Will a Koch Brothers Handout Save John Tedesco's House?

It's been quite a week for Little John.  On MLK Day, the same day Raleigh's mayor and North Carolina's governor were attending a Martin Luther King Prayer breakfast and calling out Tedesco and the Gang of Five as "way off track," Tedesco was appearing on Fox Business Network, where he defended the re-segregation school policy as good business. 

. . . Tedesco told Gerri Willis of the Willis Report that the decision is primarily a "money-saving issue."

"We spend $72 million a year on a fleet of 925 buses for transportation... We spend a lot of time getting 5 and 6-year-old kids on bus stops at 5:30, 6:30 in the morning on one side of the county to commute an hour to the other side of the county with 10 kids on a bus here and 10 kids on a bus there, so it's somewhat inefficient," Tedesco told the Willis Report.

Tedesco did not tell Gerri, nor did she ask, how many Wake County children were bused more than five miles from their homes during the days of socioeconomic integration.  Or who was bused.  From the NYTimes in 2005:

Of the county's 139 elementary, middle and high schools, all but 22 are within the 40 percent guideline, according to the district's data. Some are onlya few percentage points above the guideline, while others are significantly higher.

The overwhelming majority of the 120,000 children in the district go either to a local school or a school of their choice, officials said. Slightly more than 85 percent of students attend a school within five miles of home and another 12 percent or so voluntarily attend magnet or year-round schools.  

Although the figures can be calculated many ways, Mr. McNeal says about 2.5 percent - or about 3,000 children - are assigned to schools for economic balance or to accommodate the district's growth by filling new schools or easing overcrowding in existing ones.

Most of those bused for economic diversity tend to be low-income, he said. 

Then Tuesday, Tedesco and the Gang of 5 (or is it now 4?) were mock-rified by Stephen Colbert's withering satire during "The Word" segment.  Tedesco responded with the following statement, which sounds like something from the Koch-funded John Locke Foundation think tank (think John Birch Society without hoods):

"While it was skewed and certainly out of context I thought it was hilarious and ultimately I think we need to laugh sometimes. In this heated climate we've recently heard calls to move beyond the rhetoric and I think when we laugh together we can begin to talk together," said Tedesco.

Too bad Tedesco doesn't think we can go to school together. 

But then, Tedesco's world is quite integrated enough without the noisy and nasty poor causing trouble for white children trying to get an education.  No doubt Tedesco's new superintendent (and Fox News commentator), General Tata, would agree.

And then on Wednesday, the Progressive Pulse reported that Tedesco's home in Garner, NC is about to foreclosed:

In court filings, Tedesco’s Garner home on Rock Fish Lane had foreclosure proceedings started against it on Jan. 4, according to public court documents found in the Wake County Courthouse. A May 4^th hearing is scheduled at the Wake County Clerk of Courts office, with a foreclosure sale date on the courthouse steps taking place later in the month, on May 25.

Apparently, when Tedesco stepped forward to become a full-time mouthpiece of the Koch Brothers' resegregation initiative, he expected something more than the $11,000 he collects from being a school board member.  And so he gave up his day job with Big Brothers and Big Sisters, hoping perhaps that his media attention would bring cash as well as stardom.

And then yesterday, Wake County Republican Chair, Susan Bryant, went on the record blaming liberals for Tedesco losing his job and his subsequent financial meltdown:

RALIEGH (WTVD) -- The Wake County chapter of the Republican Party is asking for financial help for school board member John Tedesco. 

In an email sent out Thursday, Wake County Republican chair Susan Bryat says Tedesco had to leave his job at Big Brothers and Big Sisters after he was elected because "liberals threatened to cut off funding for the organization unless he was fired."

"As a result, he fell behind in his mortgage payments and now faces foreclosure," said Bryat.

She also calls out WRAL-TV for "compound[ing] the tragedy by accusing him of fiscal mismanagement."

Tedesco is one of the members of the school board majority that voted to do away with Wake County's socioeconomic diversity policy in favor of sending students to schools closer to their homes.

Tedesco's school board job only pays about $11,000 a year.

"He lost his job because he was doing what we elected him to do. Why not show him your support by sending him a birthday card and gift to let him know how much we appreciate his sacrifice, and help him when he needs it the most," said Bryat.

Here is what happened last April when he quit his job:

Tedesco worked as chief development officer for Big Brothers Big Sisters for a little more than three years. Although he earlier acknowledged that opponents of his school-board policies had contacted his employer and threatened to withhold donations, Tedesco said Friday that those threats were politically motivated and those who made them had not donated to Big Brothers Big Sisters in the past.

Since the election and his ascension in the public eye, Tedesco said, no one had pulled donations from the organization.

