Jim McIntyre: The Tip of Eli Broad's Corporate Education Spear in East Tennessee

(Photo by Sheena Patrick for MetroPulse shows McIntyre (far right) seated next to Gov. Bill Haslam. At left is former TFA cult leader and current TN Education Commissioner, Kevin Huffman)

In March 2008 Broad Academy alumnus, Jim McIntyre (Class of '06), was selected by a 5-4 vote as Superintendent of Schools for Knox County.  This followed backroom machinations by then-Mayor and Pilot Oil exec, Bill Haslam, who last year bought his way to the Governor's Office in Nashville and has since become Gates's and Broad's chief edu-stooge among Southern governors.

In fact, McIntyre was Haslam's choice for Superintendent in early 2008, as expressed here in a letter by Pilot Travel Center's COO, Mitch Steenrod, just days before four Knox County School Board members were flown to Boston for the last McIntyre interview and other "visits" prior to McIntyre's selection:

Subject: Superintendent Candidates
Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2008 18:45:43 -0400

Honorable Members of Knox County School Board,

Thank you for allowing the Chamber an opportunity to talk with each of the three finalists in the superintendent search. All three were very thoughtful and composed.In my opinion, James McIntyre would be my choice for the position. He had a clear vision of accountability and measurement. He also had a great handle on developmental curriculum and understands the teaching environment in an underserved area.Again, thank you for the opportunity and best of luck with the decision.

Mitch Steenrod
Pilot Travel Centers LLC 

Since his appointment as Superintendent, McIntyre has been a faithful water-carrier for the TN Business Roundtable agenda, as witnessed in his supporting of teacher bonus pay for test scores, downsizing instructional and non-instructional personnel,  outsourcing public jobs such as janitorial services to corporations, and marginalizing teachers and the Knox County Education Association.

McIntyre most recently declared that Knox County would not negotiate with KCEA until the State of TN makes clear the meaning of one to the scores of hostile-to-teachers bills passed this year by the BRT's state legislature.  McIntyre went even further by becoming the first county superintendent in Tennessee to deny leave time to the president of the local TEA affiliate:

Tennessee Education Association President Gera Summerford says so far, Knox County is the first system she’s aware of that’s making changes under the new law.

 “There’s nothing in the law that would prohibit a board of education from continuing with such an agreement,” she says, citing Shelby County, where the education association grants release time for its president despite never participating in collective bargaining. “In fact, it was rather surprising in Knoxville that the K.C.E.A. was notified [the last week of July],” she adds, “when in fact their communication to the school system was back in May, when they knew that there would be a new president and what their terms were.”

McIntyre has also been at the forefront of making state TCAP test scores a significant part of student grades. As a result of his recommendation, the Knox County School Board passed a plan last January to make TCAP scores count 15 percent of student school grades.  So if economically disadvantaged and special needs children were not being treated unfairly enough already, now they have an additional disincentive for going to school. That borderline passing grade on the Biology 6-weeks card?  It just became an F.

And leafy suburbs children are not exempt from this cutting edge stupidity.  For parents of students whose children in the past just made the cut for Honors and AP classes are in the same boat, with names being removed from these classes without any notification to parents. 

"Democrats Are the New Republicans"

As Arne Duncan and Newt Gingrich rev up the bus for the summer "Race Over the Cliff" tour, Bill Maher has struck again, reminding us all that the Republican strategy of moving Rightward into LooneyLand with David Duke and Michael Savage has worked to their advantage: it has made them entirely unnecessary, for the Democrats have openly taken up the agenda of Big Business without all the liberal pretense that is no longer needed to distinguish them from the opposition's remaining nutocracy. Ted Kennedy and George Miller can openly advance the US Chamber of Commerce agenda for corporations running American education without batting an eye, and the Republicans can go on a long, long holiday--that or join the "post-partisan" bus tour to promote the eminent Final Battle against American public education.

The next President will not be from the remaining One-Party system.

Philanthrocapitalists Speak, Duncan Listens

     Secretary of Education Arne Duncan recently announced his hope to see 5,000 schools turned around during the next five years.  Increases in federal spending directly tied to school restructuring (firing entire staff; closing the school; turning the school over to charter operators; or new curriculum materials) will drive this intended reform.  Duncan's plan for school turnarounds should not be a surprise given his tenure in Chicago, the current DOE's connections to various philanthrocapitalists, and the political climate in Washington.  

