Dear Democrats, Corporate America Is Not Your Friend

By Krystal Ball published at The Hill:

Repeat after me: Corporate America is not your friend. They are not your friend when they stop running ads on a right-wing propaganda show. They are not your friend when they run feel-good multicultural rainbow Super Bowl ads. They are not your friend when they pull their NRA perks. They are not your friend when they defend LGBTQ rights. They are not your friend when they restrict sales of AR-15s. 

Are we glad when big corporations make these choices, often under pressure and duress, which happen to coincide with the public good? Absolutely. Do not let yourself imagine, though, that they are making these decisions out of some charitable or noble impulse. There is a reason that the bottom line is called the bottom line. Corporations act for one reason alone: to maximize executive salaries and shareholder value. They don’t act to maximize value to you, or to be loyal to a nation, or to promote tolerance or any other lovely thing. Corporations are there to make money for their wealthy execs and wealthy shareholders.

Sometimes, the bottom line means capitulating to decent behavior through organized public shaming. Note that Delta Air Lines and many other corporations were perfectly happy to be cozy with the NRA until a group of nearly murdered high school students in Florida shamed them into doing otherwise. And again, to be clear, the shaming has convinced them that their continued ties to the NRA will hurt the bottom line, not that cutting ties is the right thing to do.

Here, the counter-example of FedEx is an instructive one. FedEx has not cut ties with the NRA. Why? Because FedEx makes a lot of money from a special relationship with the NRA and the gun manufacturers that the NRA represents. They are not any more or less benevolent than UPS (although I vastly prefer UPS, thanks to their Teamsters-organized workforce). FedEx did the math and it came out differently for them because they have a special deal with dozens of gun makers that enables them to make a mint off the shipment of handguns.

So no, I’m not sad that Georgia Republicans have decided to punish Deltafor walking away from the NRA by pulling Delta’s corporate welfare. It’s a nasty tactic but they understand the game. The politicians were just trying to change the math for Delta. I didn’t support that corporate tax giveaway before Delta gave the NRA the cold shoulder and I don’t support it now.

Sometimes maximizing shareholder value happens to coincide with decent behavior such as advocating for immigration or LGBTQ tolerance, or throwing some token dollars at corporate social responsibility window-dressing. These are lucky coincidences.

Consider, for example, the treatment of their workforces. Why does the white-collar professional creative class get plied with extensive perks and decent pay while blue-collar and service workers get treated like a chain gang? Corporate America happens to see value in professional workers and treats them like actual human beings so that they will actually stick around. The working class, on the other hand, is viewed as disposable, a commodity to be continually replaced (unless forced to do otherwise by unions or bad publicity).

If you fall on the happy side of that divide, it doesn’t mean the corporation is your friend. When a robot comes along to read your spreadsheets or write your news articles, you’ll see just how friendly things are. 

So if corporate America decides that running a pro-immigrant ad during the Super Bowl will help sell more Cokes, than that’s what they will do. And if they decide that selling millions of pain pills into a town of 400 people will enrich their shareholder beyond belief, they will do that too. Corporate America is not your friend when they sponsor Chamber of Commerce seminars on how to break unions, and they are not your friend when they sponsor summits on women  empowerment.

We forget this at our peril, and the nation’s. Because, Democrats, we are supposed to be the friend of the worker, not the corporation. The more we forget this fact, aligning ourselves with supposedly benevolent corporations and happily taking their cash, the more the multiracial working class of this nation is left to fend for itself. The more desperate these workers become, the more willing they will be to trust the siren song of scarcity that says, “There are only so many seats at the table, so we must secure those seats for US and good luck to THEM, the immigrants.  Forget about the poor, rural whites who struggle, or the urban African-Americans who might be jobless or disproportionately incarcerated.”

Democrats, it’s the multiracial working class that is your friend — and you need to be their friend again. Tell Corporate America that you appreciate their ethical opportunism and their election cash, but you are going to stick with workers, thank you very much.

Krystal Ball is president of The People’s House Project, which recruits Democratic candidates in Republican-held congressional districts of the Midwest and Appalachia. A former candidate for Congress in Virginia and host on MSNBC’s “The Cycle,” she is a video host for the soon-to-be-launched Hill.TV project. Follow her on Twitter @krystalball.

Another peek behind the neoliberal corporate education reform curtain

“Yes! Of course they [public schools] can, but my charter (school) friends don’t like it when I say that.” — Paul Vallas

The only nice thing about the right wing is that they don't obscure the reasons behind corporate education reform. Devoid of empathy, compassion, or even an inkling of the notion that human need should trump corporate greed, devotees of Randian "thought" are often entirely honest about motives of neoliberalism. Contrasted to leadership in the Democratic Party, who try to hide the premise underpinning neoliberal policies, the right wing is far more transparent on this issue. For example, arch-reactionary (and charter industry profiteer) Andy Smarick gave us an early peek behind the curtain in 2008 when he admitted that the lucrative charter industry deliberately discriminates against Students with Disabilities (SWD) and other special needs children in order to help bankrupt public school districts. The candor of his Wave of the Future piece in the fringe-right Education Next is as refreshing as it is chilling:

"As chartering increases its market share in a city, the district will come under growing financial pressure. The district, despite educating fewer and fewer students, will still require a large administrative staff to process payroll and benefits, administer federal programs, and oversee special education. With a lopsided adult-to-student ratio, the district's per-pupil costs will skyrocket." [emphasis mine]

Confronted with incontrovertible evidence that the charter industry discriminates, so-called "liberal" corporate reformers like Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee, or Ben Austin never publicly admit this is true, much less admit that it is deliberate and by design. The same goes for their assault of the teaching profession. Corner reformers on their attacks on teachers and one gets treated to an array of platitudes about wanting to "elevate the profession", and so forth. One of their reform darlings, Paul Vallas, is up-front about the war on professional educators, particularly the experienced ones. Here is the text from the slide pictured above:

"I don't want the majority of my teaching staff to work more than 10 years. The cost of sustaining those individuals becomes so enormous. Between retirement and healthcare and things like that, it means that your are constantly increasing class sizes and cutting programs to sustain the cost of a veteran workforce."

Doesn't need any explanation, does it?

Another area where the right-wing is forthcoming about the true purpose of neoliberal corporate education reform is in the rationale behind "school choice." Never mind the racist origins of the phrase school choice, or how it is the key factor behind today's schools being as segregated as the times prior to the nineteen-sixties, corporately subsidized Democrats, like Ben Austin of Students Matter, are on record saying of school choice: "It would force the district to learn how to run great schools by forcing them to compete." There is absolutely no evidence that this is true. The disciples of the radical right-wing economist who first advocated "competition" and "choice" in the education sector are entirely honest about this. I was exposed to Robert Weissberg's essay by someone during the struggle against the former Gates Foundation executive, Yolie Flores's, attack on Los Angeles public schools in the guise of her vile Public School Choice giveaway program to the charter sector. The paper was quite revealing in that like the Smarick piece above, it was candid about the real reasons for school choice — which have nothing to do with improving schools. Here is an excerpt of the abstract:

"Despite ample debates over the efficacy of school choice, theorizing has lagged behind and this hinders progress. Milton Friedman, the choice movement founder, never claimed that choice would improve academics; choice was inherently valuable and parents might demand anything. Choice advocates also exaggerate the remedial power of markets and proliferating academic options seldom brings academic diligence. Given free tutoring opportunities, those lagging behind reject them, and costs will usually be too high for most low achievers. Extensive schooling options already exist, so waging political battles to add more is unnecessary."

School choice has never been about improving education, rather it has always been a specious argument used to advance the privatization of education. I suppose in a way we owe Smarick, Vallas, and Weissberg a thank you for being honest about what really drives the charter school project, and all its attendant education reforms.

Value-Added Modeling (VAM) is pseudoscience, but profitable pseudosciences persist

"While value-added models are intended estimate teacher effects on student achievement growth, they fail to do so in any accurate or precise way. — Professor Bruce Baker"

Back in early April I penned a piece for K12NN on The American Statistical Association's (ASA) paper on Value Added Methodologies [1]. In it I asserted that the "document provides strong support to those who oppose this wrongheaded use of statistics to make high stakes decisions effecting the lives of students, educators, and our school communities." This week I noticed a trackback to a reprint of the article. What caught my eye was the title, which seemingly was entirely out of keeping with the spirit of the ASA's stance: Advocating for a robust value-added implementation.

I read through the VAM cheerleading piece and was gobsmacked by the deliberate manipulation of the ASA document's tenor and tone. This VAM apologetic read less like a legitimate blog posting and more like a corporate press release. Without doing much more research, I typed the following comments:

This quotation from the ASA document sums up the entire issue best: "The majority of the variation in test scores is attributable to factors outside of the teacher’s control". To, as the author above has, try and frame ASA's position as supportive of VAM phrenology takes mendaciousness to breathtaking heights. Rather than considering students as empty receptacles for "knowledge" deposited by a method that can be "measured," perhaps we can start talking about students as agents in their own pedagogical experiences—something that doesn't exist in the current regime of the profitable testing-industrial-complex.

The author's response displayed the same blatant avoidance of issues as the original piece. In fact, it stated some of the long discredited claims of the VAM camp, including Professor Bruce Baker's favorite trope about how "more sophisticated" VAMs address the issues people have with VAMs.

Thanks for your comment. The ASA statement seems to discuss primary drivers of student test scores, not student growth. It is well known that there is a strong relationship between students’ achievement (or test scores) and their socioeconomic/demographic background. However, there is typically little or no relationship between students’ growth and their socioeconomic/demographic background.

Another way to see this is that the most important factor of “current” test scores is prior tests scores and, once enough prior test scores are included in the model, the socioeconomic/demographic factors become relatively small or even non-significant, despite enormous sample sizes.

That said and to your concern about considering students in the context of their own experiences, more sophisticated value-added/growth models, like EVAAS, can follow the progress of individual students over time, so that each student serves as his or her own control.