And now, today, Little John emerges magnanimous, urging those millions of donations to be given to Big Brothers Big Sisters:

It looks like Wake County school board member John Tedesco will be avoiding any potential ethics concerns by turning down gifts being solicited in his name by the Wake County Republican Party.

As noted in today's article, Tedesco said he didn't know in advance that Wake GOP Chairwoman Susan Bryant would send out the request Thursday. Tedesco said people should instead send gifts and donations to his former employer, Big Brothers Big Sisters of the Triangle.

“While I appreciate their generous offer, I can’t accept it,” Tedesco said. “I know there are many other people having difficulties right now.”

But Tedesco said he'll definitely like to hear about any potential job offers he can explore.

Legally, there would have been nothing stopping him from taking any gifts.

Any potential jobs out there??  Could there be a future John at News Corp. after the next school board election?  How about the guy who gets coffee for Joel Klein?  Until then, stay tuned.

Little John Tedesco Is A Big Liar

The Koch Brothers, the John Birchers, and the segregationists of the John Locke Society will not be satisfied until American society returns to apartheid schooling and segregated living.  Toward that end, they have dispatched Little John Tedesco, mouthpiece for Wake County's Gang of Five, to other states to spread poisonous lies about Wake County, specifically, and socioeconomic integration, generally.

Below is a proper smackdown by Patty Williams:

Patty Williams is the coordinator for Great Schools in Wake, a coalition of WakeUp Wake County.
John Adams famously wrote, "Facts are stubborn things," and indeed they are for Wake County School Board member John Tedesco, who is now spreading his false conclusions about Wake County schools on a national scale.

In an OpEd column by conservative Minnesota Star Tribune columnist Katherine Kersten, Tedesco claims that “busing for diversity” failed in our county, and Kersten gave him free reign to misinform her readers.

Kersten was writing in opposition to a plan by the Eden Prairie Board of Education to use socio-economic status as a factor in student assignment—the not-so-radical idea that education leaders should work to avoid the creation of high poverty schools.

A mountain of data shows that where there is concentrated poverty in a school, (1) recruiting and retaining high quality teachers and administrators is difficult, (2) student achievement suffers, and; (3) it costs more to educate each student.  And contrary to Tedesco’s statement that “racial segregation has increased” in Wake County schools, a recent report published by Harvard University (“Segregation and Exposure to High‐Poverty Schools in Large Metropolitan Areas”) ranks Wake County among the least segregated metro areas for Black and Hispanic students.

Tedesco speaks against Wake’s past policies, but, in fact, fewer than five percent of students in Wake County are bused to avoid creating high-poverty schools.  Years ago, school board members had the foresight to use socio-economic diversity as one of several criteria for student assignment.

As a result of this focus on maintaining healthy and balanced schools, only 15 of Wake’s 163 schools have a population of students who qualify for free and reduced lunch in excess of 60 percent.

Counter to the claim that the “affluent are fleeing to private schools,” North Carolina Department of Public Instruction data demonstrates that the percentage of students attending public school has remained remarkably stable over the past decade.  In fact, from 2005-2010, Wake County netted an additional 3,110 students coming from charter, private, and home schools.

According to historical data, Tedesco’s assertion that test scores have dropped every year is also without merit.  Achievement gaps among subgroups, including economically disadvantaged, Black, and Hispanic students have narrowed, as measured by the results of end of year testing.  And our dropout rate is among the lowest in North Carolina (3.47% for the 2008-09). Graduation rates have dropped—but by a mere 1.1 percent overall over the past four years, during a period of rapid growth and overcrowding in the district.  During the same period, graduation rates for economically disadvantaged students have increased.

Clearly, there is a great deal of room for improvement in student achievement in Wake County—show me a school district anywhere in the nation for which this isn’t true. We know we can and must do more for our Black and limited English proficiency students.  Yet, rather than focus on student achievement, Tedesco and his like-minded board members have used an imaginary busing issue to demonize and politicize our school district at the expense of the children they were elected to serve.

Wake County schools have not been torn apart by “income-based busing,” as Tedesco claims.  In fact 94.5% of the nearly 40,000 parents surveyed at his request earlier this year indicated that they were satisfied with their students’ assignment.  Tedesco even called our schools an “academic mess.” This from a man elected to govern our schools!  We have excellent schools, and a strong community whose passion for education is at an all time high.  Many parents who voted for Tedesco and his majority cohort were looking for stability in assignments—not a complete and systematic destruction of the core values that drove the assignment policy.  The only academic mess created is entirely due to the Board majority’s lack of focus on the classroom.

