Mike Klonsky : Forbes Calls Charter Schools 'Part of a Corrupt System'

Demonstration in New York against school privatization.

'Part of a corrupt system':
Forbes piece pounds charters

About the only thing charters do well is limit the influence of teachers’ unions. And fatten their investors’ portfolios.

By Mike Klonsky / The Rag Blog / September 18, 2013

An article appearing in the September 10 issue of Forbes gives a swift kick in the rear end to charter schools. According to Forbes contributor Addison Wiggin, charter schools have selective enrollments, don't perform any better than regular public schools, and are part of a corrupt system that funnels public funds into the pockets of privatizers and corporate cronies through real estate deals and tax credits.

He writes:

Charter schools are frequently a way for politicians to reward their cronies. In Ohio, two firms operate 9% of the state’s charter schools and are collecting 38% of the state’s charter school funding increase this year. The operators of both firms donate generously to elected Republicans.

In Florida, the for-profit school industry flooded legislative candidates with $1.8 million in donations last year. “Most of the money,” reports The Miami Herald, “went to Republicans, whose support of charter schools, vouchers, online education and private colleges has put public education dollars in private-sector pockets.”

But it's not just about Republicans. Wiggin saves his best shots for Democrats like the ones in Philadelphia who closed 23 public schools -- about 10% of the total -- to be replaced by charters. Not to mention Arne Duncan who "rolled out the Obama administration’s 'Race to the Top' initiative, doling out $4.4 billion in federal money to the states -- but only to those states that lifted their caps on the number of charter schools."

Something I wasn't aware of was a program called EB-5 that encourages foreign investors who pony up $1 million in a wide variety of development projects -- or as little as $500,000 in “targeted employment areas” -- to buy immigration visas for themselves and family members.

“There’s a risk to taking education to Wall Street,” says Education Week -- “one that helps explain why so few publicly traded companies cater to the educational needs of students in elementary, middle and high school.”

But EdWeek charter school blogger Katie Ash attacks Wiggin's piece for being "inflammatory." Wiggin doesn't mince words, says Ash, "and I'm sure many will take offense at his staunch views."

Not me. He's shooting straight.

This article was also posted by the author to Schooling in the Ownership Society.

[Mike Klonsky is a long-time education activist who teaches in the College of Education at DePaul University and is director of the Small Schools Workshop. He has spoken and written extensively on education issues and is active in the struggles in Chicago to save and transform public schools. A veteran of the civil rights and anti-war movements, Klonsky is a former National Secretary of SDS. He blogs at his SmallTalk Blog and you can follow him on twitter here.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : Chicago's Mike Klonsky Fights for Public Education, 'Small Schools'

Chicago education activist Mike Klonsky in the studios of KOOP Radio, Austin, Texas, Friday, August 20, 2013. Photo by Roger Baker / The Rag Blog.

Rag Radio podcast:
Former SDS leader Mike Klonsky is fighter
for 'Small Schools' and democratic education

A veteran of the Civil Rights Movement and the struggle against the War in Vietnam, Mike has been involved in community and labor organizing as well as the fight for democratic education.

By Rag Radio / The Rag Blog / September 4, 2013

Former SDS leader Mike Klonsky, now a Chicago-based public education activist and advocate for "Small Schools," joined us on Rag Radio, Friday, August 30, 2013.

Rag Radio is a weekly syndicated radio program produced and hosted by long-time alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, and recorded at the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM, a cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station in Austin, Texas.

Listen to or download our August 24 interview with Mike Klonsky here:


Mike Klonsky is an educator, an education theorist, a public schools activist, and a “Small Schools” advocate.

A veteran of the Civil Rights Movement and the struggle against the War in Vietnam, Klonsky was a leader in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), serving as SDS National Secretary in 1968, and has been involved in community and labor organizing as well as the fight for democratic education. A "red diaper baby," his father was a life-long activist and a veteran of the Spanish Civil War.

Mike Klonsky teaches in the College of Education at DePaul University. One of the founders of the Small Schools Workshop, Mike serves as its national director. He also coaches basketball at a Chicago high school. Klonsky is the author of Small Schools: The Numbers Tell a Story (University of Illinois Small Schools Workshop) and co-author, along with Bill Ayers and Gabe Lyon, of A Simple Justice: The Challenge for Teachers in Small Schools (Teachers College Press).

Mike Klonsky on Rag Radio. Photo by Roger Baker / The Rag Blog.

Mike served as a member of the National Advisory Council on Youth Violence and is past president of the editorial board of Catalyst, Chicago’s school-reform journal. He has also written extensively on the history and progress of Chicago’s dynamic struggles to save and transform public schools. His SmallTalk Blog is read by thousands of educators and activists.

Read Mike Klonsky's August 27, 2013, article, "Drive-By Teachers and the Great Charter School Scam," on The Rag Blog.


Rag Radio is hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas. Rag Radio is broadcast live every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP and is rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EDT) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA. Rag Radio is now also aired on KPFT-HD3 90.1 -- Pacifica radio in Houston -- on Wednesdays at 1 p.m.

The show is streamed live on the web and, after broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive Internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation.

Rag Radio can be contacted at ragradio@koop.org.

Coming up on Rag Radio:
THIS FRIDAY, September 6, 2013: Award-winning novelist and screenwriter Stephen Harrigan, author of The Gates of the Alamo and Challenger Park.
Friday, September 13, 2013: Populist author and commentator Jim Hightower.
Friday, September 20, 2013: Long-time activist Michael James, founder of Rising Up Angry and Chicago's Heartland Cafe.

