The Nation: How Online Learning Companies Bought America's Schools

[highplainsdem]

The first page of the four-page article is here

http://www.thenation.com/article/164651/how-online-learning-companies-bought-americas-schools

and this is the single-page printable version:

http://www.thenation.com/print/article/164651/how-online-learning-companies-bought-americas-schools


This article by Lee Fang, which was reported in partnership with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute, is an expose of the forces behind the push to privatize educaton.

Please read it in its entirety.

Just a few snippets:

Despite the clear conflict of interest between her lobbying clients and her philanthropic goals, Levesque and her team have led a quiet but astonishing national transformation. Lobbyists like Levesque have made 2011 the year of virtual education reform, at last achieving sweeping legislative success <1> by combining the financial firepower of their corporate clients with the seeming legitimacy of privatization-minded school-reform think tanks and foundations. Thanks to this synergistic pairing, policies designed to boost the bottom lines of education-technology companies are cast as mere attempts to improve education through technological enhancements, prompting little public debate or opposition. In addition to Florida, twelve states have expanded virtual school programs or online course requirements this year. This legislative juggernaut has coincided with a gold rush of investors clamoring to get a piece of the K-12 education market. It’s big business, and getting bigger: One study estimated that revenues from the K-12 online learning industry will grow by 43 percent between 2010 and 2015, with revenues reaching $24.4 billion.

Moe has worked for almost fifteen years at converting the K-12 education system into a cash cow for Wall Street. A veteran of Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch, he now leads an investment group that specializes in raising money for businesses looking to tap into more than $1 trillion in taxpayer money spent annually on primary education. His consortium of wealth management and consulting firms, called Global Silicon Valley Partners, helped K12 Inc. go public and has advised a number of other education companies in finding capital.

-snip-

Another sponsor, a group called School Choice Week, was launched last year as a public relations gimmick to take advantage of the opportunity for rapid education reforms. Although it is billed as a network of students and parents, School Choice Week is one of the many corporate-funded tactics to press virtual school reforms. The first School Choice Week campaign push earlier this year featured highly produced press packets, sample letters to the editor, a sign in Times Square and rallies for virtual and charter schools organized with help from the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity. The blitz got positive press coverage, providing “grassroots” cover for newly elected politicians who made school privatization their first priority.

And of course the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is involved:

Two pivotal conservative organizations have helped Patrick in her campaigns for virtual schools: the American Legislative Exchange Council and the State Policy Network. SPN nurtures and establishes state-based policy and communication nonprofits with a right-wing bent. ALEC, the thirty-eight-year-old conservative nonprofit, similarly coordinates a fifty-state strategy for right-wing policy. Special task forces composed of corporate lobbyists and state lawmakers write “template” legislation . Since 2005, ALEC has offered a template law called “The Virtual Public Schools Act” to introduce online education. Mickey Revenaugh, an executive at virtual-school powerhouse Connections Learning, co-chairs the education policy–writing department of ALEC.

There's much, much more in the article, about the role of Jeb Bush, and Microsoft, and the "bare-knuckle politics" used, with these education "reformers" being advised to "hit on fear and anger" because "fear and anger stay with people longer" -- according to an anti-union consultant who runs ads to portray teachers unions as bullies.

[snot]

1. K&R'd & bookmarked.

[starroute]

2. And State Policy Network is joined at the hip with ALEC

I've pointed this out before, I think on some of your threads. Both come out of the Heritage Foundation, and ALEC is even a member of the SPN. But where ALEC aims specifically at state legislators, the SPN is a more general umbrella organization for right-wing legal foundations and public policy groups.

The agenda is identical, though, and they're two tentacles of the same creature.

[highplainsdem]

3. kick