Professor....you bring up some pretty good points about the direction public educaton is going and also about hedge funds and charter schools!
Hedge funds can only harm education
Saturday, June 12, 2010
By Thomas M. Stephens
By Thomas M. Stephens
Hedge funds searching for high returns via charter schools pose the same risks to public education that Big Oil poses to the Gulf Coast: a toxic mess with dire consequences.
This "spill" will originate in New York state, where hedge-fund executives mounted an offensive against teachers unions to influence lawmakers and to more than double the number of charter schools there to 460. On May 28, the New York legislature acceded to these demands, adding at least another $2 billion a year for charters.
The impetus is President Barack Obama's Race To The Top education initiative, which requires states to increase the number of charters. So the president who has been labeled a "socialist" has set in motion policies that will weaken forever our society's great equalizer: public education.
It isn't surprising for Wall Street to advance its self-interests. But it's suspicious behavior for these capitalists to devote such great resources to increase the number of charter schools.
Consider these dangers:
• Hedge funds are basically unregulated and operate with little regard for anything but profit.
• Charter schools are badly flawed. Both nonprofit and for-profit outfits run them, and they operate with minimum local control and financial accountability, as news reports across the nation have shown. All the while, they siphon students and money from public schools.
If charters improved children's education, these issues might be tolerable, but that's not the case. Results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress since 2003 show they never have outperformed public schools.
But like Big Oil, hedge-fund gurus have the financial and, thus, the political clout to pressure lawmakers to further privatize public education, and at a high cost to the public.
Don't forget what hedge funds are; they use high-risk tactics to achieve high returns. The only real limitation is that they tend to take money from supposedly sophisticated investors, some of whom represent retirement funds whose members don't want to gamble on their future incomes. At one time, hedging investment bets through various market tactics offset high risks. Not so much anymore, as recent Wall Street history shows. Disastrous failings of hedge funds stunned our reeling economy. And, tossing kindergarten-through-12 {+t}{+h}-grade schools into the vortex of a market economy will have similar results. But here the target is our children's future.
Prospects of success for hedge-fund intrusion into education is being abetted by the erosion of confidence in public schools - erosion worsened by misuse of standardized test scores and incessant pounding of teachers and teacher-preparation programs by politicians, corporate interests and misguided reformers.
Zealots are strangling our schools by demanding student and teacher accountability through more testing. As a result, "teach to the test" is the survivors' mantra. So other disciplines for life's enjoyment, including physical and health education and the arts, are disappearing.
Bottom-line and top-down reformers ignore crucial differences of our richly diverse student population, differences that homogenized teaching and standardized testing cannot fully address.
We must speak out against those who pretend to be concerned about public schools but really want to leave them to the whims of market forces. They exaggerate public education's failures and falsely claim these are a major drag on our competitive edge in the global economy.
It's strange that those who preach accountability for public education still embrace unaccountable hedge-fund managers as allies and see no problem with tossing our children's futures into the roiling waters of market forces.
Thomas M. Stephens is professor emeritus in the College of Education and Human Ecology at Ohio State University and is executive director emeritus of the School Study Council of Ohio.
etstephens@copper.net
From John Curry, June 12, 2010
From John Curry, June 12, 2010
posted by Kathie Bracy at 8:44 PM
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