Hillary’s Hedge Fund Fundraiser Was Chelsea’s Boss

By Doug Martin at Hoosier School Heist

This morning, the Associated Press reports that Hillary Clinton is busy gobbling up donations from hedge fund managers, a group highly involved in school privatization (as I detail in my book Hoosier School Heist) and one she says she will target if elected America’s new president.

According to AP, one New York City hedge fund manager who has raised at least $100,000 to Hillary’s campaign is Marc Lasry, a new owner of the Milwaukee Bucks.

In a statement to Bloomberg News a while back, Lasry said “we have a moral responsibility” to Milwaukee.  

Morality, for Hillary’s hedge fund manager friend, means a taxpayer bailout.

Even though Lasry’s basketball team  is set to bring in $89 million annually, Wisconsin governor and presidential candidate Scott Walker is seeking a $220 million taxpayer bond deal for the Bucks’ new sports arena, about the same amount to be cut from Wisconsin universities soon.

Lasry is also a team player in supporting school privatization. 

In 2012, Lasry spoke at the Invest for Kids Conference in Chicago, an event which raised $180,000 for the LEARN Charter School Network. 

The Invest for Kids Conference was led by Goldman Sachs’ managing director Ron Levin.

Hillary’s son-in-law, a few years earlier, worked for Goldman Sachs, before starting his own hedge fund.

Funded by Oprah and Walmart’s Walton family, the LEARN Charter School Network is run by past venture capitalist Greg White.  The network is well-known to pro-public school activists in Chicago for preying on poor minority communities, a “dismal track record of low performance, lots of unlicensed teachers, and a record of exclusion of English language learners and students with special needs.”

But Hillary’s connections to Marc Lasry are family-deep.  Chelsea Clinton once was employed at Marc Lasry’s hedge fund, Avenue Capital Group, which currently manages around $12.5 billion.  

Lasry's Avenue Capital Group also manages Avenue Energy Opportunities Fund, in which the Texas Teacher Retirement System has just invested $150 million.  

As Chris Hedges writes in his book Wages of Rebellion, “The citizen has become irrelevant.” Since the American Federation of Teachers’ leadership has publically endorsed Hillary, teachers should know that they, too, have become irrelevant to the powers-that-be and nothing short of a real revolution is going to give any of us a chance.

Common Sense in Philadelphia

 

This sacrifice of common sense is the certain badge which distinguishes slavery from freedom; for when men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon.

              Thomas Paine

On Tuesday, May 19^th voters in Philadelphia sent a message to billionaire venture philanthropists who were trying to buy the office of mayor of Philadelphia to promote their privatization of public schools agenda. By the day of the primary election for mayor and other offices  they had invested $7 million in advertising for the candidate they thought would carry out their agenda, State Senator Anthony Williams.

Former Councilman Jim Kenney defeated Williams by a 2-to-1 margin winning a plurality in all wards in the city. Kenney ran on a progressive platform, including the ending ‘stop and frisk’ by police, raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, and establishing universal pre-Kindergarten. Even before he decided to run for mayor, Kenney was praised for championing the erecting of a statue in City Hall for forgotten civil rights pioneer Octavius Catto. Kenney has also been a supporter of immigrant rights.

At the beginning of the campaign, Anthony Williams was considered the frontrunner. As the campaign progressed, despite flooding the airwaves with campaign commercials beyond what any other candidate could do, Williams began to drop in the polls. Williams attempted to give the appearance of distancing himself from what had been his signature role in the Pennsylvania state legislature for ten years, the promotion of charters and vouchers. As it was clear his campaign was in trouble, Philadelphia Inquirer editorial page editor (the Inquirer endorsed Williams) Harold Jackson appealed to Williams to “run on his beliefs”. Williams duplicity only made voters question what he was hiding about his plans for public education.

In the days before the end of the campaign Williams appealed to ethnic solidarity to get votes in the African-American community. This too backfired as Kenney won a plurality of the votes in the 30 predominantly black wards. In the days before the primary, the fractured Democratic Party coalesced around Kenney with endorsements from Mayor Nutter, City Council President Darrell Clark, and some Black clergy switching from supporting Williams to Kenney. 

