Margaret Spellings Rides Again!

That’s right—the cowgirl is back, with a whole new look but with the same old discredited education policy that she started hawking 30 years ago with her Texas sidekick, then-Governor, George W. Bush.

Spellings has become the point person for the political and corporate dinosaurs who have never relented from a mission to profiteer and privatize schools and, now it seems, are renewing their efforts to finish off public education with even more of the same high-stakes standardized tests that continue to be used even today in almost every state.

So as a reminder of the wreckage that Spellings oversaw beginning the late 1990s, here is a post from just before the 2008 presidential election:

Special Comment: Margaret Spellings

October 27, 2008

Margaret Lamontagne Spellings has come a long way from her humble beginnings as a legislative activist paid to hector public education supporters in the Texas Legislature. With a bachelor's degree in poli-sci and a teaching resume that is limited to a single stint as tutor on education issues to a distinctively non-curious George the Governor of Texas, she has risen to represent the neocon ruling model that insists upon political fealty above competence, ruthlessness over morality, ideology above truth, private aggrandizement over the public good.

With her fellow NCLB designer Sandy Kress working under the watchful eye of Karl Rove, who previously hired her to tutor the Governor, these core miseducators put together the infrastructure for an education bill aimed to achieve the conservative goals of education privatization, even without the school vouchers that unsuspecting Democrats strutted about getting stripped from the NCLB Act.

As Elizabeth Debray has documented, Spellings and the inner circle knew that the impossible 100 percent proficiency targets would accomplish over time what conservatives would have preferred to get done with the imposition of vouchers on the front end of the Bush reign. Rather than immediate conservative gratification, the Spellings testing requirements offered the kind of torturous schooling, a pedagogical variety of slow-motion waterboarding, that would eventually break down the will of teachers and public school supporters, thus opening up the market for the tutoring corporations, the charter profiteers, and the non-profit corporate brainwashing outfits like KIPP.

Now at the end of the Spellings reign of terror and half-way to the 2014 Judgment Day, 4 out of 10 public schools in America are on her NCLB failure list. Special ed children and English language learners who can't read the test questions are tested right along with the rest, including millions of children disabled by poverty. The poorest neighborhoods, in fact, are commanded to perform at the same level as the schools in the leafy suburbs. No excuses. And no extra resources, either.

Since NCLB became law in 2002, Bush budgets have underfunded NCLB by nearly $90 billion dollars (pdf). Head Start has been cut back by 11 percent. Career education programs, educational technology, and other programs like Reading is Fundamental have been zeroed out in Bush budgets. While cynically demanding that special ed students perform at the same levels as other students, $30 billion has been cut from the authorized amount in the 2004 IDEA Improvement Act. In short, the poor, the disabled, and the immigrant children have been sacrificed to make an ideological case against public schools and for vouchers and charters (even as research shows they are no better at producing test scores than the schools they would replace.

Recently when fielding a question concerning the burgeoning number of schools not making the AYP (Adequate Yearly Progres) cut, Mrs. Spellings limply responded with "pretty much every organization needs improvement." Yes, you are correct, Mrs. Spellings, and "pretty much every organization" accepts this fact, except yours, it seems. Pretty much every other organization does not face closure or reconstitution or some other form of demolition if the organization does not reach a level of improvement that is impossible to attain.

As a result of your manipulation, Mrs. Spellings, it is now the public school organization that has lost its most ethical and imaginative professionals on the road to "improvement." It is now only the public school organization that, in seeking the impossible, has had its purposes hijacked so that relevance, caring, and humane values have been extinguished along the way to the unreachable. It is now only the public school organization, Mrs. Spellings, that has so focused on unattainable improvements that children have become alienated prisoners in an institution that blames them for the failure that you, Mrs. Spellings, have created. It is only the public school organization whose resources have been reduced while your scheduled impossible demands have been racheted up (even though there is no level of funding that would make the 100% proficiency goal achievable). It is only the public school organization, Mrs. Spellings, whose most vulnerable and needy member units have been cynically sacrificed on the ideological altar of privatization, even as the empty rhetoric of rescue has been unceasing from your lips.

So yes, Margaret, if I may call you Margaret, we are in agreement: "pretty much every organization needs improvement," including, I will add in caps, YOUR OWN. I would argue, in fact, that your organization "pretty much" needs an entire makeover. The good news is that your imminent departure, along with your reluctant former pupil, will make that improvement possible. Perhaps, then, we can get on the road to the real work of public school improvement, rather than the ceaseless undercutting of "pretty much" the entire system. I am sure that the competent and hard working civil servants at the Department of Education will be glad to see you off.

The Spellings Privatization Machine Shifts Gears

With some uncertainty as to how long it will take for North Carolina citizens to ride her out of the state on a rail, Margaret Spellings is wasting no time implanting Koch Brothers' stooges into what has been one of the best public university systems in the nation.  If Spellings is left to do what she was put in charge to do, we will witness the replacement of public servants with crony profiteers, privatizers, and fascist hacks who circulate among the power centers of the Old Confederacy.

