One woman's tough and tender approach to grassroots conservative principles in an era of unreasonable logic from those who claim progressive strategies but fail to heed how those same strategies have failed miserably throughout history.
"Be wise as serpents ... harmless as doves."
Be living In Only Two Genders Is Now A Hate Criime
The College Fix
UPDATED
‘You can have your opinion’ as long as it doesn’t ‘deny my existence’
It’s uncommon at Jesuit universities these days for someone to openly share a traditional Catholic viewpoint.
When it happened at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, the school was so spooked it called the Los Angeles Police Department.
Both the police and the university’s Bias Incident Response Team are investigating the stated belief that only two genders exist, male and female, as a hate crime.
A Loyola alumni office employee discussed her views on sexual orientation, which align with the Roman Catholic Church, with three students who were hanging up posters on the subject on April 14.
Cosette Carleo, one of the students involved, told The College Fix in a phone interview that the hate crime under investigation is “denying transgenderism.”
Carleo’s account agrees in part with an email by the husband of the employee with whom she tangled.
The employee told Carleo, who identifies as gender-neutral, that only two genders exist, male and female, according to the student. Carleo told The Fix that statement was the hate crime.
Carleo responded that “you can have your opinion” as long as it doesn’t “deny my existence.”
Promoting ‘PanSexual’ lifestyle
Outside reports of what happened differ. The Bias Incident Response Team said in a statement obtained by The Los Angeles Loyolan that the team, the campus Public Safety office and LAPD were “looking into the events of April 14 as reported by the three students.”
Carleo told The Loyolan that she and two other students noticed that Rainbow Week posters “had been removed and placed behind a garbage can.”
As they were reposting the signs, the employee “allegedly approached the students about LGBTQ+ issues and voiced her opinions on differing sexualities, expressing that anti-LGBTQ+ signs should be put up in place of the students’ sign.”
Carleo told The Loyolan the employee “told me that I was wrong and unnatural.” An opinion editor at The Loyolanalso referred to the employee’s traditional Catholic view as a “hate crime” because it “disrespect[ed] someone else’s existence.”
In an April 16 email forwarded to California Catholic Daily, the employee’s husband blasted The Loyolan for a “distortion of facts” around the incident, saying his wife told him about the entire incident the same day it happened. (Neither has been publicly identified.)
The students were hanging up signs promoting “PanSexual” orientation, the husband wrote. After the employee discussed her traditional Catholic views on love and sexuality, it was the students who “suggested that Campus ministry place a sign promoting the Catholic idea of relationships next to their signs next year.”
The husband wrote that an alum who overheard his wife’s conversation with the students can back her account.
After discussing the signs, “everyone shook hands and my wife invited them into the Alumni office anytime they wanted to talk more,” the husband wrote. “The girls express out loud how much they enjoyed the opportunity to ‘dialogue’ on these subjects with my wife.”
The husband said his wife was suspended before anyone “got her side of the story” and the alum who witnessed the incident has not been interviewed either.
When the employee approached her supervisor “to protest the accuracy” of the Loyolan article, the supervisor “refused to talk to her,” the husband wrote.
A Facebook user claiming to be the LMU alum who was with the employee, Anthony “AJ” Gonzales, wrote a long post about the altercation, clarifying that he was on the phone with the employee.
Gonzales said the employee was “in the process of seeking legal counsel” to defend herself and hold LMU accountable for how she was “unfairly treated and summarily dismissed” before she could give her side. He did not immediately respond to a Facebook message from The Fix Tuesday night.
The alliance’s press release said the verbal altercation happened between 9 a.m and noon, but Carleo said it happened between 12:30 and 1:15 p.m. Carleo said the students assumed the signs, which had been posted two days earlier, had been removed between 9 and noon.
Though the Bias Incident Response Team told The Loyolan there were two investigations – the sign removal and the employee’s conversation with the students – Carleo admitted they have no evidence that the employee removed the signs.
Carleo told The Fix that while voices were raised in the conversation, there was no actual yelling, and witnesses who considered intervening saw that “there was no danger.”
Anthony Garrison-Engbrecht, director of LMU’s LGBT Student Services, referred Fix inquiries to spokeswoman Celeste Durante. She told The Fix on April 19 that the investigation was ongoing.
The alumni office employee did not return requests for comment. An email to her drew an automatic “out of the office” reply.
Loyolan Assistant News Editor Kellie Chudzinksi, the author of the article, did not return multiple requests for an explanation of how she attempted to reach the employee.
CLARIFICATION: The university’s Bias Incident Response Team is the source of the statement that the Los Angeles Police Department is part of the investigation. The article has been amended to clarify this.
Double Standard: Muslim Bakeries Allowed to Refuse Service to Gays and Nobody Cares
Let’s just call a spade a spade and note how the liberal media favors Islam over Christianity.
If they didn’t, then they would be up in arms over a recent video where Muslims are seen refusing a gay man service.
Here’s the story.
Steven Crowder wanted to make a point.
He wanted to show that all of the hostility being direct towards Christians over the Freedom of Religion Restoration Act is being targeted against Christians and not Muslims.
