Grubstakers - [Unlocked] Episode 82: Charter Schools feat. Freddie Deboer (Part 2)

Episode Date: July 25, 2019

Originally released July 17th, 2019. On this episode we continue our conversation with Freddie Deboer. We take a close look at the New York charter school the Success Academy, and Freddie shares his personal outlook on the future of education. See more of Freddie's work at: fredrikdeboer.com/ His book "Cult of the Smart" will be published around Summer 2020.

Hey, thank you for joining us on our Patreon side of Grubstakers. We are continuing our conversation with Freddie DeBoer. We talk about Success Academy in New York City, the largest charter school operator there, and many of the different ways they've lobbied the government and cooked the books. And we also get to talk to Freddie a bit about if he's hopeful for the future of the left and his new book, and if he ever plans to return to social media. Thanks for subscribing and hope you enjoy. First they think you're crazy, then they fight you, and then all of a sudden you change the world.

Berlusconi flatly denies that any mafia money helped him begin to start the dynasty. I have always had a thing for black people. I like black people. I'm telling you, these stories are funnier than the jokes you can tell. I said, what the fuck is a brain scientist? I was like, that's not a real job. Tell me the truth. But anyway. So something that I wanted to get to is kind of some of the specific, I guess, charter scandals. Because you write very well about this.

You wrote a piece for Jacobin called Another Day, Another Charter Scandal. And you talk about, I mean, essentially what we've kind of been talking about here is what the charter school people, the advocates always wave is, you know, suppose they have better test results than whatever public school. And you kind of go through how they cook the books to get those results. And part of the way they do that is, you know, pushing out students who have disabilities, students who are English as a second language, students who are poor. And you talk about in this Jacobin piece, essentially charter schools in Nashville were, they were getting tax dollars, and I believe they were, yeah, they were forcing homeless students to scrape together money to buy uniforms. Wow.

I mean, just like these kinds of things that, like, again, you say they're not public. It's like, well, of course, yeah. If you're receiving public money, you should not be doing something like that. So there are recognized charters that, by which I mean that they are operating under a charter, operating under a charter with the blessing of the state, that have insisted that parents of students who go to the charter donate to the company, to the foundation. There have been charters where parents are asked

to volunteer, in fact required to volunteer, to do work around the school at pains of being left out of the school, yeah. In 2013, Reuters did a big investigative piece, and they found dozens of examples of the dirty tricks that charters play in order to get students into their schools who do what we call creaming right to take the best to the best students so these are things like having students write very long essays that in order to be

considered things like having parents come to meetings at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday, right? Which, of course, implies that you have the kind of social and economic cloud to be able to do that. Right, of course. And all manner of other, people putting up all manner of other ways to game the system. And it's important to say, a lot of charter research depends upon the idea that charter lotteries are random, and therefore they're looking at a randomized sample. But there's all manner of ways, like I just mentioned, to game a lottery. In other words, you can have the application process for which you are then put into a lottery be so onerous that you inherently bias the sample.

Just the fact that charters are opt-in, just the fact that parents have to decide that they want to put their students through charters is sufficient to mess up the randomization. Yeah, and you mentioned survivorship bias, and I guess backfilling is something. In just one second here, we'll talk about Success Academy in New York, but Success Academy doesn't backfill. And so backfill is essentially if a student gets kicked out or leaves, they don't fill that spot. And then could you explain survivorship bias to us? Yeah, well, so, I mean like it's specifically in relationship to backfill so like you said so uh charter success charters uh success charter academies does not backfill after uh after second grade and so what happens is is after that point students who leave

the school for whatever reason um are not those slots are not then filled with new people the size of that class just shrinks okay so you look at the so you then say all right we the most transient portion of our student population the students were most likely to be in chaotic uh living situations the students were most likely to be marginal students um are the ones that uh the school, right, and are thus not in the numbers. So you have created selection bias artificially, and then you say, hey, look, are students too great moving from K to five? Yeah.

But, you know, you might be missing a quarter of the original class in the five-year data, and it's the quarter that is most likely to perform poorly. Yeah, of course. If you can't make it to school or if you have to leave for any reason, you're most likely on the bottom of the totem pole when it comes to what the class is going to be. And if you don't equate that into the statistic of how good the school is doing, then you're manipulating the results. That's insane.

Yeah, and so I guess we can just kind of talk about Success Academy here doing, then you're manipulating the results. That's insane. Yeah. And so I guess we can just kind of talk about Success Academy here because this is one prominent example in New York City. Essentially, Success Academy was founded in 2006. We mentioned Ava Moskowitz was the founder. From 2006 to 2012, they opened, and I should say they are the largest charter school operator in New York City. As of right now, are the largest charter school operator in New York City. As of right now, they have about 47 different schools in New York City.