As in Cecil Staton, who Spellings recently named as Chancellor of East Carolina University:

As a five-term Republican member of the Georgia Senate, Staton moved millions in taxpayer dollars to Mercer, the private university that employed him. He authored a voter ID bill that a federal judge likened to a "poll tax." He was also notorious for pushing police crackdowns on immigrants.

Most bizarrely, he was involved in an email scandal, in which the then-senator allegedly used a fake account and name to spread attacks about a political rival.

"We know Ms. Spellings was a political appointee who has had nothing really to do with advancing academia," N.C. NAACP president William Barber told Ball. "Now it seems birds of a feather flock together."

And if there are no positions to fill, then she is intent to let her handlers create new positions, as with this newly created position:

So it begins: Yesterday, new UNC president Margaret Spellings announced the appointment of Andrew Kelly to a newly created position called "senior vice president for strategy and policy." The school will pay him $245,000 a year.

A UNC release notes that Kelly was a research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute from 2002-2005, and returned to AEI in 2009 as a research fellow in education policy studies. He is also the founder and director of AEI's Center on Higher Education Reform.  

Reactions have been swift.  This op-ed appeared today in the News and Observer by Michael Schwalbe:

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/op-ed/article81662092.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/op-ed/article81662092.html#storylink=cpy

The recent hiring of Andrew P. Kelly as the UNC system’s senior vice president for strategy and policy is a sign of what UNC system president Margaret Spellings and her Republican backers have in mind for the future of public higher education in North Carolina.

Kelly, who received his Ph.D. in political science from UC-Berkeley in 2013, comes to his $245,000 per year UNC system job from the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing think tank in Washington, D.C.

Like Spellings, Kelly has no experience as an educator, other than a stint as a graduate teaching assistant. Also like Spellings, he has ties to the Bush family, recently serving as a policy adviser to Jeb Bush’s failed presidential campaign.

The AEI, for which Kelly wrote about higher education policy, is the tool of its ultraconservative funders, which include the Olin, Scaife, Lynde and Harry Bradley, Adolph Coors and Smith Richardson Foundations. Other super wealthy supporters, including Charles and David Koch, give the AEI millions of dollars through dark money channels, such as DonorsTrust.

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/op-ed/article81662092.html#storylink=cpy

What donors get for their money is ideological support for a free-market, anti-regulation, anti-labor agenda. AEI “scholars” produce op-eds, reports and policy discussion papers that oppose raising the minimum wage, support voter ID laws, oppose single-payer health care, oppose tougher regulations on Wall Street banksters and deny climate change.

What comes out of the AEI is not scholarship but pseudo-scholarship tailored to advance the economic interests of its funders. This is the world from which Kelly comes to UNC, to undertake the task of making policies that stand to affect the quality of public higher education in North Carolina for generations to come.

In fairness, one might say that what matters more than where Kelly comes from are the ideas he brings with him. These ideas are easy to find. Kelly has published articles and edited books on how to reform higher education.

One big idea that Kelly pushes is that tuition has soared in recent decades because government loans to college students have provided an open spigot of money, leading to profligate spending by university administrators and giving them an irresistible incentive to keep raising tuition to further fuel that spending.

As a result of this vicious cycle, Kelly argues, affordability has suffered, universities have avoided accountability and low-quality institutions, as well as programs of dubious career value, have been kept artificially alive. The solution is to let the market operate as it should.

“Consumers,” which is Kelly’s term for parents and students, should be told of the likely monetary payoff of degrees in different fields from different institutions, so they can better decide how to spend their tuition dollars. There should also be cheaper alternatives to traditional classes and degree programs; for example, short-term, skills-focused online instruction.

What impedes these reforms? A major obstacle, Kelly says, is the current system of accreditation, which leaves power in the hands of faculty, who want only to keep competitors out of the market and preserve the status quo. As an alternative, Kelly suggests giving the accreditation role to state governments.

Curiously missing from Kelly’s analysis of rising tuition costs and college affordability is attention to the role played by a decline in direct state funding. In the 1970s, states on average provided about 75 percent of funding for public higher education. Today, the figure is about 25 percent. Tuition rates have risen to make up the difference.

In other words, affordability is now a problem because the burden of paying for college has been shifted onto the backs of middle-class families. Kelly ignores this, likely because of why the shift has occurred: the anti-tax and shrink-the-government policies championed by outfits like the American Enterprise Institute.

When self-proclaimed reformers are in league with those whose aims and policies have caused economic hardship for working-class and middle-class families, it’s hard to take seriously those reformers’ claims to be driven by concerns for affordability, though this rhetoric makes for good public relations.

