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.

Thomas Frank on how and why the Republican Party has spent the last 30 years dismantling the country's public infrastructure.

Author and journalist Thomas Frank, speaking recently in Portland, Oregon. He discusses his latest book The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule for about half an hour, after which he takes audience questions.

Frank really hits his stride in this video, by which I mean he delivers a healthy and satisfying dose of eloquent and morally indignant populism. Exactly what I needed to get me through another day of Bailout-talk, with all of the lying, insulting, hypocritical, patronizing cant from Bush, Paulson and Bernanke. Enjoy:

In which I, having set out to enthuse about a new blog on the privatization of Chicago's public infrastructure, instead decry neoliberalism generally.

The following quotation is taken from the initial post of a certain Tom Tresser, whose blog is called Connecting The Dots In Chicago, which is about the privatization of public infrastructure. I am very happy to see that such a blog exists, and, although I as of yet know nothing about Tom Tresser except his initial post, I think I like his politics a lot. Tresser's blog is to be found on The Huffington Post's new Chicago-specific Web site:

[W]hat is the real state of our city finances? Is this trend toward self-financing and privatization really in the best interest of the people? Is Chicago so poor that it has to sell the Skyway and is contemplating selling Midway Airport? Is the Board of Education so strapped that parents all over the city tax themselves through never-ending fundraising in order to add staff, purchase computers and basic supplies for our public schools? Is the Park District so needy that it demands citizens to raise or find two thirds of the funding for local park improvements? Is the city so needy that it is entering into partnerships with anyone with cash or clout that strip the public out of "public assets[?]"

It's such a relief to witness the emergence of efforts like Tresser's to expose in digestible terms and with local/familiar points of reference the privatization of public assets, neoliberal politics, sleazy oligarchic alliances between government and big business.

It's my hope that the contributions of hard-working, clear-thinking and morally/ethically engaged people like Tresser, there will result an increased public consciousness of and capacity to think critically about:

1. the accumulation of facts on the ground of ongoing cynical and corrupt instances of the selling-off of public infrastructure -- which for apparently structural or market-dictated reasons don't seem to be covered under the beats of any mainstream or even formally 'public' news media I can think of,
   
2. and the ways in which the past 30 years of Republican neoliberal governance and strong-arm politics -- capitalizing on and perpetuating the latent fears of the so-called 'middle-class' -- has distorted in pernicious ways the very rhetoric that we use on a day-to-day basis to refer to a host of things economic, political and even personal. Namely, the 'logic of the marketplace' -- and its corollary, the 'our rights as consumers' -- has crept into sectors of society and human life in which it simply should have no place.

To elaborate on #2: a theory that I've seen floated (I think in an article in Slate, if memory serves, commenting upon the recent Wall Street Journal piece "Why no outrage?" by James Grant) about the lack of 'outrage' with respect to recent instances of the federal government doling out what in essence are welfare checks to corporations and wealthy investors. The author in Slate theorized that it has precisely to do with this 30 years of ideological work conducted by the GOP slogan-machine on behalf of the economic Right, including, obviously, corporate interests.

The result of this conditioning is that many of we Americans who probably lack completely either comprehension or even conscious allegiance to this neoliberal ideological agenda (and corporate profit-making agenda) associate ANY public ownership of infrastructure, no matter how big or how small, with inefficiency, ineptitude, and a kind of decline in economic dynamism, and thereby, an overall decline in the efficacy of the American project, which is, after all, built upon things like the vitality and industriousness of the atomized, private individual, acting in his own interests(!).

This GOP strategy by which public rhetoric and sentiment is conditioned against public infrastructure is, it seems to me, choc-full of weaknesses. One of the reasons we are seeing its stranglehold over the populace – and its stranglehold is greatest, let’s face it, over the ‘middle class’, broadly construed, and the ‘baby boomers’, narrowly construed – begin to unravel is because the sexy illusion that declares the privatization of all aspects of ownership and governance to be in everyone’s best interest can only sustain itself for as long as, in the main, economic prosperity continues to appear to march forward. In other words: the illusion can sustain itself only for as long as people keep their jobs and make pay that they’re happy with. The illusion is unlikely to fracture on the basis of our cognizance of other people’s declining economic status and opportunities. We have too many illusions to obscure us from that cognizance.

But, once our individual leg up begins to disappear, it becomes more and more difficult to avoid recognizing that something’s up. Private interest starts to seem in fact to stand in POSITIVE relation to public interest (a novel idea, that!). When private citizens can no longer afford to buy enough privately distributed gasoline from the privately owned gas station to drive to work everyday in their private cars, it becomes increasingly apparent that – to our shock – that the lower our private economic means, the more that the curbing of public ownership amounts to the curbing of our ability to rely on the ownership of anything at all! Without that ownership – be it public or private – we lack access to amenities and services. And without access to amenities and services, we lack the capacity to improve our quality of life.

Especially in the short-term, however, plenty of us who have been brainwashed by the GOP’s neoliberal agenda will continue to hold onto the dream, even as the dream starts to seem like more and more of a nightmare. When we lose our job, we will blame ourselves for not being hard-working enough. When gas prices become too high for us to afford, we will redirect our resentment and anger, and aim it squarely at people who look and speak differently than we do.