To prove it he posed as a gay man and went into Muslim bakeries and asked them to make him a cake.
This is what happened.
What the liberal media can’t explain, or rather won’t explain, is they are doing this on purpose.
They are clearly favoring Muslims over Christians.
It’s easy to see why, it’s because they want Christians to be persecuted.
With a President who is very sympathetic to Islam in office there’s no way they could go on the attack against Muslim bakeries, he just wouldn’t have it.
And all of this points to the very slippery slope America finds itself on.
Top Twenty-Five Stories Proving Target’s Pro-Transgender Bathroom Policy Is Dangerous to Women and Children
As the boycott of Target stores over its pro-transgender bathroom policy grows, the question of just who such a policy puts in danger is a natural one to ask. As these policies proliferate across the country, the number of stories of predators threatening women and children in public restrooms is also growing by the day.
The Target department store chain drew the ire of millions of Americans after it announced it was opening its bathrooms to transgender shoppers and employees and allowing them to choose whatever bathroom they feel like using at any given time.
The current imbroglio should not be a surprise, as for years Target has been a big purveyor and supporter of gay-friendly policies and causes. So, this current bathroom policy issue is not the first time the chain waded into left-wing issues.
Furthermore, last year, Target was a corporate sponsor of the “Out & Equal” conference, a summit aimed at forcing corporations into adopting gay-friendly workplace policies.
The company was also praised by gay groups for its “It Gets Better” campaign meant to boost the status of homosexuality in the U.S.
The company also has a long list of political causes and candidates it has donated to over the years.
Still, in defense of such polices, liberals ask what harm could come to anyone if bathrooms are opened up to men dressed as women, or others who claim to be transgender? On the other hand, those who reject these policies ask why the nation should put women and children in danger by allowing predators to more easily enter and install video cameras in bathrooms and changing rooms or otherwise threaten and harass people using the restroom?
Target itself has had incidents of predators threatening children in its bathrooms. Only weeks ago such an incident occurred in a Cedar Park, Texas store.
But there are dozens of such stories over the last 16 months or so highlighting the problem with setting policies that would make access to public restrooms easier for predators.
First up are five incidents in which predatory men were discovered committing criminal actions in public restrooms. Some of these men were arrested while dressed as women; others claimed to be transgender women.
Seattle Parks and Recreation is facing a first-of-a-kind challenge to gender bathroom rules. A man undressed in a women’s locker room, citing a new state rule that allows people to choose a bathroom based on gender identity.
A man dressed as a woman was arrested in Virginia on Monday after police say he was caught peeping into restroom stalls three times in the past year.
Richard Rodriguez, 30, filmed a woman in a bathroom stall at the Potomac Mills Mall, Prince William County Police said on Tuesday. A 35-year-old woman was in the stall when she saw a bag moved toward her under the stall divider. Rodriguez apparently had been filming her, police said.
PALMDALE – A 33-year-old Palmdale man who allegedly dressed as a woman while secretly videotaping females using a department store bathroom was charged with several misdemeanor counts Tuesday, authorities said.
Jason Pomare was charged with six counts of unlawful use of a concealed camera for the purposes of sexual gratification, according to Sergeant Brian Hudson of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department’s Special Victims Bureau.
A biological man claiming to be ‘transgender’ so as to gain access to and prey on women at two Toronto shelters was jailed “indefinitely” last week after being declared by a judge a “dangerous offender.”
Pro-family leaders are pointing out that this is exactly the type of incident they warned of as the Ontario government passed its “gender identity” bill, dubbed the “bathroom bill,” in 2012.
The administration at the University of Toronto was recently enlightened on why two separate washrooms are generally established for men and women sharing co-ed residencies.
Here are nineteen more stories of predators using public bathrooms to criminally victimize women and children:
A 24-year-old man was arrested Tuesday after a hidden cell phone was found recording video inside a Chapman University bathroom, police said.
A female employee told campus public safety officials at 1 a.m. Tuesday she had seen a cell phone while inside a unisex single-person restroom in the Leatherby Libraries, said Lt. Fred Lopez of the Orange Police Department. The bathroom is located on the first floor Rotunda Commons.
SAN JOSE – A private elementary schoolteacher accused of secretly recording people in the bathroom of his home was charged Wednesday with three misdemeanors, according to the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office.
Authorities say the arrest Thursday of 31-year-old Andrew Donahue of Campbell was not related to his role as a teacher at Challenger School in San Jose. Donahue has been charged with three counts of taking photographs or filming someone who is in a bathroom or in a state of privacy, according to prosecutor Luis Ramos.
HAMILTON TOWNSHIP, N.J. – A teacher, a school bus driver, and a high school student were among 16 people facing child pornography charges in New Jersey, authorities announced Wednesday.
Thomas Guzzi Jr., 36, of Pitman… is also charged with third-degree invasion of privacy for allegedly hiding a tablet computer in a bathroom stall at the theater to record video of others using the toilet. A video found on his computer allegedly revealed him installing the camera.
