Education News That the Ravitch Camp Ignores

With an army of AFT and NEA social media trolls and Basecamp bloggers at her disposal, Diane Ravitch never has to go searching for education stories to re-post at her blog, along with Ravitch's characteristically wooden introductions to them.  

The Ravitch machine maintains a daily steady stream of articles critical of charters schools, standardized testing, and corporate education reforms.  If you could discern Ravitch's actual policy positions from the articles she posts, you would think that she is resistant to corporate education reform, rather than functioning as corporate education's chief enabler and corporate union propagandist.

Diane's true colors, however, are easier to discern by the education news that she would rather we not see in the big stories that she does not report.

On December 2, Alternet published an important article by New York parent, Jake Jacobs, that lays bare Hillary Clinton's complicity in advancing the corporate education agenda during the 2016 presidential campaign.  

Ravitch's own support for Clinton is well-documented, and the Alternet article is the kind of news that Diane would rather keep in the dark, for it reminds us once more of the complicity by NPE, AFT, NEA, FairTest, and the other corporate union satellites whose tight orbits around big corporate donors are well-defined and entirely predictable.  Here is a clip:

. . . .Tying campaign donations to a singular issue like expanding charter schools might in days past been seen as a prohibited quid-pro-quo. But in this cycle, Podesta, O’Leary and Tanden all busily raised campaign money from the same billionaire education reformers with whom they were also talking policy specifics.

But they did more than talk. On June 20, 2015, O'Leary sent Podesta an email revealing the campaign adopted two of Powell Jobs' suggestions, including "infusing best ideas from charter schools into our traditional public schools.” When Clinton announced this policy in a speech to teachers, however, it was the one line that drew boos.

“Donors want to hear where she stands” John Petry, a founder of both Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) and Success Academy, New York’s largest network of charter schools, told the New York Times.  Petry was explicit, declaring that he and his billionaire associates would instead put money into congressional, state and local races, behind candidates who favored a “more businesslike approach” to education, and tying teacher tenure to standardized test scores.

Clinton’s advisors warned her that wealthy donors like Petry, Whitney Tilson, or Eli Broad could walk if she didn’t support charter schools. Broad would indeed threaten to withhold funding from Clinton when she criticized charter schools for excluding difficult students. John Podesta and Ann O’Leary would publicly correct Clinton, reaffirming her commitment to charters.

The revolving door was also in full swing, with top Clinton and Obama administration officials working for “non-profits” run by Powell Jobs and Tom Steyer. In the end, the influence of the various well-connected “experts” advising Clinton could be felt in an official education platform that endorsed a test-centric approach that was becoming unpopular with parents, students and educators. . . .

Ravitch Bars Talk of DNC Rigging of 2016 Primary Race

Since last November, Diane Ravitch has spent an inordinate amount of time painting horns on Betsy DeVos and labeling her as the Chief Privatizer of American Schools.  While it is certainly important to point out the lunacy and danger of DeVos's fanciful plan to expand the small number of states that have voucher laws, Diane has ignored the privatizing role that she, herself, has played by giving approving to ESSA and by okaying the 7,600 existing charter schools and by refusing to repudiate charter school laws in 46 states.  

More importantly, Diane refuses to talk about how she came to support these corporate ed reform policies.  She refuses to talk about Weingarten's authoritarian endorsement of CorpEd's calendar girl, Hillay Clinton, in July 2015, just a month before Hillary paid $20 million to gain control of the DNC during the Fall of 2015.

In a post today, Dr. Ravitch reminds us that some things must remain secret and that the past is only important only if we all agree on it.  If the understanding of past is contentious and makes us uncomfortable about outcomes of events that we helped to shape, then it's best to keep quiet about it so that maybe people will forget about our culpability in making a reality that we now denounce.

She tells her readers:

Carry on your claims and counterclaims about the 2016 election elsewhere. All such comments will go into moderation as soon as I see them and may never be posted. It is my blog and I say enough is enough. The only person helped by the prolongation of this discussion is Trump. 

Right now, please focus on the Tuesday elections, especially in Virginia and New Jersey.  In Virginia, Republican Ed Gillespie has resorted to racist attacks on Ralph Northam.  

