The NPE/Fairtest Machine: Culpability High, Credibility Low, Part 1

The last minute flip-flop is a tactic favored by politicians whose allegiances and/or debts cannot be shared among supporters who have been led to believe a narrative that is anything but true.

When Hillary Clinton, for instance, was Secretary of State and even months after, she remained ostensibly on the fence about the TPP, which will likely to become this generation's equivalent to the toxic NAFTA.  When TPP negotiations were completed and passage was inevitable, Clinton came out strongly against it, thus satisfying her multinational corporate donors while pretending to side with workers here and abroad.  She played the same game with the Keystone pipeline.

On a much smaller scale, Ravitch and her NPE have done something very similar around the ESEA/ESSA/ECCA issue.

It started back in April of this year, when Ravitch offered her unequivocal support for the Senate version with this:

One may quibble with details, but the bottom line is that this bill defangs the U.S. Department of Education; it no longer will exert control over every school with mandates. This bill strips the status quo of federal power to ruin schools and the lives of children and educators. . . .This is a far better bill than I had hoped or feared.

Of course, none of that was true, except for the fact that Ravitch was on board the Lamar Alexander privatization train barreling toward passage of a more damaging version of NCLB. Lamar has been at it for so long that anyone with Ravitch's history knows where his priorities are.

Defanging of ED?  I think not. What the Feds have done is allow the charter industry to write most of this ESEA update and the corporate foundations to write the rest. The result is a states rights version of ESEA, which, as Gary Orfield has noted, will "set the country back by more than a half century." 

Meanwhile, the Feds, who have spent $3.3 billion on charters over the past two decades, will escalate the handouts to the segregating charter industry for new and established "no excuses" charters to buy everything from real estate to scantron machines:

Along with incentivizing more charters comes an ECAA treasure chest of discretionary grant opportunities that will now be open to states, municipalities, and other "state entities."  Under the new ECAA, federal money will go directly from Congress to the states or to another "state entity," which now may include a "state charter school board" or even a "charter school support organization."

The new ESEA, if approved, will further erase the boundaries between corporations and government, and the main job of the USDOE will be to service the applications for assistance for charter school expansion, charter school facilities, training of charter school teachers and administrators, incentivizing test-heavy merit pay plans, and other corporate "innovations" aimed to privatize public schools and to further diminish the profession of teaching. 

Even without passage of the Escalating Charter Compensation Act (ECCA) the new ESEA, ED will increase its funding to charter schools by 48 percent in 2016--to a whopping $375 million per year.  Even so, the charter industry is pressing for $500 million per year next year.  If ESEA passes, that number will look look small potatoes.

So while the Feds at ED have been de-fanged in terms of regulation and oversight for segregated charters and the corporate teacher education that they will fund over the coming years, the budgets at ED, with the passage of ESEA, will remain overflowing with education privatization dollars that will go to any outfit waving a charter school flag.

But surely, at least, Ravitch must be right that the new ESEA will strip "federal power to ruin schools and the lives of children and educators."  Yes?  Once again, not true.

In fact, annual mandated testing will continue unabated.  Even though Monty Neill, now acting as front man for Ravitch, argues that AYP and sanctions have been eliminated, this is not accurate.  

The 5 percent rule, however, remains a central privatization tool in the new ESEA, which means that the bottom five percent of test-scoring schools, i. e., the poorest schools, must be targeted for turnaround each year.  And with a new bottom 5 percent guaranteed in perpetuity (or until all schools have been privatized), tell me again that sanctions have been eliminated.  

Obfuscation, dissembling, and lies.

Stay tuned for Part 2.