But we mentioned founded 2006. From 2006 to 2012, they opened 22 schools. So essentially, they were only able to do this because of, you know, total buy-in from the Bloomberg administration. You know, another billionaire who's not only donated his personal fortune to uh charter schools or donated uh who's not only put his personal fortune towards charter schools but also used his access to the levers of government power to give them a big advantage where they were able they're still able to uh take space from public schools without paying them any rent um but i guess i just wanted to kind of talk about Success Academy and some of the things that they've done.

It should just be noted, I know, Freddie, you've written about how essentially Success Academy takes advantage of the fact that a lot of people would like to live in New York, so you can get these teachers who, say, don't have the certificates to come out here and, you know, work 70 hours weeks, you know, in a job that's extremely stressful just because they want to be here in the big city. And then they'll quit after like two or three years. And I guess you were saying to us earlier that that's not really scalable to small towns yeah i mean uh i know a lot of i mean i can imagine and i have known in my life a lot of young people who are willing to do most anything uh to be able to have like you know a foothold

in new york right um and uh i'm sure it sounds like a great idea to a lot of ambitious young people well i'm gonna go and i'm gonna work in a charter school for a couple years, two, three, four years, and then I'll go and I'll start making my money in finance or marketing or whatever. I'm sure this is all wrapped up in a white savior narrative in their own head. But this is simply not a model that can apply to schools in the destitute villages of the Ozarks. Sure, yeah. It's not a model that's going to apply in the de-industrialized Midwest. It's not a model that's going to work in North Dakota on an Indian reservation.

So New York is able to support the turnover. Yeah, exactly. Whereas other places aren't. Right, because this is such an attractive place to live. Our unemployment rate is, I think, maybe even lower than 3%, right? So this is a place that somebody might want to come to and say, I'm going to start my life here.

I want to start my New York adventure. And teaching seems like a pretty cool short-term gig. I mean, and it's worth zooming out also. Remember that the basic claim of the ed reform movement is that our educational problems are a talent deficit in teaching. We don't have good teachers, so therefore we don't have good students. So there, if you think about that carefully, right? Like, how do we get these talented people into teaching? Well, their whole approach sort of fails on its own merits, even if I accepted that, because all they've done is made the profession of teaching worse right right for 25 years and so how are you going to attract all of these you know according to their own numbers we would need to replace

teachers on the rate of hundreds of thousands literally hundreds of thousands of teachers would need to be replaced in order to make uh everywhere America reach their standards according to them, right? There's no bullpen. Yeah, that doesn't exist. Where are we going to get this collection of hundreds of thousands of people who are willing to come and work a really emotionally punishing job, a job that many people work 60, 70 hours a weekend, a job with low social status.

And where one of the only things, a couple of the only things that is attractive about the job, powerful unions and teacher tenure are being eroded by the very people who say that they want to introduce more talent. Teach for America. One method of finding those people would be a stronger union that does fight for higher wages and higher social prestige or remind people of that prestige, I guess. One of the things that they always propose,

well, you know, what we're going to do is the bargain will be you'll lose tenure, but we'll pay you better, right? Which, number one like if the teachers unions want to negotiate that in good faith more power to them but of course the other thing to say you can't get that right right like it's these people i debate charter schools with they always say well we'll pay them more so you're going to raise the property taxes in every

municipality in the country sufficiently to be able to fund meaningful raises to teachers? Did you know in the early 1970s, the average first-year lawyer made about $7,000 a year more than the average first-year teacher? Now it's more like $117,000 a year more than the average first-year teacher. Now it's more like $117,000. So if you want to make the profession better, there's plenty of ways to do that that don't involve getting rid of the organizations that advocate for them. Would you say that property tax was part of a big reason

that school performance itself, even though it's so hard to measure, advocate for them would you say that property tax was part of a big reason that like i guess school performance itself even though it's so hard to measure what is so like geographically besides like you know people's uh like students actual socioeconomic background property tax itself always seemed to be like maybe a back door to a kind of socioeconomic segregation because... Of course, yeah. It's absolutely true that property taxes and the inability to get into the zones with the highest performing schools is a way to segregate people and to keep poor black kids out of rich white districts.

Sure. We should be careful in how we look at, you know, those dynamics and not assume, well, if we could just tear down that wall, the zoning wall, then we could let the students go to the good school and everything will be fine. Because, of course, one way to look at it is that students perform poorly because they can't get into the good school another way to look at it is that the school that we consider good we consider good precisely because it excludes the kids who perform poorly right right man yeah is there any like is there any studies on the improvement because i

mean like so much of what we've talked about today is about how the students will perform to a certain degree based off the studies you said in third grade. Are there any research about, well, these kids were bad and then they improved because of certain measures? Is that happening at all? Oh, I'm sure it is. Yeah. Again, like I'm talking and I should be clear that I'm talking at the from 10,000 feet. There's plenty of kids who are improving. If you want to, so I wrote up on my website a while back a study that said, let's just

look at all these different interventions and see how they affect students. And the, it was all kinds of things like technology in the home, technology in the classroom, larger class size, smaller class size, just a bunch of different things. Something like 14 different potential interventions. Now this should not surprise anyone because this is education research, but something like 11 out of those 14 or 10 out of those 14 showed no effect at all. All right. Sure.