The real goals of the AEI’s “billionaire class” sponsors in regard to public universities have long been clear: turn them into engines of profit making; use them to train scientists, managers, pro-business analysts, and professionals; and, to the extent possible, do not allow them to promote critical thought about the concentrations of wealth and power in America.

To his credit, Kelly seems to have recognized, at least at one time, that administrative bloat – the proliferation of highly paid presidents, vice presidents, vice chancellors and the like, along with armies of staff assistants – is part of what ails higher education and drives up costs. With his new job, he becomes part of that problem, too.

Michael Schwalbe is professor of sociology at North Carolina State University.

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/op-ed/article81662092.html#storylink=cpy

Margaret Spellings Equally Ignorant on Education and Civil Rights

The next time you hear one of the elite corporate know-nothings spouting about education being the new civil rights, please remind them that civil rights, 1) are not priced so that many cannot afford them, and 2) civil rights are transformative, rather than dehumanizing (see the KIPP Model).  

A clip from the Daily Tar-Heel that makes these points well:

....Spellings has had a busy week in the media, including her Feb. 29 response to the UNC Faculty Council, her March 1 appearance on “The State of Things” and an email to the entire UNC system. Spellings certainly seems aware of the discourse and codes one must know and use in order to secure a modicum of political alliance within higher education institutions — diversity and inclusion being near the top of the list. However, espousing sexy Twitter-ready aphorisms such as “education is the new civil right” will only take Spellings so far when she is administering a university system and not advising a campaign. 

First, civil rights are the rights of citizens based on their status as citizens without regard to financial means. Markets, on the other hand, by definition create elite hierarchies based on ability to pay. Spellings’ opening message set against her continued public embrace of free market lexicon staples such as “value proposition” and students as consumers troublingly straddles an ideological line. She needs to fall on one side convincingly to maintain credibility. Second, education being a civil right is not, in American history, quite “new.” It is in fact the relatively new assaults on education as a civil right by Spellings’ political party that need combating. 

If Spellings truly believes her statement, which is supported by her rhetorical commitment to access, affordability and value, she can show good faith by relentlessly requesting that Raleigh and state taxpayers find funding avenues that will maintain quality offerings and output while reducing tuition costs for in-state students, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds whom she specifically mentions in her system-wide email....

Read more: http://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2016/03/opinion-spellings-needs-to-further-clarify-positions
Quoted from The Daily Tar Heel

Corporate Tool, Margaret Spellings, Is Met with Walkouts on First Day

North Carolina students will never allow the Koch Brothers to destroy their university system:

On Margaret Spellings’ first day in office, hundreds of students and faculty members opted for a less traditional style of education — by walking out of their classes. The walkout — protesting UNC-system President Margaret Spellings’ first day on the job — was organized by the UNC-Chapel Hill BOG Democracy Coalition and Faculty Forward, among other organizations. 

 Protesters took to the steps of Wilson Library, wielding signs while select protesters spoke out about Spellings and her public record. Madeleine Scanlon, a UNC senior arrested at a Board of Governors meeting earlier this year, said the main goal of the walkout was to educate students across the UNC system about Spellings and the board. 

 “People don’t know who the Board of Governors are — they don’t understand why Margaret Spellings needs to go,” Scanlon said. Other walkouts were coordinated with other UNC-system schools. According to Ignite NC, a progressive grassroots organization, more than 5,000 students protested across six campuses. The UNC-Chapel Hill walkout focused on Spellings’ role in implementing No Child Left Behind, her tenure on the board of directors at the Apollo Education Group, Inc. — the parent company of the for-profit University of Phoenix — as well as her stance on LGBT issues and recent board policies affecting historically black colleges and universities.

Read more: http://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2016/03/as-unc-system-president-margaret-spellings-walks-in-students-walk-out

Koch Brothers' Gunslinger, John Fennebresque, Arrested at Charlotte Airport

At the behest of the John Birchers and Wall Street hustlers now controlling government in North Carolina, corporate crony and lawyer, John Fennebresque, was put in charge of firing UNC's eminently qualified former president, Tom Ross, and installing the unqualified corporate stooge, who has BS degree in political science. 

Two days ago Fennebresque was arrested trying to take a handgun onto a commercial jet at the Chartlotte airport.

Take a few minutes to watch the video below from a story in the News & Observer to see Fennebresque's feeble attempt to explain why Tom Ross, sitting to his right, was fired for no reason other than to put the Koch choice in charge of public higher ed in NC.

Margaret Spellings Hires Company to Provide Cover for Coming Onslaught at UNC

An anonymous billionaire has paid the bill for Margaret Spellings to hire the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) to conduct "a study" and make recommendations for business-friendly changes at UNC.

BCG has been described as an international consulting firm with "its own distinct and one-dimensional ideological framework, promoting a particular set of public policy choices."  BCG, in fact, is the brain trust that may be credited with the charter school system that sprang up in NOLA following Katrina.  From the News & Observer:

The study was Spellings’ idea. The first step, she said, is to get input “from our various customers and users,” including campuses, legislators, the business community, boards of trustees and others.