COLFAX, Wash. – A man was arrested after deputies believe he had been secretly filming multiple women using the bathroom. Court documents indicate the recordings were taken both in his home, as well as one of the alleged victim’s homes. The recordings dated back several years, according to court records.
Michael A. Novak was arrested as deputies arrived with a search warrant for his home. His alleged victim’s said they knew and trusted him.
MIAMI – Beyond the outer walls of La Perla, inside the women’s bathroom, is where a customer said she found a recording device facing the direction of the restaurant’s toilet.
The woman was assisting her child in the bathroom off Southwest 152nd Street and Southwest 137th Avenue Saturday when, according to a Miami police report, she noticed a strange device tucked away under the sink.
PERRYSBURG, OH – Police have arrested a 14-year-old student in connection to an investigation involving two teens from Perrysburg Jr. High School.
The incident happened on March 18., after an alleged 14-year-old boy video-taped a 13-year-old student in the bathroom and forwarded the video to other students.
A Maryland volunteer teacher and choir leader charged with sexual abuse and child pornography directed children in sexually explicit videos filmed in a school bathroom, according to court documents released on Tuesday.
A security guard at a Long Island high school has been arrested, accused of taking video of a student going to the bathroom and posting it to Snapchat, police say.
Police said at a news conference Wednesday that the guard at Roosevelt High School followed the 16-year-old boy into the bathroom and videotaped him in the stall from outside.
WILTON MANORS, Fla. – A Wilton Manors man arrested on sexual battery and video voyeurism charges last year is facing additional charges after another victim came forward, authorities announced Friday.
(MARTINSVILLE) – A former manager of the Martinsville Chili’s has been charged with allegedly videotaping eight women changing clothes or using the bathroom in the local restaurant’s restroom. His fiancée found the videos on a home computer and called police.
40-year-old Justin Carl Behnke of Indianapolis has been charged with 15 felony counts of voyeurism.
CORALVILLE, Iowa – A Johnson County man is accused of secretly videotaping dozens of men using the restroom at a Coralville business.
A victim came forward to police Sunday morning saying he was using a stall at Scheels Sporting Goods at Coral Ridge Mall when he saw a man take a photo of him.
LYNDHURST – The former fire captain and youth football coach accused of videotaping teen girls as they used his bathroom pleaded guilty Thursday to fourth-degree invasion of privacy, according to northjersey.com.
SIKESTON, MO – A 19-year-old Sikeston man was arrested after allegedly videotaping at least three people in the YMCA men’s locker room.
Earl Madison, a four-year, part-time employee of the YMCA of Southeast Missouri, is facing three counts of invasion of privacy in the first degree, according to the Sikeston Department of Safety.
IOWA CITY, Iowa – UI Police Tuesday night said they had located the person of interest in connection with a man videotaping a woman while she was showering in a residence hall.
MARSHALL COUNTY, AL – David Barrow, the former Guntersville girls’ soccer coach who pleaded guilty to human trafficking charges in Madison County, appeared in a Marshall County courtroom on Monday to enter a plea on charges of producing porn with minors.
Barrow pleaded guilty to two counts of that offense around 10:30 a.m. He was sentenced to serve 30 years in prison.
A Pennsylvania man who was arrested for taking photos of a 10-year-old girl in a public restroom has now also been hit with child porn charges, police report.
Quarryville, PA, resident James Thomas Shoemaker, 19, was arrested last week when he was found hiding in a stall of the woman’s bathroom in the Sheetz store on Manheim Pike. Police said he was taking images of young girls on his cell phone.
A man has been arrested after allegedly placing a hidden camera in a Starbucks bathroom in Brea, and recording at least seven adults, police said Tuesday.
The arrest of Melcher Carrilloalvarado, a 44-year-old La Habra resident, was announced a day after police said a woman had found the camera in a unisex restroom at a Starbucks located at 101 West Imperial Hwy.
With all these stories, it is also apropos to ask just how many Americans these transgender polices would affect. By even the most generous estimations only .3 percent of the nation claims to be transgender. So, in the end, these extreme policies of bending over backwards for people who claim to be transgender are designed for less than half of one percent of Americans.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com
Georgia’s policy on undocumented students: ‘A practical loss and a moral failure’
Ashley Goodrich is a full-time high school social studies teacher and a doctoral student at the University of Georgia in the College of Education’s Department of Educational Theory and Practice.
In this essay, she says Georgia’s policy banning undocumented students from the top research campuses and requiring them to pay out-of-state tuition at other public colleges hurts the students and the state.
By Ashley Goodrich
It’s that time of year when the much anticipated college acceptance and dreaded rejection letters are arriving in the mail. For many high-achieving graduating seniors, their letters won’t be coming from schools in Georgia because they’re undocumented.
Aldo Mendoza, 20, grew up in Athens, but cannot attend the University of Georgia because of his immigration status.
Meet 20-year-old Aldo Mendoza. Although Aldo has lived in Athens, Georgia, for most of his life, graduated from one of its public schools, and holds a worker’s permit and driver’s license through Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, state policymakers refuse to treat him equally when it comes to attending the state’s public colleges and universities.
