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By BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

A key role in the elite drive to privatize public education is being played by privately owned school “accreditation” agencies, which are immune from public scrutiny, and under the absolute thrall of pro-privatization forces like the US Chamber of Commerce and the Broad Foundation. Are you hearing stories in local corporate media about your school board being “dysfunctional” and your school systems accreditation threatened? It could mean the US Chamber of Commerce and the Broad Foundation just want to replace them.

Originally published at Black Agenda Report on February 27, 2013

Why Does the US Chamber of Commerce Want to Train or Replace Your Elected School Board, If They Haven’t Already?

By BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

“…The representatives of corporations, billionaires, Wall Street speculators, along with their right wing foundations and political tentacles like the US Chamber of Commerce, all of whom aim to privatize education have been allowed to embed themselves in the supposedly impartial processes which evaluate and accredit schools and school systems.”

There’s a not-so-secret campaign underway to privatize public education, an effort that is making unprecedented progress under the administration of Barack Obama. How is such a thing possible? Public education is supposedly a matter of local government, in the hands of thousands of school boards across the country, most of them chosen by local voters?

The representatives of corporations, billionaires, Wall Street speculators, along with their right wing foundations and political tentacles like the US Chamber of Commerce, all of whom aim to privatize education have been allowed to embed themselves in the supposedly impartial processes which evaluate and accredit schools and school systems. From these completely unaccountable positions, they are able to create convenient “crises” at will by making spurious and anonymous accusations against elected local school board members, and threatening to withdraw the accreditation of individual schools and entire districts. When such threats are made, a mayor or governor can appoint extra school board members or as in Georgia this week, replace school board members the voters have chosen with his own pro-privatization flunkies.

Here’s how it works. The federal Department of Education is forbidden to tell local school districts precisely what they can and cannot do or teach. But the Department of Education officially recognizes privately owned and operated “accreditation agencies” to decide whether a school, a school board or a school system are up to snuff. There are 6 of these accreditation agencies covering the 50 states, and three of these covering more than 20 states are under the umbrella of something called Advanc-Ed. Being “private” and not-fpr-profit that Advanc-Ed’s processes, educational policies, judgment calls and the rest are completely immune to public scrutiny.

“…The Obama administration has allowed these unaccountable forces unprecedented access to federal levers of power. ..”

Advanc-Ed’s director of public information told Black Agenda Report on the phone that it was entirely funded by the nominal dues paid by school systems for the privilege of accreditation, and that those dues largely paid for its professional development activities, training education leaders, which meant principals, administrators, school board members, interested public officials, and probably members of local business communities who wanted to be more involved in local educational policies. A little digging into the content of some of Advanc-Ed’s professional development work revealed a number of other players. A typical one is the Center For Reform of School Systems, a not for profit largely funded by the deep pockets of a longtime major advocate of school privatization, the Eli Broad Foundation. CRSS also appears to be deeply involved in the US Chamber of Commerce‘s push to “influence” the boards of education in cities across the country.

The Obama administration has allowed these unaccountable forces unprecedented access to federal levers of power. It was the Broad Foundation’s consultants, along with the Walton Family and Gates and others, who actually wrote Race To The Top’s voluminous guidelines, as well as many of the state level proposals that won the lion’s share of funds under the program.

If you live in the metro Atlanta media market you’ve been bombarded with corporate media news coverage the last month or two of a looming crisis in the school system of suburban (and majority black) Dekalb County, pop. 700,000. The crisis is that the accrediting agency the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, part of Advanc-Ed, is threatening to withdraw accreditation for the county’s entire school system. You can pay careful attention to daily corporate media stories of the crisis for weeks on end without ever hearing what the specific accusations against the board members are. You hear that the board members just don’t work together, that they fuss and fight, that they doze off in public meetings, that they may have hired relatives or mismanaged funds, but that they should just step down for the good of the children. The reason news stories can’t be any more specific about the accusations that threaten the accreditation of a large county school system is that Advanc-Ed’s own report, based largely on anonymous sources, is just as vague, trivial and non-specific. Check it out here.