Please look to saving what we can and building for the future, not wallowing in events that we can argue about endlessly, without any resolution. 

Wow--not much respect for history by someone often recognized as an historian. It's clear that DR has no respect for the old adage, "those who are unwilling to recall the past are doomed to repeat it." And because she refuses to remember the past, she is helping the DNC to continue the same mistakes that led to political positions that mealy-mouthed, amorphous, poorly-defined, and typically spineless.

Ralph Northam is in trouble in Virginia because he sounds too much like the DNC candidates that were/are the Clinton choices: uninspiring, lifeless, patronizing, and cowardly.  

As others have noted since this Donna Brazile's offered the clip from her book (please don't buy it) about Hillary's purchase of the DNC in August 2015, the most popular politician today is the guy who got the shaft from the DNC.  Bernie Sanders is the most popular politician in America not because he is left of center.  Bernie is most popular because he is proud of his positions, unwavering in his support for them, and people know what they are.

To know where we are today requires that we know where we have been.  The outcome in the future depends upon it.  

DeVos: a product of bipartisan embrace of failed, racist “school choice” policies

“I stand behind the charter school… movement, because parents do deserve greater choice” — Hillary Rodham Clinton

With both mainstream presidential candidates publicly stating they believed in the white supremacist notion of school choice, it wasn’t hard to see the Trump nomination of someone as extreme as Betsy DeVos as being possible. How these abject, failed policies play out in reality is instructive.

Vice on Detroit: School choice gutted Detroit’s public schools. The rest of the country is next.

Trump’s Victory: What American Federation of Teachers President Weingarten should say

Professor Lois Weiner dismantles Randi Weingarten’s calamitous and undemocratic decisions to back a severely flawed candidate. Decisions that, in turn, led to Trump’s victory. This brilliant essay is a must read.

Trump’s Victory: What American Federation of Teachers President Weingarten should say

Standing Rock and the Earth vs Big Oil

 Bill McKibben has an op-ed in the NYTimes on the latest global warming flash point and human rights atrocity in the making in North Dakota.  A clip:

. . . . Originally, the pipeline was supposed to cross the Missouri just north of Bismarck, until people pointed out that a leak there would threaten the drinking water supply for North Dakota’s second biggest city. The solution, in keeping with American history, was obvious: make the crossing instead just above the Standing Rock reservation, where the poverty rate is nearly three times the national average. This has been like watching the start of another Flint, Mich., except with a chance to stop it.

The second is that this is precisely the kind of project that climate science tells us can no longer be tolerated. In midsummer, the Obama administration promised that henceforth there would be a climate test for new projects before they could be approved. That promise was codified in the Democratic platform approved by Hillary Clinton’s campaign, which says there will be no federal approval for any project that “significantly exacerbates” global warming.

The review of the Dakota pipeline must take both cases into account.

So far, the signs are not good. There has been no word from the White House about how long the current pause will last. Now, the company building the pipeline has pushed the local authorities to remove protesters from land where construction has already desecrated indigenous burial sites, with law enforcement agents using Tasers, batons, mace and “sound cannons.”

From the Clinton campaign, there’s been simply an ugly silence, perhaps rooted in an unwillingness to cross major contributors like the Laborers’ International Union of North America, which has lashed out against the many other, larger unions that oppose the project. But that silence won’t make the issue go away: Sioux protesters erected a tepee in her Brooklyn campaign office on Thursday. If Mrs. Clinton is elected on Nov. 8, this will be the new president’s first test on environmental and human rights.

Does Randi Weingarten think no one is paying attention?

by Ken Derstine
September 13, 2016

This article is also posted at Defend Public Education!

 

On September 9^th, the Answer Sheet ran a column in the Washington Post under the title “What if Randi Weingarten were U.S. education secretary?” The article is an interview with American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten by author C.M. Rubin, author of several education books, two on-line series on global education, and publisher of the online blog CMRubinWorld. She is a Fellow of the Disruptor Foundation.

