Groups like these (above) invest, meaning put up money, to make money by propping up corporate charter schools, and dismantling specifically public schools with majority students and teachers of color in the process. These investment firms, started by the rich (and white), are quite literally making money by exploiting low-income Black and Latino communities and profiting mightily from it.
What often goes unnoticed is the degree to which the charter school racket is a huge real estate money maker for developers. These groups acquire these public school properties, sell them to the CMOs, usually at a sky-high profit, and the taxpayers end up footing the expense. This somehow rarely gets mentioned by education reformers or their representatives. Their messaging and their representatives deliberately keep the public’s focus on “education” and “kids” – and not on these organizations, their 990s, or their investment portfolios indicating how much profit is to be gained by charter school investors. Instead, they continue repeating the lie about the efficacy of test scores and “proficiency” as indicators of good schooling, while ignoring the education reform movement relies on dispossessing communities of color of their schools — flaws and all — capturing their budgets, and enriching themselves in the process.
Some folks really believed the education reform movement was about improving education for Black and Brown kids?
Where at one time the approaches of education reform lay solely within the ideology of white conservatives and neoliberal billionaires, education reform advocates nowadays look alot more like me than the white billionaires who maintain, and benefit from, economic inequality crushing our communities. These white billionaire education reformers simply evolved their messaging strategy to be more racially and politically inclusive.
In conversations regarding education quality, education reformers, Black reformers, much like the white reform advocates before them, seldom substantively reference that schools deemed “failing” correlates strongest with neighborhood poverty — not a lack of quality teaching. (In full transparency, and as a teacher union president, I have no tolerance for poor or lazy teachers, or teachers that wanna simply do the least, teachers who show to not care about our kids, or have low-expectations for our kids — and I mean no tolerance at all.) Black education reformers’ refusal to identify the societal and ecological factors that compromise student outcomes they rail so much about, more so than any school-based intervention, makes me wonder: are these people truly this ignorant, or is it something else?
The push for education reform by Black reformers remind me of Nixon’s effort to orchestrate “Black Capitalism” as a means to divert focus and unity away from the collective goals of the Civil Rights Movement and demands from Black radicals. His plan was to convince some influential Black folks that the way to make it in America and out of its racist past, is through establishing private enterprise, not through government intervention or forcing government to course correct. By focusing on Black capitalism, the responsibility is placed solely on exploited Black communities to pull themselves out of exploitation. That is, if Black communities suffer, it is because Black communities did not do enough to save itself; thereby absolving the government of its responsibility to make Black communities whole.
The Black messengers of education reform behave similarly. Here, the answer for only the Blackest and poorest areas to succeed economically, is through getting a “good education”; which they reduce to mean receiving “good test scores”. And when, predictably, the most impoverished and exploited students and schools in America did not produce “good test scores”, the same folks who profit from inequality and pushed for this education misdirection, are already well positioned to profit from their dispossession (in teaching, district and school operations, budgets, and even neighborhoods). Behind all of this, I hope folks can recognize from the beginning of the education reform movement to today, the effort was, and always has been to for the wealthy to access a massive pool of public money that was once off limits. And in order to do so, they had come up with a problem that, presumably, could only be solved by giving wealthy corporate interests more public dollars, and greater control over those public dollars. And, in that large urban districts filled with Black and Latino students and Black teachers have the largest budgets, politicians along with wealthy corporations, targeted urban school districts in order to access enormous sums of money. Though the decades-long shifting of money from the domain of the public to private had nothing to do with improving the lives of Black and Latino kids, Black and Latinos kids, their communities, and Black teachers are collateral damage in this racist neoliberal endeavor.
If folks truly cared at all about improving educational outcomes for students, or improving their life’s potential, they would have put their energy and focus into fighting to reverse the wealth inequality the rich benefit from, and that our children and teachers are victims of. Instead, reformers and policymakers created a way to benefit monetarily off the desperate hopes of parents who want better for their children. Reformers have long been gaming the most exploited communities to keep the public looking away from their true motives, which is to erode democratic oversight over our districts, and over our budgets — and in that, rake in enormous sums of money in the process to this inequality train moving. The Education Reform Movement was never about improving education for our kids, and we should have been hip to the game a long, long time ago.