Now education in the classroom, that vastly improved outcomes, right? What's that? Technology in the classroom, that vastly improved outcomes, right? I'm afraid the error bars were firmly over the zero. Now the quarterly town hall meetings, we find out that actually it does vastly improve outcomes when they use our product That's great and the Board desperately bargaining to keep his job right now, but you in quite the opposite

I mean the thing is we have to understand always is that education we're talking about small effect sizes and big variations So not finding an effect is like what you expect generally Most stuff doesn't mean't move the needle very far. Now, the most powerful one, though, and it's very much worth pursuing. So it moved things about 0.4 of a standard deviation, which is not world shaking, but is real. Still something, yeah. Yeah. Was individual and small group tutoring.

Yeah, that makes sense. It was the number one most consistent and powerful improvement. So you could ask the question, how come we don't hear about individual and small group tutoring as something that we should be instituting everywhere? And the answer is, number one, you've got to pay for it. And number two, that is not a change that permits you to remake the world in your own image, right? The thing is you've got to understand, like, these billionaires,

they're doing this in part to satisfy their own self-definition as being like titans of industry and people who are philanthropists who are going to change the world. So you say to them, hey look, you personally could easily fund many, many, many tutors, and you'll move the needle at.4 of a standard deviation, which is meaningful, and the students will learn something in their regular schools after school. That doesn't excite them, right? Right. But I'm going to come in and be the revolutionary. Right, right.

And I'm going to be Mark Zuckerberg, and I'm going to have my absolutely disastrous Newark misadventure where I try to wipe the entire slate clean and surprise, surprise, parents actually give a shit about what you're doing to their kids' schools. That's what they want. They want to be the revolutionary. They don't want to participate in funding incremental small benefits. Two things I want to mention real quick. One, I think that you said it very perfectly earlier when we talk about improvement in education, it is about monetary gain. How much this person learns will affect their career choices, not at all about how intelligent the person is most likely. And the thing you mentioned just now about tutoring, I actually dropped out of high school because I was having a very difficult time. And then I started going to

secondary school is what I've called it, where it's, you know, if you broke an arm and you missed three months of math, they can get you back on track in a couple of weeks, essentially. And so I started going there to make up my freshman year, essentially. So I was going to, I was retaking freshman classes and then going to this tutoring thing. But then by the end of that second year, I went, I'm just going to finish school here because regular high school for me was difficult and stupid. And the social dogma of who are you going to take to prom to getting up at 7 for no real reason. I mean, the entire system of education is very archaic when we actually look at it,

and in this new system, I got to choose, you know, like, hey, I'm going to take these two or three classes. I'm going to choose what time I can take them, and I can go in and do it, and it's a one-on-one thing, and you and do it and it's a one-on-one thing and you can't cheat when it's a one-on-one system you can't be like faking math when a person's over your shoulder being like you're not doing that right

and it really freed my it was probably the best time in school I had because I had a difficulty with education throughout the entire process and even after that I tried going back into the traditional route and then failed again there but those two years that I spent doing that like one-on-one classes, and I will wholeheartedly admit I was so fortunate and my parents had the luxury of being able to do

that for me. But that time period, I know that the research is 0.4, but I promise you if we institute more of that, it would improve students vastly because it's just it just makes sense you can't you can't fake being taught one-on-one it's just not possible yeah but maybe if you tried the program andy road that would have given you a better experience we do have individualized remediation pathways so if the student's having trouble with a particular problem you can go and you know they'll have a video of a teacher explaining it which is just like a teacher in real life explaining that and this one has which is just like a teacher in real life explaining that. And this one has animations, which you can't do in real life.

Well, animations really was what I loved about the tutoring. I mean, I needed cartoons to learn. Andy, are they going to make you write the program that trains your replacement when they fire you for trying to unionize? I mean, they're getting there. Actually, one thing. So we've been talking about how billionaires, you know, they're doing it because it's sort of a vanity project in a way. But one thing that kind of stuck out to me when I was doing some reading about the KIPP schools, which are also, you know, private schools. They started in New York, but I think they're nationwide now um that seemed much more insidious and more in line with um like how the reason in in high school most high schools you

know there are bells between classes the legacy of that uh was to prepare kids for factory work oh really yeah uh and it uh the thing about KIPP schools at least in an article from a former teacher that I was reading was like they teach kids to try to internalize their failures in ways where everything is just like, you know, I did this wrong. I need to make myself do better. Things like that where it seems like it's almost a more insidious project to kind of, in a way, make people who are going to be the working class

maybe a little more compliant. Am I reading too into that? Am I being too paranoid? No, I don't think so at all. You know, private schools are on a whole other level, in part because, you know, for many... So private school vouchers are an interesting thing. They don't work.

