Robert D. Skeels and Doug Martin on War Report on Public Ed Sunday

by Doug Martin

I will be joining fellow Schools Matter blogger Robert D. Skeels and BATS member Dr. James Avington Miller Jr. this Sunday, August 3, on the War Report on Public Education. 

Robert will be speaking about the upcoming LAUSD school board election (he ran against a billionaire-funded candidate for a board seat in 2013) on the first segment of the radio show, starting at 2 pm Pacific California Time and 5 pm Indiana Time.

My segment will begin around 2:45 pm (or a bit later) California Time or 5:45 (or a bit later) Indiana Time.  I will be discussing Evan Bayh's involvement in the school privatization movement and the politics of the corporate school movement.

Hope everyone can tune in!  Here is the link:  http://www.bbsradio.com/thewarreport

Evan Bayh Loves Christel DeHaan and Hedge Funders: CORPORATE SCHOOL ALERT

by Doug Martin

With so many people saying Evan Bayh must come back to Indiana to "save" public education as governor, it is time to set the record straight and let Hoosiers know about the real Evan Bayh.

Here is just a glimpse (after only a few hours of research) into Indiana’s hero, Fox News' on-air contributor, and former governor of and senator for Indiana, and it is not pretty.

Anyone who thinks Evan Bayh is good for public education is either lying or has not been informed.  Let’s inform the unformed now and expose the liars. 

BAYH’S CORPORATE SCHOOL PIECE OF THE PIE

Back in 2002 in an article for the neoliberal Democratic Leadership Council entitled “How Bush Stole Education,” Bill Gates’ operative Andy Rotherham, the hedge fund-funded Democrats for Education Reform's former director, insisted that NCLB was more Evan Bayh and Joe Lieberman’s pet project than it was George Bush’s. 

Rotherham, who plays a role in my book Hoosier School Heist, claimed that “Mr. Bush’s education agenda is largely a New Democratic one…. The new education bill, which is regarded widely as ‘Bush’s education initiative,’ was largely written by Democratic Sens. Joe Lieberman (Conn.) and Evan Bayh (Ind.), along with other New Democrats.”

New Democrats here is a code word for privatizers like Bill Clinton and Bart Peterson, Bayh's past chief of staff.

Bayh, indeed, was a player in NCLB, the bill which set the dominoes in motion to use standardized testing to turn our schools over to private companies, many of them campaign donors.

So, it makes perfect sense that Bayh—in a scratch-your-back moment—now gets a paycheck from Apollo Global Management, the owners of McGraw-Hill Education which includes the CTB/McGraw-Hill division Indiana taxpayers have a $95 million deal with for ISTEP, despite constant errors and problems. Bayh, too, is a board member of McGraw-Hill Education. 

Evan Bayh is also doing lobbying for McGuire Woods, a mega-law firm/lobbying outfit which has represented charter schools in court, has many members on charter school boards across the US, “counsels” charter school bond lenders, and even lobbies for online K12, Inc., the for-profit corporation started by racist Bill Bennett which buys out lawmakers in many states, including Indiana.

In 2011, Bayh joined the board of Fifth Third Bank, a bank also mentioned for various reasons in Hoosier School Heist.

ALL ABOARD THE DEHAAN/HEDGE FUND CAMPAIGN TRAIN

Evan Bayh (who grew up in a small, small town just a coalmine down the street from me, years earlier; just a rabbit-throw down the highway from where Eugene V. Debs is buried) has ALOT of money in his rainy-day campaign closet.  Not much of it comes back home to Indiana.

And Democrats running with no gas money from Bayh or the Indiana Democratic Party on the campaign trail this year should know that, in May, Bayh gave $4,000 (page 11) to Cory Booker’s US senate campaign. 

The former mayor of Newark, NJ, DFER hedge fund-supported Booker is the Walmart/Amway/Bradley Foundation operative who has worked for white billionaire school privatizers since his Black Alliance for Educational Options/Bush years. 

In 2012, Bayh’s election committee dished out $2000 to Andre Carson, Indiana’s DC corporate schooler (page 9). 

Carson met with his Gulen friends a week or so ago, just on the heels of the FBI raiding the Gulen charter school in Indy. 

One of Bayh’s own protégé’s worked at Indy’s Gulen school. Teach Plus’ Patrick McAlister--IPS board member Caitlin Hannon’s campaign manager, former TFA member, and teacher at Gulen’s Indiana Math and Science Academy--got his big break as an intern with Evan Bayh back in 2008. 

But Bayh and Andre Carson have another thing in common, and that is Christel DeHaan. 

When the media and Democratic Party in Indiana painted DeHaan as merely a Republican mega-donor during the Tony Bennett charter school grading scandal, they hushed the fact that DeHaan has given campaign funding to Obama, Joe Donnelly, Andre Carson, and Evan Bayh. 

Since 2011, Andre has received $10,200 from DeHaan (see here, here, here, and here).  Bayh has received $3,000 since 1998 from Tony Bennett’s princess, shockingly even more than Indiana Democratic Party's evil foe Mike Pence did when he was in DC (see Pence's $2,000 from DeHaan here and here).

The Indiana Democratic Congressional Victory Committee is a DeHaan breadwinner, too. It got $10,000 from DeHaan in Sept. 2012.  In 2010, she gave the same group another $10,000.  In 2008, Oprah and Mitch Daniels’ friend DeHaan gave the group $5,000 and another $1,000 in 1998.

If all is this is not enough to shake you, school voucher-supporting Republican School Choice Indiana’s Fred Klipsch, Walmart and DeVos’ main Hoosier front-man, gave Evan Bayh $2,000 in 1997 (scroll down the page here).