     Take, for example, this recent document put out by the Coalition for Student Achievement, a group funded by (among others): Business Roundtable, Center for American Progress, Democrats for Education Reform, NewSchools Venture Fund, Stupski Foundation, Gates Foundation, Business Coalition for Education Excellence, Commission on No Child Left Behind, Broad Foundation, Fordham Institute, and Center on Reinventing Public Education.   The reform agenda pushed in "Smart Options: Investing the Recovery Funds in Student Success," was constructed during an early 2009 meeting in Washington, D.C (p. 2). Many notable education entrepreneurs, philanthropic foundations, think tanks representatives, and a number of the most noteworthy education reformers attended the meeting: TFA representatives, NewSchools Venture Fund CEO and California State Board of Education President Ted Mitchell, NewSchools Venture Fund partner Jonathan Schorr, Green Dot CEO Steve Barr, and New Teacher Project CEO Timothy Daly; four Gates Foundation representatives, two Broad representatives (although Andrew J. Rotherham is not listed as representing the Broad Foundation even though he serves on their board); Thomas B. Fordham's Chester Finn, and Education Sector's Chad Alderman and Rotherham; Michelle Rhee, NYC Chancellor Joel Klein and the NYC COO, and the Louisiana Superintendent Paul Pastorek.  And don't forget to throw in two McKinsey & Co. representatives for a touch of global management flavor.  Their cumulative thoughts were summarized in "Smart Options" and proposed as a blueprint for education reform.  

     The document notes that "nearly 5,000 schools (or about 5 percent of all U.S. public schools) are now in at least Program Improvement 5 status" (p. 26)  But districts and states have avoided firing the entire staff of a school, closing the school, or turning the school over to charter management organizations.  Speaking about national education, KIPP, Green Dot, Uncommon Schools, Yes Prep, and Aspire are specifically mentioned as "high-performing schools serving high-poverty students" before the document calls for governors and state officials to "Aggressively close poor-performing schools and replace them with new high-performing schools." [their bold](p. 27)  Many other ideas - from teacher reform to national standards to data-driven instruction - are shared with Duncan's like-minded reformers.  These may not be Duncan's words - but this outline could easily be confused with an official outline of the DOE's plans for education reform and the unprecedented $100 billion.

     There is not an ounce of evidence to suggest these kind of reform efforts will work.  But the Philanthropy Roundtable operates with its own set of rules - just check the guiding principles of the Philanthropy Roundtable, listed on page 139 of this recent document.  The reform efforts are guaranteed to do one thing and one thing only: apply market mechanisms to public education. Markets are a great way to do some things - but not a way to provide equitable, high-quality public services to everyone.

EEP: Front Group for Business Roundtable

The New York Times had the story about the recent neo-lib and neo-con party in New York to put together a strategy so that profiteers of all political stripes can cash in on part of the Dunc's $5 billion that is up for grabs in the Race to the Cash contest sponsored by ED. The front group is called the Education Equality Project, and if the odd political bedfellows such as Newt Gingrich, Al Sharpton, Joel Klein, and Randi Weingarten have their way, the poor in this country will be equally subjected to a universal change-the-child punitive pedagogy that puts the full weight of altering our racist and classist society on the shoulders of children, teachers, and parents. Meanwhile, the casino capitalists and their apologists accumulate tax money to fund the corporatization of American public schools. Here is a clip from the Times:

. . . .Now Mr. Klein and Mr. Sharpton “have rounded up Education Secretary Arne Duncan, several big-city mayors and former Clinton nemesis Newt Gingrich to appear with them at a convention this week,” Ms. McAdoo said, “where they will surely move to create a national presence for themselves as the defenders of children against, oh, say, the teachers’ unions.”

Back to strange bedfellows: Ms. McAdoo’s criticism notwithstanding, the teachers’ union president, Randi Weingarten, was on stage with Mr. Duncan, Mr. Sharpton and Mr. Klein at Thursday’s conference, which the union had helped to sponsor.

“Nobody is supporting us more financially than Randi Weingarten,” Mr. Sharpton said.