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/education/article53812025.html#storylink=cpy

Protesters Disrupt UNC Board of Governors Meeting

Other videos shot by participants here.  From Chapel Hill, NC:


   

End Spellings' UNC Presidency Before It Begins

Protests are guaranteed tomorrow at the UNC Board of Governors meeting:

The UNC Board of Governors picked Spellings in October, after holding an “emergency meeting” shortly before a new law kicked in that would have required the board to nominate three finalists before picking a new system president. 

The protest will take place during the board's meeting on Friday morning and is being organized by a handful of liberal groups, including the Faculty Forward Network, Greenpeace USA, Ignite NC, Progress NC and UnKoch My Campus. Students say that in addition to rescinding Spellings' appointment, they also want the board to stop holding meetings during exam and break periods, a practice they say fails to honor open-meetings laws.  

Spellings' appointment falls in line with other recent board decisions that have ruffled feathers, students and faculty say. "The Spellings issue has just brought a lot of other things to a head and is just the latest embodiment of the corporatization of higher education in the state," said Altha J. Cravey, a geography professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Spellings Defends Toxic NCLB Policies

Even though national test performance gains were higher before NCLB than after, and even though the achievement gaps between black and white/rich and poor remain gaping, and even though ACT scores are flat and SAT scores are at a ten year low, and even though child poverty has risen steadily over the past 15 years, and even though millions of our best teachers have been run out of teaching by unethical testing and pressure cooker accountability practices, and even though tens of thousands of communities across the country have lost their schools to corporate welfare charter reform schools, and even though  90+ percent of the nation's schools were failing by 2014 (based on Spellings' impossible definition of "adequate"), and even though a half-million parents last year opted their children out of the racist and classist tests that Margaret Spellings' policies inspired, even with all this, the bloviating cow, Margaret Spellings, yesterday defended the most damaging and irresponsible education policy in American history:

Spellings, a key architect of No Child Left Behind, made no apologies for an accountability system that is now vehemently derided by schools and parents. Many have that luxury, Spellings said, because it's not their children who are failed by public schools. School districts and board members are always ready with an excuse as to why some children, especially those in poverty, can't learn.

"It made people uncomfortable and it still makes people uncomfortable, this idea that adults need to do a better job serving our students," Spellings said. "How can we hold onto that outrage in our heads when only half of our minority students are getting out of high school? How can we hold that idea in our head with the notion that all our teachers are effective and pretty much all the schools are good, but half the kids aren't performing and our workforce is at risk?"

Outrage, indeed!  Under Spellings' watch, resegregation of schools escalated, labeling and sorting of children became standard school practice, child health deteriorated, school funding became more unfair, teaching became scripted, curriculum was canned, child stress soared as learning waned and play was banned in many schools, school privatization proliferated, and child poverty rose to an all time high. So yes, Margaret, I'm holding the rage.

Spellings' Preparation for UNC Job

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Spellings as President of UNC resulted from the North Carolina Tea Party Taliban's (TPT) political purging within the UNC system.  Art Pope, who functions as the chief stooge of those billionaire John Birchers, the Brothers Koch, led the effort to unseat the former UNC president, who was Democratic, experienced, and competent--three strikes against anyone running a public institution in line for corporate takeover. 

Below is a clip from a piece in The Nation, which points out two of Spellings' most recent exploits after leaving the White House that made her resume even more attractive to the TPT:

Spellings went on to work in the troubled for-profit industry after leaving the White House—an experience, she told UNC’s board of governors, that taught her “a lot about how we can serve our students and think of them as customers in providing a product in convenient ways for them.” Beginning in 2012 she served on the board of the Apollo Group, the parent company of for-profit chain University of Phoenix. That “diploma factory” is now under investigation by the Federal Trade Commission, in part for its aggressive recruiting of military veterans. Its online program has a graduation rate of just 7.3 percent, and the student loan default rate is up 5 percent from the national average.

Spellings also chaired the board of the Ceannate Corporation, a student loan–collection agency. It’s not surprising that she had connections there: During Spellings’s tenure the education department was accused of acting “as a wholly owned subsidiary” of the student-loan industry. Preying on student borrowers is lucrative business: profit margins for loan collectors average 30 percent. “Despite widespread calls to reform the student loan industry, Spellings and the Ceannate Corporation have simply profited off of it,” two UNC professors wrote in a recent op-ed. “Spellings’ defense of for-profit colleges [following her appointment] is perhaps just as disturbing as the predatory practices these institutions use to fleece students.”

Spellings Leader in NC Taliban War on Public Ed

In August Valerie Strauss posted a report by James Hogan on the effects of the Tea Party Taliban that seized control of North Carolina politics and its public education system in 2012.