Aside from being patently wrong, the whole thing smacked of being boilerplate text written in the bowels of a corporate public relations department. That's when I decided to look into this dubious Jennifer Facciolini was and who she wrote for. I should have done that in the first place.

As of 2012, Statistical Analysis System (SAS) Institute Inc., is one of the largest privately owned software companies in the world with revenue $3.02 billion USD (2013). They are the developers of the wildly inaccurate, but highly profitable Education Value-Added Assessment System, (AKA SAS EVAAS) — a VAM implementation used in many districts. Money chasing SAS is all about big fish government contracts, to wit an excerpt from a recent Businessweek piece:

SAS Institute Inc. won a $6,479,583.96 federal contract from the Defense Information Systems Agency, Scott Air Force Base, Illinois, for Statistical Analysis System software licenses and support renewal.

When a huge firm like SAS pulling down big dollar defense contracts makes the education "market" their priority, you can believe that they won't let things like facts and evidence discrediting VAM get in the way of them selling and supporting their EVAAS phrenology kit to any and all districts infected by the neoliberal corporate reform virus.

Hiring several white, well educated former-teachers like Nadja Young and Jennifer Facciolini to shill for your product is a smart public relations investment for the VAM behemoth. Given that they were teachers in the south, the chances are that they are making a great deal more money at SAS by simply selling out their former profession to corporate interests. Whether the boilerplate prose in their gushing blog posts is written by them or not isn't all that important. What's important is the appearance that professional teachers actually might think that phrenology and VAM are legitimate sciences. I can only hope that that the prose in these mindless corporate posts isn't written by these former teachers. Students should never be exposed to such nonsensical drivel. A selection of some of their titles should serve to numb the mind of any sentient being:

• Data-driven education books make great holiday gifts for educators. Yes, really.
• "March madness" of student course enrollment gets assist from value-added assessment
• Beyond value-added: Teachers need diagnostic data to improve their practice
• Student growth measures can be the bridge to new assessments

I'll spare readers further torment. As the preponderance of evidence against VAM pseudoscience like the watershed ASA paper grows, expect profit hungry firms like SAS to keep doubling down on the duplicity and deception. Having an army of former teachers shilling for your defective product is a small expense compared to losing those highly profitable contracts with districts.

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NOTES

[1] In its various permutations we've seen the "M" in VAM stand for Modeling, Measures, Methodologies, and others. The only honest word for last member of the acronym would be "Mendaciousness," since phrenology by any other name is…

Pearson Agrees to Pay $7.7 Million for Using Foundation to Advance Corporate Profits

This past week the Pearson Foundation agreed to pay $7.7 million to settle a charge that the Foundation had used charitable and tax-exempt assets to further Pearson profits.  The amount of the settlement represents .0077% of Pearson profits for 2012.

Following the widespread adoption of Common Core corporate standards that resulted from race to the top incentives, Pearson saw its profits soar in 2011 by an amazing 72%.

Here is a link to an earlier post on Pearson-Gate, which provides the seedy details of Pearson's influence peddling.

And below are details of the settlement:

NEW YORK – Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman today announced a $7.7 million settlement with Pearson Charitable Foundation, a not-for-profit that is affiliated with the for-profit education company Pearson, Inc. Under the terms of the settlement, $7.5 million will be directed to recruiting and retaining high-quality kindergarten through 12th grade teachers. In addition, the Foundation will adopt program changes and governance reforms to ensure that charitable assets of the Foundation are not improperly used for the private benefit of Pearson, Inc. The settlement resolves an investigation by Attorney General Schneiderman’s Charities Bureau that revealed misuse of charitable assets by Pearson Charitable Foundation in a manner that benefited Pearson, Inc. in violation of the Not-for-Profit Corporation Law and the Estates, Powers and Trusts Law of New York.

“The law on this is clear: Non-profit foundations cannot misuse charitable assets to benefit their affiliated for-profit corporations,” Attorney General Schneiderman said. “Moving forward,  funds for Pearson Charitable Foundation will be used exclusively for legitimate charitable purposes, beginning with millions of dollars to help ensure that every public school student has a great teacher in the classroom.”

An investigation by Attorney General Schneiderman’s Charities Bureau revealed that Pearson, Inc., the largest for-profit education company in the world, developed course materials through the Pearson Charitable Foundation that Pearson, Inc. intended to sell commercially. 

Beginning no later than 2010, Pearson, Inc. sought to develop a series of courses, associated instructional materials and software offerings aligned with the Common Core State Standards, a set of standards governing the skills in mathematics and language arts taught to students from kindergarten through the 12th grade. The Common Core State Standards have been adopted by 45 states, the District of Columbia, and four U.S. territories. In these jurisdictions, school districts will be required to use materials “aligned” with the Common Core State Standards. 

Pearson, Inc. decided to develop its Common Core aligned course offerings within the Foundation, with substantial funding by Pearson, Inc., in order to attract foundation support and credibility for its commercial products. 