Ms. Weingarten said that the union had given about $10,000 a year for the last eight years to the National Action Network, Mr. Sharpton’s civil rights group — not to the Education Equality Project.

It is heartening to see others writing about the takeover of education by the oligarchs. Clay Burrell has this:

It hasn't been a good week for NYC Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and the Education Equality Project (EEP) he co-founded (under suspicious circumstances) with Al Sharpton. (The EEP is the "test the students, silence the parents, close the schools, blame the teachers, ignore the socio-economic factors" wing of education reform.)

Not quite the party they'd planned? They held a conference this week - their biggest ever platform for the EEP, according to the pre-conference fanfare - that didn't seem to go over very well. Arne Duncan was met with boos when he announced his support of Mayor Bloomberg's control of NYC public schools. Al Sharpton himself backed away from supporting Klein's boss. A Q&A session featured critiques of Klein's claims of improvement and calls for his dismissal. See New York City Public School Parents for a good summary and web roundup about the event.

The EEP website doesn't pass the test for accuracy and rigor: Aaron Pallas at Gotham Schools saved me the labor of fact-checking the Education Equality Project's website, and here's the score: out of its 8 featured facts about the achievement gap, Pallas finds four are false, two are "toss-ups," and two are true. By my count, the Klein-Sharpton site would score 25% if this were a test. (Since two are toss-ups, I might make excuses for them and inflate the grade to a 40. But that goes against the "no excuses" mantra.)

Shades of AIG in NYC schools fiscal management: Klein's status as poster-boy of Eli Broad's "business administration" solution to urban school district administration may have taken a hit if the report by City Comptroller Bill Thompson on $700 million in contracting overruns for a two-year period is even partly accurate. (Thompson is running for mayor against Bloomberg.) Fred Klonsky highlights some whoppers:

• Contracts for goods and services that have exceeded their cost estimates by nearly $700 million over the past two years.

• A single $1 million contract with Xerox to lease copiers that ended up costing the DOE nearly $68 million.

• A contract for cafeteria equipment that ballooned from roughly $15,000 to $850,000.

• A software deal that went from $135,000 to $5.5 million.

And Sharon Higgins has this most recent addition at Education Notes Online to the growing literature on the misanthropic oligarchs, or as she calls it, vulture philanthropy:

From Sharon Higgins

Here’s a scholarly and informative article to share with you: "The Politics of Venture Philanthropy in Charter School Policy and Advocacy," by Janelle Scott (Associate Professor at UC Berkeley, formerly NYU) and published by SAGE. It will take a while to read (32 pages), but I believe it will be worth your time.

Scott explains the billionaires' strategy to push charter schools onto communities and how they are maneuvering their immense foundation-giving to achieve this result. She also describes the not-always-well-intentioned, and/or misguided, history of foundation "giving" which has targeted communities of color in the past.

The foundation-giving programs of today require an important trade-off from the local communities: namely, the relinquishment of interest and power over their own public schools to the public education notions of a few immensely wealthy oligarchs. What does it tell us that the communities where this is occurring necessitated first being placed under authoritarian rule?

Scott’s article explains how the "gifts" of these foundations are going to a broad range of charter advocacy groups, pro-charter research organizations, alternative teacher and principal training programs, charter school development organizations, etc. EdVoice, Center for Education Reform, TFA, NewSchools Venture Fund, NewLeaders for New Schools, KIPP, Green Dot, Democrats for Education Reform, and the EEP are just the teeny tiny tip of the you're-going-to-have-charter-schools-if-you-want-them-or-not iceberg.

Scott describes the flow of money to these organizations with the intent to have them work as a network in unison to further the billionaires' goal. Very few of the donations go directly to individual schools and their students, but just enough to make them look a lot better than their traditional school neighbors. The majority of the dollars go toward advocacy, propaganda, and the building of a national pro-charter school structure.

I've recently learned how Broad has bought off large, important portions of PBS, and how Ms. Gates is on the board of the Washington Post. The extent to which the media has been co-opted by this force would be a good topic for someone to track. We know how heavily they have influenced the White House.

I was especially interested to learn that one of the official techniques used to push charter schools, and described in a 2004 Philanthropy Roundtable donors guide, is "...the sponsorship of efforts that put parents of color out front instead of 'rich, white Republicans.' " The technique is exactly described here and here.

