A tale of two states and two models for public education

In Minnesota we have a governor who was a teacher. In Los Angeles, teachers are striking in a district whose superintendent has never been a teacher, has no training of any kind in education, and is single-minded in his commitment to privatizing public schools.

By Jeff Kolnick, Pete Ontiveros, and Dennis Hagen-Smith

Jan. 18, 2019

photo of article author — Jeff Kolnick and Pete Ontiveros

Gov. Tim Walz, a career public school teacher, recently appointed another public school teacher, Mary Cathryn Ricker, to head the Minnesota Department of Education. What a great idea. Who better to lead our Pre-K-to-12 system of education than an educator?

In Los Angeles, teachers are striking in a district with a superintendent who has never been a teacher, has no training of any kind in education, and is single-minded in his commitment to privatizing public schools.

While Minnesota was electing an educator to be governor, in Los Angeles a cadre of billionaires, committed to turning public schools into profit centers for corporations, were busy buying a majority of the Los Angeles School Board. In 2017, pro-charter-school billionaires spent an unprecedented $9.7 million to affect the election. Contributions came from the Walton Family Foundation (Walmart), Doris Fischer (The Gap), Reed Hastings (Netflix), and Eli Broad (construction). Their investment paid off when the new school-board majority appointed their billionaire buddy, Austin Beutner, as the superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District. The district is the second largest in the nation with more than 600,000 students and 30,000 full-time teachers.

Beutner, an investment banker by trade, has no children in the LA public schools, and knows nothing of the daily challenges or the missionary zeal teachers bring on their journey to deliver quality public education. He is driven by a one-item agenda: ensure the failure of public schools in order to privatize LA Unified and enrich the investor class. The educational consequences of this are irrelevant to the billionaire crowd because their children have trust funds and go to private schools.

The ‘portfolio model’

portrait of dennis hagen smith — Dennis Hagen-Smith

Beutner is a follower of the “portfolio model” of public education. According to Chalkbeat reporter Matt Barnum, advocates of the portfolio model seek to have choice in public schools, weakening the idea of having an excellent school in every neighborhood. The district encourages competition with for-profit charter schools, backs off managing the schools, and rewards high performing schools while closing bad ones. In other words, a successful school system is just like managing a stock portfolio. Paul Hill, who founded the Center on Reinventing Public Education in 1993, wrote, “Like investors with diversified portfolios of stocks and bonds, school boards would closely manage their community’s portfolio of educational service offerings, divesting less productive schools and adding more promising ones.”

If only it were that easy. Unfortunately, school districts are not stock portfolios, students are not products, teachers are not machines, and classrooms are not assembly lines.

The United States is poised to observe an experiment in public education. In one state, a governor with roots in teaching and learning appointed a commissioner of education who shares those roots. Meanwhile, in California, a group of billionaires is seeking to turn public schools into corporations. One state will focus on teaching and learning and the other on making money. And the subjects of this experiment are a generation of young people.

What is happening in America?

Out of alternatives

Minnesota is unlikely to see a teacher strike because our leadership focuses on educating students and not lining the pockets of investors. Peter Greene, a former educator turned journalist, explained the nature of teacher strikes this way: “Teacher strikes happen because teachers believe they are out of alternatives. … Strikes happen when school district leadership convinces the most strike-averse teachers that they are out of options. … Increasingly the agenda of many people taking positions of authority over public education is to dismantle public education and replace it with a network of private charter schools, a process often accelerated by starving public schools for funding in order to manufacture a crisis. And lest we forget, current secretary of education Betsy DeVos once declared that public schools are a ‘dead end.’ Beutner’s comment to a reporter regarding the strike was, ‘There are ways to educate kids that don’t rely on a physical body.’ Teachers are not necessary.”

We are a products of California public schools, from the kindergarten to community college to the UCLA. We are in solidarity with the teachers working to preserve the excellent educational system that gave us the chance to learn and thrive. The three of us wish we were represented by an educator like Tim Walz, who would never take the PUBLIC out of public education.

Jeff Kolnick and Pete Ontiveros grew up together in Orange County, California, and graduated from public schools, Fullerton Community College, and UCLA. Dennis Hagen-Smith graduated public schools and became friends with Jeff and Pete at UCLA. Pete’s work with students inspired Dennis to become a teacher. Jeff teaches history at Southwest Minnesota State University. Pete is a retired elementary school teacher and longtime member of the United Teachers of Los Angeles. Dennis is 2018-2019 LAUSD Teacher of the Year.