Failing Florida schools face sanctions. Using "disaster capitalism" to privatize public schools.

Back in the early 80s right after Reagan was elected president, a report called A Nation at Risk came out. It was a detailed analysis of education in America written by several leading authorities who were told to do some research and find out what was wrong with our public schools in America. Note they weren't told to examine and report on the state of public education but to find out what was wrong. So the assumption that our public schools were failing our kids was implanted. Add that to the growing number of white families abandoning public schools and you have a problem waiting for a solution.

They must have spent a gazillion dollars printing out copies of this report because for several years back in the 80s, it was everywhere. I had 3 copies of it at one time. The Reagan administration was determined to get this report out to the American people.

About the time this report came out, a new idea formed in the minds of the private school parents who still wanted to save money educating their kids. Why not have the government give them a voucher that they could use for tuition? So they began pushing that idea.

Meanwhile in the late 80s and the early 90s, states began telling school districts that if they wanted more and more state funding they were going to have to do something to show they were actually educating kids. So the TEST came to be.

"The president's ultimate goal," said former Gov. Howard Dean (D-Vt.), one of the Democrats who now harshly attacks NCLB, "is to make the public schools so awful, and starve them of money, just as he's starving all the other social programs, so that people give up on the public schools."

..."It's going to cost them more in property taxes and other taxes than they are going to get out of it," Dean told The Associated Press following a campaign stop.

..."Every group, including special education kids, has to be at 100 percent to pass the tests," Dean said. "No school system in America can do that. That ensures that every school will be a failing school."

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) -- The State Board of Education unanimously approved intervention plans Tuesday for closing one and revamping 11 schools with the worst student achievement records in Florida.

The plans will kick in at the schools still operating if they fail to get off the critical list after the state issues its school grades later this year. The steps include firing principals and removing or reassigning teachers or requiring that teachers reapply for their jobs. Other actions include increased funding and staffing such as more reading, math and science coaches.

..."Florida is one of six states the federal government approved to participate in the pilot program. It combines state and federal school grading systems and is aimed at focusing outside assistance where it is most needed.

Most Florida schools have failed to make adequate yearly progress under No Child Left Behind although three-fourths of the state's schools earned A's or B's on their state report cards. The state grades are based on how well students do on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, or FCAT. Students have been taking the standardized test this month. Before differentiated accountability, a school had to meet up to 39 No Child Left Behind criteria and missing just one might be enough to get a failing grade.

Schools on the intervention list have received D's and F's from the state for the past couple years. A school must get a D or higher from the state and improve in at least one No Child Left Behind math or reading subgroup or its intervention plan will go into effect. To get completely off the intervention list, a school has to get at least a C from the state and improve in two No Child Left Behind subgroups.

Restructuring a school is the most serious penalty for not meeting AYP, said Sherrie Nickell, the associate superintendent of learning.

Some restructuring options include the school becoming a charter school, replacement of staff or having a separate organization contract to run the school.

1. Becoming a charter school. Though they are start up funded with public money, they do not have to meet the regulations that public schools must meet. That is getting into some cloudy areas.

Charter schools do not have to keep students who do not perform to expectation and their standards. Correct me if some of that has changed. Where do you send those students then? Now they send them back to "public" schools whose funding is being taken away for "charter" schools.

2. Replacement of staff. So sad. Instead of providing support there are only penalties. There are so many good teachers at these 18 schools, laboring without proper tools and books.

3. Having a separate organization contract to run the school. This is the option that says "privatize" the most loudly. These schools whose funding has been sidetracked for private school vouchers and charter schools, and don't forget magnet schools which get all they need....these schools will now be turned over to a private contractor.

The Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) is now calling for reforms including school choice and merit pay for teachers.....America is a tale of two public school systems: one that works reasonably well, although it could certainly be better, and one that is by almost any standard a disaster," says From.

.."From argues that the public school system too often serves the interests of teachers and administrators at the expense of the students themselves. It is a "monopolistic" system that "offers a 'one-size-fits-hardly-anyone' model that strangles excellence and innovation" he says.

Characterizing charter schools as "oases of innovation," From writes, "The time has come to bring life to the rest of the desert-by introducing the same forces of choice and competition to every public school in America."

From also says Democrats should work to redefine the very notion of public education itself.

"We should rid ourselves of the rigid notion that public schools are defined by who owns and operates them," he writes.

Around the world, disaster is providing the means for business to accumulate profit. From the Asian tsunami of 2005 that allowed corporations to seize coveted shoreline properties for resort development to the multi-billion dollar no-bid reconstruction contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan, from the privatization of public schooling following Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf Coast to the ways that No Child Left Behind sets public school up to be dismantled and made into investment opportunities--a grotesque pattern is emerging in which business is capitalizing on disaster. Naomi Klein has written of,

"... the rise of a predatory form of disaster capitalism that uses
the desperation and fear created by catastrophe to engage in
radical social and economic engineering. And on this front, the
reconstruction industry works so quickly and efficiently that the
privatizations and land grabs are usually locked in before the
local population knows what hit them."

Capitalizing on Disaster in Education

Despite the range of obvious failures of multiple public school privatization initiatives, the privatization advocates have hardly given up. In fact, the privatizers have become far more strategic. The new educational privatization might be termed "back door privatization" or maybe "smash and grab" privatization. A number of privatization schemes are being initiated through a process involving the dismantling of public schools followed by the opening of for-profit, charter, and deregulated public schools. These enterprises typically despise teachers unions, are hostile to local democratic governance and oversight, and have an unquenchable thirst for "experiments," especially with the private sector. (10) These initiatives are informed by right wing think tanks and business organizations. Four examples that typify back door privatization are: (1) No Child Left Behind, (2) Chicago's Renaissance 2010 project, (3) educational rebuilding in Iraq, and (4) educational rebuilding in New Orleans.