This general strategy may also explain why a deeply-in-debt-to-the-IRS Al Sharpton was persuaded to join the pro-charter force.

Another small item that may be of interest to some of you is that the Broad Foundation paid the Century Foundation $100,000 (in 2004) and $29,973 (in 2007) to "support research on the late union leader Albert Shanker." You may view The Broad Foundation 990's here.

Perhaps this is the "why" it has come about that pro-charter forces mention Albert Shanker so frequently for being responsible for the idea of charter schools. They use this statement to both justify the existence of charter schools, and to attempt to disarm the teachers' union complaints about them.

The details of these maneuvers are extensive, and won’t be easily grasped by the American public, not to mention the lesser educated parents in the communities now being targeted. The word about what is really going on desperately needs to get out more broadly.

Download the article here. But you have to register first. I have the pdf. Email me if you want a copy.

Related:

Susan Ohanian reports on Broad takeover of Phi Delta Kappan

Note: These are the people Weingarten and the UFT/AFT want to partner with.

The Age of the Education Oligarchs: Nip It in the Bud

Last updated: 12:55 pm

(U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and the misanthropist Eli Broad at an inauguration party courtesy of Broad (and the taxpayers). (Via Flickr))

The many millions that the neo-liberal oligarchs have pumped into the Democratic Party Machine have paid off handsomely in every area of government, especially education. Darling-Hammond, the only Obama advisor who had any understanding of education issues and educational solutions (as distinct from business solutions), was banished early on in favor of the Harvard business guys, economists, lawyers, recycled sychophants from the Clinton years, testing industry leeches, and most importantly, the new superclass of education entrepreneurial parasites and tax evaders, who have their non-profits and foundations in place to launder their hoarded, dirty money so that American taxpayers will end up funding the planned takeover of public schools for corporate interests.

Education by and for the oligarchs is intended to be achieved while making the education-industrial complex deliriously wealthy for putting in place a system that drains any remaining creativity from the schools and for instituting an oppressive, omnipresent surveillance system so that students and teachers are monitored K-20. The most galling part of all this is that the inherent evil of this neo-fascism is shrouded for its perpetrators and press offices by a rosy, inpenetrable fog of arrogance, hubris, and an overweaning air of unacknowledged privilege and superiority. What tiny bit of liberal guilt or glimmer of awareness that does register to this new superclass of super A-holes is quickly glossed over, then, by a bullying rhetoric that has been only slightly tweaked since the recent reign of the Decider.

Remember when Bush attacked anyone who might resist the inherently classist and racist testing plans as engaging in the bigotry of low expectations? Well, that sentiment survives and takes on new life in the Age of the Education Oligarchs, as recently evidenced in the speech by the new President of the ASCD corporation, who promises to maintain the advertising campaign to have educators drink another cup of Kool-Aid:

. . . .We can foster a world in which learning transcends geographic and cultural barriers.

A world in which poverty caused by economic conditions and poverty of racial inequities, and the most sinister of all, the poverty of low expectations - all can be overcome by learning. . . .

And so it goes--if your homeless students aren't learning like Seth and Caitlin or the Obama girls, well, there is something you need to fix about your expectations, Mr. Teacher Man.

Meanwhile, the same strategy of lying about the public schools continues, too, under the new regime. FactCheck.org is now in the game:

Summary
Last year, the president touted U.S. gains in education, saying that our "fourth- and eighth-graders achieved the highest math scores on record." He bragged that "African-American and Hispanic students posted all-time highs." Last week, the president said those eighth-graders weren't so great at math after all. He claimed they had "fallen to ninth place" in the world, and he bemoaned a high school dropout rate that had "tripled" over three decades.

What a difference a year makes.

Last year President Bush was talking up improvements that had occurred since his No Child Left Behind Act was implemented. This year President Obama is making a case for spending more on teachers' salaries, early education and more as part of his new agenda. We certainly wouldn't argue that education can't be improved, but some of the figures Obama used painted a bleaker picture than actually exists:

The high school dropout rate hasn't "tripled in the past 30 years," as Obama claimed. According to the Department of Education, it has actually declined by a third.

Eighth-grade math scores haven't "fallen" to ninth place compared with other countries. U.S. scores have climbed to that ranking from as low as 28th place in 1995.

