Saving Schools?

originally published March 19, 2008

Ralicia Kelley of Dallas, TX might truly become a child left behind. A few months before graduation, Ralicia found the doors of her charter school locked shut, severely challenging her plans to graduate and enter college. Ms. Kelley’s charter school, Lynacre Academy, filed for bankruptcy, and its doors were barred suddenly in February. Students lucky enough to have read the addendum to a Dallas Morning News article would find the phone number of the Texas Education Agency office to inquire about their educational future, but obstacles of criterion incompatibility will make it incredibly difficult - when not impossible - for Lynacre’s seniors to graduate on time.

The disaster at Lynacre Academy does not, of course, reflect the performance of all charter schools. If students are fortunate enough to land in a school of adequate management, they will experience a crisis-free, uninterrupted education. Indeed, some students find themselves in excellent charter schools, and they benefit significantly. But in all cases, it is a matter of luck. The children find themselves at the mercy of the managers of the school.

How are public schools any different? Aren’t public school students also at the mercy of their administrations’ competence? Yes, but, public schools don’t board up the windows and lock their students out when the grown-ups fail. Georgia House Bill 881, recently passed by the state House of Representatives to face Senate debate, aims to remove children from the frying pan of a failing public school system into the fire of charter schools and potential privatization.

The bill faces a sympathetic audience in the state Senate Committee on Education and Youth, and as of press time it is likely to come before the Senate for a vote. The committee is chaired by Republican Senator Dan Weber of Dunwoody, who authored what became the Charter Systems Act of 2007, something of a prototype for HB 881. The committee’s vice-chairman, Joseph Carter (R-Tifton), co-sponsored the same legislation. Carter and committee secretary Don Thomas co-sponsored Senate Resolution 919 in February, which commended radio talk show host Neal Boortz. Boortz has been one of public school’s most vitriolic opponents, calling public schools the “most rampant form of child abuse in this country” (this from his book, Somebody’s Gotta Say It). Boortz, like many in the charter school movement, envisions a fully privatized education industry to replace all public school systems.

Time and again, charter school initiatives constitute the first step toward the entrance of private capital into the education of children. In state after state, from Texas to Utah to Pennsylvania, charter schools, having been cleaved from the democratic control of local citizens, are bought up by corporations. It should not be a surprise, then, that House Bill 881 includes an article whose language might form the basis of potential privatization. The unelected commission prescribed by the bill may “direct charter schools and persons seeking to establish charter schools to sources of private funding and support.” Any firm seeking to profit from Georgia’s children should find little difficulty justifying its intentions if 881 remains unchanged through Senate scrutiny.

There may be no scarier vision than that of children being subjected to the vagaries of market forces. Corporations have a single allegiance, to profit. The profit motive brought us the assembly line, Wal-Mart, and 30-minute pizza delivery. It also brought us the sub-prime mortgage crisis, the pernicious effects of which are just becoming known. The sub-prime lenders’ allegiance was to profit, not their borrowers’ well-being. Education corporations, likewise, cannot be concerned with the fate of the children and families from whom they derive profit. While profit may be a proper dictator of some aspects of society, it should be kept far away from children, marked with a skull and crossbones like the bottles underneath the sink.

Imagine each foreclosed home during our current crisis is a school full of children. What sort of tragic game of musical chairs would result as the forsaken children were left to desperately scramble for a place to continue their education? Imagine the boarded-up commercial districts in depressed neighborhoods; what would prevent children’s schools, once privatized, from suffering the same fate?

The market can be propulsive, and this aspect is emphasized in the debate over the privatization of schools. The introduction of market competition, say reform proponents, encourages improvement and innovation. Conspicuously absent from the debate, however, is how the market treats losing performers. If your child’s school is losing, for whatever reason, the market will not handle it gently. The first economics course at UGA describes the laws of market economics. The market functions according to its laws of investment and return, not morals; and while this model might work well for building widgets, it is an unsafe environment for a child’s well-being.