We can say that pretty confidently. But they are, have a kind of strange, I found a strange relationship to people who actually work in private schools, which is they want more revenue and private school vouchers bring in more revenue but what most private school people most absolutely do not want is to actually lower the barrier and let anybody in right right because it's a lot to rattle in and what they're what they are oftentimes what they are selling themselves on you know their, their, their pitch is part sort of, we have a very carefully manicured student body and, you know, the right kind of people go here, you know?

And so there's a lot of ideology in private, in private school. There's also a lot of religion in private school still. So even after there's been a, there's far more secular private schools than there used to be, but still I believe the Catholic church is still the largest owner of private schools. So, yeah, there's some independent day schools, which are like hippie schools. And I'm sure the people behind them have good intentions, but they also can be pretty creepy to me also, you know?

Some of the hippie stuff, really, I don't know. Like, what parts of them are odd? Like, you know, I do believe in the necessity of having a curriculum, and oftentimes some of these schools are based on, like, the idea of just total formless education which is everything is based on choice you can sort of do whatever you want um i mean you have you know you'll have certain times and designated periods to do things but you know it's sort of like uh they're selling the students on you know you you direct your education at all times and i think that number one it's really important in life to read and learn things that you wouldn't read and learn if it was just your own decision.

Right, right. Like, there's a lot of things that I read in my life that I hated reading, but I'm glad that I read them. But I also think that, like, and maybe this is me sort of sticking up for the capitalist indoctrination, but I also think it's important to teach, uh, young people that like, uh, you know, you are not going to be the captain of your entire life,

that you are going to live in a society that's going to put all kinds of constraints on you. And you have to be prepared to navigate those constraints and to have an emotionally healthy relationship towards them. And so we make the manner kists. Um, I did want to just mention some Success Academy stuff. So you mentioned this kind of horrible work environment.

So I took a look at Glassdoor, the website where employees can write anonymous reviews about their employer. So Success Academy had 2.6 stars out of 5 as of February 2019. And then suddenly a bunch of five-star reviews started appearing. And then they got up to 3.2. But I did just like this one review from June 24th, 2019. Quote,

Get ready to spend approximately 95% of your life, not counting sleep, at work. Micromanagement, emphasis on militaristic style of teaching. They make you teach like a drill sergeant. Long hours, lots of paperwork. Expect to stay in the building from 6.30 a.m. to 6 p.m., then go home and do hours of paperwork through the night and weekends.

On weekdays, by the time I would finish, I would only have enough time to get ready to go to sleep and wake up in the morning. You're treated like a robot, no time, barely any for lunch breaks or rest. Higher-ups don't care about your feelings, family,-being they just want you to produce long story short only if you're living by yourself and or have kobe-esque work ethic this job may be an okay fit for you and you know there was a video that was released in the new york times maybe five years ago of the success academy teaching technique which i would i would call um institutionalized child abuse. Oh, yeah. I mean, I just think that there is a certain level of sort of abuse at which, like, you know, I don't care.

Even if you could prove to me that this is having, like, a positive educational outcome. Right, right. You're crossing a line. Yeah. Yeah, and so, you know, Success Academy, when it started up, it got a million dollars directly from Don Fisher. We mentioned the founder of The Gap, the person who really knows how to treat children. And it just kind of goes from there. And I did want to mention, we mentioned, so Bill de Blasio, when he was actually running for mayor, was talking about this. I should mention co-location is the name of, essentially in New York City still,

charter schools, including Success Academy, will be able to get space in public schools for free. They don't pay any rent to the public schools. So Bill de Blasio, when he was running for mayor, said we have to end that, you know. So Success Academy is from the nation in 2014. They have a giant rally where they make teachers attend to protest quote bill de blasio's quote war on charter schools and minority students uh and so basically the uh let me just see if i have this quote here uh they they the

nation interviewed one anonymous staff member who said, quote, I don't want to say it's hostile or abusive, but definitely I feel that coercive measures are taken. The rally really demonstrated a lack of boundaries. And essentially, they sent out, you know, permission slips to all these parents of students and all these teachers and said, hey, we're going to Albany to protest Bill de Blasio and say, you know, he's at war with minority students. And by the way, if you're a teacher here, we're going to fire you. I mean, they didn't explicitly say that, but it's very clearly what they were implying.