Besides draconian cuts to everything from teacher positions to drivers' ed, the Bircher wing of corporate education reform has legalized vouchers and has uncapped the growth of both non-profit and for-profit charters.  Here a a clip from Hogan's report:

N.C. teachers are prohibited by law from unionizing, but they did have a common advocacy group in the North Carolina Association of Educators. In 2011, the legislature passed a law targeting how the group collects dues from member teachers.

Then-Governor Beverly Purdue vetoed it. In 2012, the law made its way back to Purdue, who vetoed it again–but the House overrode it during a sneaky, late-night vote. (The law was later found to be discriminatory, retaliatory, and a violation of free speech and thrown out by state courts.)

But with teacher’s main advocacy group effectively muzzled, the legislature was free to run rampant, and teachers quickly came under fire.

Teacher salaries fell to near the bottom among all states in the nation and worst in the South after five years with zero pay increases. And when Republicans finally acted to increase teacher pay, they claimed to make the biggest pay hike in state history–but in reality only bumped up paychecks by an average of $270 per year. When you factored inflation into the mix, teachers were losing money.

Meanwhile, Texas and Virginia started actively recruiting North Carolina teachers to go work in their states. It didn’t take much to convince Tarheel teachers to flee–especially after some teachers discovered they earned substantially less money than when they started thanks to inflation.

In case pitiful paychecks weren’t enough to deter teachers from returning to work, the legislature next took aim at teacher tenure. The Republican-led proposal initially was to eliminate tenure altogether, but eventually they came up with a plan that would grant teachers pay raises for giving up their career status. It was, as I wrote then, a clever way of getting rid of veteran teachers.

To add the greatest insult to injury, the anti-knowledge ideologues of the NC Taliban have put Margaret Spellings in charge of UNC and the 27 other state campuses in the NC public university system.
 
If nothing else, Spellings is consistent, and it didn't take long for Maggie to let her true colors show as the new prez of UNC.  Read it and weep.

President Spellings

Anyone with the intellect to appear brilliant to George W. Bush is probably not smart enough to stay out of the public eye.  The re-emergence of Margaret Spellings as president of a prestigious state university system proves as much.

Having ballooned her bank accounts since 2008 as she criss-crossed the nation serving on executive boards and offering corporate education consultation as chief proprietor of her modestly named company, Margaret Spellings, Inc., it appears that Spellings has once again been called upon by the billionaires to use her hammy fists and her drunk cowgirl persona to beat down one of the last remaining civilized institutions of our dying planet.

When Spellings left the White House, she carried with her the knowledge of how to become the most despised education official in the land to everyone, at least, who does not fly on a corporate jet.

Along with Bush's bagman, Sandy Kress, Spellings used her extensive knowledge (a B.S. in poly-sci) to craft an education policy for the nation that would deconstruct public education and hand out the remaining chunks to billionaires and their underemployed Ivy League drones.  By the time she left her office at ED, billions in ed funds were going into the pockets of Bush cronies, almost half of U. S. schools were on the NCLB failure list, and the charter school industry was draining public school budgets in 40 states.

A few of the other Bush accomplishment that Spellings oversaw:

Since NCLB became law in 2002, Bush budgets have underfunded NCLB by nearly $90 billion dollars (pdf). Head Start has been cut back by 11 percent. Career education programs, educational technology, and other programs like Reading is Fundamental have been zeroed out in Bush budgets. While cynically demanding that special ed students perform at the same levels as other students, $30 billion has been cut from the authorized amount in the 2004 IDEA Improvement Act. In short, the poor, the disabled, and the immigrant children have been sacrificed to make an ideological case against public schools and for vouchers and charters (even as research shows they are no better at producing test scores than the schools they would replace.

Let's not forget, too, that it was Spellings oversaw illegal interest payments to the student loan kingpins at Nelnet, and then in 2007 she went against her own Inspector General's recommendation in order to make sure the profiteers at Nelnet could keep $278,000,000 in illicit student loan interest payments.

But it was the work of the Spellings Commission that no doubt put Spellings at the top of the Koch heads' list of candidates for UNC president.  The Commission, which was headed by the surly Charles Miller (the John Bolton of higher education), offered a plan to turn higher education into research centers for corporate R&D, human capital training centers, and revenue streams for corporate contractors and student loan companies.  Let's remember, too, that the Spellings report was keen to create the same intrusive accountability procedures in higher ed that devastated K-12.

Perhaps it is time for the tenured faculty to finally get off their asses and to mobilize against the impending Spellings disaster.  It is now or never.

Broad Names Three New Board Members

Three new execs will join the Board of Directors for the Broad Center for the Management of School Systems. The current board includes Joel Klein, Barry Munitz, Dan Katzir, Arlene Ackerman, Richard Barth, Louis Gerstner, Jr., Maria Goodloe-Johnson, Wendy Kopp, Margaret Spellings, and Michelle Rhee. Yikes.