Right off, Ms. Weingarten launches into her usual spin, that, while mistakes were made in education under President Barack Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan with “too many tests” and inequitable funding, things are being “reset” with the Every Child Succeeds Act of 2015. The specifics of the disaster of Race to the Top, especially for low-income school districts that have seen dozens of schools closed and public schools being put on starvation budgets to expand privatization with charters, are not mentioned. According to Ms. Weingarten, U.S. education is on course to a brighter tomorrow with ESSA.

Asked, “Does the current state of our underprivileged school systems help foster radicalism?" Ms. Weingarten says she does not know of “any empirical data that would answer your question.” She then makes a series of platitudes about how unfortunate the underfunding of schools in low-income communities is with no mention of who is responsible for this situation. Apparently listening to communities is not part of her job description!

This is followed once again with praise that ESSA has returned responsibility for education to the states “including standards and accountability, teacher development and evaluation, and interventions.” In other words, were she to become Secretary of Education, nothing would be done to promote public education on the federal level, but education would now fall under reactionary “states rights” provisions.

Weingarten then praises the AFT’s participation in the Partnership for 21 Century Learning whose goal is using corporate education reform methods to move education from the three R’s to the four C’s (communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity). Randi Weingarten is a P21 Strategic Council Member. Note P21’s Six Essential Elements and Actions Steps are heavily infused with Gates models of blended learning and global education goals. Its founders are a who’s who of corporate education reform. Secretary of Education John King has made P21 schools the focus of this year’s seventh annual (started by Arne Duncan) Back-To-School Bus Tour by the U.S. Department of Education. (Note P21 members listed in the previous link.)

The interview then goes on to a discussion of the effects of poverty on the education of students from low-income families. Once again she gives a series of platitudes that are a response to the rising opposition to corporate education reform. No mention is made here or in any part of the interview about the role of charters in draining funds from public schools, particularly in low-come communities. Instead, she mentions community schools, many of which outsource support services to nonunion businesses, as one band-aid for underfunded schools.

She also says, “testing should not be the be-all and end-all of education”, apparently hoping people have forgotten her active opposition to the Opt Out movement led by parents in various parts of the country.

On the next question, Weingarten says teachers are underpaid but does not say what should be done about this. She agrees with corporate education reformers that the teaching profession needs "fixing". As her solution, she cites the AFT’s “Raising the Bar” report of a few years ago that called for all new teachers to pass an exam akin to bar exams for lawyers as a way to “improve teacher quality”. More tests!

Tellingly, she cites a poll by TeachStrong as proof that three-quarters of teachers are undervalued in terms of how they are treated and supported. TeachStrong is a coalition of forty businesses (including leaders of corporate education reform) and corporate unions (AFT and NEA) who are providing the education program for a Hillary Clinton administration. Many of TeachStrong's partners are funded by the Gates, Broad, and Walton Foundations.

Ms. Weingarten concludes the interview by dodging a question about competition for resources between public, private and charter schools, only stating public schools should be fully funded.

The Hillary Clinton campaign has revealed it collection of education advisors. As described by blogger Peter Greene, they are:

Chris Edley Jr., the president of the Opportunity Institute, a California-based think tank that works mostly on early-childhood and college access initiatives

Lily Eskelsen García, the president of the National Education Association

Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers

Carmel Martin, the executive vice president for policy at the Center for American Progress and onetime adviser to former Education Secretary Arne Duncan

Catherine Brown, the former vice president of policy at Teach for America and current vice president of education policy at the Center for American Progress

Richard Riley, the secretary of education under Bill Clinton who's known for his views that don't neatly fit into the pro-reform or pro-teachers' union wings of the Democratic Party.

In the words of Peter Green, “If you want to vote for Clinton because you don’t want the world to burn, that’s fine. Just don’t imagine that public education is going to have a friend in the White House.”

With her early endorsement of Hillary Clinton, Randi Weingarten has been rewarded with “a seat at the table” with other corporate education reformers. The Washington Post interview shows that if she were appointed Secretary of Education, Randi Weingarten would be no different than John King or Arne Duncan.