So it is just something where it's like, clearly, this, in the case of Success Academy, you have public money being turned into Eva Moskowitz's private dictatorship in which she can use it, use students, use parents, use teachers as, you know, lobbying to put pressure on the de Blasio administration, which was successful in that the state in 2014 overruled de Blasio, Andrew Cuomo did, and they passed a law that says now the city of New York has to pay money to any charter that rents private space. So not only do they get, you know, public space for free, but if they actually pay some private landlord, the city has to reimburse them. So, I mean, that's the current status quo in New York. And, yeah, and, you know, you can just kind of go on through there with, like, different stuff with Success Academy and what they've been able to do to the city and state government.

So I quickly did a Google search and I think three or four years ago they had a video of a teacher literally abusing a child. And it's crazy that that can happen. And then I obviously didn't know about it. I just didn't know about it. But then the fact is that not only can that continue, but it's almost condoned to a certain degree. Because if you just look up charter school abuse, it's just a miles-long results page.

The teacher was successfully abusing that child. It's explicitly condoned. They came out with a press release after that, and they said this teacher was doing what she's supposed to do. She's doing her job i mean like in the same vein like when you see uh abuse from like authority uh from like police or military and then the press release says exactly that like not this is what we're trained to do it's like how are we condoning this what i mean you you know i i hate to be this explicit but i remember when sean and i were talking about

researching for this episode i told him just Google charter schools rape. Like the amount of situations where that's been happening where the school either knows about it and isn't stopping it or it's happening between students and they don't give a shit. It's just lunacy and obviously that's an issue that affects all situations not just charter schools

but the fact that they've been so complicit in even dealing with it is just horrible. Well I think it's an interesting thing. Like, obviously, it'll happen at public schools, too. But, you know, you look at like DynCorp, the private military contractor, where they had like in Kosovo a massive sex trafficking ring that they tried to cover up because they wanted to protect their United Nations funding. So you will have like these charters getting public money. And it's like, OK, these are private tyrannters getting public money and it's like okay these are private tyranny is getting public money their incentive might be to sweep things under the rug if it might affect their ability to get public money you know i like that they're trying to hide behind their like

comp only merely comparable educational outcomes like you said like if you could drop a kid into a private school or a or a charter or a public, and you could expect it would fall within a fairly narrow band. Yeah, I mean, look, obviously this is massively contested, and there are some people who will say very different. But currently the best research that I'm aware of, the best research that's out there, suggests that there's very little daylight at all between the outcomes of charter schools and the outcomes of public schools. And again, my general stance is not so much to argue that the outcomes are better for public schools. My stance is to say that I don't know how good the charter school's outcomes are because of how many different ways we know they use to cream

and to get sort of a manufactured student population that will have the best outcomes. As long as that's true, as long as they're doing that and people are letting them get away with it, it's essentially impossible to make responsible comparisons. Yeah. So just a couple other Success Academy things I want to go through real quick. Success Academy, there was a student and him and his mother became whistleblowers about how they were suspending him multiple times to try to kick him out of a Success Academy

on the Upper West Side. Eva Moskowitz wrote a memoir where she essentially doxed that student. She released his academic records, which is a violation of federal law. So this is just from the New York Daily News. Basically, a federal education department official found that she was in violation there. Quote, school officials are not permitted to further disclose personally identifiable information from a student's education record absence the parent's written consent. So essentially, she like to retaliate against the student whistleblowing on her. She, you know, doxed him and released his records.

There was no fine, but they did find that she was in violation. But I did just like from the New York Daily News, a Success Academy spokeswoman said the school would appeal the decision, quote, we reject the Trump administration's attempt to curtail our First Amendment right to correct irresponsible reporting about

false claims, unquote. And so, you know, I mean, like we talk about whatever social justice or rhetoric you want to do. This is essentially a federal bureaucracy finds out that you violated the law and then doesn't fine you and you appeal to like whatever anti-Trump stuff. And then in April 2019, Success Academy takes 10 million dollars from the Federal Department of Education to open six new schools in New York. So it's just ridiculous. Also, there is no bigger advocate

for charter schools in the United States than Betsy DeVos, our current Trump administration Department of Education, and someone who Eva Moskowitz used to be quite chummy with back when it was politically palatable for her to do so.

Oh, really? She was on the short list for Secretary of Education, apparently. Wow. And there's another from Chalkbeat.org. In April 2019, a lawsuit was filed against Success Academy, essentially saying that a Brooklyn student with special needs was repeatedly suspended by them, again, to try and get him out of there. They called child services on his mother. Apparently at one time they dropped him

off at a police precinct. Um, and you know, so, and this, again, this lawsuit is part of a pattern where parents of special needs students say, you know, uh, that in the past success academy has threatened parents with child welfare investigations, which is extremely fucked up. Held students back from advancing to the next grade for disciplinary reasons. And just used these harsh disciplinary practices that, of course, don't work and have a very adverse effect on students with disabilities because they're cooking the books, like you say. Do they do anything good? I mean, like I know we're, I mean, is there any reason for them to be around? They're leeching money from the government.

