Christofascists Plan To Dismantle Head Start

Trump’s christofascists are finalizing plans to destroy Head Start through deregulation.  Eliminating standards for Head Start programming will throw open the door for states and localities to send our most vulnerable children to white nationalist versions of vacation bible school to begin their oppressive indoctrinations with taxpayer dollars. 

Story in the Times:

The Trump administration is preparing a major rollback of federal requirements for Head Start, a change that supporters of the child care program fear could gut its longstanding antipoverty mission.

The proposed changes would remove most of Head Start’s 133 pages of requirements for math and literacy curriculums, class sizes, medical screenings, home visits and even a requirement that children brush their teeth after meals, according to three people with knowledge of the plan who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations.

Administration officials say the changes will streamline a heavily regulated program while giving states and cities more control over how it is run.

But Head Start advocates say that erasing regulations serves as a backdoor way to dismantle a program the administration does not like. The White House last year called Head Start “radical” and tried but failed to freeze spending on it. . . .

Memphis Ready to Turn Over $23 Million Head Start Budget to Corporate Cronies at Porter-Leath

We posted on September 30 about Shelby County Mayor, Mark Luttrell, and his cozy relations with fellow corporate pol, Mark Threlkeld, who presides over the Board of Trustees of Porter-Leath, a non-profit corporation that is building an empire on backs of young victims of the Zero Tolerance Era.

The former Orphan Asylum

Porter-Leath's history goes back to the 19th Century, when it served as home of last resort for children of the destitute.  Today it is run by President Sean Lee, who lives across the border in a very white and leafy section of Mississippi.

Lee seems particularly qualified by corporate standards to take on the new duties of running an early childhood education program such as Head Start.  He has a Bachelors in Business, and his other job before coming to Porter-Leath was in HR at Elvis Presley Enterprises, Inc.

But of course we know he will have lots of help from the Gates Foundation if Mayor Luttrell gets his way, when Porter-Heath becomes the recipient of the $23 million annual stipend from the Feds for Head Start, as well as any portion of a planned sales tax increase on food that is not swallowed up to lower property taxes for prosperous friends and neighbors of the Luttrells and the Threlkelds. Plus generous tax-shelter dollars from philanthrocapitalists who are eager to begin instilling compliance at a very early age in the black kids of Memphis.

And, too, there will be plenty of help to divvy up the cash from the State's corporate welfare agency, the Achievement School District, which has already established a "partnership" with Porter-Leath:

Porter-Leath Partners with ASD to Provide High Quality Pre-K Posted on: Friday, September 06, 2013 Porter-Leath has launched a partnership with four Achievement School District Schools, one Aspire school and a second KIPP: Collegiate Memphis Elementary school, to provide high quality pre-kindergarten for over 200 children. The schools in the new partnership include: Frayser Elementary Corning Elementary Whitney Elementary Cornerstone Preparatory School  Hanley Elementary (Aspire) Shannon Elementary (KIPP) The partnership follows recent Porter-Leath Preschool expansion efforts. Porter-Leath's partnership with KIPP began last school year on their Henry campus and the agency began operating Frayser Head Start and Child Development Center in January 2013.

President Sean Lee already has help from once-upon-a-time businessman, Mike Warr, whose salary of $128,000 actually exceeds that of Lee at $112,000.  After Warr bought and sold the failing Monday's Child clothing outfit, he became Head of Development at Porter-Leath, and he has been trying to "close" on Head Start since 2008, when he barely missed:

Biggest missed opportunity: Unable to close on a Shelby County Head Start contract in 2008

The story has been unreported by the Commercial-Appeal until now.  Missing is any mention of what happens to public early childhood teachers if the Luttrell-Threlkeld-Barbic plan goes through:

The County Commission failed to approve a resolution on Monday that urged the county administration to apply for a $23 million federal grant to continue operating the county’s Head Start program. 

The resolution, proposed by Commissioner Steve Mulroy, was a request and would not have been binding. 

The commission also passed a resolution on Sept. 23 that urged the Shelby County Board of Education to take over the Head Start Program. According to the federal government website, Head Start “promotes the school readiness of children ages birth to five from low-income families by enhancing their cognitive, social, and emotional development.” 

Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell told commissioners that officials with non-profit Porter-Leath have said they planned to apply for the grant and that school officials have also indicated that Head Start would be a good fit for the system. 

Unless something changes before the Oct. 22 application deadline, there are no plans for the county to reapply, Luttrell said. 

Head Start began under President Lyndon Johnson in the mid-1960s. A troubled local Head Start was taken over by the county 10 years ago. It now serves about 3,200 children.

Luttrell has said previously that an outside entity would be able to secure other funding for the program and be able to possibly double the number of students enrolled. 

The resolution need at least seven votes to pass and failed in a 6-5 vote.

Update 4 pm October 15:

Bill Dries at the Daily News reports that Shelby County Schools will make a bid on Head Start. It matters not to the 500 employees of Shelby County, however, who now work in Head Start.  Their jobs will be gone if either entity wins the $23 million to privatize Head Start in Memphis.

. . . . Schools superintendent Dorsey Hopson told school board members Monday, Oct. 14, he and his staff will apply for the federal funding by the Oct. 22 deadline.

“He envisions that the district would need approximately four additional employees that would work for the district,” said school board chairmanKevin Woods. “Unlike the Shelby County government system, which had approximately 500 employees operating its program, we would contract with early childhood providers to run those centers.” 

Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell said Monday that Porter-Leath, a Memphis-based children’s and family services provider, will also make a bid for the Head Start contract now operated by county government. 

Luttrell also said Monday he could foresee backing both applications once they are completed and he reviews them on their way to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. 

County Commissioner, Terry Roland, who is the poster boy for anger mismanagement in county government, had this to say:

“There is a layer of bureaucracy that has to be funded with local government,” said commissioner Terry Roland. “The quicker we get this out of the county’s hands, the better off the children will be.”

Yes, indeed.  Get that $23 million into the hands of those corporate welfare leeches who are lined up for blood.  That's what the poor children of Shelby County represent.

The Head Start Enron Trader Initiative: The Arnold Foundation in Indiana, Louisiana, NYC, Texas, and Beyond

By Doug Martin

The national news has painted Enron’s retired trader and hedge fund manager John Arnold as a Jesus figure since he and his wife announced they were going to cover the government costs of funding Head Start during the government shutdown (better known as the good cop/bad cop ploy by both parties to throw senior citizens, kids, and the poor and middle class under the bus), but the Laura and John Arnold Foundation's main goal is school privatization.

The Arnolds, dishing out the couch-change of $10 million for Head Start, say this money is a loan and they will want the money back.  But the whole thing was merely a publicity stunt meant to digress from the shady things John Arnold has been up to lately.

When the news broke on the Head Start deal, a few attuned people were seeing through the smoke and mirrors.  As David Sirota points out, John Arnold, worth a mere $2.8 or $3.8 billion (depends who you talk to and when, and as if the difference matters), is a major con-man:

What do you do after a week’s worth of embarrassing revelations about your craven effort to slash the pensions of unsuspecting middle-class retirees? If you are a billionaire former Enron trader, you manufacture a self-congratulatory spectacle by offering a bit of pocket change to low-income kids – and you get to rest assured that the national media will suddenly ignore your pension-looting ways and dutifully portray you as a benevolent hero.

Such is the breathtakingly cynical P.R. strategy of John Arnold. After a week of revelations about his scheme to help Wall Street and the conservative movement loot public pensions, the former Enron trader made headlines yesterday by handing over a rounding error of his billion-dollar fortune to the federal Head Start program ostensibly to help float it through the government shutdown.

Theresa Rosado, the illustrator for my forthcoming book Hoosier School Heist and a fine researcher, was onto the Head Start funding trail from the get-go, emailing me to let me know that Walmart scholar Stuart Buck worked for the Arnold Foundation. Josh McGee, an economist in the Dept. of School Reform at the University of Arkansas, too, crunches numbers at the Arnold shop because economists know nothing about education but everything about making the big bucks.  For his work for the Arnolds, McGee was paid $122,501 in 2011 (see page 40 in PFD).