Obama also set a goal "of having the highest proportion of college graduates in the world" by 2020. But in terms of bachelor's degrees, we're nearly there. The U.S. is already second only to Norway in the percentage of adults age 25 to 64 with a four-year degree, and trails by just 1 percentage point. . . .

It is unfortunate for Broad, Gates, Dell, the Waltons, and Fisher, etc. that their ascendancy would come at a time when the bankruptcy of their Greed Model has come into sharp relief against a world of struggling workers and unemployed people living in tents. And yet the U. S. Department of Education still doesn't get it, for it reflects more every day a single viewpoint that has been entrusted to the rapacious raptors of unrestrained greed who continue to feed on American taxpayers, while ensconsing themselves in the highest seats of political power.

But exposure, alone, will do nothing to stop the imminent takeover. This will take something equivalent to everyone in America stopping payment on everything. The politicians had best pay attention--denial of any authority, i. e., anarchy, is not so far-fetched, and the anger that was building during the 8 years of Bush is ready to explode on an already-out-of-touch Adminstration that believes it can play the same tune, only faster. A clip form Matt Taibbi's piece in Rolling Stone that is a must read:

. . . .People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they're not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.

The crisis was the coup de grâce: Given virtually free rein over the economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited emergency powers to clean up their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve — "our partners in the government," as Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most recent bailout.

The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron — a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers. . . .

Another Report on Effects of Poverty You Will Never See Reported in Corporate Media

As Arne and the Disruptors prepare to unload their billion-dollar bribes to cash-starved states that are willing to buy the Business Roundtable's antiquarian reform agenda of national high stakes tests, teacher pay based on test scores, and the deprofessionalization of teaching, another piece of research from David Berliner adds to the mountain of data that points to the reason for low achievement that the Business Roundtable and Achieve, Inc. continue to ignore: POVERTY. But, then, without poverty, how could the BR and Achieve, Inc. continue to demonize the schools and to offer their own solutions that serve no one besides their own corporate interests. Poverty, in fact, keeps the Business Roundtable in the business of educational control initiatives operated by the education industry.

From EPRU at Arizona State:

New policy report explains how poverty's effects are the real culprit

Contact: David Berliner -- (480) 861-0484; berliner@asu.edu
Kevin Welner -- (303) 492-8370; kevin.welner@gmail.com

TEMPE, Ariz. and BOULDER, Colo., March 9, 2009 - A new report issues a fundamental challenge to established education policies that were promoted by the Bush administration and are likely to be continued by the Obama administration. These policies are based on a belief that public schools should shoulder the blame for the "achievement gap" between poor and minority students and the rest of the student population. But the new policy report argues that out-of-school factors are the real culprit--and that if those factors are not addressed, it will be impossible for schools to meet the demands made of them.

"Schools are told to fix problems that largely lie outside their zone of influence," says David Berliner, Regents Professor of Education at Arizona State University, and author of the report, Poverty and Potential: Out-of-School Factors and School Success. The report is jointly published by the Education Policy Research Unit (EPRU) of ASU and the Education and the Public Interest Center (EPIC) at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Berliner's report comes as debate continues over the renewal of the No Child Left Behind Act, which imposed stiff accountability measures on schools in return for federal aid. NCLB requires public schools to demonstrate "adequate yearly progress" toward the eventual elimination of gaps in achievement among all demographic groups of students and imposes a variety of sanctions if they fall short.

"This report provides exactly the type of information that should guide policy," says EPIC director Kevin Welner of CU-Boulder. "It clearly and concisely explains why poverty must be directly addressed by anyone who hopes to close the achievement gap. Just as importantly, it explains why just tinkering with NCLB is a fool's errand."

Last week, Education Secretary Duncan told the Washington Post that those who would use the social ills of poor children as an excuse for not educating them "are part of the problem." Welner agrees. "But," he says, "those who point to schools as an excuse for failure to address social ills are equally at fault."

Berliner explains that NCLB "focuses almost exclusively on school outputs, particularly reading and mathematics achievement test scores." He says, "The law was purposely designed to pay little attention to school inputs in order to ensure that teachers and school administrators had 'no excuses' when it came to better educating impoverished youth."