From Reuters:

Broad Center for the Management of School Systems Announces Three New Members of Board of Directors

Thu Oct 29, 2009 8:01am EDT

Broad Center for the Management of School Systems Announces Three New Members of Board of Directors

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 29 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- U.S. News and World Report Editor-in-Chief Mortimer Zuckerman, CityView Executive Chairman Henry G. Cisneros and Chicago Public Schools executive Melissa Megliola Zaikos have joined the board of directors of The Broad Center for the Management of School

Systems, the center announced today. They join 10 other board members who are advising the center as it develops talented urban education leaders across the country.

The Broad (rhymes with "road") Center for the Management of School Systems is a nonprofit organization dedicated to raising student achievement by recruiting, training and supporting executive talent from across America to become the next generation of urban school district leaders. The center runs two executive training programs: The Broad Superintendents Academy(www.broadacademy.org) and The Broad Residency in Urban Education(www.broadresidency.org). To date, The Broad Center has trained nearly 300 individuals to hold leadership and management positions in urban school districts.

The three new members of the board of directors will provide strategic counsel to The Broad Center as it seeks to increase the number of top executives trained and placed in urban school systems around the country working to raise student achievement district-wide and reduce chronic income and ethnic achievement gaps. The three new board members are:

-- Mortimer Zuckerman, chairman and editor-in-chief of U.S. News & World Report, publisher of the New York Daily News and chairman, Boston Properties

--Henry G. Cisneros, executive chairman of CityView, former president of Univision and former U.S. secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)

-- Melissa Megliola Zaikos, autonomous schools officer, Chicago Public Schools, and a former Broad Resident

"We are fortunate that Mort, Henry and Melissa have committed to helping the center improve its ability to develop effective leaders for our nation's largest school districts, and we appreciate their wisdom, insights and experience," said Eli Broad, founder of The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, which funds The Broad Center.

Zuckerman and Cisneros bring extensive executive experience leading some of the nation's largest and most successful media companies and public and private institutions. Megliola Zaikos, a former Broad Resident and former manager at Deloitte Consulting, currently serves as the line supervisor for 95 Chicago schools that have been granted increased autonomy by the school district. She will represent Broad Residency graduates on the board.

... [cont]

Zuckerman, Cisneros, and Zaikos will help guide the Broad Superintendents Academy and Broad Residency in Urban Education. Not a bad pick-up for Eli's henchmen, it's always nice to have a billionaire with a big media outlet on your side. This isn't the first time Eli and Cisneros have teamed up - Cisneros was named to the board of directors of KB Homes back in 2000, and the two men also teamed up for a massive housing project in 2000. As for Zaikos? She's worked as a Broad Resident in Chicago for a number of years, mostly on a Gates-sponsored project focused on redesigning the city's high schools.

Duncan To Begin NCLB Tour

Yesterday the Washington Post, the only national newspaper kept afloat by the testing industry, offered the testing industry's new leading stooge, Margaret Spellings, (move aside Rod Paige), a chance to paste her well-worn and practiced lies about NCLB into the editorial pages of the Post. And yesterday, Aaron Pallas at Gotham Schools wasted no time in making a liar of the liar in an understated and studious post. Here's a teaser:

The first figure below shows reading scores in grades 4 and 8 on the main NAEP from 1998 to 2007. (Keep in mind that the NAEP scale goes from 0 to 500, so this figure may exaggerate the size of the trends over time.) In the fourth grade, the average score increased by six points between 2000 and 2002, then stabilized, and finally increased by two points from 2005 to 2007. The 2007 average score is significantly higher than the scores in 2005, 2003, 2002 and 2000. In the eighth grade, the average score held steady between 1998 and 2002, and really hasn’t budged much since then. The 2007 average of 263 is significantly higher than the 2005 average of 262, but is identical to the 2003 average of 263, and is actually a point lower than the 2002 average of 264. The best summary here is that the scores have been essentially flat since 1998. [click chart below for better view]

Today the Post has Libby Quaid's news piece on Call-me-Arne's announced NCLB "listening" tour, which offers the Dunc a chance to sell national testing, teacher pay-per-score plans, endless data gathering, and corporate welfare charters--all in the name of hearing the people speak. A couple of clips:

Duncan gives the law credit for shining a spotlight on kids who need the most help. No Child Left Behind pushes schools to boost the performance of low-achieving students, a group that typically includes minority kids, English-language learners and kids with disabilities.

"Forevermore in our country, we can't sweep those huge disparities with outcomes between white children and Latino children and African-American children, we can't sweep those under the rug ever again," Duncan said.

That spotlight has been shining brightly, Arne, even for white folks like me and you, since Brown v Board of Education. For a while we paid attention to them, but when St. Reagan alighted in Washington, we began to look, instead, at how Civil Rights and school integration screwed up our schools. Since then, we have been working hard to shine the spotlight elsewhere, away from the poverty and racism that created the disparities, preferring to focus the interrogation lamp, rather, on the victims and on the only American public institution remaining that was created with the vision of educating children of all classes together.