There was speculation in the press that School Reform Commission member Bill Green will run as an independent in the November election to promote his privatization of education agenda. Green had been outspoken in his support of Williams despite being a member of the School Reform Commission since his appointment by Governor Corbett. He contributed the legal limit of $2900 to his campaign. Green said the election of Kenney “was no coronation” as evidenced by the low voter turnout.

The voter turnout was the lowest in modern Philadelphia history with more registered voters abstaining than those voting. Only 30% of registered voters voted.

Also elected as a Democratic nominee to a City Council-at-Large seat was Helen Gym. Gym is a founder of Parents United for Public Education and has been one of the leaders of those campaigning for defense of Philadelphia’s public schools. On the day of the election, the head of Boys’ Latin charter sent out an email urging people not to vote for Helen Gym because “she hates us.”

A non-binding resolution was passed by voters calling for the abolition of the School Reform Commission, the administrators of the Philadelphia School District since the state takeover in 2001, and a return to local control of Philadelphia schools.

While the election is a victory for democracy over the attempt of wealthy hedge fund managers to buy an election, we can have no illusions that public education in Philadelphia is now safe. Far from it!

The Philadelphia public schools have been under relentless attack by corporate education reformers for many years. The starved schools have been taken off of life support. In the last few years, teachers have been forced to buy basic supplies just to teach their students even as their salaries, including step increases, are frozen.

Most libraries in public schools have been closed. Counselors have been cut so most schools have part time or no counselor. School nursing is now provided part time in most schools. This can now be seen as the beginning of the attempted dismantling of the Philadelphia public schools.

On April 10^th the SRC announced substitute teacher services would be bid out to private contractors.

On May 13^th, the SRC announced that they want to outsource public school nurses to private companies. Listen to this interview with school nurse Eileen Duffey talking about what this will mean for medical services in Philadelphia public schools.

On May 17th, the School District announced a contract had been reached with the union of the lowest paid employees in the District, noontime aides and cafeteria workers. While these low paid workers received a modest wage increase, it came at the cost of the District stopping payments into the union’s health and welfare fund and the lose of seniority protections for layoffs and rehires. Superintendent William Hite, a graduate of the Broad Superintendent's Academy, took the opportunity to lecture the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers to follow this example of “shared sacrifice” to make up for the underfunding of the public schools.

The SRC has announced their first “turnaround of a turnaround”, (a term invented so they didn't have to have community meetings) the turning over of a “failed” independent charter school to charter management company Mastery.

Can Kenney be counted on to fight this onslaught on public education? Jim Kenney is a centrist when it comes to privatization of public schools. In other words he has said different things at different times regarding the expansion of charters depending on the audience and his ratings in the polls.

Early in the campaign he was for expansion of charters as long as the state reimburses their cost. Late in the campaign he ended his commercials with “I support all public schools in Philadelphia”. The qualifier “all” indicates he thinks, despite their classification by the U. S. Census Bureau, that charter schools are public schools. This raises concerns of how much resistance he will make to ALEC legislators in Harrisburg who want to expand charters. The Pennsylvania School Boards Association has recently questioned why the Pennsylvania Coalition of Public Charter Schools is advising its members not to follow Pennsylvania Right-to-Know which traditional public schools must follow by law. 

In the past Kenney has supported vouchers.  One of Kenney’s early backers, Senator Dwight Evans, not only is a strong proponent of charters, but for more than ten years he has been a proponent of vouchers, which are presently in the form of Educational Improvement Tax Credits, a back-door voucher program. The EITC diverts business tax money for public schools to student scholarships for private and religious schools of the business’s choosing. The EITC and the Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit program pose a grave, and largely unrecognized, danger to public education. In addition, this legislation is a clear violation of separation of church and state.

Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York is promoting similar legislation. Jeb Bush, as Governor of Florida, pioneered this method of getting around the massive opposition to vouchers that existed a decade ago.

On Friday, May 15th, four days before the election, a rally for Helen Gym was held at the School District headquarters. It is apparent that there was not much interest in getting parents and teachers out to the rally since it was held at 10:30 a.m. Joining this photo op of politicians and labor leaders who had endorsed Helen Gym was American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten. Reporters were told she had flown in from Los Angeles, after international travel, just to be at the rally.

Weingarten gave her usual stump speech with much fist pumping and effusive praise for Helen Gym as the Superwoman we have been waiting for. As usual, it was much “sound and fury signifying nothing.” There is no way that one Councilwoman, no matter how gifted, can stop the privatization onslaught. While a seat in City Council will give Helen Gym a powerful platform to fight for public schools, it will be within a Democratic Party which places priority on the interests of real estate developers, corporate interests such as Comcast, the Chamber of Commerce , and the banking community, not the common good.

Philadelphia Federation of Teachers President Jerry Jordan has not proposed any trade union fight against the attacks. His response to both the privatization of substitute teaching and nursing is that the PFT would be "pursuing every option available to stop the privatization of our public schools." This is hisweak-kneed response to the balkanization of the Philadelphia School District despite his acknowledgement that privatization has been prepared by the Boston Consulting Group for several years. For details see “Who is killing Philly schools?” 5/2/12 and “Who’s Still Killing Philly Schools?” 5/22/2013 by Daniel Denvir in the Philadelphia City Paper.

For all her bluster, Weingarten does not want a mobilization of the Philadelphia labor movement as those seen in 1973 and again in 1981 when teacher strikes were ended after the threat of a general strike by the city labor movement.

Glaringly missing from her bombast was any mention of the Opt Out movement against standardized testing being led by parents across the country. Weingarten is a supporter of the Gates Foundation promotion of annual standardized testing and the Common Core.

Immediately after the rally, Ms. Weingarten rushed off to New York City where she joined Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach for America, officials from the Gates Foundation and other educational technology enthusiasts at the Oppi Learning Festival 2015. The program says “Oppi Festival is a unique learning event which allows all education key stakeholder groups from around the world to come together, share ideas and experiences, tackle challenges and form new partnerships.

Ms. Weingarten was part of the welcoming ceremony where she had a conversation about Global Kids. Missing from the speakers were American K-12 teachers or educators from the academic world of higher education who have decades of experience with American education. NYC teachers were invited to be in the audience to learn how they to could collaborate with corporate education.

Weingarten returned to Philadelphia Tuesday to campaign for Kenney and Gym and to join the victory celebration at Helen Gym’s campaign headquarters.

On May 9^th, Ms. Weingarten appeared on HuffPost Live. Using the standardized testing crisis as a smoke screen, she attempted to rescue the Common Core, heavily funded by the Gates Foundation, from parent and teacher opposition to it.

To bolster her credentials for promoting the Common Core, she made much of her teaching experience as the basis for supporting Common Core. This has been her practice of late: to deflect questions about why she continues to promote Common Core and take attention from her alliance with the Gates Foundation. At an appearance at a forum of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute on June 28, 2014, Ms. Weingarten went on for several minutes about her teaching experience.

Norm Scott of Ed Notes Online, who was in the NYC United Federation of Teachers when Weingarten became its President, said of her credentials recently: 

Randi has distorted the reality of her teaching experience, often by parsing the language to give an impression that she taught for 6 years when in fact she taught full time for only 6 months at Clara Barton HS in Brooklyn. The rest of the time she taught a few classes a day before going off to her other job at the union - a unique arrangement not exactly available to the average teacher. (My guess is that once Shanker came down with life-threatening cancer around 1989 or 90, he and Sandra Feldman, then UFT president, had to decide on succession and Randi, a fairly recent arrival at the UFT, was chosen over people who had worked for the UFT since its inception, leading to some resentment.) Since Randi was a lawyer - she was the UFT counsel - with no teaching credentials, they had to scramble to get her certified and find her a "teaching" part-time gig before she could claim the mantle of UFT president. They found her a "safe" school near her home. Clara Barton, across the street from Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, was a vocational school focused on nurse and health care worker training, a school that attracted a number of girls. Unity Caucus member Leo Casey was the chapter leader and would cover Randi's back when needed. Everyone in the school knew they were getting a "celebrity" staff member who would one day be the president of the union. By never having taught in real conditions like her constituents, Randi never had a sense of what it was really like.

