The Gray/Henderson Social Justice Minstrel Show

Since Mayor Gray was brought to office last November by angry voting parents and teachers disgusted with the arrogant puppets, Fenty and Rhee, he has gone from sounding tough on the corporate oligarch containment and control plan for poor children to performing a deep bow to the billionaires who have let him know who runs DC and DC Schools.  In January, Gray was critical of the Gates-Broad teacher evaluation scheme based on test scores, but now, not so much. Not nearly so much, as Bill Turque at WaPo reports:

Gray said at a forum on school reform Jan. 15 that there was a significant difference between teaching at Stanton Elementary in Southeast Washington, where 90 percent of the 269 students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch (a common barometer of household poverty), and Horace Mann Elementary in Northwest Washington, where none of the students meet the guidelines for subsidized lunch.

“That’s a very different challenge,” he said then. “And frankly, I’m not convinced that we have figured out yet how, with an evaluation system that covers all teachers across the city, that you account for the social challenges that inevitably are to be addressed.”

Asked Wednesday whether he had followed up with Henderson, Gray said he had but deferred to her.

She said that under no circumstances would she support changes to IMPACT that would hold teachers to different standards if they worked in schools with high concentrations of children from low-income homes.

“We will never support an evaluation system which allows teachers in challenged areas to teach less than teachers in other areas,” said Henderson, who took a leading role in shaping IMPACT as Rhee’s deputy for “human capital.” “In fact, we owe it to those students to ensure that we maintain a high standard,” she said.

Asked whether he was “on board” with Henderson’s view, Gray said: “I’m on board with supporting the chancellor.”

Does Henderson and her corporate brain trust believe that people are so stupid as to believe that maintaining high standard for all children means we can expect all children to perform the same to the same standard?  Are we to give blind students books for the sighted simply because seeing children use them to their benefit?  Are we to believe, as Plato did in ancient Greece, that women may become guardians and warriors only if they can demonstrate the same physical strengths as men?  Or should we return to the day when we told girls that they can play varsity basketball if they make the boys' team?

When we look at Civil Rights history, including Title IX, we see repeated examples of the Courts and other sane people deciding that in order to treat people equally, we sometimes must treat them differently.  Or as John Dewey said, it says nothing about the deficiency of beef steak that we do not feed it to infants.

And yet, that is exactly what Henderson would have teachers to do.  And if the children whose unique disability that results from soul-and-body corroding poverty do not respond like the pink-cheeked children of the leafy suburbs, then it is the teacher and the children who are to be blamed.  The end result: the behavioral screws are tightened on children as they sink deeper into docile failure, and teachers are turned into goats and/or prison guards.  What could be more socially just than that for an out-of-control capitalist regime that must keep urban America entirely diverted by a manufactured failure based on entirely phony measurements? 

Henderson and Gray have defined their roles as just another pair of puppets dancing a minstrel show of social justice in blackface, whose strings are managed by the anti-democratic forces that must be sent packing if America and the world are to survive.

Parents and teachers of DC:  say yes to humane schools, and no to the penal pedagogy plan that continues under the new puppets.

Tom Nida, DC Bankster and Charter School Board Chair

The open sewer of charter school corruption will be a major challenge for Mayor Vincent Gray's new administration in DC.  Having been run for years now as a source for loan portfolio building by the bank where the DC Charter Board President, Tom Nida, is employed, Gray must decide where to draw the line between public funding of zero tolerance charter schools and the private profits by banksters and charter school CEOs. 

In 2009, alone, the collective net profit by DC charters was $29,000,000.  In the meantime, DC children go to these total compliance corporate madrassahs without the benefit of school libraries, clinics, gyms, or even cafeterias.

Bill Turque has the latest installment on the continuing scam, and here is a clip that captures the moral repugnance by those who prefer to keep public schools under the oversight and governance of the public:

. . . . The debate over equity in the funding of public and public charter schools continues to simmer and is likely to get more attention in a Gray administration. Nida's banker's-eye view of the charter sector did not sit well with some school advocates, who said private financing and public schools are a toxic brew. Mark Simon, a DCPS parent, an education policy analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, said he found Nida's speech "abhorrent."

"This is the same Tom Nida, the banker who headed up the D.C. charter board while retaining his position as a bank vice president overseeing a profitable increase in his bank's mortgage portfolio due to mortgages extended to charter schools he was helping to oversee," Simon said. "The two concepts of private profit and public education should not be intertwined as Mr. Nida is wont to do. ... He represents what is wrong with mixing private profit and the management of public education." . . . .

The Voters Have Spoken: Rhee Must Go

With days to prepare for the inevitable, the Washington Post has a lengthy political obituary this morning for the defeated Fenty, and Michelle Rhee and the corporate ed deformers get two lines.  The Post's editors would rather focus on Fenty's tin political ear and forget that the voters have soundly rejected the billionaire boys club (BBC) who want to take over DC and the DC Schools.  Fenty was deep into the pockets of the white oligarchs, and his bowing to Broad and Gates and the Waltons to put Rhee in charge of schools was and is the most visible symbol of a political hand-off to philanthro-capitalism in the nation's capitol.  Now Fenty's defeat is the most visible symbol of the voters' repudiation of government run by venture capital and vulture philanthropy "supermen."


Robert McCartney has a commentary in WaPo this morning that points out many of policy faults of the snarling Michelle Rhee, but somehow they are painted, too, as personality flaws, rather than the steamrolling and bullying by a corporate board intent upon making DC the urban model for corporate education.  In spite of all the flaws, McCartney urges Gray to go slow, dance the soft shoe, and keep Rhee.  Right.


Valerie Strauss has a slightly different take, urging Gray to act swiftly to make it clear who is running the schools.  Unfortunately, she misses the revolutionary aspect of this historic vote and fails to attribute the Fenty drubbing to voters sick of corporate hubris without boundaries and corporate welfare run amok.  Strauss goes on to argue that the acceptance of the $75 million from the Duncan RTTT bribery fund will assure that DC Schools are locked in to BBC's policies, whether or not Rhee is fired.  What an odd conclusion, when in fact, the one-shot $75 million represent less than 10 percent of DC's annual school budget of almost $760 million.  Since when would a superintendent or mayor be held hostage by such a commitment. 

If Gray wants to be the conciliator, his first act should be to fire the one person who stands most squarely in the way of that goal.  Not only would firing Rhee serve that aspiration, but it would also send a message to the Foundation Supermen that he is not for sale, a message that will make DC voters that could once again have a voice in their city.