Aldo’s opportunities to pursue higher education in Georgia were severely limited in 2008 when the Georgia General Assembly passed Senate Bill 492 that denies in-state tuition and Georgia’s HOPE Scholarship to undocumented immigrants. Two years later, the University System of Georgia Board of Regents signed off on policy 4.1.6 which bans college-bound students from applying to Georgia’s top five public universities, including the University of Georgia. Recently Georgia’s Supreme Court denied students with DACA, like Aldo, the opportunity to sue the Board of Regents for in-state tuition..
By growing up in Athens, Aldo has been part of UGA programs that partner with Clarke County K-12 schools, like the Center for Latino Achievement and Success in Education’s SALSA program. “All my life I’ve been involved with UGA,” says Aldo.
After the onslaught of these discriminatory decisions, Aldo feels deceived. “I basically grew up around UGA and when the ban happened [as a high school junior], I felt like I was being stabbed in the back because all my life I grew up around it and now I’m unable to attend. Some of my peers, well my best friends, go to UGA.”
Now, Aldo attends the University of North Georgia. He takes two to three courses a semester. He would prefer to take a regular course load, but he can’t afford it, even with his part-time jobs. Because of SB 492, he does not qualify for in-state tuition. Therefore he would have to pay $19,748 (out-of-state tuition) for a full academic year instead of $6,206 (in-state tuition). That’s three times more than his high school classmates are paying.
Instead of giving up, Aldo has become a leader in the undocumented youth movement through Georgia Undocumented Youth Alliance and ULead Athens, an organization that provides college and career guidance to undocumented students. “Before then, I was kind of iffy about going to college because in the back of your mind, you’re undocumented. Your parents push you to go to college, but you don’t feel like you can.”
Many educators, students, parents and community members aren’t aware of these policies. And undocumented students, like Aldo, don’t realize the impact of these policies until they start applying to schools.
What can we do to support our undocumented students in their pursuit of a postsecondary education?
Schools need to provide college and career guidance specific to the needs of our undocumented student populations in their advisement and counseling programs. One place to start is the national organization Educators for Fair Consideration, which has a clearinghouse of online resources for educators.
Students can be allies in the undocumented student movement. High school students in Athens have done just that, by organizing DREAMfest to educate the community about these policies. UGA students, faculty, staff, and alumni signed a petition asking President Jere Morehead to lift the ban. In February, college students from UGA, Harvard, Smith, Bard, and other colleges worked in solidarity with Freedom University to stage integrated classroom sit-ins on UGA, Georgia Tech, and Georgia State campuses.
Parents, family, and friends of graduating seniors can give support to undocumented students in their pursuit of a postsecondary education by donating to the ULead scholarship fund.
What can we all do? Contact members of the Board of Regents and your representatives urging them to pass legislation that will overturn these anti-immigrant policies.
In response to Georgia’s anti-immigrant legislation, a group of University System of Georgia academics criticized policymakers for relegating “a whole group of young people to a permanent caste of lower status, unable to obtain an education and condemned to work for low wages in the shadows of the economy. Their undeveloped talents represent both a practical loss and a moral failure that the state of Georgia can ill afford.”
We should all follow the lead of this group of professors and condemn the continued segregation of our public colleges and universities.
I never expected to witness the slow suicide of a country, a civilization. I suppose nobody does.
Let me tell you, there’s nothing epic about it. We who have the privilege of travel often look down in satisfaction at the ruins of ancient Greece; the Parthenon lit up in blues and greens. The acropolis. The Colosseum in Rome. We walk through the dusty streets of Timbuktu and gaze in wonder at the old mud mosques as we reflect on when these places had energy and purpose. They are not sad musings, for those of us who are tourists. Time has polished over the disaster. Now all that is left are great old buildings that tell a story of when things were remarkable – not of how they quietly fell away. “There was no reason, not really,” we tell each other as we disembark our air-conditioned buses. “These things just happen. Nothing is forever; and nobody is at fault. It’s just the way of the world,” our plastic wine glass in hand. Time ebbs and flows, slowly wearing away the foundations of a civilization until it collapses in upon itself – at least that’s what we say to comfort ourselves. There’s nothing to do about it. These things can’t be stopped. They just are.
This is what people will say in a hundred years, a thousand years about Caracas, Venezuela. Or Maracay, or Valencia, or Maracaibo. Those great sweltering South American cities with their malls and super-highways and skyscrapers and colossal stadiums. When the archeologists of the future dredge the waters of the Caribbean and find the remains of sunken boats; putting them on display in futuristic museums to tell of the time when this place had hosted a civilization. Ruins of great malls filled with water and crocodiles – maybe the ancient anaconda will have retaken their valleys; maybe the giant rats that wander the plains will have made their abodes in the once-opulent homes of the oligarchs – covering the tiles and marble with their excrement. “There was nothing that could have been done,” the futuristic tourists will also say. “The country declined – and vanished – it’s the way things go.”
We tourists are wrong.