They are abusing kids. Well, what, why the, you know, like in the inception in the 70s, is this all going on then as well? Or was there a actual kernel of like, this is a decent idea? They make Ivy League kids suffer from burnout. And I think that's commendable.

Yeah. Look, I think that the public schools need, and to a certain degree, are starting to generate alternative models for students who are not suited to the typical model. Sure. There are some cool things happening. My niece, for example, she's starting high school this fall, and she'll be spending half of her day in the high school that I went to, and then she's going to spend the second half of her day in an arts high school studying drawing because she's someone who the typical six hour long day probably wouldn't work for her academically. Luckily, she has the kind of academic ability where she can spend a lot of time working on art without, you know, setting her back very far.

I know of a school in New Haven, Connecticut, where it's an outdoor, I mean, they have a building facility there, and there are some traditional academics that go on there, but they also have beehives and chickens and pigs, and they grow crops and stuff, and the kids come. And so not only do some kids go there, I believe, two or three times a week and then spend the other couple days at traditional high school, but kids from other schools can, I think it's once a month,

can go and spend a day there when they want. That's great. And they send the special needs kids to the beehives without the proper equipment to drive them out. So those kind of models are cool. beehives without the proper equipment to drive them out. Yeah. So, so those kinds of models are cool. So I'm not opposed to people's efforts to shake things up, but you know,

I'm a leftist and you can't get more neoliberal than charter schools. They are about dismantling regulation and they are about moving public assets into private hands and Just fundamentally opposed to that mission One other scandal DNA info 2013 article It essentially goes through how the under Bloomberg the New York City Department of Education was bending over backwards for Moskowitz's success Academy essentially, this is saying that

this article says that the the moskowitz success academy was given uh space rent-free space we mentioned in public school buildings to open 14 co-location sites throughout bloomberg's term um in each handover uh from dna info in each handover moskowitz demanded that department of education deliver the space clear of furniture and broom swept by 5 p.m the last day of the school year but since students use the space until the second to last day of the school year the department of education was less left with less than 36 hours to clear the area costing the department tens of thousands of dollars in overtime from contracted workers scrambling to meet the onerous deadline and

then dna info actually got emails between um moskowitz and the then uh deputy schools chancellor kathleen grim essentially moskowitz like emailing her being like quote as you know we will move uh stuff if it is not out by 5 p.m as the agreed upon time and date when all stuff is removed moskowitz wrote we have been discussing for months three exclamation points. Let's avoid the sequel to Movegate 2, she added, referring to 2010 to 11 when

Department of Education didn't meet her deadline. And basically Grimm responded like two and a half hours later saying like, yeah, don't worry about it. And the city had to spend, according to DNA info, about $124,000 just closing and moving stuff out of those locations right at the end. Really?

Yeah, so it's just like something where it's like totally unnecessary money spent and time spent to clear these spaces for a charter school. And the fact that they have this much access to the time and attention of the most senior people in the city is very disturbing. This money is spent for absolutely no reason. And, you know, we've kind of gone through this by now, but a better use of this financial resources might be, say, free school lunches or anything else that might ameliorate. Anything but this.

Yes. I mean, like, that's ridiculous. Yeah. And, you know, so it's like maybe de Blasio is not as much of a fan, but his hands, well, I don't even know. His hands were already tied by the time he came in because Cuomo is like very close to Moskowitz as well. And they've made sure that they will continue to be able to have these free space and public spaces. But also the city as rising rents in New York is now shelling out Forty some million a year to just pay them to rent in private spaces as well So now go over this again if you didn't already so are are they able to operate in?

Public schools without paying them rent is that still going that's still going on It's still going on and then is that just in the United States or is that all I mean for this specific? Is it a New York thing or is it all over the U.S. that this is happening? I don't know of other specific districts where it happens it wouldn't surprise me if it did. Gotcha sure. Yeah so this New York law was a state law in 2014 that says that not only do they get to operate for free in public schools but they the city has to pay them if they rent private spaces so according to Chalkbeat as of 2018 the city has to pay them if they rent private spaces. So according to Chalkbeat, as of 2018, the city spent $44 million paying for their rent in private spaces. And in 2017, they spent $27 million. So you just see as rents rise in New York, of course, we're going to be on the hook for more and more of that.