Pearson, Inc. and the Pearson Charitable Foundation planned that the courses developed within the Foundation would be sold commercially by Pearson, Inc. Internal business analyses prepared by Pearson, Inc. projected that potential profits from sales of the courses and related offerings could be in the tens of millions of dollars. 

After the start of Attorney General Schneiderman’s investigation, Pearson Charitable Foundation sold the partially developed courses to Pearson, Inc. at a price of $15.1 million.

Attorney General Schneiderman’s investigation also found that the Pearson Charitable Foundation provided grants to an independent organization of school officials in the United States for a jointly sponsored International Summit program, a series of conferences on education that were held in various foreign locales and attended by state school officials. The Foundation and Pearson, Inc. worked with the organization of school officials to plan and organize the International Summits, to identify speakers and presenters and, in some cases, to recommend school officials from participating countries. School officials who were invited were from jurisdictions where Pearson actively did business and sought to do business. The travel and lodging expenses of state school officials from the U.S. were paid for by the organization of school officials, using funds donated by Pearson Charitable Foundation. In addition, the Foundation independently sponsored the travel and lodging of guest speakers, presenters and summit delegates, including school officials, from foreign countries. 

Pearson, Inc. sales personnel attended these International Summits, while no employee of any other for-profit education company ever attended. Following the International Summits, Pearson attendees were able to share commercially valuable information with their colleagues in Pearson’s international business concerning the interests and potential educational needs of some of the non-U.S. delegates to the summit.

Pearson Charitable Foundation agreed to pay a total of $7.7 million to resolve Attorney General Schneiderman’s investigation into these matters. The Office of the Attorney General will use $7.5 million of these funds to support programs and projects in New York and other states affiliated with the 100Kin10 initiative that recruit and retain excellent K-12 teachers and support teachers in providing high-quality instruction aligned with the Common Core State Standards. In his 2011 State of the Union address, President Barack Obama set a goal for the nation of training 100,000 new science, technology, engineering and math teachers in the next decade. 100Kin10 is a network of more than 150 organizations that came together in 2011 to help meet that national goal.

In addition, the Foundation agreed to several important program and governance reforms. Among these, the Foundation agreed to include at least three independent directors on its board who will review any Foundation transaction that could reasonably be expected to benefit Pearson, Inc. Such transactions will proceed only after a finding by the independent directors that the transaction is fair, reasonable and in the best interests of the Foundation. 

The Foundation further agreed that Pearson products and services will not be featured at events that are funded directly or indirectly by the Foundation unless the products and services are donated, and that the only Pearson employees who will attend such events are those who are assigned to spend substantial time on Foundation matters.

The Pearson Charitable Foundation will also pay $200,000 for the costs of the Attorney General’s investigation.

This investigation was handled by James Katz, Senior Adviser & Special Counsel to the Attorney General, with the assistance of Charities Bureau Researcher Liam Arbetman, under the supervision of Charities Bureau Enforcement Section Chief David Nachman and First Deputy for Affirmative Litigation Janet Sabel. 

A copy of today's agreement can be viewed here.

Gingrich Chooses Keegan for Her Strong Corruption Credentials?

Lisa G. Keegan has come a long way since her feature in the Peoria Times in 2006, which followed many months of avoiding questions emanating from a federal audit that noted the missing millions that someone raked away while she was running the Education Leaders Council during the champagne popping days for the ed industry under Bush II.

Keegan served as McCain's mouthpiece on education 4 years ago, and this time around she has hooked up with someone whose corruption credentials make her look like a paragon of virtue.  Hey, everybody's doing it!

When Gingrich loses, will Keegan leverage her new visibility into a job in the post-partisan corporatist ED?  Maybe the new Secretary of Education?, since Party labels are meaningless in the brave new corporate ed world of pushing the same old bullshit to benefit the same 1%ers.


My post from June 14, 2006:

In a NOW segment aired March 26, 2004 that introduced the Bush cronies who had just been handed $77,000,000 in ED funds to seed school privatization ventures, Lisa Graham Keegan, head of the Education Leaders Council, gushed to reporter, Michelle Mitchell:

You don't think anybody's making money off of education? Big secret, it's happening. People make millions.

This admission came even as Mitchell was reporting that an audit had showed that the $16,000,000 that ELC had squeezed from ED (with the help of former ELC chief, Gene Hickok) was going to pay big salaries that Lisa and her friends were doling out to one another.

It wasn't long after that, however, until Keegan took her cut and split, leaving a big mystery as to what happened to the other millions that ELC had received for the impressive-sounding programs pumped on ELC's spiffy website, before it went black last year.

Now it seems Keegan is back, this time looking for more federal infusion for her version of virtual education. On the website for her company, e2020, Inc., it appears that e2020 is a form of on-demand teacher in a box, marketed heavily to urban areas where high schoolers find it too dangerous to go to school. One might think of e2020 as the Iraqi model for education: keep the students and the teacher in their virtual green zones, where they are free to learn all they desire to know.