 ____________________________________________________________________________________________

If you want to cut through the historical revisionism and obfuscation about Randi Weingarten’s history with corporate education reform, see these articles at Defend Public Education:

The Broad Foundation and the Unions – February 24, 2013

Which Side Are You On? – July 14, 2014

Randi Weingarten: Sleight of Hand Artist – Part 1 – April 19, 2015

Randi Weingarten: Sleight of Hand Artist – Part 2 – April 22, 2015

The previous link is discussion of an interview with Rick Hess that Randi Weingarten did before an audience at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute. Rick Hess recently issued a document called The Reform Agenda which Peter Green analyses here: Hess: The Reform Agenda.

Turning Collaboration Into a Bad Word – December 17, 2015

 

Ravitch Censors to Protect Clinton Complicity

Some people remain amazed at Diane Ravitch's "conversion" that came after she figured out that everyone with a brain had discovered the Big Lie that undergirded the ed policies that she had espoused for the past 30 years.  

What many people don't know is that Ravitch did not leave her Party--her Party left her as it dove over the cliff, stage right.  

Now that the Democratic Party has become the the party of Nixon, Diane has a home, and she is just as menacingly protective of this one as she was her last.

Ravitch at Clinton Fundraiser

The commentary below comes from Alison McDowell:

I have come to realize that the "personalized" blended/hybrid digital learning programs inundating our classrooms since the passage of the ESSA can be traced back to the creation (via Bill Clinton's Executive Order 13111 in 1997) of the Advanced Distributed Learning Program. This Department of Defense program utilized considerable resources from private sector interests and academic institutions.

I encourage all who truly care about public education in the 21st century to familiarize themselves with the Clinton family's involvement in promoting technology-based education and digital workforce badges.

While the primary function of ADL was to enhance distance learning for DoD and federal employees, it is clear from the implementation plan that the intention was to create an infrastructure that would fundamentally change the delivery of educational content well beyond those limits.

Almost twenty years later, the chickens are coming home to roost for K12 education, just in time for Hillary Clinton to step back in. The federal government's current plan to "redesign" public education for the 21st Century is based on a military-industrial complex model. I hope people wake up before it is too late.

The following links tell an interesting story. I encourage people to start digging in. There's a lot more material out there.

History of the ADL program: https://www.adlnet.gov/about-adl/

ADL (now xAPI) expands to track live human datastreams: https://www.adlnet.gov/…/performance-tracki…/experience-api/

Bill Clinton's Executive Order 13111: https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-1999-01-15/pdf/99-1185.pdf

“(3) mechanisms for the Federal Government to encourage private sector investment in the development of high-quality instructional software and wider deployment and utilization of technology-mediated instruction so that all Americans may take advantage of the opportunities provided by learning technology;"

DOD report on ADL Implementation: https://www.pdf-archive.com/2016/09/01/adl-implementation-dod/

Clinton Foundation's Support of Digital Badging:https://www.clintonfoundation.org/…/digital-badges-unlockin…
Clinton Family's Ties to the for-profit Laureate Universities International: http://www.laureate.net/OurNetwork/ExploreLaureate?q=clinton

Pearson 1997-2000: http://www.ulib.niu.edu/publishers/pearson.htm

I submitted the above comment on the morning of 8/30/16 on Diane Ravitch's recent post about attending a Clinton fundraising event. https://dianeravitch.net/2016/08/30/im-with-her-literally/#comments 

It has not made it out of moderation.

Does your candidate hold left wing or right wing views on education?

“Hillary Clinton, who, for me, is a neoliberal disaster…” — Professor Cornel West

Is your candidate progressive or reactionary on education issues? One measure is to compare their views to those of the notoriously right-wing JBS. Here we look at some critical issues facing students, families, and our public schools.

Neoliberal Corporate Education Reform… for “other” peoples’ kids

“CCSS assume an American population embodied with a similar history of freedom and cultural ‘neutrality’ or ‘universality’” — Donald H. Smith, Ph.D.

