{"id":186263,"date":"2014-03-17T20:51:00","date_gmt":"2014-03-18T01:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/03\/17\/and-i-would-have-gotten-away-with-it-too-if-it-werent-for-you-meddling-voters\/"},"modified":"2014-03-17T20:51:00","modified_gmt":"2014-03-18T01:51:00","slug":"and-i-would-have-gotten-away-with-it-too-if-it-werent-for-you-meddling-voters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/03\/17\/and-i-would-have-gotten-away-with-it-too-if-it-werent-for-you-meddling-voters\/","title":{"rendered":"And I Would have Gotten Away With it Too, if it Weren’t for You Meddling Voters"},"content":{"rendered":"

The very rich seem to think that democracy is a drag, because it gets in the way of their making even more money by privatizing essential public functions<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The newest bit of \u201cwisdom\u201d for public education comes to us from Netflix Chief Executive Officer Reed Hastings, who is a big charter school supporter and an investor in the Rocketship Education charter school network. At a meeting of the California Charter Schools Association on March 4, he said in a keynote speech that the problem with public schools is that they are governed by elected local school boards. Charter schools have boards that are not elected and, according to his logic, have \u201ca stable governance\u201d and that\u2019s why \u201cthey constantly get better every year.\u201d<\/span>

<\/span> Here\u2019s a transcript of part of the Hastings speech, published on stoprocketship.com<\/a> (and you can watch the video below):<\/span><\/p>\n

And so the fundamental problem with school districts is not their fault, the fundamental problem is that they don\u2019t get to control their boards and the importance of the charter school movement is to evolve America from a system where governance is constantly changing and you can\u2019t do long term planning to a system of large non-profits\u2026The most important thing is that they constantly get better every year they\u2019re getting better because they have stable governance \u2014 they don\u2019t have an elected school board. And that\u2019s a real tough issue. Now if we go to the general public and we say, \u201cHere\u2019s an argument why you should get rid of school boards\u201d of course no one\u2019s going to go for that. School boards have been an iconic part of America for 200 years. So what we have to do is to work with school districts to grow steadily, and the work ahead is really hard because we\u2019re at 8% of students in California, whereas in New Orleans they\u2019re at 90%, so we have a lot of catchup to do\u2026So what we have to do is continue to grow and grow\u2026 It\u2019s going to take 20-30 years to get to 90% of charter kids\u2026.And if we succeed over the next 20 or 30 years, that will be one of the fastest rates of change ever seen around the world for a large system, it\u2019s hard. [applause]<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Actually, all charter schools don\u2019t have stable governance and all of them aren\u2019t getting better every year (plenty close because of their lousy governance) and even charter advocates have called for changes to improve governance structures. What Hastings is suggesting is that democratic elections themselves create unacceptable instability in governance of public education.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Note that Hastings has invested millions in Rocketship charger schools, and while they claim to to be a not for profit, stoprocketship.com<\/a> does provide numerous links that seem to indicate that much of their activities are structured so as to provide profits for its principals and those who make contributions.<\/p>\n

No wonder Reed Hastings thinks that voters are annoying.  It makes the grifting too hard.<\/p>\n

Note that this is not limited to education, where charter schools do not (when comparing apples to apples) outperform the public school system, and where in the extreme case (New Orleans 90% charters) we are seeing increasing cases of malfeasance and misfeasance requiring greater oversight.<\/p>\n

It also applies to things like trade deals, or the Simpson-Bowles commission.<\/p>\n

Even if this actually resulted in good policy, it would be wrong, but when you look at things like NAFTA, CAFTA, TPP, TTIP, etc., it is clear that all it does is that it creates an orgy of corruption and rent seeking.<\/p>\n

When you decide to take democracy out of the mix, and run this stuff “like a business”, someone gets the profit, and ain’t the taxpayer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The very rich seem to think that democracy is a drag, because it gets in the way of their making even more money by privatizing essential public functions: The newest bit of \u201cwisdom\u201d for public education comes to us from Netflix Chief Executive Officer Reed Hastings, who is a big charter school supporter and an investor …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[966,970,968,1003,1196],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186263","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-charter-schools","category-corruption","category-education","category-philosophy","category-privatization"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186263"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186263"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186263\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}