I know, because I have watched the suicide of a nation; and I know now how it happens. Venezuela is slowly, and very publically, dying; an act that has spanned more than fifteen years. To watch a country kill itself is not something that happens often. In ignorance, one presumes it would be fast and brutal and striking – like the Rwandan genocide or Vesuvius covering Pompeii. You expect to see bodies of mothers clutching protectively their young; carbonized by the force or preserved on the glossy side of pictures. But those aren’t the occasions that promote national suicide. After those events countries recover – people recover. They rebuild, they reconcile. They forgive.
No, national suicide is a much longer process – not product of any one moment. But instead one bad idea, upon another, upon another and another and another and another and the wheels that move the country began to grind slower and slower; rust covering their once shiny facades. Revolution – cold and angry. Hate, as a political strategy. Law, used to divide and conquer. Regulation used to punish. Elections used to cement dictatorship. Corruption bleeding out the lifeblood in drips, filling the buckets of a successive line of bureaucrats before they are destroyed, only to be replaced time and again. This is what is remarkable for me about Venezuela. In my defense – weak though it may be – I tried to fight the suicide the whole time; in one way or another. I suppose I still do, my writing as a last line of resistance. But like Dagny Taggert I found there was nothing to push against – it was all a gooey mess of resentment and excuses. “You shouldn’t do that.” I have said. And again, “That law will not work,” and “this election will bring no freedom,” while also, “what you plan will not bring prosperity – and the only equality you will find will be in the bread line.” And I was not alone; an army of people smarter than me pointed out publically in journals and discussion forums and on the televisions screens and community meetings and in political campaigns that the result would only be collective national suicide. Nobody was listening.
So I wandered off. I helped Uganda recover after a 25 year civil war – emptying out the camps and getting people back living again. I helped return democracy to Mali, and cemented a national peace process. I wrote three novels. I moved, and moved, and moved again. I loved my wife; we took vacations. We visited Marrakesh, and Cairo, and Zanzibar and Portugal and the Grand Canyon. We had surgeries. I had a son. We taught our son to sit up, to crawl, to walk and to run; to sing and scream and say words like “chlorophyll” and “photosynthesis”. To name the planets one by one, to write his name.
All the while the agonizingly slow suicide continued.
And always, in the early morning over coffee I open my computer to document, if only for myself, the next cut in Venezuela’s long, tragic suicide. I chat with my friends, who continue to try and explain to the mindless why their misery is a direct result of one bad idea built upon the last in a great edifice of stupidity. Good men and women who are stuck in a two-decade old debate from which there is no escape. I say silent prayers for the next in the long line of political prisoners. I look at photographs of places that I knew – beaches where I went and restaurants that I frequented; covered in garbage or boarded up and stinking. I watch the videos of the nightly sacking of supermarkets that are fortuitous enough to have had a supply of something.
Tonight there are no lights. Like the New York City of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”, the eyes of the country were plucked out to feed the starving beggars in abandoned occupied buildings which were once luxury apartments. They blame the weather – the government does – like the tribal shamans of old who made sacrifices to the gods in the hopes of an intervention. There is no food either; they tell the people to hold on, to raise chickens on the terraces of their once-glamorous apartments. There is no water – and they give lessons on state TV of how to wash with a cup of water. The money is worthless; people now pay with potatoes, if they can find them. Doctors operate using the light of their smart phones; when there is power enough to charge them. Without anesthesia, of course – or antibiotics, like the days before the advent of modern medicine. The phone service has been cut – soon the internet will go and an all-pervading darkness will fall over a feral land.
The marathon of destruction is almost finished; the lifeblood of the nation is almost gone. No, there is nothing heroic or epic here; ruins in the making are sad affairs – bereft of the comforting mantle of time which lends intrigue and inevitability. And watching it has, for me, been one of life’s great tragedies.
PEARSON’S QUEST TO COVER THE PLANET IN COMPANY-RUN SCHOOLS
For decades, the major landmark of Balut, Tondo, a densely populated slum squeezed against Manila’s North Harbor, was a monumental pile of often-smoldering trash nicknamed Smokey Mountain. “It used to be sort of pretty, actually,” says Nellie Cruz, a lifelong resident. She points to the spot, now bulldozed, across a reeking, garbage-strewn canal from where we stand with her 13-year-old son, Aki.
The scene is humble, yes, but Nellie, a single mother, isn’t destitute or desperate. She’s a modern, upwardly mobile megacity dweller, the kind you’re equally likely to meet in Shanghai or São Paulo, except with better English skills—the legacy of the Philippines’ history as a US colony and one key to its current economic growth.
Both Nellie and Aki carry iPhones, for example, though the devices were given to them by Nellie’s sister, a nurse, who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Cruzes’ immaculate, doll-size family compound has a caged rooster in the front yard, Christian inspirational wall decals, and a strong Wi-Fi signal. In contrast to the screen-time panic among US parents, Nellie is OK with her only child spending time in his attic bedroom, gaming and browsing science pages on Facebook, rather than out on the street exposed to the pounding sun, the omnipresent filth, and the drug gangs on the corner.
The same protective but ambitious impulses were at work when it came to choosing a school for Aki. He attended Catholic institutions when he was younger. Then Nellie lost her job in marketing. So for sixth grade, Aki went off to public school.