One can expect, too, that there will lots of federal dollars to fund this new kind of powerful school choice--and, of course, to close the achievement gap. You know.

You can read about Lisa's new adventures in today's Peoria Times.

A Few of Wall Street's Columbia and Harvard Whores

The ivy walls of academe have been breached.  No, it didn't take any horde of barbarians, just a wheelbarrow of cash, left at the door of university presidents and professors from once-esteemed schools such as the Harvard Business School, Harvard School of Economics, and the Columbia Business School.  A couple of clips here from the Oscar-winning documentary, Inside Job.

See below Frederick Mishkin, Professor Columbia Business School and his dean, Glenn Hubbard:



See below John Campbell, Chair of the Harvard Economics Department

Race to the Top and the Politics of Corruption

Arne Duncan became Secretary of Education because of his fealty to the corporate education reform agenda that he nurtured and learned under in Chicago. When it was time for Arne, as Secretary, to announce the leader for the $4.35 billion bribery fund known as Race to the Top, the Oligarchs chose Joanne Weiss, COO and Partner of the New Schools Venture Fund--a vast web of corporate and corporate foundation cash strategically invested in the cause of privatizing education, all the while collecting huge tax credits for all that generosity by these vulture philanthropists. Duncan said:

"Joanne will help us push a strong reform agenda that is entrepreneurial in spirit, providing carrots and sticks, to change the way we do business, and fundamentally turn around underperforming schools in ways that last for decades," Duncan said.

Now when tiny Delaware submitted its RTTT grant application, a Boston non-profit corporation, Mass Insight, was instrumental in helping Delaware to develop its school turnaround plans. Mass Insight's favorite turnaround model is the same one that Arne and Billionaire Boys' Club prefer:

The consequences for failing to reform test scores will have more bite. The state is going to create a team to oversee these schools, with leadership coming from Mass Insight Education & Research Institute, a Boston group that favors replacing the staff and leadership when overhauling a failing school. Mass Insight, which receives funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, among other corporations and educational reform partnerships, supports the type of reform model that led to the recent firing of the principal and teachers at Rhode Island's Central Falls High School.

The Rhode Island district's move also won praise from Duncan and Obama.

In the coming months and years in Delaware, there will be penalties -- including loss of funding -- for schools that fail to improve, according to the state's Race to the Top application.

Previous attempts at school reform in Delaware were unsuccessful because they focused on changing programs, said Justin Cohen, the president of Mass Insight. Research has shown that to make a change there needs to be far-reaching staffing changes, he said, but school leaders have historically chosen the "path of least resistance.

Now where do the geniuses at Mass Insight get their piles of non-profit to help states develop plans that the judges really like? Well, they happen to get their sponsorship from the same people who wrote the Race Rules and whose COO is, indeed, the Race Director:

Leadership Sponsors

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Barr Foundation

The Boston Foundation

National Math & Science Initiative

• Exxon Mobil Corporation
• Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
• Michael & Susan Dell Foundation

Nellie Mae Education Foundation

NewSchools Venture Fund

Just continue to follow the money. This race to the trough will make the Reading First crooks under Bush look like dopey Boy Scouts.

The Only Education Reform That Matters This Year

Keith Olbermann calls out the corporate-owned Democrats who are blocking health care reform with the public option that over 70% of Americans want:

From the Digital Divide to the Digital Diversion

A second offer showed up in my mailbox this morning for a new book by Terry Moe and John Chubb on the glories of cyber ed, which is viewed by the financiers and lawyers in charge today of education policy as the ultimate solution to education for the poor and working class. From cyber charter elementary to cyber college, a new educational caste system has been devised that will offer two very different types of educational experiences, one grounded in the sterile isolation and alienation of the flat screen, and the other based within the warm incandescent community of other middle class minds and bodies exchanging the breaths of privilege and mutual care.

The poor rural and urban students will avail themselves of the former, and the economically privileged will continue their well-heeled traditions with the best teachers, real campuses, and the best apparatus that money can buy. Meanwhile, the poor will have laptops and modems, we may presume, provided by Gates and Dell, and charged off at an exorbitant rate to the taxpayer as part of the new world of the cyber charter and the cyber college. Think of it: following graduation, the poor will even find minimum wage jobs online, so that they may live their entire lives without having to get dressed! Think of the cost savings.

The selling of this distinctly dystopian future is something else, again. It is wrapped in the threadbare reform rhetoric that no one believes anymore, insulting as it is to the intelligence of anyone able to read. Moe and Chubb have teamed up once more to promote the Oligarchs' solution of corporate-run testing factories, the online variety no less, as the way to achieve what the Finns have achieved by honoring the teaching profession, creating world-class standards, funding their school, nurturing their students, and getting rid of high stakes testing. Finland, for instance, does not use test scores to determine how much to pay teachers.