Democrat for Education Reform’s hedge fund manager Joel Greenblatt donated $1,000 to Bayh in 2004. 

Former Gotham Capital hedge fund manager Daniel Nir, a good Bayh buddy, has also loaded (see here and here) Evan's campaign chest.  Gotham Capital is thick in the school privatization movement.

Bayh, too, is giving campaign money to DFER’s favorite son, Michael Bennett in Colorado (see page 10 here).

My new research reveals tons.  In fact, the powers-that-be used the Black Alliance for Educational Options and the DFER (both started by many of the same people, and people from Indiana, as I note in Hoosier School Heist) to make it look like the Republicans and Democrats were both on the same page, for once, because school reform was good for children.  That was the hoax.  Then came NCLB. Then came the heist.  Evan Bayh was bought by DeHaan and Klipsch a few years before Bart Peterson was making his move to school-privatize Indianapolis.

Bayh in many ways is as much a grandfather of the corporate school movement as anyone from the rightwing.

BAYN: TRAINING THE NEXT COPORATE SCHOOL WORKFORCE

As most know, Indianapolis’ first school privatizer Bart Peterson was Bayh’s chief of staff.  Other Bayh people have been and are still part of the heist.

Stan Jones, who Bayh selected for the Higher Education Commission in Indiana, now works for the Bill Gates Foundation.

The board of the Indianapolis Lighthouse Mission Charter School--now part of a multi-state outfit--had three people that used to labor for Bayh on it when the school applied for its charter several years ago. 

Former Bayh and Peterson official Doran Moreland now is employed with the Friedman Foundation, a group funded by the Koch Brothers, the Bradley Foundation, and others highlighted in Hoosier School Heist. 

Moreland runs Rocketship Education in Indiana, the charter school promoted by the Jonas Brothers and other billionaires.

THE "WE CAN DO BETTER WITH A CIVIL WAR TOUR?"

We have some great candidates running for office in Indiana under the Democrat Party name this election, and it's time to support them.

And them only.

Since so many Indiana Democratic corporate school reformers want to run for governor, the Associated Press recently asked if there was a civil war brewing in the Indiana Democratic Party.  Who knows.  But maybe it's time to start one before it's too late.

 

The State Board of Ed, the Uneducated Educated, and the Unelected

By Doug Martin

Despite letter after letter and a strong physical presence in support of our democratically elected supt. of public instruction, the Pence/state board/CECI trio today set the ball in motion to steal more power from Glenda Ritz to carry on the billionaires' corporate-theocratic agenda I detail in my book Hoosier School Heist.

The whole attack against Glenda Ritz is, in essence,  an attack against women who make up the majority of the teaching workforce.  It is the same "Father-Knows Best" mentality that was at play with Mitch Daniels, which I wrote about a few years ago and cognitive linguist and political scientist George Lakoff has described extensively.  Although I do not often see eye to eye with state board member Andrea Neal--who works for the Koch Brothers-associated Indiana Policy Review Foundation--I am glad she stood up and voted against the attack today on Ritz.  Today's male attack against Glenda is very similar to the attack by Tony Bennett (who just received a mere $5,000 slap on the wrist for breaking the law) when he said in an email that his IDOE cronies needed to find ways to call out our supt. of public schools' "stupidity."

Let us talk about "stupidity."   

I spent 6,000 hours, at least, studying this assault on public schools in Indiana and probably another 2.000 on what is going on across the nation.  Even though smart people make the blueprint, those carrying out the orders, even though they are power hungry, greedy, and lapdogs of billionaires, are not very bright.  Ironically, we have unelected members on the state board of education who are highly uneducated.  In other words, "stupid." Stupid to country, stupid to democracy, and stupid to all things sacred.

Has Dan Elsener ever read the Upanishads and does he understand the Bible?  My guess is probably not.  He believes it is God's work he is doing, dragging Jesus from the cross and flipping the Savior on his head to propagate a free-market Christianity beginning in the early part of the 20th century and culminating in the type of Kerns Family propaganda which finds its way into think tanks, universities, the media, and rightwing evangelical borderline fascist TV shows.   

Has Mike Pence read the real research on global warming, where the only debate is when (not if) the human race is going to die?  No, he hasn't.  The progress he promotes is leading us straight to the grave; the so-called jobs he promises by using taxpayer money to train future workers in our public schools have all been shipped overseas.  For the jobs left, the billionaire plan Pence wants to utilize will merely flood the market so that  these over-trained workers can be paid less. 

Does Brad Oliver read Walt Whitman to his wife at night, that compassionate and spiritual poetic line stating that "every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you?"  Don't bet on it.

It is time to tell it like it is.  It is a world with dumb and corrupt people in charge.  Our country's US DOE is run by Bill Gates even though he never graduated from college, doesn't read neuroscience, and lacks creativity, spirituality, and compassion. 

You can't measure creativity, spiritual wellbeing, or the ability to live peacefully with bugs, flowers, and animals by a standardized test score, even though Evan Bayh, now working for the Apollo Global Management private equity firm that owns McGraw-Hill Financial, isn't going to say otherwise.

I have been saying this all along, in every city I visit and on every radio show I do.  There is no sitting at the table with these people.  They are carrying the table out of the backdoor with your head on a platter and setting you house on fire. 

Let us kick the billionaires and politicians to the curb and let us build libraries and labor unions.  Let us put a psychologist in every school and a public worker on every bridge.  Let us create living-wage jobs for parents so that can find time to read books to their sons and daughters at night and give them a good healthy meal in the morning.  Let us support kid and teachers.

Let us support Glenda Ritz and rebel against Pence, the state board, and the unelected CECI.  Sign the petition to have the state board of ed. in Indiana be elected public officials now.