After all, it’s no secret that the GOP machine currently and since Richard 'Tricky Dick' Nixon at least, capitalizes upon the middle class’s resentment of that which is unfamiliar, and preys upon the middle class’s self-pity at the notion of having to think for so much as a moment about the interests of those who look different and live differently than it does. In other words, the resentment of the haves toward the have nots. A resentment revolving around such intangibles as fear, paranoia, historical but usually sublimated racism, and – of course – the myth of American meritocracy, with its built-in relief from having to feel guilty about how much more you have than other people. When you think about it, the fact that the GOP since Nixon was able to capitalize and perpetuate a resentment of the poor than flows from the top to bottom of the economic ladder – despite how clearly counterintuitive this would appear – is quite astonishing!

So, now, as it becomes increasingly difficult for Joe Suburb, who’d construed himself previously to be a have to ignore the fact that on a day-to-day basis, he’s more and more of a have not, the GOP will perhaps discover an ideological task for itself that on paper should be much easier than the one it’s been up to for the past 30 years. All the GOP has to do is reorganize its ideological energies around the notion that outside forces, particularly in the Middle East – tapping in, naturally to existing but mostly sublimated racism, fear and anti-Arab sentiment – is responsible for having taken the opportunities of the American middle class away! Indeed, the Right has already been at it, laying the groundwork not only for the neoconservative idea of attacking Iran, but I would argue, for the neoliberal idea that Middle Eastern oil-rich nations are, as it were, 'infringing upon the American, free-market-derived right' to buy and sell oil/gasoline at a 'fair’, price that’s not ‘artificially inflated’ by ‘evil-doers’ who look different than we do.

Again, if the GOP was able to tap into the resentment of the haves toward groups of have-nots who ‘look, talk, act and pray different than we do’, it should be fairly easy for it to redirect that resentment toward people who not only ‘look, talk, act and pray’ differently, but who live on the other side of the world, and who are portrayed as the actual culprits for the decline in the standard of living in the United States’s middle class. Oh, and by the way: ‘they’re all terrorists, and they hate our freedom’.

After all, one of the hallmarks of the aforementioned 30-year ideological project is that it undertakes to becloud the bright line that should, of course, exist between good governance and good economics. Between the public good and the good of private industry. Between democracy and capitalism! The Chinese Olympics, after all, is a kind of apotheosis of the alliance of gentlemanly economic goodwill between the USA and China that was brokered originally by Nixon and Henry 'Realpolitik' Kissinger.

At present, there is justifiable outrage on the part of activists and ordinary people globally toward China’s extensive past and continuing human rights abuses. But, do you know what I find awfully telling? The fact that you’d have to look much harder indeed to find people expressing outrage at an even more pernicious and even less containable evil: that of authoritarian capitalism. I believe that only a paranoid lunatic would suggest that any mainstream politician or business interest in the USA actually favors authoritarianism. What I am pointing to is the fact that there appears to be such an alarmingly meager amount of discussion of the ways in which the combination of authoritarianism and capitalism is a blueprint in and of itself for widespread human, political and economic injustice.

It’s easier, after all, to talk about human rights abuses – be they systemic or discrete – because it just makes more human sense as offensive to those of us who see ourselves as having a moral conscience. It functions in much the same way as the recent spate of corruption and abuse in Washington DC through alliances between federal government and private sector interests: I’m speaking of course about Jack Abramoff, et al. As Tom Frank’s new book apparently discusses (I haven’t read it yet, apart from the excerpt published in Harper’s), such lobbying/contracting/special interest abuses are SYSTEMIC in Washington. But the way business is done in DC, there are one or two ‘fall guys’ chosen from among a number of powerful participants, the ‘fall guy’ is prosecuted in a big-headline-generating, sex-scandal-type way, and life goes on, as though the whole thing was a discrete, unique, even bizarre or unusual infraction of a system that basically works.

As more and more of us begin to realize, the system of course doesn’t work. And I’m happy to see that Tresser’s blog has been set up for the purpose of addressing these tendencies on a local level, where they’re familiar and palpable. Where we ordinary Joes can trace trends and tendencies as they unfold before our eyes, in addition to taking to task on a case-by-case basis individual politicians and shady businessmen for their corruption, neglect or the deliberate creation of opacity from public scrutiny. So that we can all begin to recognize intuitively that the outsourcing of public infrastructure to the marketplace is in effect the outsourcing of democracy itself; the destruction of our rights to scrutinize, to protest, to oppose, and to vote in accordance with our beliefs, ethics and political preferences; a gag order against the use of our own voices as citizens. So that we have a shot at realizing that the outsourcing of our public infrastructure is in effect the outsourcing of the public good.

Thomas Frank on The Colbert Report

Thomas Frank discusses his new book The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule with Stephen Colbert, the latter in full-tilt on-screen persona mode. Frank: "What you have misunderstood, Stephen, is that the argument of the book is that conservatives suck."



Thomas Frank is unquestionably one of my favorite people: he's a great writer, he's funny as hell and his politics are exactly on the money. Most importantly, he takes the piss out of hypocrites and con-artists in a voice that updates the polemical stylings of the old-timey, mustachioed populists.

See his regular column in The Wall Street Journal 'The Tilting Yard', read his books, all of which are outstanding, and either recall fondly or discover afresh the grandeur that was/is The Baffler.