As is the case many times in history, young people who have their whole lives in front of them and want a say in what kind of world they will live in, are unencumbered by past practices and political connections. On May 12th, hundreds of Philadelphia his school students did not report to school and Opted Out at the beginning of the Pennsylvania Keystone standardized tests. (Video of a student walkout.) Some administrators threatened the students with being denied the right to participate in the Prom or walk in their graduation.

A Philadelphia teacher was suspended for four days without pay for informing parents about Opting Out when asked.

Philadelphia high school student Giancarlos Rodriquez on The Rick Smith Show on why students opted out of the PA Keystone test.

A parent from Kensington High School talks on The Rick Smith Show about the suspension of her daughter for a week for Opting Out of PA Keystone Exams.

A Philadelphia teacher shares what it’s like to subject students to hours of standardized testing and what it is doing to his students.

On May 19^th, Election Day, the Caucus of Working Educators in the PFT held workshops at Central High School about various issues in education today. This video has excerpts from the Opt Out session which shows the testing crisis that is deepening in Pennsylvania.

The young people Opting Out are showing what must be done to stop the privatization onslaught. Only such acts of civil disobedience, combined with a mass mobilization against corporate education reform, can change the trajectory of events. Out of this mass mobilization a political movement must be developed which declares independence from the two-party system and develops a program for the needs of the 99%.

Also see:

Thousands of Newark students march against state control of schools
Bob Braun's Ledger - May 23, 2015

Mayor Ras Baraka, citing "chaos, graft, miseducation," demands people take back Newark schools
Bob Braun's Ledger - May 28, 2015

Who got the first meeting with Kenney after the win? S. Jersey political boss Norcross
Philadelphia Inquirer - May 22, 2015

PA: Another Charter Boosting Plan | Curmudgucation - May 21, 2015

How Big Money Lost in Philadelphia's Mayoral Race | The American Prospect - May 20, 2015 

Turning “Collaboration” Into a Bad Word | Defend Public Education

Divide and Conquer: The Philadelphia Story | Defend Public Education - May 4, 2015 

More on questions about Randi Weingarten’s teaching experience:

Public Lives; Hoping to Continue Education as Union Head | New York Times – January 20, 1998

How long did Weingarten teach? | Linking and thinking on education – July 14, 2011

Did AFT's Randi Weingarten last much more than “10 minutes in a classroom?” | Whitney Tilson’s School Reform Blog – July 21, 2011

An Open Exchange with AFT President Randi Weingarten | Mercedes Schneider @ The Chalk Face – November 4, 2013

Also see:
Kathy Hochul: Best Way to Support Public Schools Is By Taking Money From Them, Giving It To Private Schools and Charters | Perdido Street School - May 22, 2015
Randi Weingarten made robocalls for Governor Cuomo's running mate Hochul in the Democratic primary. 

Michael Mulgrew Wants His Common Core Back That He Never Had

Michael Mulgrew is fed up with those billionaires that have taken his Common Core away from him.  Or so it would seem.  

According to Mulgrew's frothing revisionist rant to speak in support Weingarten's continued embrace of the rotted Core, teachers had these standards, see, and these guys came and took 'em away, see, and screwed 'em up, see, and now it's time to take them back, see, and to make them good again. But we can't take em back, see, unless we vote to keep them as they are cuz if they weren't bad, we wouldn't have anything to fix.  And if you don't like it,  he'll punch you in the face and push you down.  Got that?

How did this nitwit-on-steroids ever rise to his position? 