“There were 58 students in one classroom,” he tells me. “Only some of us, the Section 1s”—top performers—“got to sit in the classroom. The others studied in the corridor.” Nellie didn’t like her quiet, polite child having to mix it up with kids “from all walks of life,” as she puts it.
So for seventh grade they found a new option at the other end of the street from the public school, housed in a former umbrella factory. The sign outside reads “APEC Schools: Affordable World Class Education From Ayala and Pearson.”
APEC isn’t just new to Tondo or Manila. It’s a different kind of school altogether: one that’s part of a for-profit chain and relatively low-cost at $2 a day, what you might pay for a monthly smartphone bill here. The chain is a fast-growing joint venture between Ayala, one of the Philippines’ biggest conglomerates, and Pearson, the largest education company in the world.
In the US, Pearson is best known as a major crafter of the Common Core tests used in many states. It also markets learning software, powers online college programs, and runs computer-based exams like the GMAT and the GED. In fact, Nellie already knew the name Pearson from the tests and prep her sister took to get into nursing school.
But the company has its eye on much, much more. Investment firm GSV Advisors recently estimated the annual global outlay on education at $5.5 trillion and growing rapidly. Let that number sink in for a second—it’s a doozy. The figure is nearly on par with the global health care industry, but there is no Big Pharma yet in education. Most of that money circulates within government bureaucracies.
Pearson would like to become education’s first major conglomerate, serving as the largest private provider of standardized tests, software, materials, and now the schools themselves.
To this end, the company is testing academic, financial, and technological models for fully privatized education on the world’s poor. It’s pursuing this strategy through a venture called the Pearson Affordable Learning Fund. Pearson allocated the fund an initial $15 million in 2012 and another $50 million in January 2015. Students in developing countries vastly outnumber those in wealthy nations, constituting a larger market for the company than students in the West. Here in the US, Pearson pursues its privatization agenda through charter schools that are run for profit but funded by taxpayers. It’s hard to imagine the company won’t apply what it learns from its global experiments as it continues to expand its offerings stateside.
The low-cost schools in the Philippines are one of Pearson’s 11 equity investments in programs across Asia and Africa serving more than 360,000 students. Two of the most prominent, the Omega Schools in Ghana and Bridge International Academies based in Kenya, have hundreds of campuses charging as little as $6 a month. They locate in cheaply rented spaces, hire younger, less-experienced teachers, and train and pay them less than instructors at government-run schools. The company argues that by using a curriculum reflecting its expertise, plus digital technology—computers, tablets, software—it can deliver a more standardized, higher-quality education at a lower cost per student. All Pearson-backed schools agree to test students frequently and use software and analytics to track outcomes.
Not every Pearson-backed chain will succeed, but the company can use the outcomes to assess which models work best. Pearson will have a stake in the winners; the Affordable Learning Fund takes at least one seat on each board. The goal is to serve more than a million students by 2020.
Like any global scheme, the fund has a mastermind: Michael Barber, Pearson’s white-haired, indomitable yet excruciatingly polite chief education adviser. As a McKinsey consultant to the nation of Pakistan starting in 2010, Barber implemented an educational system that now sees nearly three out of four residents of the second-largest city, Lahore, attend low-cost private schools, many paid for by government vouchers. Now he’s taking his ideas global with Pearson.
The growth of privatized education is igniting a global debate. Last April, major teachers’ unions in the US, UK, and South Africa signed a letter to Pearson CEO John Fallon that read in part: “By supporting the expansion of low-fee private schooling and other competitive practices, Pearson is essentially ensuring that a large number of the world’s most vulnerable children have no hope of receiving free, quality education.” In July, the United Nations Human Rights Council adopted a resolution that called for monitoring all private education providers.
Pearson’s corporate reputation doesn’t help matters. In the US, just the mention of its name is enough to make some education activists apoplectic. In 2014 the company was implicated in an FBI investigation of unfair bidding practices for a $1.3 billion deal to provide curricula via iPads to the students of Los Angeles Unified School District. Meanwhile, in New Jersey, Pearson monitored the social media accounts of students taking its Common Core tests and had state officials call district superintendents to have students disciplined for talking about the exam. Barber himself points out to me that his face appears as “the seventh-scariest person in education reform” on an anti-Common Core website.
Yet in many parts of the world, low-cost private schools are a big step up from existing public schools, where buildings may be falling down, philanthropic grants are used to line local officials’ pockets, and teachers don’t bother to show up. The father of Nobel laureate and youth education advocate Malala Yousafzai himself started a chain of low-cost private schools in Pakistan.
Barber’s thesis is simple: If his company can offer a better option, millions of families like the Cruzes will vote with their feet. “Technology and globalization are going to change everything, including the status quo in education,” he says.
“People think Pearson is this big company going after these markets in a predatory way,” says Katelyn Donnelly, managing director of Pearson’s Affordable Learning Fund. “I’m always like, wow, I wish we were milking money.”James Day
It’s the last week of the first academic year at Aki’s new school in Tondo, and it feels pretty much like the last week of school anywhere. The students, four classes of seventh graders totaling 123 kids, are excited, dressed up for a play; their families are happy and proud.