And even though the "reformers" have wasted the past 25 years with a test-til-you-puke strategy that continues to not work, that reality is lost on these fools, who have their eye on a prize that has nothing to do with student learning or quality schools--but on filling the pockets of the ed industry leeches looking to increase their share of tax money intended for education. In fact, the continuation of the test factory failures of the past 25 years holds open the door to the continuation of another generation of reforms dreamed up by the same ad agencies that sell you all the other modern day remedies you have come to count on not to work.

From the Wall Street Journal:

. . . . In response to "A Nation at Risk," Terry Moe and John Chubb in 1990 published "Politics, Markets and America's Schools," which identified special-interest groups -- mainly teachers unions -- as the culprits in preventing the reforms urged in the report. Now Messrs. Moe and Chubb have returned to the subject with "Liberating Learning," a more optimistic sequel. The authors believe there exists a magic bullet that is capable of shattering the unions' political power and, at last, bringing the sort of reform and excellence to U.S. K-12 education that might make U.S. students competitive with Finnish teenagers. The ammunition? Technology.

Mr. Moe is an academic researcher at the Hoover Institution; Mr. Chubb, an executive with Chris Whittle's for-profit education venture, Edison Learning. They think that technology -- particularly online education -- holds two potentially dramatic benefits. One is simply a general improvement in education as students from "anywhere -- poor inner cities, remote rural areas, even at home" gain access to high-caliber instruction. More important, the authors say, is technology's ability to destroy the political barriers that prevent education reform.

Despite much public rhetoric about the urgent need to improve American education, despite the investment of billions of dollars in schools, little progress has been achieved. Why? Messrs. Moe and Chubb blame the "politics of blocking" -- the thwarting of such simple reforms as paying teachers for performance. Many states prohibit even gathering data that link individual teachers to the test scores of their students.

Technology, the authors say, may enable the circumvention of political blocking. They make their point forcefully, with copious and surprising examples. In 1995, for instance, Midland, Pa., a declining steel town on the Ohio border, launched the Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School. Today the online school serves 8,000 students throughout the state. And the classes aren't just digital correspondence courses -- there are textbooks and live educators, including "synchronous teachers," who work with students through instant messaging, voice and interactive whiteboards while the kids are engaged with their lessons online. Advisers are required to communicate with students' families at least once a week by email and once every two weeks by phone. . . .

There is one thing that may get in the way of this brave new cyber world of education for the disenfranchised, and, as always, it has to do with the greedy over-reaching that has characterized this generation of corporate bottom-feeders. Here is the latest from Pennsylvania, where the lawyers of the Agora Cyber Charter School are using up the money they have taken from the taxpayers to file numerous lawsuits to block the State from bringing a halt to their corrupt gravy train. From the Inquirer:

With the state poised to pull the plug over alleged mismanagement, an online charter school based in Devon is fighting back in not just one court, but three.

One week after the Pennsylvania Department of Education began the process of revoking its operating charter, the Agora Cyber Charter School has filed lawsuits in federal, state, and county courts challenging the action and seeking the return of public money the state had diverted from Agora into an escrow account.

The litigation - filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia, Commonwealth Court in Harrisburg, and Chester County Court of Common Pleas - is the latest salvo in a dispute over the school's management contract with a company owned by Agora founder Dorothy June Brown.

Agora, which opened in 2005, enrolls 4,400 students statewide who receive online instruction at home.

The Education Department, which oversees the 11 cyber charters in Pennsylvania, alleges that Agora's board of trustees violated the operating charter by contracting out management services. To make matters worse, state officials say, the company, Cynwyd Group L.L.C., is controlled by Brown.

Cynwyd was to be paid $2.8 million from Agora's $41 million budget this academic year - although, according to the Education Department, most of the management work was performed by another company, K-12 Pennsylvania L.L.C.

On June 11, the state told Agora's board to cancel the Cynwyd contract and to resign in 10 days. When the board did neither, charter-revocation proceedings were begun and a two-day hearing in Harrisburg was scheduled for next month.

The Education Department already had started to divert Agora's local, state, and federal funds into an escrow account, to prevent money from flowing to Cynwyd.

In court documents filed this week, Agora's board contends that education officials had known about the Cynwyd contract since 2006 but raised no objections until April 29.

Joel L. Frank, an Agora attorney, is asking the courts to halt the revocation proceedings and to return the money, which he contends was withheld in violation of state law.

"We will review the complaints and respond in a timely manner," Leah Harris, an Education Department spokeswoman, wrote in an e-mail yesterday.

School districts, she added, have been asked "to place their tuition payments to Agora into an escrow account from which the costs of the students' education will continue to be paid. All federal funds will be paid to Agora. There is no intention on the part of [the department] to withhold federal dollars from Agora."

Despite the revocation proceedings, state officials have said Agora is expected to operate in 2009-10.

Also on Monday, Agora's board sued K-12 in Chester County Court. Although the state maintains the escrow fund, the trustees contend that K-12 has had some access to the money in order to pay bills, and they are seeking an accounting.

Henry E. Hockeimer Jr., the attorney who represents K-12, said that under the escrow procedures, the state must preapprove all Agora bills paid by K-12. Any expenditures, he said, "have been for the educational needs of the students."