The Atlantic has a surprisingly candid piece entitled “A Public-School Paradox” about the hypocrisy of the establishment elite in Washington not sending their own offspring to public schools. This has been exacerbated by the fact that the most vociferous neoliberal corporate education reform proponents — like Barack Obama, Arne Duncan, and Hillary Rodham Clinton — are all private school parents. Disconnected and disinvested from the public commons, they advocate for horrific, racist, classist “reforms” that only serve to widen the gap between working class families and themselves. Especially disturbing is this trio of Democratic politicians’ full-throated support of the white supremacist Common Core State Standards (CCSS), a curriculum from which their own scion were spared. This is equally true, if not more so, for reactionary, right-wing troglodytes like Donald J. Trump, whose, as The Atlantic piece points out: “five children all attend(ed) private schools”. It’s almost a given that George W. Bush, whose contempt of public schools was apparent in his support of segregationist charter schools and imposing NCLB on a hapless nation, would have sent his scion to private schools while president, had they been that age.

My brief comments in reaction to the piece follow.

---

Sidwell Friends School is the polar opposite of the horrific KIPP dungeons Obama advocates for other POC kids. My editor at Schools Matter — Dr. Jim Horn — has been publishing chapters from his book on KIPP, but I have a paper copy I’ll read once the MPRE is over. It was Horn that coined the phrase “cultural sterilization” to describe the no excuses model inflicted on students. I can’t think of a better way to frame it, nor anything more removed from the experience of establishment elitists that advocate it for “other” peoples’ children.

HILLARY AND HEWLETT PACKARD

By Doug Martin, Author of Hoosier School Heist

Hillary Clinton’s campaign for chief of America continues to get backing by those in the school privatization business.

Hewlett Packard’s Meg Whitman--a Republican fundraiser whose net worth is $1.95 billion--has recently come out in support of Hillary and says she will donate “substantial” money to Clinton’s campaign.

Whitman in 2014 was appointed to Teach for America's board, alongside Bill Clinton's bank deregulator Larry Summers, one of the people responsible for the financial crisis of 2008 which bailed out the billionaires and kicked poor Americans out of their homes.

Whitman’s Whitman-Harsh Family Foundation handed TFA $10 million in 2011. 

Also in 2011, Whitman’s foundation donated “$2.5 million to Summit Public Schools to start 10 more high-performing charter high schools in low-achieving areas in Silicon Valley, with a promise to double that amount if other tech titans match her $2.5 million.”

She also gifted that same week in 2011 $500,000 “to Los Angeles Unified to extend web-based math instruction software.”

I am sure that Hewlett Packard dreams of the day when there are no teachers in classrooms and lessons and tests are graded by computers.

As the author of  Hoosier School Heist,  Doug Martin’s research has been used by or referenced in Salon, Alternet, the Black Agenda Report, the Washington Post, the Associated Press, PBS, and newspapers and radio shows across Indiana and America.  His newest book project deals with Big Pharma, Big Medicine, the Cancer Industry, hospital fraud, and nursing home and health care corruption in Indiana.

THE MIND TRUST SPIN-OFF IN CINCY AND BEYOND

By Doug Martin 

 

In my book Hoosier School Heist, I expose the Mind Trust, formed by once Democratic mayor of Indianapolis Bart Peterson and his charter school director David Harris.  I have also written on the Mind Trust spin-off formerly known as CEE-Trust (and its ties to Bill Gates, George Bush, and Joe Klein), which now goes by the name Education Cities and is operating in at least 24 cities. 

Before doing a recent NAACP Indy panel on ALEC, the Mind Trust, and school privatization a few days ago, I decided to peek into what Education Cities has been up to. Here are just a few things I found. 

Besides having the Mind Trust’s David Harris and Earl Martin Phalen and corporate school grandfather Howard Fuller (a BAEO/Edison connected operative who played a role in school privatization in Indiana and Philly) as board members, the Mind Trust spin-off Education Cities is being funded by well-known school privatization billionaire organizations like the Walton Foundation, the Dell Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the Kauffman Foundation, and the foundation started by Eli Broad, the Broad Foundation. 

 

The Broad Foundation is noteworthy because of recent events. 

Started by Obama supporter Eli Broad, the Broad Foundation placed its members in Arne Duncan’s Dept. of Education.  Broad, as my book mentions, gave former Indiana supt. of public ed. Tony Bennett a $50,000 campaign gift back in the day.   