Katelyn Donnelly, my companion in Manila, is the managing director of the Affordable Learning Fund. “We started here from the ground up,” she says of APEC, explaining that she and Barber have taken a more hands-on role in the Philippines than in any of the other school systems that Pearson has invested in. “We were struggling to find the next couple of schools to back. So we thought, OK, well, maybe we can build one from scratch.”
Their Filipino partner is Fred Ayala, who opened the first call center in the Philippines and eventually sold his business to the Ayala Corporation (no relation). Taken together, call-center and other white-collar work that can be done over phones or the Internet account for 1 million jobs in the island nation. Ayala thinks it should be twice that. “The limiting factor is the supply of skilled talent,” he says. “You have education systems producing kids that have good academic foundations but are not as employable as the employers would like.”
Ayala assembled a board of executives with international experience to create an education company that would mold middle and high school students into the perfect entry-level employees for foreign corporations. The execs had the on-the-ground knowledge and connections; Pearson brought the educational expertise and a $3 million investment.
The biggest obstacle to expanding here, Donnelly tells me, is the dearth of available facilities within safe walking distance for kids. So APEC decided to rent a few rooms here and there, close to students, in neighborhoods all over the city.
Because space is tight, the schools have no nurse’s office and no science lab. Some have no gym or play space. One amenity offered everywhere is closed-circuit cameras, a nod to parents’ paramount concern: physical safety.
Pearson models do vary by setting and the visions of individual entrepreneurs. All of them, though, save money on teachers and claim they still deliver a superior education—even though most research shows that teacher quality is the single most important factor in a student’s education. Donnelly and Barber draw parallels to US charter schools, which employ younger, less-experienced teachers without union protections, and to Teach for America, which places recent college grads into the country’s most challenging classrooms with just five weeks of training.
“You’re getting younger, not-formally-qualified teachers, so you’re paying them a lot less,” Donnelly says. “You’re providing a lot of the content and the training centrally and trying to figure out how you can make them successful. Each of our investments is doing that in slightly different ways.” In the Philippines, teachers are supervised by a more experienced “master teacher” who floats between schools. In its first year, the school in Tondo had smaller class sizes than the nearby public school, but it doesn’t plan for it to stay that way.
The curriculum, designed with much input from Pearson, hints at innovative, progressive ideas about education, like interest-driven learning and collaboration. Every classroom has computers and Internet access. There are also frequent standardized tests and a custom-built software system that uses analytics to manage applications, admissions, parent satisfaction, and student outcomes.
Most important, all instruction is in English; that’s the number one academic priority the parents I talk to mention. Students tutor each other in various subjects—Aki is a mentor in English and science but a mentee in math. Through the Life Labs curriculum, students work in groups to create public information campaigns on topics like safe smartphone use. They may not be dissecting frogs, but they know how to shake hands and put together a PowerPoint.
About a month after my visit to Tondo, I sit over tea and sandwiches with Michael Barber in a cozy chamber at his airy offices on London’s Strand. The white art deco building, overlooking the Thames, sports the largest clockface in the city, nicknamed Big Benzene for the building’s first tenant, Shell oil. Barber, 59, is in the midst of treatment for a rare form of skin cancer. Although he’s pale and thin, with a fresh scar behind his left ear from surgery, he makes a point of saying he has never felt better. He spent the previous day cycling some 50 miles in the English countryside.
Barber’s quest to transform education began when he was a young man, married with three daughters, teaching school in a newly independent Zimbabwe in the early 1980s. His initial idealism about the yearning of rural black Africans for education and the aspirations raised by self-rule faded to frustration with the slow pace of change. Later he became a key member of Tony Blair’s administration, where he focused on schools, health, and literally running the trains on time. Next came his stint at McKinsey, during which he started his work in Pakistan, and then he brought his mission to Pearson. He depicts working in the private sector as the ultimate expression of his pragmatism. “Are we going to get more children education by building more and more public schools?” he asks me. “In the developing world, that plan hasn’t worked.”
Pearson’s Affordable Learning Fund, on the other hand, is winning the “ground war” of creating higher-functioning school systems, he says. Now it’s time to tackle the “air war” of public opinion. “We want to be judged on our performance,” he says.
The most comprehensive global review of research on low-cost private schools was published in 2014 by the UK’s Department for International Development—and it’s worth noting that Barber advised the agency on education in Pakistan at that time.
The review found strong evidence of better learning outcomes—that is, test scores—at private schools than at public schools. That’s probably in part because the teaching is in fact better. Compared with teachers at government-run schools, which can be dogged by corruption, those at tuition-charging schools in developing countries are more likely to show up, to spend more time providing effective teaching, and to be paid regularly for it.
However, other analyses have pointed out that the students at fee-charging schools tend to come from families with a little more money, which generally correlates with higher test scores. There’s an X factor too, harder to quantify: It could be that for-profit schools attract more parents like Nellie, who place more of an emphasis on education and whose children would therefore do better in any setting. Critics of charter schools in the US make a parallel argument, accusing them of “creaming off” the most engaged families.