No Child Left Behind

No Child Left Behind sets schools up for failure by making impossible demands for continual improvement. When schools have not met Adequate Yearly Progress, they are subject to punitive action by the federal government, including the potential loss of formerly guaranteed federal funding and requirements for tutoring from a vast array of for-profit Special Educational Service providers. A number of authors have described how NCLB is a boon for the testing and tutoring companies while it doesn't provide financial resources for the test score increases it demands. (11) (This is aside from the cultural politics of whose knowledge these tests affirm and discredit). (12) Sending billions of dollars of support the way of the charter school movement, NCLB pushes schools that do not meet AYP to restructure in ways that encourage privatization, discourage unions, and avoid local regulations on crucial matters. One study has found that by 2013 nearly all of the public schools in the Great Lakes region of the U.S. will be declared failed public schools and subject to such reforms. (13) Clearly, NCLB is designed to accomplish the implementation of privatization and deregulation in ways that open action could not.

Privately funded and operating as an extraparty organization without official Democratic sanction, and calling themselves "New Democrats," the DLC sought nothing less than the miraculous: the transubstantiation of America's oldest political party. Though the DLC painted itself using the palette of the liberal left--as "an effort to revive the Democratic Party's progressive tradition," with New Democrats being the "trustees of the real tradition of the Democratic Party"--its mission was far more confrontational. With few resources, and taking heavy flak from the big guns of the Democratic left, the DLC proclaimed its intention, Mighty Mouse–style, to rescue the Democratic Party from the influence of 1960s-era activists and the AFL-CIO, to ease its identification with hot-button social issues, and, perhaps most centrally, to reinvent the party as one pledged to fiscal restraint, less government, and a probusiness, pro–free market outlook.

It's hard to argue that they haven't succeeded.

While the DLC will not formally disclose its sources of contributions and dues, the full array of its corporate supporters is contained in the program from its annual fall dinner last October, a gala salute to Lieberman that was held at the National Building Museum in Washington. Five tiers of donors are evident: the Board of Advisers, the Policy Roundtable, the Executive Council, the Board of Trustees, and an ad hoc group called the Event Committee--and companies are placed in each tier depending on the size of their check. For $5,000, 180 companies, lobbying firms, and individuals found themselves on the DLC's board of advisers, including British Petroleum, Boeing, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Coca-Cola, Dell, Eli Lilly, Federal Express, Glaxo Wellcome, Intel, Motorola, U.S. Tobacco, Union Carbide, and Xerox, along with trade associations ranging from the American Association of Health Plans to the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. For $10,000, another 85 corporations signed on as the DLC's policy roundtable, including AOL, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Citigroup, Dow, GE, IBM, Oracle, UBS PacifiCare, PaineWebber, Pfizer, Pharmacia and Upjohn, and TRW.

And for $25,000, 28 giant companies found their way onto the DLC's executive council, including Aetna, AT&T, American Airlines, AIG, BellSouth, Chevron, DuPont, Enron, IBM, Merck and Company, Microsoft, Philip Morris, Texaco, and Verizon Communications. Few, if any, of these corporations would be seen as leaning Democratic, of course, but here and there are some real surprises. One member of the DLC's executive council is none other than Koch Industries, the privately held, Kansas-based oil company whose namesake family members are avatars of the far right, having helped to found archconservative institutions like the Cato Institute and Citizens for a Sound Economy. Not only that, but two Koch executives, Richard Fink and Robert P. Hall III, are listed as members of the board of trustees and the event committee, respectively--meaning that they gave significantly more than $25,000.

The DLC board of trustees is an elite body whose membership is reserved for major donors, and many of the trustees are financial wheeler-dealers who run investment companies and capital management firms--though senior executives from a handful of corporations, such as Koch, Aetna, and Coca-Cola, are included. Some donate enormous amounts of money, such as Bernard Schwartz, the chairman and CEO of Loral Space and Communications, who single-handedly finances the entire publication of Blueprint, the DLC's retooled monthly that replaced The New Democrat. "I sought them out, after talking to Michael Steinhardt," says Schwartz. "I like them because the DLC gives resonance to positions on issues that perhaps candidates cannot commit to."

A key member of the event committee for the 2000 annual fall dinner was Mike Lewan, who runs a boutique lobbying house that has represented clients such as Oracle and BellSouth. In the late 1980s, Lewan, who joined the DLC because he was "one of those disaffected Democrats," went to work as Lieberman's chief of staff--and promptly introduced the Connecticut senator to the DLC. Today, Lewan helps recruit support for the DLC on K Street. "It's astonishing to me how much support the DLC is getting from the professional Washington people, the lawyers, the lobbyists," he says. "There's a relationship and a trust level that's been built up."

Joining Lewan on the event committee were several dozen of Washington's elite lobbyists, including representatives from the Dutko Group, Greenberg Traurig, the Wexler Group, Verner, Liipfert, and SVP Kessler and Associates, all with blue-chip clients, along with lobbyists for Chevron, Citigroup, Salomon Smith Barney, and others. One was Arthur Lifson, vice president for federal affairs at Cigna Corporation, one of the nation's largest health insurers and a company that stands to gain enormously if, say, Medicare were privatized along the lines proposed by the DLC and by one of its founders, Senator John Breaux of Louisiana. "The DLC is trying to bring some fresh ideas to Medicare and to dealing with the uninsured," says Lifson, whose company is listed as a member of the DLC's policy roundtable. "It builds on changes that are taking place in the marketplace, rather than turning everything on its head Hillary Care." Lifson frankly endorses the DLC as a counterweight to "populists ... at the other end of the party."