K-12 Pennsylvania is a subsidiary of K12 Inc., a for-profit education company in Herndon, Va.

The cyber school's finances also are under scrutiny by the Philadelphia School District inspector general and by federal investigators as part of a general criminal probe of local charter operations.

The Sunny Side of the Depression for Corporations: Cutting Wages and Benefits

Today's Washington Post has a story on the new strategy by corporations to use the Depression that their greed and incompetence created as reason enough to cut wages and benefits of those workers lucky enough to still have a paycheck. This follows on the heels of recent developments by banks to use some of the billions in federal bailouts to buy up foreclosed properties, rather than to loan money to citizens trying to buy homes. All of this is occurring as bank lobbyists use more bailout dough to buy up enough votes from crooked Senators of both parties to halt modifications in the bankruptcy law last week that could have saved 1.7 million homeowners from foreclosure. As Durbin admitted last week, banks "frankly own the place."

Meanwhile, kids hoping for college must contend with a minefield of crooks and gougers from the Sallie Maes of the world, ready to victimize those who can't afford to pay their own way without loans. And their younger brothers and sisters--well, they continue the cram as the Business Roundtable's cheap charter movement picks off more and more poor public schools for corporate welfare conversion, all with the blessing of the Obama Administration. Which brings us back to the subject of cut wages and benefits for workers, yes?

Finally, following a voucher link on my Google Alerts, I came across a summary in the Miami Herald of Florida legislative action during the current session that just ended. These two actions were stacked together in the list of "accomplishments" for Florida's illustrious body of corporate stooges:

- Strengthen a private school voucher program for children from low-income families by giving insurance companies dollar-for-dollar credits against premium taxes for donations to the program, now supported solely through similar corporation income tax credits.

- Require public school students who lose or damage textbooks to pay 100 percent of replacement costs instead of 50 percent to 75 percent under present law.

No write-down for students losing a book, but some pretty good action for corporations with giving programs to shut down public schools.

Just Before the Revolt

Two stories that make such great bookends in WaPo today on the American oligarchs and their minions. Not only have the oligarchs' front men paid for the executive salary caps to be taken out of the Stimulus bill, but now the oligarchs and their lawyers are waging war on those who are losing their jobs due to the excess, greed, and thievery of these same oligarchs. The corporate target: unemployment benefits of their former employees.

First, the end of the empty rhetoric on compensation caps:

By Tomoeh Murakami Tse

Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, February 12, 2009; Page D05

Congressional efforts to impose stringent restrictions on executive compensation appeared to be evaporating yesterday as House and Senate negotiators worked to fine-tune the compromise stimulus bill.

Provisions to impose a penalty on banks that paid hefty bonuses and to cap pay at $400,000 for all employees at firms applying for additional government funds did not survive the compromise, sources said.. . .

And then this:

By Peter Whoriskey
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, February 12, 2009; A01

It's hard enough to lose a job. But for a growing proportion of U.S. workers, the troubles really set in when they apply for unemployment benefits.

More than a quarter of people applying for such claims have their rights to the benefit challenged as employers increasingly act to block payouts to former workers.

The proportion of claims disputed by former employers and state agencies has reached record levels in recent years, according to the Labor Department numbers tallied by the Urban Institute. . . .

. . . . "I couldn't believe it," said Kenneth M. Brown, who lost his job as a hotel electrician in October.

He began collecting benefits of $380 a week but then discovered that his former employer, the owners of the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center, were appealing to block his unemployment benefits. The hotel alleged that he had been fired for being deceptive with a supervisor.

"A big corporation like that. . . . It was hard enough to be terminated," he said. "But for them to try to take away the unemployment benefits -- I just thought that was heartless."

After a Post reporter turned up at the hearing, the hotel's representative withdrew the appeal and declined to comment. A hotel spokesperson later said the company does not comment on legal matters. Brown will continue to collect benefits, which he, his wife and three young children rely on to make monthly mortgage payments on their Upper Marlboro home. . . .

School Construction Funds Cut From Stimulus

As I noted in an earlier post, one of the last things the Business Roundtable crowd wanted to see in the Stimulus was enough money to carry forward a national building renewal plan for public education, or enough state education assistance to remove the incentive from cash-starved states to accept Duncan's upcoming federal bribes to open more charter chain gangs. After all, who wants a charter school in a strip mall when you have s shiny, renovated public school to attend? Lost in the axing was $20 billion for school construction.

Will Secretary Duncan, or the Chief School Portfolio Manager as he likes to call himself, prevail with his plans to turn over American schools to business interests to do for public education what they have done for their own domain of expertise--business? Are we ready to accept the bankrupt notion that children's education should be treated as a business, or are we really ready to swallow the phony free-market rhetoric that would allow CEOs to replace public governance in the institutions that contain our most precious assets? Are we ready to allow the tax-dodging edupreneurs to bring down a public education system and a teaching profession that took almost 200 years to build up?

And what's with the President's lip service to school construction during his press conference the other night? Couldn't he manage a few nickels to at least offer a pretense that renewal of public schools has a chance?