On the negative side, the 2014 review found “weak and inconclusive evidence” that low-cost private schools are truly affordable or accessible to the poor.
Research by groups that oppose for-profit schools goes further. The Privatization in Education Research Initiative reports that when schools aren’t free, poor students must work one day and go to school the next, and boys are educated in favor of girls. The official position of many groups, including the UN’s Committee on the Rights of the Child, is that charging a fee, no matter how low, excludes the most needy and magnifies social divisions—like those between Aki and his neighbors in Tondo, for example.
History suggests they are right. Starting in the 1980s, the World Bank, as a condition of lending, pushed about 90 poor countries to raise revenue by charging fees to attend public schools. When evidence showed the tuition was excluding millions of children, a global campaign to abolish the fees gained traction, and in the early 2000s the World Bank dropped the policy. David Archer of the international development group ActionAid, who cofounded that campaign, believes that the power of “free” is one good reason school enrollment has risen by 50 million worldwide in the past 15 years. “The clear evidence is that when you charge children, the poorest cannot afford to go,” he says.
Barber has an answer for that too: government-funded vouchers to make private schools free to the poor. “The question is, how do we get every child a good education? Not how we fix our public system,” he says. “Parents know that education for their children is the only route out of poverty, and they have often been frustrated with public schools. Those who oppose choice for parents are really only opposing choice for the poor—the wealthy always have choice.” Vouchers, he says, level the playing field.
Jishnu Das, a lead economist at the World Bank’s Development Research Group, has questioned the data behind Barber’s claims of great improvements in Pakistan’s schools. He doesn’t think much of the voucher idea either. He says it’s perfectly fine for private providers to compete in the free market, just as they do in the preschool market in the US. If Nellie can afford $2 a day for her only child to have a chance at a better future, that’s her prerogative.
But it’s a real mistake, Das says, for government to put a thumb on the scale by diverting large amounts of cash away from already struggling public schools toward private providers: “If the government can’t be trusted to run schools, it can’t be trusted to price vouchers.”
Some fear that Pearson’s privatized school chains, like APEC in the Philippines (above), abandon the world’s poorest and most vulnerable students.Courtesy of Pearson
Donnelly first met Barber at McKinsey. She worked closely with him in Pakistan and came with him to Pearson in part to advance the low-cost model. “People think Pearson is this big company going after these markets in a predatory way,” she says. “I’m always like, wow, I wish we were milking money.”
Starting schools in the developing world is far from a quick or easy buck—margins are thin, costs and red tape must be cut as much as possible. “It’s a struggle getting these companies breaking even and getting growth and trying to wade through a mire of regulations,” she says.
Still, in the Philippines at least, the odds favor Pearson’s bet on APEC schools. The government is in the midst of a huge expansion of its school system, making 11th and 12th grades compulsory by 2017. That’s 2.7 million more students in just two years. APEC’s competing low-cost model is off to a good start, with 24 branches and 3,300 students and plans to add 5,700 more next school year.
It’s hard to argue with the mission of local entrepreneurs like Fred Ayala who strive to offer a better educational option to their communities. In Tondo, Aki’s mobile phone and his impeccable English, both of which he’s currently using to learn about global warming and interstellar travel, really do look like catalysts for a better life for his family.
But a matchup between a $9 billion public company and the impoverished governments of developing countries looks lopsided, to say the least. If Pearson achieves its vision, only the most destitute would remain in public schools in the world’s largest and fastest-growing cities. Or those schools would close down altogether, as governments increasingly outsource education—a fundamental driver of development and democracy, a basic human right, and a tool of self-determination—to a Western corporation. Teaching would become a low-paid, transient occupation requiring little training. And Pearson would try to bring the lessons it learns in Africa and Asia to education markets in the US and the UK.
One morning in Manila, I had breakfast at a five-star hotel with James Centenera, who had worked closely with Donnelly and was key to launching the APEC schools. In his view, for-profit schools have quickly become an accepted part of the educational landscape here—just another option. “I’m glad people have stopped asking whether the schools are better.” Startled, I realized his remark spoke to a mantra of Barber’s: irreversibility.
In other words, create enough momentum around any change and you’re no longer arguing the merits of your idea. You’re simply treating it as a fact on the ground and rallying others to the cause.
What makes this a most effective path to change is also what makes it terrifying and infuriating to critics. Inserting itself into the provision of a basic human service, Pearson is subject to neither open democratic decisionmaking nor open-market competition. The only check on its progress will be the tests that Pearson itself creates.
Barber’s temperament doesn’t allow for a wisp of doubt. He downplays “nice little initiatives” and “little boutique projects.” To him, the only scale that matters is global—historic. His heroes are Churchill, both Roosevelts: leaders who slammed their fists down on the table of world events, rearranging all the figures on the game board at once. Ever polite, he is nonetheless unyielding. “I recognize that to get really good things to happen is a bit of a struggle.” So Pearson’s grand experiment on 360,000 kids continues—capturing just a little more of that $5.5 trillion with each passing day.
Anya Kamenetz (@anya1anya) is the author ofThe Test, a book about standardized testing in US schools.