“…Georgia’s notoriously corrupt legislature has passed laws allowing the state governor, much in the pattern of Michigan, to replace duly elected local school board members with his own appointees, and just yesterday, the governor did just that…”

The accusations may be flimsy, but nothing has to be proven in a court of law. Their purpose is to justify provoking the useful crisis that disaster capitalism requires on the educational front to replace the board members and carry out policies that locally elected officials would not dare dream of. In the last couple years, Georgia’s notoriously corrupt legislature has passed laws allowing the state governor, much in the pattern of Michigan, to replace duly elected local school board members with his own appointees, and just yesterday, the governor did just that, suspending 6 of 9 school board members in the state’s third largest school district after appointing a black Democrat flunky with no classroom bona fides whatsoever as county school superintendent.

Last year, the same breathless accusations about “not working together” bad manners and infighting were enough for the accreditation agency to threaten the city of Atlanta’s public schools with loss of accreditation unless they went along with the wishes of its CEO, former BP executive Erroll Clark. Clark also lacks any classroom experience, and once said in public that he learned all he needed to know about managing a large school district while on the board of BP. Atlanta’s accreditation is still on probation. The year before, accreditation agencies sparked a year-long crisis by threatening the accreditation of another large majority black metro Atlanta county, Clayton.

It doesn’t just happen in Georgia. The US Chamber of Commerce, the Broad Foundation and other privatizers, in league with the Obama administration are trying the same thing in Seattle, and elsewhere around the country. If you hear chatter on corporate media about your local elected school board being “dysfunctional,” you’re probably looking at a tentacle of the same beast working your own backyard. Beware. It doesn’t mean your current elected school board is a paragon of educational virtue. It does mean that they’re probably in the cross-hairs, maybe because they’ve dragged their feet on implementing this or that pro-charter or pro-privatization measure, maybe just because when the privatization goodies flow to the connected they are on the wrong team.

“…Obama apologists excuse his supposed inability to get good things done with the claim that Republicans in the Congress and the media block him. But the lack of a majority in Congress hasn’t stopped him from doing some perfectly horrible things, like Race To The Top…”

Essentially we have allowed privatizers, and not for profit bodies funded directly and indirectly by the privatizers to embed themselves in, to actually become the “authorities” which “certify” our school sysems. Neat trick. Our public Department of Education sanctions them, and they do what DOE is legally prohibited from doing —- take the stick to school systems to force the adoption of high stakes testing, common core, and related “run the school like a business” strategies, and ultimately, privatization.

It’s time to take the discussion out of shallow waters like whether school closings are “racist” or not, and call the real names and frames of what’s happening and how it’s made to happen. We won’t rescue public education, we have no hope of stemming the wave of high-stakes testing and privatization without killing these corrupt private accreditation agencies, and substituting some transparent, fair and bottom-up system of accrediting schools and school systems.

Congress did not approve Race To The Top, and its attendant wave of teacher firings, school closings and the like. But it’s federal policy and it’s happening. Lots of Obama apologists excuse his supposed inability to get good things done with the claim that Republicans in the Congress and the media block him. But the lack of a majority in Congress hasn’t stopped him from doing some perfectly horrible things, like Race To The Top. The role of privately owned, pro-privatization entities in school accreditation is an object lesson in how the most powerful office in the world can reach around Congress if it wants to, and enforce its will (and the will of the charter school sugar daddies) upon hundreds of local boards of education and hundreds of poor communities across the country. It’s time to stand up and enforce some will of our own.

Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report. A longtime Chicagoan, he now lives in exile near Marietta GA, where he is a state committee member of the Georgia Green party and a partner in a tech firm. Contact him via this site’s contact page, or at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.

by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

Originally published at Black Agenda Report on April 22, 2015

Should we be wondering if the prosecution of cheating Atlanta teachers for racketeering was racist? Or should black parents and educators be leading a movement against high-stakes standardized testing as the gateway tool to privatizing public education in black and brown communities across the country?

When drama queen Fulton County judge Jerry Baxter demanded public post-conviction apologies from Atlanta teachers already convicted of racketeering lest he hand them double digit sentences, it struck raw nerves in parts of black America. Black pastors and community leaders called press conferences. They held rallies and issued stern statements. They denounced the judge for making “common criminals” out of black teachers. Inevitably, they wondered whether white teachers would have been prosecuted or subjected to post-conviction humiliation of this kind.

They’re asking the wrong question. What they ought to ask is why the teacher perp walk is being served up in the first place. They need to ask who profits from the continuing crisis in public education in black and brown communities? The answers are not hard to find.

The whole thing, from the indictment of Atlanta Public Schools superintendent Beverly Hall,who died before the trial was complete, to the posturing of public officials and corporate media about “cheating the children” is the latest act of a long, long fake crisis. Judge Baxter’s histrionics too, in which he called the cheating scandal “the sickest thing that’s ever happened to Atlanta,” were a great contribution to the story our billionaire-owned media wants to paint about public education.