So sure, Arne, we can sweep it under the rug, just as long as the goal of ending poverty is pushed aside by efforts to blame children, teachers, and schools for the effects of poverty that your Administration continues to have plenty of empty "empathy" for. No problem.

Yet Duncan has many criticisms of No Child Left Behind, and he has plenty of company. Opponents insist the law's annual reading and math tests have squeezed subjects like music and art out of the classroom and that schools were promised billions of dollars they never received.

Critics also say the law is too punitive: More than a third of schools failed to meet yearly progress goals last year, according to the Education Week newspaper.

That means millions of children are a long way from reaching the law's ambitious goals. The law pushes schools to improve test scores each year, so that every student can read and do math on grade level by the year 2014.

"What No Child Left Behind did is, they were absolutely loose on the goals," Duncan told the Education Writers Association, meeting in Washington. "But they were very tight, very prescriptive on how you get there.

"I think that was fundamentally backwards," he said.

Duncan said the federal government should be "tight" on the goals, insisting on more rigorous academic standards that are uniform across the states. And he said it should be "much looser" in terms of how states meet the goals.

The education community is watching closely to see just what Duncan means by "tight" and "loose." So far, the administration has offered few clues.

Is there some kind of thought disorder going on here? Is the impossible goal of 100% proficiency by 2014 not impossiblie enough?? And excuse me, Arne, but this business of "looser" in terms of how states get to your "more rigorous" standards is the same philosophy W. sold in 2001. A quote from Bush's original NCLB proposal available here:

If schools are to be held to high standards, they must have the freedom to meet those standards (p. 7).

Spellings Gets an Earful in Vegas

A newly-tinted and unusually well-fed Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings, has nothing to show for her eight years of unceasing threats, sanctimonious sanctions, and unfunded mandates, except for the fact that public school systems of America are even more strapped for cash than they were eight years ago. She continues to spout her unrepentant bromides and to offer a 99.9% tin ear on everything NCLB.

While Paige and Spellings doled out billions since 2002 to the testing-technology complex and their crooked cronies of the textbook-tutoring industry, public schools have been melting down under the steam heat of impossible testing targets and sanctions designed by the enemies of public education. Nonetheless, Spellings continues even to the end, in a fashion that has made her a soulmate of the Simpleton Decider, to proclaim the virtues on the most disastrous education policy ever conceived at the national level. According to Spellings, NCLB has made it possible for school systems to better target their freeze-dried budgets.

Texas cannot reclaim this incompetent hag fast enough. It would seem the folks in Las Vegas agree:

The federal No Child Left Behind Act, an education law intended to improve student achievement, can also help public schools weather the tough economic climate, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said Tuesday.

The Clark County School District, for instance, is preparing for anticipated reductions of $120 million in state funding next year.

Armed with the student test data gathered by federal mandate, Spellings said, educators can go to lawmakers and say: "This is where we are, this is what we need, and this is who needs help."

Spellings, who was in Las Vegas to speak at the Federal Student Aid Conference at Bally's, said the economic crisis is forcing public schools to look carefully at how resources are allocated. Information on school performance can be used to set budget priorities.

"As discouraging as it can be, it's an opportunity to right the ship and make sure we're spending the money on the things that are absolutely essential."

. . . .

During a news conference, Spellings insisted that educators can use the information on school performance to set budget priorities "so we can be a lot smarter with the limited resources we have."

No Child Left Behind, enacted in 2001, calls for schools to have all students performing at grade level by 2014. The federal act is often criticized by those who see it as an unfunded mandate that places too much emphasis on testing and call it punitive for labeling under-performing schools as failures.

Spellings said Tuesday that she doesn't understand the criticism. She said the legislation was intended to create more awareness and force necessary change.

"It just says these are the facts ma'am," said Spellings, whose term ends with the Bush administration.

Spellings said she will continue to advocate for No Child Left Behind.

Spellings came under criticism Tuesday after speaking to the conference of financial aid advisers. Audience members criticized both student loan programs and her leadership. . . .

Spellings Planning Pumpkin Wrap Spa Treatment

From Austin's statesman.com:

. . . .Spellings, who has worked for George W. Bush throughout his presidency and when he was Texas governor, said she hopes to return to the Lone Star State after her daughter graduates from high school in 2010.

Is a book in her future? "I don't know. I'm planning to go to the spa." That would be Lake Austin Spa Resort, where Spellings recommends the pumpkin wrap.

Her travels have convinced her that Asia, for instance, "is on fire with improving education." By contrast, she sees complacency in parents of students in affluent school districts in the United States. And she says parents of minority students, whose high school and college graduation rates lag sharply behind those of their white counterparts, need to get mad. . . .

I think they just did, Maggie--it was called Election Day!