Finally, to counter the claim of Tedesco’s alleged “efficiency mess,” one need look no further than to the conservative Civitas Institute, whose recent study found Wake County to rank in the top quartile of cost-effective schools: “Wake County’s per-graduate cost was found to be nearly $20,000 below the average per-graduate cost” among North Carolina schools.

Sadly, student bullying has been a topic that we’ve heard all too frequently about of late.  In Wake County, we are witnessing a new form of bullying in the relentlessly negative, highly charged rhetoric that Tedesco uses to taunt the public into thinking that our public schools are failing.  I know many school districts that would envy a 78.4% graduation rate, a nationally acclaimed magnet program, and an average bus ride of 17 minutes in a county that spans 831 square miles.

Research shows conclusively that, in fact, using socio-economic diversity as a means of improving academic achievement boosts the achievement of all students. Just remember—diversity is the complexion of a 21st-century world.

But rest easy, those who care for children in Minnesota. Tedesco’s views did not prevail with a majority in the Eden Prairie schools system. In the end, their leaders were braver than Wake County’s current education regime:  Eden Prairie’s Board of Education voted 5-4 to use socioeconomic status as one deciding factor in assigning students.  They are headed in the moral direction—against creating high poverty schools or segregated schools.  Why can’t we say the same in Raleigh and Wake County?

Tea Party Celebrates Two Big Victories This Week

The Tea Party celebrated another victory last evening for the corporate virtue of selfishness and the good ole era of Jim Crow exclusion.  With the nomination of Rand (can you guess the origin of that name) Paul, self-described libertarian, the Tea Party faithful moved another inch toward their twin goals of unrestrained greed and racial purity.

Some people seem shocked at Mr. Paul's public pronouncements in support of legalized discriminatory behavior, but these backward-embracing views are exactly the values that won him the support of the conservative base and corporations like Fox News that continually feed the hatred and misinformation of the base.  It is no surprise that Paul would mention Kentucky one time in his acceptance speech and the Tea Party nine times.  He owes his victory to the powers of unrestrained greed and racist manipulation, rather than to the good people of Kentucky.

This week had another Tea Party victory of sorts, when the Wake County School Board took the official vote to end the largest and most successful diversity school program in America.  It was, after all, the Tea Party's money and organization (and a pitiful voter turnout) that allowed the social antiquarians to establish the Gang of Five Republicans that brought down socioeconomic integration in Wake County Schools. 

The spokesman of the new majority is the dangerous fool, John Tedesco, who listens to enough talk radio to have his talking points down pat, even if they sometimes get a bit mixed-up.  In a recent comment on the return to segregation based on a neighborhood school policy that will mirror the segregated housing patterns of Wake County, Tedesco said:

"We're letting . . .  families go to the school nearer where they live," said Tedesco, the board member. "What's wrong with that?"

In most of Tedesco's public comments, however, he attempts to mask the racism with a saccharine concern for the "all children:" 

"We need to focus on all, all, all students," member John Tedesco said. The district has told some poor students they cannot go to their neighborhood schools, "and I don't think that's fair." 

Yes, yes, all children.  There are other more outrageous examples, such as this one in this clip from the Progressive Pulse that truly captures the Tedesco logic that was in full view leading up to Tuesday night's vote:

It’s one thing to simply be against public policies that intentionallly promote socioeconomic diversity. It’s quite another to purport to base one’s opposition on, of all things, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education! But that’s just what Wake County School Board member John “Tea Party” Tedesco attempted to do tonight as part of the debate surrounding the Board’s final vote to eliminate diversity as a factor in student assignment.

Tedesco attempted to draw a tortured analogy between the situation of a lower income student in Wake County who is transported to an integrated, lower poverty school further from his or her home . . . to one of the plainitiffs in Brown case who was barred from attending an all-white school near her home becasue of her race.

Here’s Tedesco:

So what we’ve done in this county at some time now, is told many of our children and many of our families even if they live near a school, because their mom and dad doesn’t have enough money in their pocket, they’re not welcome to go to school with their friends and their neighbors. And I just don’t find that fair. I find that inherently unfair. That if a section of children should exceed that fifty per cent or fifty-one per cent or fifty-two percent, that we have to tell that two per cent ‘you got to get on a forced bus ride out of town cause you’re not welcome in your neighborhood.’”

Got that? This is the person drafting THE PLAN to totally remake one of the largest and most successful school systems in the United States: a man who has such a twisted and confused view of American history that he’s willing to cite the most important anti-segregation case ever handed down by the Supreme Court as grounds for intentionally re-segregating the schools!

But the real Tedesco can be seen here in this clip speaking up to the microphones at, yes, a Tea Party rally back in April, just shortly after the initial vote to end socioeconomic integration in the Wake County Schools.  Note the wildly popular return to segregated schools is masked by the phrase of "ending a generation's worth of social engineering."