Broad is also funding Hillary Clinton’s campaign. As Nancy Bailey a short time ago wrote: 

Education Week recently compared the education platforms of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.  Under “choice,” they mention that Hillary Clinton upset some charter advocates last fall when she stated that they didn’t serve all students.

The Wall Street Journal reported that one education reformer troubled by her comments was Eli Broad. Broad is currently on the move to make all Los Angeles public schools charters. And it is stated that he threatened to withdraw campaign funding if Hillary Clinton didn’t retract her claim—which she did.

In fact, Eli Broad's cozy relationship with the Clintons goes way back, as Ken Derstine highly details is his excellent piece, "Eli Broad and the Clintons: Update of the Update." 

Education Cities is in Massachusetts, too.  The Center for Collaborative Education, which is now carrying the corporate agenda’s water, announced a while back that it had “been designated as an ‘Emerging Harbormaster’ by the Next Generation Learning Challenge and Education Cities to launch a new Personalized Learning Network in Massachusetts.”

Next Gen.’s ultimate goal, which the Mind Trust with Bill Gates’ help has been pushing for years, is to turn schools into complete online learning hubs with a few teachers babysitting students. 

Along with the Gates Foundation and the Ford Foundation, the KnowledgeWorks Foundation—another online-school promoting group--funneled $31.5 million into Ohio in 2002.  

In Cincinnati, Education Cities is represented by Accelerate Great Schools, a private-public set-up which includes the KnowledgeWorks Foundation, the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, the Cincinnati Regional Business Committee,  the Cincinnati Public Schools, the Farmer Family Foundation, and the Haile U.S. Bank Foundation. 

The Cincinnati Regional Business Committee, in 2013, handed Teach for America, the temporary corporate-led teacher group, $300,000, with the Haile U.S. Bank Foundation adding another $20,000 in 2014 and $25,000 to TFA in 2015.

In 2014, Haile also gave the hedge fund-led DFER and Education Cities-affiliated Bellwether Education Partners (a group highlighted in my book Hoosier School Heist) $21,600 for its Cincinnati High Performing Schools Accelerator, which follows the corporate school model to a tee where, as my book shows, the fake progressives, Big Business, and the Catholics and often the Christian Right join hands to put a big dent in public education. 

Corporate school reformers like to swoop into poor cities, promise a moonshot, and set the neoliberal disaster capitalism dominos in place for complete privatization.   Cincinnati is a waiting victim, where 50% of the children live in poverty.

Who is heading the Cincinnati show?  Patrick Herrel, a former Teach for America recruiter and past vice president of recruitment for The Mind Trust, was picked by the corporate powers-that-be in 2015 to lead the Accelerate Great Schools.  (To see how Herrel supports Gates’ public money heist for online learning charter schools, see page 38 in my book.)  

One board member of the Accelerate Great Schools is Cintas’ Scott Farmer (the son of one of George Bush’s 15^th largest fundraisers in 2000) , whose Cintas, according to Forbes, was being investigated by the U.S. Inspector General for violating in 2006 “the federal False Claims Act when it tacked millions of dollars in ‘environmental fees’ on uniforms, mops, mats and towels it cleaned for the [U.S.] postal service as part of a ten-year, $200 million contract.”  

The U.S. postal service “dropped its pursuit of recovering $816,733 in October” 2007 because the Justice Dept. decided not to file criminal charges.  

Forbes also notes that in 2001 an Alabama Circuit Court lawsuit claimed “similar charges on customer invoices were bogus. That suit, originally seeking $175 million, was settled for $14 million. Cintas has stopped imposing such fees.” 

Hoosier School Heist is filled with similar stories, the private-public nightmares you hardly ever read about in newspapers.  The kind the Mind Trust/Education Cities crowd hope you never catch wind of.

As the author of  Hoosier School Heist,  Doug Martin’s research has been used by or referenced in Salon, Alternet, the Washington Post, the Associated Press, PBS, and newspapers and radio shows across Indiana and America.  His newest book project deals with Big Pharma, Big Medicine, the Cancer Industry, hospital fraud, and nursing home and health care corruption in Indiana.