Here are a few corporate schoolers who pocketed Arnold Foundation money in 2011 (see page 44 in PFD):

$100,000 to hedge fund-operated Education Reform Now, Democrats for Education Reform’s sister.

$118,000 to the venture capitalists and billionaires at the NewSchools Venture Fund

$2.1 million to Stand for Children, who used hedge fund money to buy Illinois Democrats and Bain Capital to attack teachers in Massachusetts.

$7 million to Students First

$1.1 million to Teach for America Houston

$5 million to Teach for America’s national branch

$75,000 to the Texas Charter Schools Association

$2.5 million to The  New Teacher Project, imported to Indiana (and other states) with Mind Trust and Bill Gates money.  

$52,500 to the Thomas Fordham Institute, the rightwing outfit set to help the Center for American Progress  eliminate elected school boards across the country.

The Arnold Foundation also backs KIPP Schools and last year funneled $15 million into the school privatization movement in New Orleans, giving cash to the Bradley/Walmart front group the Black Alliance for Educational Options, the Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools, New Schools for New Orleans, and the NYC Relay Graduate School of Education, which takes teacher evaluation to a new level, so that Masters degrees are only given to teachers in training who show that their students from low-income communities can do well on standardized test scores.  

The Arnolds must gush over NYC’s Relay Graduate School of Education, which was founded by KIPP, Achievement First, Uncommon Schools, and Larry Robbins, the owner of Glenview Capital hedge fund.  Just a month before Relay School of Education was accepted by the Board of Regents, Robbin’s Amy and Larry Robbin’s Foundation donated $500,000 to the Regents Research Fund, with help from Bill Gates, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, and others, to help the State Education Department through a new “Fellows” program to implement Race to the Top evaluation guidelines for teachers and principals, curriculum, and other things the Business Roundtable first called for in 1989.  Many of these “Fellows” were recruited from Teach for America, the College Board, and other corporate-friendly groups, and were paid upwards of $189,500, as was the case of Kristen Huff, who spent seven years doing assessment design and product development for the College Board, which in 2006 made $500 million from products dealing with testing, as Jim Horn has noted.

Filthy rich hedge fund managers out to privatize education and make more money off of loans to charter schools and stealing from teachers pensions love to help each other out in the name of “benefiting children.”

And the Arnold Foundation is out for Hoosier kids, too. In Indiana, the Arnolds joined billionaire Obama supporter Eli Broad, the racist and poor-bashing Bradley Foundation, rightwing Gleason Foundation, and Dell to fund the Teacher Prep Review, which is highly endorsed by the former mayor of Indianapolis and Eli Lilly official Bart Peterson’s Mind Trust and the hedge fund supported Democrats for Education Reform Indiana. In October 2012, along with Eli Lilly, the Joyce Foundation (the school privatization outfit where Obama used to work), and the Lumina Foundation, the Arnolds financed Indy Mayor Ballard’s corporate school blueprint What’s Possible. 

What is the Lumina Foundation?  It’s a private outfit that promotes the skills-gap myth nonstop so that the public schools at all levels can be turned into corporate workforce training grounds so the filthy rich don’t have to pay their own money to train workers.  The group’s leader is John Mutz.  A past trustee for the Hudson Institute, former Republican lieutenant governor of Indiana, previous Conseco official, and one-time president of PSI Energy, John Mutz was Lilly Endowment’s president from 1989-1993. He was also a director at the GEO Foundation’s 21st Century Charter School, an Indianapolis Charter Schools Board member, and co-chair of the billionaire Betsy DeVos-run front-group, All Children Matter, in Indiana.

John Mutz and the Arnolds must really get along well. The Arnold Foundation loan money will be used to keep Head Start open in six states: Florida, Mississippi, Connecticut, South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, as his Teach for America/New Teacher Project money allows real teachers to get the axe around the country and kids to be shipped off to charter school factory farms to be shot up with test bubbles then placed into a society that is already too sick to function.

 

 

 

 

 

Head Start Hammered by Shutdown

From WaPo: The government shutdown has caused as many as 19,000 children to lose access to Head Start today, the National Head Start Association reported Tuesday.

More than 20 programs across 11 states did not get the annual grant they had been scheduled to receive Tuesday and cannot provide early education and related social services to children and families.