Weingarten's Day of Inaction December 9

In October AFT launched its Principles that Unite Us (PUU), a piece of foamy rhetoric that offers the impression of resistance to corporate ed reform while providing a rubber stamp to CorpEd's status quo assault on public education.

PUU is full of fuzzy talk that offers plenty of corporate space to 1) continue the education genocide based on high stakes testing, 2) the implementation of the Corporate Common Core, 3) the continuing use of test scores to evaluate teachers, 4), the continuation of alt-cert schemes like TFA, 5) the continuing resegregation of schools, and 7) the continuing spread of corporate charter schools.

In its essence, PUU represents the semantic version of a staged Weingarten arrest to show her solidarity with the people as she prepares to go to lunch with the Business Roundtable.  Reading it you can be sure that nothing will intrude on the back room deals that have been cut with the Gates Foundation, and that Randi's lawyers are standing by so that she doesn't miss her flight to the next site of corporate domination, where she can be arrested once more as her sign of protest.

Last month the PUU groups announced that December 9 would be a Day of Action.  Looking through the list of activities, you will find this kind of Weingarten endorsed action:

MilwaukeeAs Milwaukee is home to the first voucher school program where taxpayer money is taken from community schools and given to unaccountable, for-profit schools, parents and educators are speaking out. Activists will gather for holiday caroling and a march for public education.

We are accustomed, of course, to CorpEd coopting sound ideas and concepts to justify and undergird their oppressive tactics, but to see union misleadership doing it in order to tamp down real non-violent resistance and civil disobedience adds a new wrinkle to the struggle.  But stay tuned--you never know where Randi will use her Get Out of Jail Card Free card stamped next.

Finally, it should be noted that Randi's Day of Inaction comes just one day before the Human Rights Day on December 10.  But then any coordination or association with such leftist notions as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights would not go down well at the Gates Foundation.

The New Republic Provides Wedding Details for Randi Weingarten and Bill Gates

To the 800,000 K12 teachers who are paying dues for AFT union support:

Your union dues are not going to protect you and your students from the corporate onslaught by efficiency zealots, privateers, and proto-fascist ideologues.  In fact, your president, Randi Weingarten, has joined forces with the oligarchs to begin the Accountability Testing 3.0 regime that has failed so miserably in the two previous releases.  

Below is a full page informercial in the March 25 issue of that neoliberal rag, The New Republic.  

(A reception will follow the ceremony).

Six Steps to Effective Teacher Development and EvaluationBY VICKI PHILLIPS AND RANDI WEINGARTENSponsored by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and American Federation of Teachers

Sponsored content by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and American Federation of Teachers.

Some see us as education’s odd couple—one, the president of a democratic teachers’ union; the other, a director at the world’s largest philanthropy. While we don’t agree on everything, we firmly believe that students have a right to effective instruction and that teachers want to do their very best. We believe that one of the most effective ways to strengthen both teaching and learning is to put in place evaluation systems that are not just a stamp of approval or disapproval but a means ofimprovement. We also agree that in too many places, teacher evaluation procedures are broken—unconstructive, superficial, or otherwise inadequate. And so, for the past four years, we have worked together to help states and districts implement effective teacher development and evaluation systems carefully designed to improve teacher practice and, ultimately, student learning.

While many factors outside school affect children’s achievement, research shows that teaching matters more than anything else schools can do. Effective teaching is a complex alchemy—requiring command of subject matter, knowledge of how different children learn, and the ability to maintain order and spark students’ interest. Evaluation procedures must address this complexity--they should not only assess individual teachers but also help them continuously improve.

Yet both of us have become increasingly concerned that states and districts are doing evaluation quickly instead of doing it right, which could have serious adverse effects.

RESPONS-IBILITY FOR IMPROVING TEACHING SHOULDN’T REST WITH TEACHERS ALONE.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) study in 2009 to identify effective teaching using multiple measures of performance. The foundation also invested in a set of partnership sites that are redesigning how they evaluate and support teaching talent.