Yet, as explained in the new report, that position is not merely unrealistic, but certain to fail. Berliner says that NCLB's accountability system is "fatally flawed" because it makes schools accountable for achievement without regard for out-of-school factors.

Berliner reviews a half-dozen out-of-school factors that have been clearly linked to lower achievement among poor and minority-group students: birth weight and non-genetic parental influences; medical care; food insecurity; environmental pollution; family breakdown and stress; and neighborhood norms and conditions. Additionally, he notes a seventh factor: extended learning opportunities in the form of summer programs, after-school programs, and pre-school programs. Access to these resources by poor and minority students could help mitigate the effects of the other six factors.

Because of the extraordinary influence of the six factors that Berliner identifies, "increased spending on schools, as beneficial as that might be, will probably come up short in closing the gaps." Instead, he calls for an approach to school improvement that would demand "a reasonable level of societal accountability for children's physical and mental health and safety."

"At that point," he concludes, "maybe we can sensibly and productively demand that schools be accountable for comparable levels of academic achievement for all America's children."

Find David Berliner's report, Poverty and Potential: Out-of-School Factors and School Success, on the web at:
http://epicpolicy.org/publication/poverty-and-potential

TFA and KIPP: Ivy League Temps and Corporate Missionaries, Part 1

Posted last week at Change.org:

TFA and KIPP: Ivy League Temps and Corporate Missionaries Part I

In just a few years, TFA has established itself as one of the smart-people-who-just-graduated-with-liberal-arts-degrees-and-now-have-no-idea-what-they-want-to-do-with-their-lives-but-are-pretty-sure-it-isn’t-remain-in-the-spin-cycle-of-academia-or-move-on-to-the-next-preset-hierarchy-in-the-finance-world demographic. Used to be those poor souls could only go to law school or move to New York and “go into, like, publishing or something.” But TFA positioned itself in such a way that it gets the lost souls who have an impulse to do something to help the world immediately upon graduating.

It’s like the Peace Corps. But, you know, creepier.
-–David Chernicoff, Yale Daily News, 10-27-06

In 1990 Teach for America, the wildly profitable non-profit that skeptics often refer to as Teach For Awhile, received an initial grant from Exxon Mobil and, thus, began an organization whose avowed mission remains to place as many Ivy League would-be teacher recruits in poor public schools as possible. This year TFA has an operating budget in excess of $100 million, net assets of over $120 million, and a work force of over 6,000 bright, energetic, and, yes, clueless recruits engaged in on-the-job training in some of America’s most desperately-poor, low-achieving schools, where children, by the way, need most of all (beyond the need to end their poverty) the most highly qualified, experienced teachers with deep knowledge of the subjects they teach and knowledge of how to teach those subjects.

Despite what the grim reality calls out for, TFA, in contrast, places teacher trainees with zero years teaching experience and without qualifications from any accredited training program in schools with the least resources and the greatest need. Beyond a five-week pre-service basic training course and four visits during the first year, TFA leaves their primarily white, middle-class recruits (1 in 10 is African-American) to their own devices in providing poor, minority students with what these recruits quickly find out they do not have. And with the TFA public relations machine that is able to instigate media wars and think tank assaults against legitimate research that shows the advantages of certificated teachers when compared to TFA and other uncertified recruits, there is little to stand in the way of the new definition of teaching as, not a calling or even a profession, but as a job that the service oriented do for a few years before moving on. Sort of like the TFA model.

But nothing about this grandiose do-gooderism exercised at the expense of poor children in poor schools seems to matter to the growing network of individual, foundation, and corporate donors eager to write checks in support of this growing mission. TFA now includes groupings of contributors for the 5 and 10 million dollar categories. The Dells, the Fishers, and Eli Broad are listed among several others in the $10 million “Expansion Fund” list.

Nor does there seem to be any moral reservation or element of doubt expressed by these idealistic recent grads who would seem equally eager to sign up. Last May TFA announced that the new class of 3,700 recruits was drawn from a pool of 24,718 applicants. The air of exclusivity comes at a price, however, for despite the impression that top-performing Ivy Leaguers are beating a path to the recruitment office, TFA spent $2 million more in 2007 on recruiting and selection ($18.5 million) than it did on candidate training ($16.5 million). But then, Madison Avenue never came cheap.