But I guess just something that was interesting to me about Eva Moskowitz is I guess she's, you know, she taught Betty Friedan when she was a teacher. She's did a VHS video called Some Spirit in Me, which is kind of a look at the the feminist movement. And she talks about, you know, like the Trump administration. In her book, she writes, like so many of you, I am deeply distressed by both the hateful violence in Charlottesville and by President Trump's refusal to clearly denounce it. Nobody with any empathy for the plight of people of color in this country could respond the way that he did, unquote. But it's like, I guess at the same time, she's making, what, half a million dollars a year to run this charter network. And it's like very clearly not only diverting resources away, but also diverting democratic control away from communities

that she is, you know, very much claiming to speak on behalf of. And I guess it's just something that maybe bothers me where I guess materialist language can't really be abused in this same way. If you're much more focused on dollars and cents at the end of the day, it's much harder to do this kind of stuff where you talk about, she talks about to me, like social justice involves choice or something like that. She uses that to promote charter schools. Like you can't be in favor of social justice if you can't say you can send your children

to any charter school, you know? And I guess it is just something that's kind of a general trend you see in America where this language of justice and what is right is really used to obscure very clear material things that are, in my view, harder to obscure. Is that fair? Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, the era that we live in is an era

of ultra-aggressive capitalist politics wrapped up in the language of social justice. You know, there's this, pride just happened. And pride is, you know, despite all of the corporatization, it's something that is still worthy of fighting for and defending. But, you know, people were saying,

you know, the first pride was a riot. The next pride should be a riot too. And I was just thinking, I'm completely with you on that. That's a great idea. But if the next pride is a riot, I promise Bank of America will be there handing out water bottles. Yeah, right. And it's a very insidious thing. I mean, one of the things about Trump is that he is a convenient villain in the sense that he is both got the capitalist terrible side. He's got the

racist terrible side. It's all wrapped up together in one really horrific package. Whereas what we have to worry about a lot moving forward is neoliberal politics, technocratic politics, capitalist politics that come wrapped up in this social justice warrior language, which, you know, is absorbed through the internet and that college. Right. And she makes this speech denouncing Trump, but of course, there's no problem taking 10 million from his Department of Education to promote her agenda and her network of schools. And I'm sure work with Betsy DeVos, maybe she doesn't tries to not do that publicly because it's, you know, Betsy DeVos and Trump has at least, let's say, on the liberal Democrat side, more politicized charter schools than they have been in the past.

Where you have, you know, Cory Booker, we mentioned Newark, this hundred million he gets from Zuckerberg to try and, you know, charterize all the Newark schools. And now he has to, like, back away from that because, if anything else, the Trump administration is making this a more polarized issue. Yeah. And, again, so I would recommend to listeners, if you are interested in these issues that we've been talking about today, there's a book by Dale Russockoff from a few years ago called the prize and it is all about Mark Zuckerberg giving I think a hundred or a hundred and fifty million dollars to Newark and the tag team of Cory Booker and Chris Christie saying this is the opportunity to crush the teachers unions and implement charter schools. It was an absolute unmitigated disaster from beginning to end.

Russell Coff is very objective sort of to a fault and does not really take a stance on the broader issue of charter schools. It's just a really well-reported book. So this tag team of Cory Booker and Chris Christie, this was before he was dating Rosario Dawson, right? That's right, yeah. That was before he was talking about the politics of love on the campaign trail. All right, and so I guess moving forward, I am just curious as someone who's read your writing and very much enjoyed it, are you hopeful for the future of the left at this point? Are you more cynical? And I guess I did also want

to give you a chance to, again, plug your book and just express on behalf of me, at least, and I know many other people, yourself and Amber Frost and others, have written very articulately about what I think many of us have a sense in our head, which is that, you know, a lot of what we are told is like, you know, virtue is deployed in a very cynical way to obscure things. And it's hard for some of us to articulate this sometimes. So I do want to thank you and others. And I hope that you will return, you know, when the book is published to writing more full time. And also, you've criticized the irony left, but we're not part of that problem, right? To be determined, yeah.

So am I hopeful about the state of the left? Look, on the one hand, you have multiple candidates for the Democratic nomination who are not just supporting the Medicare for all scheme but who are genuinely appear to be genuinely afraid to be seen on the wrong side of that issue right you have I mean the the Democratic primary is a sort of litany of people trying to prove their leftist credentials. Andrew Cuomo, after a spirited challenge from Cynthia Nixon, has been, I keep expecting to see him wearing a Chase shirt, you know. Right, right. He's been working so hard to prove that he's the progressive champion.

And there really does seem to be a groundswell of movement in a leftward direction because frankly the system is broken and people know it. That being said, I would not call myself particularly optimistic I think because of people like Eva Moskovitz because it is so easy to deracinate terms from progressive politics and progressive values and use them in a way that's cynical and it serves the interests of capital people are getting very good at that you know one of the things that you get one of the things that you are paying for when you go to an expensive private college is you are paying for a vocabulary of virtue, right?

A vocabulary of social justice, which allows you to navigate in certain fields and occupations. Now, that's still pretty small. We should be careful not to exaggerate the degree to which sort of woke discourse has infiltrated. But certainly, if you want to be in academia, if you want to be in journalism, if you want to work at a think tank, if you want to be someone who is part of the people who write our culture. And you have to have that discourse. And when you have an elite delivery system, right? So you get trained in being woke, right? Through your privilege. And then you try to marry that to what is fundamentally a bottom-up movement, right?