The charter school/ privatization argument is, in many cases, an argument against democracy. To suppose that managers in an office in Atlanta - or, worse, out of state - are better suited than local school boards to run school districts is nothing if not a rejection of democracy’s central principles. Maureen Downey of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution correctly points out that House Bill 881, which assigns significant power to an unelected commission in Atlanta, is an “assault on the constitutional powers of school boards,” wresting decision-making power from those who participate directly to a commission which has “no firsthand knowledge of the district’s needs.”

Finally, it seems that legislators are going to extraordinary lengths to avoid the elephant in the classroom: not enough money is going into school systems. No one would consider funding the military  in the  ascetic manner with which we regard education. Certainly no one would blame an infantry armed with BB guns  against an opponent with high-caliber artillery. Why, then, do we  allocate so little money for education only to blame the underfunded schools for having difficulty? The job of educating the children of Georgia is of paramount importance - our legislators should treat it as such.

Matthew Pulver

Open Letter to DHS

originally published March 19, 2008

February 26, 2008
Jamie Johnson
Director, Office of National Labs
Department of Homeland Security
Washington, DC
Re: National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility (NBAF)
proposed Athens, GA location

Dear Mr. Johnson:

I appreciate that you have a difficult, perhaps daunting, job. It is probably an understatement to say that your having to oversee the NBAF site selection process and the ultimate development of what likely would be the world’s largest BSL-3 and BSL-4 laboratory, a facility which would experiment, perhaps on an unprecedented scale, with some of the world’s deadliest and most virulent pathogens on large animals, while at the same time having to assure reluctant residents of the targeted communities that such a facility would make a benign and beneficial neighbor - which neither degrades the environment nor poses a risk to public health or safety - can’t be easy.

The purpose of this letter is to suggest how to make your load a little lighter, make your work a bit easier. It’s simple: Take Athens, GA, off the short list of potential NBAF sites.

As I mentioned during our brief visit before the DHS-sponsored meeting in Athens on Feb. 19, most informed citizens of Athens and surrounding communities do not want NBAF (or anything like it) in their midst, so close to one of our scarce water sources, the Oconee River, our Botanical Garden, our schools, churches and neighborhoods. The DHS site selection process is seriously flawed, as is the DHS community comment process. DHS claims the public comment period is over, but you are just now coming to our community to host a public forum and answer questions about NBAF. Then, when we ask questions, as we did on Feb. 19, we do not get definitive answers. Instead, we get mere speculations about what NBAF would bring to Athens, with comparisons to Plum Island when those comparisons are favorable, and non-specific statements about the safety of new technology (presumably superior to Plum Island’s) when those comparisons are unfavorable. Just now the community is learning that NBAF was invited to Athens without community or community government input. Just now the community is learning about the environmental hazards and potential health risks NBAF will bring to town. And now DHS refuses to formally consider our comments and questions for the record. This is wrong. FAQ, Inc. (“For Athens Quality-of-life”) requests that you re-open the public comment period for the record, and that DHS specifically include in the public record a copy of the video of the Feb. 19 meeting, along with copies of the unedited versions of the written questions from the community that were selected to be asked, as well as copies of all those questions that were not selected to be asked, or answered, at that meeting.

Community Acceptance

We know that “community acceptance” is an important component of what DHS must consider when making its final choice for the NBAF site. Regardless of what may have been represented to DHS in its dealings with the Georgia consortium, “community acceptance” has not been achieved, or even sought, by those who are promoting NBAF for Athens. Further, our mayor’s letter of recommendation given in March 2006, the only apparent indicia of community acceptance in the Georgia consortium’s proposal to locate (all other letters of recommendation were from persons or entities with a financial or other “stake” in NBAF being located in Athens), was a “freelance” undertaking by her without formal action by the Athens-Clarke County Commission or any public forum. Thus, her letter was not a valid indication of community acceptance.