And the AFT has developed a continuous improvement model for teacher development and evaluation that is being adapted in scores of districts to help recruit, prepare, support, and retain a strong teaching force.

From our research, and the experiences of our state and district partners, we’ve learned what works in implementing high-quality teacher development and evaluation systems:

1. MATCH HIGH EXPECTATIONS WITH HIGH LEVELS OF SUPPORT.

2. INCLUDE EVIDENCE OF TEACHING AND STUDENT LEARNING FROM MULTIPLE SOURCES

3. USE INFORMATION TO PROVIDE CONSTRUCTIVE FEEDBACK TO TEACHERS, AS BEFITS A PROFESSION, NOT TO SHAME THEM.

4. CREATE CONFIDENCE IN THE QUALITY OF TEACHER DEVELOPMENT AND EVALUATION SYSTEMS AND THE SCHOOL’S ABILITY TO IMPLEMENT THEM RELIABLY.

5. ALIGN TEACHER DEVELOPMENT AND EVALUATION TO THE COMMON CORE STATE STANDARDS.

6. ADJUST THE SYSTEM OVER TIME BASED ON NEW EVIDENCE, INNOVATIONS, AND FEEDBACK.

Weingarten Gets Arrested for the Cameras in Philadelphia While Remaining Janus-Faced on Charter Schools

Randi Weingarten is in Philadelphia, pretending to put herself in between the closing of 23 schools and the opening of a new batch of corporate welfare charter schools to replace them.  Below is her staged arrest.  Seems pretty calm there, Randi.

Now when you go on the AFT website and start to look at the charter-friendly historical revisionism that Randi's lawyer chums have put together there for teacher consumption, it is hard to see why Randi would be in Philadelphia getting her arrested to stop the spread of charter schools, which she obviously embraces.  From AFT's website:

In a landmark address in 1988, former AFT president Albert Shanker became one of the first education leaders to champion the concept of charter schools. Shanker envisioned teacher-led laboratories of reform that would experiment with new instructional practices. These practices would then be subjected to rigorous evaluation and, if successful, would serve as models for other public schools. 

Shanker also saw charter schools as a way to empower teachers, free them from overly bureaucratic regulations, and strengthen their voice in school and curriculum decision-making. In his view, unions were essential to charter schools, because unions help create the kind of secure work environment that encourages innovation and risk-taking.

This kind of half-truth could have been written by Joel Klein or Chris Cerf or Michelle Rhee--it's exactly the same strategy they use to pretend that Shanker was a lifelong supporter of charters.   That Weingarten would use the same strategy says everything about the kind of teacher mis-leader she is and has been since she sold her soul to devil named Bloomberg.

And so the AFT history above sounds like Shanker was a proponent of charters, yes? Jersey Jazzman has documented Shanker's change in position in 1993, when Shanker came to see that the reform schoolers had embraced charters as the alternate route to school corporatization.   

This happens to be written by Shanker's widow, Edith Shanker, in response to a Weingarten Klein re-writing of history in 2011:

A few months ago, in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), Joel Klein invoked Al Shanker’s name as an educator in support of today’s charter school “reform” efforts. Klein wanted the public to believe that Al was the originator of the charter school concept (he wasn’t) and that he would today be supportive of the charter school ”reform” ideology now being spread around New York City and the country as a panacea for low student achievement. Conveniently, Klein did not indicate that Al denounced the idea of charters when it became clear that the concept had changed and was being hijacked by corporate and business interests. In Al’s view, such hijacking would result in the privatization of public education and, ultimately, its destruction – all without improving student outcomes.

Will Randi clean up her charter-friendly website when she gets out of jail for protesting the mass charter conversion in Philadelphia?  Only her lawyers know for sure.  

The quicker that teachers boot her out and replace her with a child and teacher advocate, the sooner the destruction of the profession can be halted. Sweet photo below from 2009-2010 Annual Broad Report (l to r-Broad, Spellings, Klein, Weingarten). Click to enlarge.

Full discloure: I am a member of AFT.