In the meantime, here is a clip from Raw Story on the backlog of corporate fraud investigations that will take years to get through. More unaccountable lawyers and CEOs in charge, anyone? Anyone?

By DEVLIN BARRETT

WASHINGTON — The FBI is conducting more than 500 investigations of corporate fraud amid the financial meltdown, FBI Deputy Director John Pistole told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, and there is an even bigger mountain of mortgage fraud cases in which hundreds of millions of dollars may have been swindled from the system.

Pistole says there are 530 active corporate fraud investigations, and 38 of them involve corporate fraud and financial institution matters directly related to the economic crisis.

Additionally, the FBI has more than 1,800 mortgage fraud investigations, more than double the number of such cases just two years ago.

There are so many mortgage fraud cases, he said, that the bureau is not focusing on individual purchasers, but industry professionals generating fraud schemes that could total as much as hundreds of millions of dollars.

"It is a matter of lawyers, brokers or real estate professionals that are systematically trying to defraud the system," Pistole said. . . .

Will the Shining Citi Becomes the CitiCorpse?

I've had a Citi credit card for a long time, and I have in recent years used it like a free Amex card: buy stuff and pay it off at the end of the month before interest accrues. Recently I got to wondering about all those points I've been collecting, and when I checked, I had enough for a new DVD recorder and a bunch left over.

About 2 weeks after my new player arrived, so did my monthly bill. My interest rate had gone from 7.99% to 14.96%. When I called up and finally got a human voice, I was told the cost of credit has gone up and so, I, a loyal platimum customer, must pay my fair share. When I asked a question that was not among the scripted responses, the poor lady put me onto a supervisor. He told me I could accept the new terms or accept the fact that my card would not be renewed when it expires.

Today's WaPo has a story about a new GAO report that shows that Citi is the leader among the corporate scumbags who set up foreign subsidiaries to evade American taxes. So it looks like now I and everyone else with a Citi Card is paying our fair share at least 4 times: the fees Citi collects for using its card, the increase in interest rates to pay for the tight credit, the taxpayer cash to pay for Citi's 45 billion dollar bailout, and now, extra taxes to pay for the taxes that Citi hasn't been paying for years.

I told the Citi supervisor on the phone that I know it is not his fault that he works for a corrupt bunch of thieves. He did not disagree--in fact, he said Happy New Year. From WaPo:

Most of America's largest publicly traded corporations -- including several that are receiving billions of dollars from U.S. taxpayers to finance their recovery -- have set up offshore operations that could help them avoid paying U.S. taxes on their profits, a government study released yesterday found.

American International Group, Bank of America, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley are among the companies that are getting bailed out by U.S. taxpayers while having subsidiaries in locations where they can avoid paying U.S. taxes, according to the Government Accountability Office.

Of the 100 largest public companies, 83 do business in tax-haven hotspots like the Cayman Islands, Bermuda and the British Virgin Islands, where they can move their income into tax-free accounts.

It is all legal, but it could come to an end, given the dire condition of the U.S. economy and President-elect Barack Obama's campaign pledge to close this popular business tax loophole. The Treasury estimates that it loses $100 billion a year in tax revenue as a result of companies shipping their income off shore, and congressional leaders are vowing to introduce legislation forcing big companies to pay full freight.

The GAO did not independently review company transactions to see if the companies purposely created tax-haven businesses to avoid U.S. taxes. But it said that historically, offshore subsidiaries are used for reducing tax costs and shielding transactions from public view.

Several of the companies are household names, including Pepsi, Exxon, Dell and Dow Chemical. In the list of 100 companies that GAO studied were 63 with major federal contracts, including Caterpillar, BearingPoint, Boeing, Merck & Co. and Kraft Foods.

Legislators gave particular attention to the 14 companies on the list that received bailout money from the Treasury in the recent financial meltdown. Sens. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.) and Carl M. Levin (D.-Mich.) requested the GAO study as a launching pad for their effort to curtail what they call "tax-dodgers."

The bailout recipients on the list include Bank of America, which received $45 billion; Citigroup, $45 billion; American Express, $3.4 billion; and Goldman Sachs, $10 billion, according to the Taxpayers for Common Sense watchdog group.

"This is kind of like economic patriotism," Dorgan said. "Americans were told you have to pony up some money to help these companies. And it's rather infuriating for them to find out now that those companies, when they were profitable, didn't want to pay taxes and found clever ways to hide their money overseas."

Several companies said they are engaged in legitimate business operations around the world, and rejected the premise that they are trying to avoid paying their share of U.S. taxes.

Representatives from two companies reported in interviews that they couldn't say whether their foreign operations ultimately reduced their total tax bill.

"We do business around the globe," AIG spokesman Nick Ashooh said. "It's absurd that we're being accused of using these as tax havens. Now what the net tax impact is, that's extremely complicated."

The GAO found 17 companies with no business in tax-haven locales, including Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, United Parcel Service, Verizon, Lockheed Martin and Northrup Grumman. . . .