The Georgia proposal to locate was submitted before any information about NBAF had been made available to the public other than a misleading, puffed-up February 2006 press release from the Georgia Governor’s office that contained wildly exaggerated claims of economic impact (up to $6 billion over 20 years). That exaggeration, touted by UGA officials for over 18 months, was pure wishful thinking. The belated launch of the UGA/ NBAF website in February 2007 further touted the exaggerated economic claims until September 2007, when my wife, Kathy Prescott, and I met with David Lee of UGA (along with other representatives of UGA). At that meeting we asked for the assumptions upon which such remarkable numbers were based. A new report was then hastily prepared by UGA’s Carl Vinson Institute of Government that projected not $6 billion, but $1.5 billion over 20 years. It was not until January 2008, after more urging from us, that UGA published the report on its website and quietly explained that the earlier projected figures were based on “best guesses” made in 2006, when they allegedly had no DHS-provided information (although the DHS-provided information which UGA waited 18 months to use in its economic projections had been available to UGA since February 2006 - we have a dated copy of its being furnished to UGA). Further, we have recently learned from experts FAQ has consulted that the economic model used to predict even the lesser economic estimate published by UGA late last year leaves out many important factors necessary to be a legitimate predictor of economic impact.

During my time as an enforcement lawyer in Washington, DC, with the Securities and Exchange Commission, such gross misrepresentations in connection with the sale of a security would have warranted a criminal prosecution. After 38 years policing clients’ disclosures as a securities and corporate lawyer, I am frankly astonished that the continuous misrepresentation and manipulation of material facts regarding something as serious as a huge, potentially deadly bio-terror laboratory would be considered proper tactics by its proponents in furthering the agendas of UGA and/ or DHS. A deceit is a deceit, for whatever purpose, and deceitfulness is made worse when committed by those in whom we have been conditioned to place our trust - such as a vice president of a university, or an official of a federal agency. NBAF could turn out to be a far more dangerous lemon than your typically oversold and overrated used car.

All the Information

Because of the disingenuous information being published by UGA and DHS about NBAF, my wife and I undertook to research the NBAF story on our own. Ultimately, we became so disillusioned at the lack of candor and the manipulation of information on the UGA/ NBAF website and in the media, that in late 2007, we founded FAQ, Inc. FAQ’s initial purpose was to inform the uninformed, or badly informed, Athens community of the true complexity of the issues that surround NBAF, issues that UGA and DHS had been unable or unwilling to answer in a forthright manner. Even the answers that were given by UGA and DHS often changed over time as, to use UGA’s terminology, DHS “refined” its concept of NBAF. The more the people became aware of what NBAF was really all about, the more the community became informed, then the more we became convinced in our opposition to NBAF. Our opposition has been further provoked by learning that the actual community had been excluded by the Georgia consortium from the NBAF invitation process, even though DHS named “community acceptance” as on of DHS’s four principal criteria for locating NBAF.

In my personal conversation with you last Tuesday night [Feb. 19], I confirmed that FAQ and the grassroots community have prepared, and are poised for, a vigorous and unrelenting fight by all legal means to prevent NBAF from being imposed upon the community of Athens. It is imperative that DHS follow the letter of the law in reviewing the impacts this facility will have on Athens. All citizens’ concerns must be heard by DHS, and thoroughly evaluated and reviewed on the record by the appropriate DHS officials in compliance with all applicable laws.

I did enjoy the brief visit with you on Feb. 19, and I respect you as a person and for your service to our government. But I hope you will take seriously our resolve to keep NBAF away from Athens. If the EIS is done properly, I know you will find that there will be serious adverse environmental impacts from the construction and operation of the facility in Athens, and that there is the potential for devastating impacts, in terms of animal health, human health and economics, from the possible spread of foreign animal diseases from this facility. If the EIS is not done properly and fails to lead NBAF away from our fair city, please be aware that we will take all lawful necessary actions in response.

Sincerely,

Grady Thrasher

Co-founder, FAQ, Inc. - “For Athens Quality-of-life”