Below are more than enough reasons why Daniel Elsener needs removed from the Indiana State Board of Education now. This information comes from my soon-to-be-released book, Hoosier School Heist. Below the entry please also read the statement from the Education Community Action Team & Parent Power Indianapolis, and be sure to email the necessary individuals listed below to voice your protest against Elsener and the state board:
v Daniel Elsener is Indiana governor Mike
Pence’s henchman on the Indiana State Board of Education and is trying to take
all power away from the democratically-elected superintendent of education
Glenda Ritz. Elsener is a Republican. This means the Indiana State Board of Education has more Republicans onboard than Democrats, which is against Indiana law.
v Daniel Elsener is the former leader of
Christel DeHaan’s Family Foundation.
Former ousted Indiana superintendent of education Tony Bennett resigned in
Florida recently for rigging the grade of DeHaan’s charter school while he was
in Indiana because she was a big campaign donor.
v Daniel Elsener is the president of
Marian University, a Catholic school which runs the Turnaround Leadership
Academy.
v In order to work with twenty-two
so-called “failing” public schools, Elsener and Marian’s Turnaround Leadership
Academy used a $500,000 grant from the Indiana Department of Education in 2010
which was rewarded because of political connections. Elsener was Tony Bennett’s wife’s boss when
she worked for Teach for America at the campus and the grant-deal went down.
v At Elsener’s Turnaround Leadership
Academy, Teach for America, the New Teacher Project, Elli Lilly, right-wing
think tanks, and Marian University train the corporate leaders who will hire
temporary teachers to replace veterans when the state turns over their schools
to for-profit companies who all have ties to or are campaign donors of Hoosier
politicians.
v When first starting Elsener’s Turnaround
Leadership Academy, Marian University consulted with Rob Smith, Lilly
Foundation’s president and local Teach for America board member, Teach for
America’s Jason Kloth (now Indy Mayor Ballard’s deputy mayor of education), and
the Christian Right Kerns Family Foundation which paid the Sagamore Institute (formerly
run by Mitch Daniels’ sister) to help align Marian and Notre Dame’s principal
training programs with the Indiana Department of Education’s MBA-based
guidelines.
v Now managing school voucher money for
parents and working hard to get the books of Mitch Daniels’ racist friend Bill
Bennett taught in the Indiana schools, the Sagamore Institute is a free-market faith-based
pseudo-research group which received state money to work with meth addicts and
whose founding chairman was Indiana senator Dan Coats.
v For the MBA-shaped training program,
the hundreds of millions of dollars-strong,
liberal-promoted Teach for America seemed fine with Marian using content
from the Center for Catholic Stewardship for its academy curriculum and had no problem being a part of the Christian Right-funded
program.
v To pump out corporate school leaders to
manage public schools like businesses, Elsener’s Marian now also teams with the
Bradley Foundation-funded George W. Bush Institute’s Alliance to Reform
Education Leadership and hired Steve Farr, from Teach for America’s national
office, to its faculty.
v Elsener and Marian University teamed with the New Teacher Project
and former Indy Mayor Peterson’s the Mind Trust in 2007 to form the
Indianapolis Teaching Fellows program, which, according to the New Teacher
Project website, has trained 300 temporary teachers for Indianapolis and
Northwest Indiana. Ariela Rozman, the
New Teacher Project’s CEO, sits on the Mind Trust board. From October 2011 to the end of September
2012, Rozman made a hair short of $300,000 in total compensation to plant
short-term teachers across the country, even though she comes from the
consulting and pharmaceutical industries and has no teaching experience.
v Charles Schlegel teaches at Elsener and
Marian University’s Academy for Teaching and Learning Leadership which houses
the Turnaround Leadership Academy.
Ironically, as principal at Wayland Middle School in Massachusetts,
Schlegel violated 2008 campaign laws when he sent emails through his school
address to parents, begging them to support a local property tax increase to
fund the schools. Now back in Indiana,
Schlegel—a Teach for America operative—made $120,000 for running the
libertarian Challenge Foundation Academy Indy in the tax year ending in June
2011. Mindy, Schlegel’s wife, was the
senior advisor for teacher quality at the Indiana Department of Education,
where she helped rewrite the teacher evaluation method. A Democrats for
Education Reform hedge-fund group member, she also sits on the board of the
Indianapolis KIPP charter school with Claire Fiddian-Green, who is a former
Mind Trust and Indiana Charter School Board leader and now works for Mike Pence
to help privatize Indiana public education.
Mindy, too, is a former Teach for America member.
v In April 2011, a Teach for America
graduate attending Elsener and Marian University’s Academy for Teaching and
Learning Leadership was featured in Mitch Daniels’ Aiming Higher PAC’s
anti-teacher seniority TV ad. A Teach
for America alumnus and Harshman Magnet Middle School teacher, Pam Heuer
protested that although she raised her students’ reading scores, she was laid
off from the Indianapolis school district in 2009 because she was the last one
hired. The school district rehired Heuer
before the next school year started, but Daniels’ ad producers didn’t mind
using Heuer for their mostly out-of-state-funded agenda. Now a manager for
Teach for America in Indianapolis, Heuer was invited to the Bill Gates-financed
NBC Education Nation, a free
promotion week for charter schools, school vouchers, and anti-seniority
billionaires, where she elbowed with Arne Duncan and Michelle Rhee. Heuer has also made videos for Stand for
Children, another Mind Trust/Joyce Foundation-funded anti-teacher seniority
clique. The Hollywood fantasy Waiting for
Superman director, Davis Guggenheim, touted Heuer as one of the top ten
teachers in America.
v Then there’s Marian University student and Indiana
Charter School Board member Jamie
Garwood. When the Indiana State Ethics Commission
ruled that Garwood could not participate in the authorizing board discussions
concerning the Urban League’s charter school application for Fort Wayne, since
she was the Urban League’s director of development, the Indiana Charter School
Board approved Urban League’s request to allow American Quality Schools to run
the charter school anyway, after Garwood promoted it on TV.
Elsener needs removed from the Indiana
State Board of Education, and the board and Mike Pence need to let Glenda Ritz
do what the people of Indiana elected her to do: to stop the crony capitalism
and government-corporate-theocratic takeover of Indiana public education.
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Statement
from the Education Community Action Team & Parent Power Indianapolis
Glenda Ritz already has the
strategic plan via her campaign platform that Indiana voters approved, Mr.
Elsner. Time for you to resign because
you are not representing the people of Indiana, are wasting SBOE resources and
tax payer's money!
Daniel Elsner blatantly has
disrespected the majority of Indiana voters who have voted Glenda Ritz into the
office of Superintendent of Public Instruction in Indiana when he nominated
himself as head of a new SBOE committee to come up with the strategic plans for
Indiana's education. In addition, many
reports have come forth concerning his disrespectful behavior towards Glenda
Ritz in SBOE meetings. These are not
only grabs for power from the Marian University President but are very converse
to the University's very own Franciscan Values: dignity
of the individual, peace
and justice, reconciliation,
responsible
stewardship. Doug Martin's upcoming book outlines many of the affronts to Marian University's values in which
Elsner has partaken. It is time to demand his resignation from the SBOE and ask
the Marion University's Cabinet why they have a leader who does not value their
values.
http://www.marian.edu/about-marian/leadership/cabinet
