"Stand for Children" Stands for Profit by Charter Industry

As Gene Bryant noted on Facebook, corporate education profiteers and their political supporters are trying to buy the Nashville Metro School Board.  Nashville Rise has partnered with Stand for Children in an attempt to blow up the public schools in Nashville.

Below is a tutorial on how Stand for Children really stands for profit by the charter school industry.

Guest Post: Relay Graduate School of Education: A Policy Brief

Posted by the Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools on January 6, 2016.
This year the Philadelphia School District used training videos on classroom management from The Relay Graduate School of Education as part of its New Teacher orientation. The principals of Blaine and Kelley Elementary School (recent turnaround schools) are enrolled in Relay’s principal training program.

Relay Graduate School of Education is a teacher/principal training program based in New York and founded by people who had little experience or training in education. The school has opened a Philadelphia/Camden branch and has a partnership with Mastery Charter in the Philadelphia region. Since it appears to be extending its reach inside the Philadelphia School District we felt the need to explore Relay’s history and influence.

Kate Peterson, a graduate student at Arcadia University, has looked into Relay’s founders and programs. Her findings are posted below. We want to thank Kate for her thorough research and for allowing us to post it.


Relay Graduate School of Education Policy Brief

by Kate Peterson
January 2, 2016

Relay Graduate School of Education is a stand-alone school based in New York City. It began as Teacher U in 2007, when Dave Levin, co-founder of KIPP Public Charter Schools, and Norman Atkins, co-founder of Uncommon Schools, decided to develop a program that would supply their charter schools and others with high-quality teachers, which they deemed as scarce. They partnered with the founder of Achievement First, Dacia Toll, to create their program. Receiving $10 million from Larry Robbins, founder of the hedge fund Glenview Capital Management and current board member of Relay, and $20 million from the non-profit The Robin Hood Foundation, the three charter school leaders partnered with Hunter College in New York to implement their program (Relay Graduate School of Education, 2015h; Barbic, 2013).

In 2011, it was renamed Relay Graduate School of Education and was granted a charter by the New York State Board of Regents (Relay Graduate School of Education, 2015h). Partnering with the New York City Department of Education, they began training district public school teachers. After its claimed success with this program, Relay spread to other major cities including New Orleans and Newark (Barbic, 2013). Today, in addition to these cities, Relay has branches in Chicago, Houston, Memphis, and more recently Delaware and Philadelphia/Camden (Relay Graduate School of Education, 2015a).

Norman Atkins is currently the president of Relay and has been associated with several charters. He received a B.A. in history from Brown University and a M.A. in educational administration from Columbia. He began his career as an independent journalist (Uncommon Schools, n.d.). From 1989 until 1994 he served as the co-executive director of The Robin Hood Foundation in New York City, a prominent donor to Relay as well as to numerous charters in New York City, including Uncommon Schools and KIPP (Uncommon Schools, n.d.; The Robin Hood Foundation, 2015). Then in 1997, he co-founded and co-led North Star Academy Charter of Newark. In 2005 he co-founded Uncommon Schools, a charter management organization that currently manages 44 charters. Atkins now serves as board chair for Uncommon (Uncommon Schools, n.d.). Additionally, along with Dave Levin, Atkins co-founded and is a board member for Zearn, a non-profit online math program designed for kindergarten to eighth grade based on the Common Core standards (Zearn, n.d.). Zearn also receives funding from The Robin Hood Foundation (The Robin Hood Foundation, 2015).

Click here to read the rest of the article. 

Clinton Duplicity Bolsters Corporate Colonialism

There was a time when American expansionism around the world was wrapped in the thin rhetorical veil of democratic empowerment, but that was back then, before the Soviets dispensed with their socialist facade to openly embrace the American model of unrestrained greed and corruption.  This move was liberating for both Russian and American oligarchs, in that the pretense could be dropped and worldwide corporate fascism could be fully unleashed under the new banner of "globalisation."

Bill and Hillary Clinton have taken full advantage of the new alignment of world dollar power to stuff their own pockets and to spread their patronizing brand of neoliberal social welfare, whose principal beneficiaries are the oligarchs to whom they owe their public faces.

A week or so back, Bill Clinton showed up unannounced to inspire a hundred of the biggest corporate whales from around the world with more of his dissembling, lip-biting and gravelly emotionalism. The new target for venture philanthropy is the international education market, and this time, instead of textbooks inspired by the US State Department propagandists, this crusade is grounded in the new corporate paternalism aimed to produce passive, well trained drones willing to do whatever their corporate bosses require--even if means the end of human civilization.

The lead organization, it seems, in the new effort to increase corporate "giving" from 7 to 20 percent is Business Backs Education, an outfit ostensibly based in the Middle East with a few brown faces to front for a whole pack of white men running the show.

. . . This campaign, Business Backs Education, is intended to help close a $26bn (£16bn) annual funding gap needed to provide a school place for all primary-age children.

It wants businesses to spend 20% of their corporate social responsibility (CSR) budgets on education by 2020.

"Business can and should play a much greater role," in both the developed and developing world, says Vikas Pota, convener of the Global Education and Skills Forum and chief executive of the Varkey Gems Foundation. . . .

 Here is the kind of dissembling bullshit that Clinton brought to inspire the oligarchs:

"If you're going to get into education, I think it's really important that you invest in what works," Clinton said. "For example, New Orleans has better schools than it had before Hurricane Katrina, and it's the only public school [district] in America where 100 percent of the schools are charter schools."

I suppose it would be good to know how "better" is better.  Right, Bill? Is it better for 4,500 public school teachers to unlawfully lose their jobs?  Is it better that NOLA schools resemble prisons more than schools?  Is it better that New Orleans citizens can't even choose mustard or mayo on their fast-food chain store education for their children?  Is it better that state and federal dollars are funding unregulated testing factories that brutalize children?

If you want to know the real story of New Orleans, have a look here at a Buras article from 2011.  Below is a chart (click to enlarge) from that piece that depicts the interwoven clustering of corporate profiteers, corporate welfare kings and queens, and the corrupt political machine that keeps it afloat.