Margaret Spellings Beats the Bushes For Work

From the Wall Street Journal:

Many of the roughly 3,000 political appointees of President George W. Bush are beating the bushes harder than expected for post-election employment.

. . . .

One high-level Bush appointee who has yet to launch his job search said colleagues are alarmed by the weak job market. "They are getting a lot less than they expected," he said.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, for example, has signaled possible interest in leading a business, one knowledgeable person says. But a mid-sized industrial business seeking a CEO recently declined to consider her because of her lack of corporate experience, as well as her close ties to the president, that person says. Ms. Spellings has been advising President Bush on education issues since he was governor of Texas. A spokeswoman says Ms. Spellings intends to remain in education. . . . .

How about something entrepreneurial that fits your credentials, Secretary Spellings. I'm thinking, umm. Got it:

Maggie's Fireworks and Bait Shop
Crawford Texas
We say, go fish!

Send us your own suggestions. We will pass them on.

Special Comment: Margaret Spellings

Margaret Lamontagne Spellings has come a long way from her humble beginnings as a legislative activist paid to hector public education supporters in the Texas Legislature. With a bachelor's degree in poli-sci and a teaching resume that is limited to a single stint as tutor on education issues to a distinctively non-curious George the Governor of Texas, she has risen to represent the neocon ruling model that insists upon political fealty above competence, ruthlessness over morality, ideology above truth, private aggrandizement over the public good.

With her fellow NCLB designer Sandy Kress working under the watchful eye of Karl Rove, who previously hired her to tutor the Governor, these core miseducators put together the infrastructure for an education bill aimed to achieve the conservative goals of education privatization, even without the school vouchers that unsuspecting Democrats strutted about getting stripped from the NCLB Act.

As Elizabeth Debray has documented, Spellings and the inner circle knew that the impossible 100 percent proficiency targets would accomplish over time what conservatives would have preferred to get done with the imposition of vouchers on the front end of the Bush reign. Rather than immediate conservative gratification, the Spellings testing requirements offered the kind of torturous schooling, a pedagogical variety of slow-motion waterboarding, that would eventually break down the will of teachers and public school supporters, thus opening up the market for the tutoring corporations, the charter profiteers, and the non-profit corporate brainwashing outfits like KIPP.

Now at the end of the Spellings reign of terror and half-way to the 2014 Judgment Day, 4 out of 10 public schools in America are on her NCLB failure list. Special ed children and English language learners who can't read the test questions are tested right along with the rest, including millions of children disabled by poverty. The poorest neighborhoods, in fact, are commanded to perform at the same level as the schools in the leafy suburbs. No excuses. And no extra resources, either.

Since NCLB became law in 2002, Bush budgets have underfunded NCLB by nearly $90 billion dollars (pdf). Head Start has been cut back by 11 percent. Career education programs, educational technology, and other programs like Reading is Fundamental have been zeroed out in Bush budgets. While cynically demanding that special ed students perform at the same levels as other students, $30 billion has been cut from the authorized amount in the 2004 IDEA Improvement Act. In short, the poor, the disabled, and the immigrant children have been sacrificed to make an ideological case against public schools and for vouchers and charters (even as research shows they are no better at producing test scores than the schools they would replace.

Recently when fielding a question concerning the burgeoning number of schools not making the AYP (Adequate Yearly Progres) cut, Mrs. Spellings limply responded with "pretty much every organization needs improvement." Yes, you are correct, Mrs. Spellings, and "pretty much every organization" accepts this fact, except yours, it seems. Pretty much every other organization does not face closure or reconstitution or some other form of demolition if the organization does not reach a level of improvement that is impossible to attain.

As a result of your manipulation, Mrs. Spellings, it is now the public school organization that has lost its most ethical and imaginative professionals on the road to "improvement." It is now only the public school organization that, in seeking the impossible, has had its purposes hijacked so that relevance, caring, and humane values have been extinguished along the way to the unreachable. It is now only the public school organization, Mrs. Spellings, that has so focused on unattainable improvements that children have become alienated prisoners in an institution that blames them for the failure that you, Mrs. Spellings, have created. It is only the public school organization whose resources have been reduced while your scheduled impossible demands have been racheted up (even though there is no level of funding that would make the 100% proficiency goal achievable). It is only the public school organization, Mrs. Spellings, whose most vulnerable and needy member units have been cynically sacrificed on the ideological altar of privatization, even as the empty rhetoric of rescue has been unceasing from your lips.

So yes, Margaret, if I may call you Margaret, we are in agreement: "pretty much every organization needs improvement," including, I will add in caps, YOUR OWN. I would argue, in fact, that your organization "pretty much" needs an entire makeover. The good news is that your imminent departure, along with your reluctant former pupil, will make that improvement possible. Perhaps, then, we can get on the road to the real work of public school improvement, rather than the ceaseless undercutting of "pretty much" the entire system. I am sure that the competent and hard working civil servants at the Department of Education will be glad to see you off.