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Mike Klonsky : Drive-By Teachers and the Great Charter School Scam

Drive-by teachers: The Wal-Mart model. Image from Gawker.

Drive-by teachers:
The great TFA/charter school scam

'Short careers by choice' translates into teachers being reduced to low-wage information-age delivery clerks while most 'learning' is done by students sitting in front of a computer screen.

By Mike Klonsky / The Rag Blog / August 27, 2013

Educator, activist, former SDS leader, and "Small Schools" advocate Mike Klonsky will be Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, August 30, 2013, from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, and streamed live to the world. Rag Radio is rebroadcast on WFTE-FM in Mt. Cobb and Scranton, PA, Sunday mornings at 10 a.m. (EDT), and on Houston's KPFT HD-3 90.1 (Pacifica radio) Wednesdays at 1 p.m. (CDT). Podcasts of all shows are posted at the Internet Archive.

The August 27 New York Times carries a piece, "At Charter Schools, Short Careers by Choice," by Mokoto Rich. The notion that young, inexperienced short-timers, many with only five weeks of Teach for America (TFA) training, should form the backbone of the nation's teaching core, has become one of the lynchpins of corporate-style school reform.

The drive-by teacher strategy is being pushed heavily by the power philanthropists in the Gates, Broad, and Walton Foundations. It actually is based on the Wal-Mart model where about 70% of its poorly-paid workforce turns over within a year. This is what the reformers mean by 21st Century jobs.

At Success Academy Charter Schools, a chain run by Eva Moskowitz, a former New York City councilwoman, the average is about four years in the classroom. KIPP, one of the country’s best known and largest charter operators, with 141 schools in 20 states, also keeps teachers in classrooms for an average of about four years.

"Short careers by choice" translates into teachers being reduced to low-wage information-age delivery clerks while most "learning" is done by students sitting in front of a computer screen. The benefits to the charter operators include the elimination of pensions, tenure, salary increases, and union protection. This means more money going into the pockets of the charter operators. Moskowitz for example, pulls down about $400,000/year.

Rich says the notion of a foreshortened teaching career was largely introduced by Teach for America, which places high-achieving college graduates into low-income schools for two years. Today, Teach for America places about a third of its recruits in charter schools.

"Strong schools can withstand the turnover of their teachers,” said Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America. “The strongest schools develop their teachers tremendously so they become great in the classroom even in their first and second years.”

But studies have shown that on average, teacher turnover diminishes student achievement, writes Rich. Advocates who argue that teaching should become more like medicine or law say that while programs like Teach for America fill a need in the short term, educational leaders should be focused on improving training and working environments so that teachers will invest in long careers.

Reformers claim that this is all a generational thing where today's young teachers are "restless" and don't like to stay in one job too long. One young teacher, "who is already thinking beyond the classroom," is quoted, saying, “I feel like our generation is always moving onto the next thing, and always moving onto something bigger and better.”

I wonder, especially, with a shrinking job market and devastated middle class, what a real teacher would feel is "bigger and better" than teaching children?

This article was also posted by the author to Schooling in the Ownership Society.

[Mike Klonsky is a long-time education activist who teaches in the College of Education at DePaul University and is director of the Small Schools Workshop. He has spoken and written extensively on education issues and is active in the struggles in Chicago to save and transform public schools. A veteran of the civil rights and anti-war movements, Klonsky is a former National Secretary of SDS. He blogs at his SmallTalk Blog and you can follow him on twitter here.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Mike Klonsky : Let's Not Get All 'Warm and Fuzzy' About Teddy Roosevelt

Theodore Roosevelt's "New Diplomacy." Political cartoon courtesy of Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog.
Before we start feeling all warm
and fuzzy about Teddy Roosevelt...

By Mike Klonsky / The Rag Blog / December 13, 2011

Let's remember that Teddy Roosevelt, eulogized in President Obama's Osawatomie speech on "New Nationalism" last week, was at his best a tame economic reformer and at his worst, a racist, imperialist warmonger. Publicly, Roosevelt spoke out against racism and discrimination at times, but also believed in Social Darwinism, the philosophical rock bed of white supremacy.

Here are a few of TR's thoughts on race and politics that Obama failed to mention:

In 1894, he wrote an article entitled "National Life and Character" in which he said that, "negroid peoples, the so-called "hamitic," and bastard semitic, races of eastern middle Africa were "not fit" to compete with whites and it would take "many thousands years” before the Black became even “as intellectual as the [ancient] Athenian."

According to linguist and historian Noam Chomsky, "Theodore Roosevelt was a shocking racist. I don't use the analogy lightly, but it's a fact that you have to go to the Nazi archive to find anything similar."

Roosevelt wrote:

The expansion of the peoples of white, or European, blood during the past four centuries which should never be lost sight of, especially by those who denounce such expansion on moral grounds. On the whole, the movement has been fraught with lasting benefit to most of the peoples already dwelling in the lands over which the expansion took place.

With regard to the conquest of a half of Mexico, Roosevelt explained:

...it was inevitable, and in the highest degree desirable for the good of humanity at large, that the American people should ultimately crowd out the Mexicans from their sparsely populated northern provinces.

And then, in a line that would do Texas' Gov. Rick Perry and most of the Republican candidates proud, TR wrote, "It was out of the question to expect Texans to submit to the mastery of the weaker race."

So I'm sorry, Pres. Obama. But I'm just not ready to embrace Roosevelt's "New Nationalism" quite yet. I hope you aren't either.

[Mike Klonsky, an educator, writer, and school reform activist who lives in Chicago, was active with SDS in the Sixties. Mike blogs at SmallTalk, where this article also appears.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...