The only direction that the left has is bottom-up, then I think that that's just an inherently unstable thing. And I could see a young, smiling face of neoliberalism become the next face of the Democratic Party and totally separate the economic policies that we want from their grounding in social justice. Also,

I just think global warming is going to destroy us. Yeah, I hate that the truth. I feel like everybody knows that. So, I don't know. It's just like, often with politics stuff, and I just, you know, and I feel like everybody knows that. And so I don't know. It's just like often with politics stuff, I just want to be like, global warming is going to crush us.

You know, that's my thoughts on the income tax credit. Yeah, global warming is going to crush us. I think there will be actually. My positive spin on global warming is that it's pretty bleak, but it's also going to inspire an almost certain nuclear war. And I think the nuclear winter

is really going to turn things around for us. Me too, yeah. But yeah, and I guess last thing for me is something I always think about that you wrote, and I'm paraphrasing this, but you talk about going to a tenant association meeting and seeing, I believe, a Latino veteran use the phrase, we have to man up, and then seeing a woman in $300 shoes lecture him for using that phrase.

I mean, that's just one of those things that I read, and then that sticks in my head. And it's like, you know, I worked at Whole Foods, I worked at Zabar's, and you do see that again and again, these, let's say, Eva Moskowitz types who like have, like you say, the education to know how to speak this language that we're told that using proper terminology is synonymous with virtue. And it is just something that worries me where... That sounds nothing like my CEO stating support for a teacher strike while at the same time pushing anti-collective bargaining policies

on certain employees. But it is something that just kind of worries me, where it's like, obviously, we should try to be careful and good in our language, but I do think that electorally, a lot of this stuff is poison. And if the conversation is about this instead of these material issues, then we're in trouble. And, I mean, you look at, like, like what Fox News talking about whatever AOC is saying about, you know, let's say Nancy Pelosi being a racist instead of whatever AOC is saying instead

about Medicare for all. It has a way of taking over the conversation because people want it to take over the conversation. You know, I'm as a a socialist i'm an internationalist necessarily right i believe in i wouldn't even say open borders i say no borders but um uh and for me just let them all in um but uh however if democrats don't get their message right on immigration we're going to have another trump administration. I mean, if Democrats are not exceedingly careful about how they express themselves and the message that they deliver on that topic, we will absolutely have Trump again in 2024. And I guess so your book, unless anyone else has any questions for Freddie while we've

kept him long enough. A while ago, I wrote that like, when you think I wrote that if you don't think of the world, when you think of the future, you're living in the past. And I think that anybody that thinks that we can somehow segregate one another to make a better tomorrow, it's just an idiotic ideal. It doesn't make any sense to me. So I wholeheartedly support the open everything concept. I mean, the thing is people would be less inclined to

leave their home nations if western powers hadn't fucked them up in the first place. Yeah, right. There's a great Barry Crimmins joke where he talks about America being terrible and he goes you know, why don't I move to another country? Because I don't want to be affected by

America's foreign policy. I mean, so like you look at Syrian refugees, right? Well, why are Syrian people fleeing Syria? Well, a lot of it has to do with the fact that Western governments installed the first Assad regime, you know?

So, Freddie, your new book will be out summer 2020. It's called Cult of the Smart. First of all, thank you again for being here. Sorry we went so long, your new book is, uh, would be out summer 2020. It's called cult of the smart. Um, first of all, thank you again for being here. I'm sorry we went so long, but it is absolutely fascinating to pick your brain on this stuff. So your book is called cult of the smart. Um, is there anything else that you want to advertise to people? No.

Yeah. Just, um, yeah, I wish the book was coming sooner, but, um, I'm hoping that review copies will be in people's hands early next year and that reviews start popping up pretty soon after that. I don't know if I'm going to be able to find anybody to blurb the book, but I do hope that it starts a conversation, as the people say. Have you met this guy, Richard Spencer? That's someone I would prefer not to chat about. But yeah, no, the cold,

the smart. And I think that you should pick it up if you're interested in knowing why everything is so fucked up. And I'm just curious when the book comes out, do you have any plans to return to the hellscape that is social media, social media? No, we have broken up quite permanently and I'm a much happier person.

I can tell. You're glowing. The rest of us are slouched and miserable. Freddie just has this aura coming off of him. I get asked to freelance fairly often. I get asked to pitch, and I consider it. But for now, I'm good. But if people want to find your work, you have a website?

Yeah, frederickdeboer.com, F-R-E-D-r-i-k-d-e-b-o-e-r.com and we'll put that in the description of our bio as well all right anything else all right thank you again so much thank you absolutely enlightening thanks all right thanks for listening bye