And yet for all the sunny assuaging of white middle class guilt and the successful beefing up of law school resumes skimpy on service that TFA has enabled for its thousands of past and present recruits and donors, there are some dark elements of TFA that are incubated and grown by this movement.

First and foremost, TFA leaves unchallenged the urban reality of schools that are largely or entirely segregated by income and race, preferring instead to focus on interventions that do not challenge the poverty that is the root of test score gaps to begin with. Not unlike the vast majority of education reforms of the past century that have been divorced from social forces that are at work in perpetuating poverty, TFA focuses narrowly on changing instruction and on altering the organization and content of the child’s mind as the ready remedy for poor schools. In so doing, TFA barricades itself from the root cause of weak test scores, which is poverty, while necessitating, it would seem, a draconian kind of pedagogical treatment that we might expect of 19th Century missionaries in a heathen land. Ira Socol, in fact, refers to TFA as a colonial missionary project.

The most highly publicized of the prescriptive regimens for changing the poor, rather than changing poverty, has been developed, in fact, by two celebrated TFA alums, Mike Feinberg and David Levin, the founders of the KIPP Schools (Knowledge Is Power Program). Based on highly-scripted lessons, iron-fisted discipline, memorization, recitation and drill techniques, longer school days, longer school weeks that include Saturdays, and longer school years, this type of teaching is suited, if for anyone, for the young, energetic, single, and temporary social missionaries of TFA. As John Derbyshire noted,

I am sure there are some people who enter the teaching profession with the desire to crunch their way daily across the crack-vial-littered streets of crime-wrecked inner-city neighborhoods in order to put in 15-hour working days, but I doubt there are many such.

KIPP and TFA have formed, then, a marriage that is mutually supportive and sustaining, and both organizations are now fed by the same deep institutional revenue streams that flow toward social manipulation, privatization of public spaces, and limitless tax credits. Wendy Kopp, CEO and Founder of TFA, is married, you see, to KIPP’s CEO, Richard Barth.

The Business Roundtable Prefers the Stupid and the Bought to Govern

The Business Roundtable and the U. S. Chamber of Commerce are about to foul their three-piece suits worrying that Mr. Obama could appoint a team at ED who may be more beholden to the educational needs of American schoolchildren than they are to the the testing-technology-textbook complex who brought you NCLB, corporate tutoring, corporate charter schools, Reading First, etc.

It must, indeed, be scary to imagine someone as Secretary of ED who has read the Business Roundtable's political playbook based on fear-mongering, teacher bashing, and a divisive uber jingoism that has carved out a special place to preserve the brashness, arrogance, and ignorance of the American business class in matters of education policy. For those who view education reform as doing the same things we were doing a hundred years ago in ways more profitable to the corporations that feed off schools, this is truly a scary time.

Here's a clip from a piece in WaPo that examines the anxiety being felt by the loyal opposition during the transition to a new governing team, a team where thinking is not suspect, actions are not simply the sum of the political arithmetic, and reflection is not judged as a sign of weakness:

. . . .The Ivy-laced network taking hold in Washington is drawing scorn from many conservatives, who have in recent decades decried the leftward drift of academia and cast themselves as defenders of regular Americans against highbrow snobbery. Joseph Epstein wrote in the latest Weekly Standard -- before noting that former president Ronald Reagan went to Eureka College -- that "some of the worst people in the United States have gone to the Harvard or Yale Law Schools . . . since these institutions serve as the grandest receptacles in the land for our good students: those clever, sometimes brilliant, but rarely deep young men and women who, joining furious drive to burning if ultimately empty ambition, will do anything to get ahead."

The libertarian University of Chicago law professor Richard Epstein, who is not related to Joseph Epstein, worries that the team's exceptionalism could lead to overly complex policies. "They are really smart people, but they will never take an obvious solution if they can think of an ingenious one. They're all too clever by half," he said. "These degrees confer knowledge but not judgment. Their heads are on grander themes . . . and they'll trip on obstacles on the ground." . . ..

After eight years of Paige, Spellings, Brownie, Harriet Myers, Rumsfeld, Gonzo, and W., any of whom needed no obstacle to put them on their arses, it must, indeed, be scary for the masters of manipulation to see someone coming to Washington who has studied all their tricks.