investment and governance practices. Imagine Schools is basically a giant loan shark.

Let's get these sleaze-balls and hucksters away from our schools already.

Harper's piece on "The Vanishing Liberal."

Frequent Harper's contributor Kevin Baker—who, according to his byline, is actually a novelist—has a couple of great things to say in an essay in the magazine's April issue (which non-subscribers like Your Humble Blogger will simply have to go out and buy in order to read). The essay's subtitle—"How the left learned to be helpless."—is somewhat misleading, or in any event insufficiently specific. Let's face it, the contention that the left is helpless can in and of itself be said to be controversial only in the sense that it assumes that the left exists. 

What's important about Baker's argument as regards this helplessness is the comparison he posits between today's thoroughgoingly lost and disillusioned left—a group among which I suppose most normal (or even semi-normal) people under the age of 40 must by definition count ourselves—and its intellectual and spiritual forbears in American history: the Populist and and the Progressive movements. Those movements, for all of their flaws, had gravitas. Vitality. Rocks. You get the picture.

It should not be surprising that contemporary left/liberalism/whatever pales in comparison to those often quite radical historical movements. But what's nice is that Baker's piece offers more than the usual woe-is-us routine.

(Not that it's bad to say "woe is us." It's actually necessary for us to say it. However, the usual plodding, overlong and doom-and-gloom-laden fare does tend to get annoying. For example, see the final rant that now-former Harper's Editor-in-Chief Roger Hodge contributed to the magazine before he was—shockingly, and in an ominous sign for the mag's future, as Hodge was an intelligent and ballsy editor—sacked.)

Instead of simply throwing up his hands in despair (although he does do that), Baker threads together a political-historical narrative that serves as a call for genuine grassroots action of an order that we've not seen in this country in generations. He sets the scene by lamenting the fact that President Barack Obama,

[o]ne of the most charismatic politicians of his time, a man who was able to raise the most money and draw the biggest crowds in American political history has apparently decided that his new job is to fluff up the generals and bankers and politicians who not very long ago were in panicked disarray. Armchair psychologists from the Maureen Dowd school of political commentary like to analyze this conversion in terms of the elusive personality of Obama himself. Others prefer to dwell on the surprising ineptitude of his administration. And some simply accept his about-face in terms of the political exigencies of an essentially conservative nation, concluding wistfully that Obama is confronted by so many barriers to change—Republican obstructionism, the treachery of this or that Democratic senator, the nature of the Constitution itself—that the country is now ungovernable.

All of which may be true. But it only skims the surface of a greater tidal shift, one that has little to do with Obama himself and in fact has inundated the whole of our democratic process. This shift, which is subtle and has been many years in the making, might best be understood by considering a design underlying many of the interrogation techniques we employ at the (still-unclosed) prison at Guantánamo or at the black sites we still maintain, wherever they are. That is, bringing about the state known as learned helplessness.

The expression dates from a famous set of experiments by Martin Seligman some forty years ago, in which he found that dogs exposed to repeated and seemingly random electric shocks eventually stopped trying to escape those shocks, even when they could very easily do so. This insight gave rise to “no touch” torture, pioneered in large part by the CIA, whose efforts to “break” prisoners involved all manner of techniques, from the unsavory to the absurd, such as depriving prisoners of sleep for weeks on end, bombarding them with ear-splitting noises, exposing them to extreme heat and cold, shackling them in “stress positions,” tying bras to their heads, making them bark like dogs, and waterboarding them. There is no evidence that such practices enhance the odds that prisoners will provide more useful information to interrogators. It is well established, though, that they will make prisoners docile, and so the techniques remain popular.

For decades now, as our public discourse in general has become more scattered, random, and irrational, Republicans—funded by corporate and other elites in the private sector—have stunned Democrats with absurdist attacks that have proved to be effective at garnering votes and, more important in the long term, at hampering Democrats even when they hold the majority. Democrats have been reduced to a state of psychological helplessness, one in which any political obstacles—ranging from the prevarications of stalking horses like Senators Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson, to the plaintive cries of the tea-baggers out in the streets, to the sterner demands of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or Big Pharma—are transformed into insurmountable organic obstacles.

We have learned to be helpless. And in this state of political depression, it no longer matters how many elections liberals win for the Democrats, or how badly Republican, right-wing policies fail or how much damage they do to the country or the world. There is simply no way to do anything differently.

Such hapless fatalism is, of course, in direct opposition to every tenet of American liberalism, which is rooted in the idea that human agency is still possible in the modern world—that democratic action can make a difference when ranged against vast, impersonal forces and supposedly immutable “laws” of human society. Liberalism’s antecedents lie in one nineteenth-century rebellion after another—against laissez-faire capitalism, patriarchy, slavery, Social Darwinism, and other efforts to transmute political dispositions into irrefutable “social science.” American voters of the time were regularly assured by authoritative voices that “hard money” was an indispensable economic principle; that women, people of color, and many varieties of European immigrant were inherently inferior; that any attempts to regulate the “natural” workings of the economy, even private charity, would thwart human progress because they interfered with the culling of those who, in Herbert Spencer’s description, were not “sufficiently complete to live.

[...]

And so we arrive at the present moment, in which the people are not asked to do anything. The fine words and able presentation of Obama, whether delivered at West Point or on Wall Street or in the well of the House of Representatives, obscure the fact that they are subtle parodies of a century of liberal argument. Whereas the Populists’ soapbox lecturers or the Progressives’ magazine exposés or FDR in his radio “fireside chats” explained the way of the world to the people and argued for why and how that way must change, Obama—like most Democratic leaders—concedes that the way of the world is wrong but tells us why it must stay that way because, some time in the past, powerful interests decreed it so.

[...]

Now, to be sure, there are problems with Baker's narrative—especially as regards sympathies within some manifestations of historical Progressivism itself toward Social Darwinism and other 'social scientistic' gobbledygook that he ignores completely—but no matter. It's worth a read. And one of its themes—the notion that human beings can and/or should always work to improve the world in which we live, to make it more fair and just, etc.—is a very interesting one about which I intend to say more in the near future. Specifically, I think there are some important details of this Enlightenment spirit that a rejuvenated left-populism needs to get right intellectually and rhetorically.