The one-percenters need us to believe public education in our communities is some new kind of sewer infested with incompetent teachers who are cheating children and the public every week they draw paychecks. The long, long crisis of public education has been designed, engineered and provoked by powerful bipartisan forces to justify their long game, which is the privatization of public education. That’s the Big Plan.

Since at least 2001, when George W. Bush’s conservative Republicans teamed up with Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy’s liberal Democrats to pass and implement the No Child Left Behind Act, it’s been the policy of both capitalist parties implemented by the federal Department of Education to create, to provoke and to exacerbate a phony educational crisis. This program of crisis-creation has been backed by Wall Street, by banksters and hedge fund types, by giant corporations like Wal-Mart and powerful right wing interest groups like the US Chamber of Commerce as well as the so-called philanthropic tentacles of corporate America like the Gates, Broad, Heritage and Walton Family Foundations. The solution to the fake crisis has been the whole industry of testing experts, turnaround consultants, diploma mills for fake principals, lucrative charter school companies and their contractors, and the private but government sanctioned agencies that rate school districts. Even the agencies that rate school districts are staffed by the same “run the school like a business” experts approved by the US Chamber of Commerce who were employed to write President Obama’s Race to the Topprogram, which punishes school districts that don’t privatize or implement “run the school like a business ‘reforms’” fast enough.

High stakes standardized testing, like the tests educators cheated on in Atlanta, is an essential tool in provoking the crisis, but it’s a big lie. These kinds of tests don’t reflect student progress or teacher competency. They track to family income, and family income in the US correlates largely to race. So as Glen Ford put it back in 2012

“The standardized tests were bombs, designed to explode the public schools and the teaching profession. Everyone involved knew that inner city kids would fail the tests in huge numbers, setting the infernal machine in motion for the closing of schools and the wholesale firing of teachers…”

The bombs were planted not just in Atlanta, but in thousands of school districts across the nation, with predictable results. A 2012 story in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution revealed that the same suspicious patterns of radical test score improvement seen in Atlanta could be found in more than 200 school districts across the country, from Philly to Portland, and from Alaska to Alabama. Clearly, cheating teachers and principals in Georgia were and likely still are doing the same things the same way as their colleagues across the country.

It’s also very true that Atlanta’s teachers were singled out. Other teachers in other states were merely stripped of their jobs and professional licenses. Teach For America alums Michelle Rhee and Kayla Henderson both headed Washington DC’s public schools when massive cheating scandals occurred, but unlike Atlanta’s Beverly Hall, neither they nor their subordinates are in any danger of prosecution. Atlanta on the other hand, is closely associated with the notion of African Americans running big cities, so making the example of black educators in Atlanta makes perfect political sense for those orchestrating the crisis. Still we shouldn’t feel too sorry for the Atlanta teachers. Beverly Hall turned big chunks of Atlanta’s public schools over to privatizers, and even helped divert $140 million a year for more than 20 years away from Atlanta’s public school children to line the pockets of developers and gentrifiers in a lucrative boondoggle Atlantans know as “the Beltline.”

If the black political class and black educators really stood for the interests of their students and communities they would be educating black parents and students across the country about their right to opt out of tests that serve no legitimate educational purpose, as teachers in Chicago and Seattle are already doing.

But that’s problematic too. Opposing standardized testing would place the black political class in conflict not with the slippery nebulous demons of institutional racism, but biting some of the very real and easy-to-find hands in corporate America that feed it. Taking issue with standardized testing, Common Core and the drive to privatize education would put black educators in opposition to corporate America, to the Gates, Walton Family (Wal-Mart), Eli Broad and other foundations, and to Republicans and Democrats including President Obama and Arne Duncan, his Secretary of Education. This is not an easy thing to do when national black “civil rights” organizations from the National Action Network and the National Urban League have eagerly accepted corporate-engineered school reform with corporate dollars, and President Obama is deeply beholden to the charter school sugar daddies.

So it looks like we can count on our black political class to stick to the script on the Atlanta teachers cheating scandal. They’ll talk about whether the prosecution was racist, and they’ll wring self-righteous hands over teachers “cheating the children.” But they won’t question those who set up the rigged game of high stakes testing or why.

Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report and serves on the state committee of the GA Green Party. Contact him at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.