Guest Post: Citizen Jack responds to LA Weekly's fluffing Ref Rodriguez

“That’s not exactly investigative reporting or a critique of the powerful. But it represents the kind of contrarian, screw-you mentality that fits the New Times worldview now evident at the LA Weekly.” — Professor Jon Wiener

"Jack," a frequent commenter on Professor Diane Ravitch's site, sent me the following critique of Joshua Emerson Smith fluff-job of charter school profiteer Refugio "Ref" Rodriguez. The fact-free ham-fisted Smith piece appeared in that trashy porn and masseuse ad pennysaver known as the LA Weekly (aka Weakly)—a bastion of Jill Stewart's brand of Ayn Rand Libertarianism.

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CITIZEN JACK's OPEN LETTER TO THE AUTHOR OF THE L.A. WEEKLY ARTICLE ABOUT REF RODRIGUEZ

To Joshua Emerson Smith, (the author of the above L.A. WEEKLY article):

 

As with someone else who just posted, I'm also utterly shocked that you didn't mention the troubling and shocking revelations about Ref Rodriguez that emerged from a recent state audit---the same audit that Ref's ally Monica Garcia pulled out all the stops to keep sealed, but ultimately failed to do so.  (See the video of Monica and Ref standing side-by-side at last year's California Charter School Association shindig---this video is posted elsewhere in the COMMENTS section.)

 

Seriously, dude, writing an article about the Kayser / Rodriguez 2015 election, and not mentioning "Food-gate" even once is akin to... oh, I dunno... 

 

... writing about the 2004 Presidential election and not mentioning Bush's ill-advised invasion of Iraq, and most importantly, the fact that no WMD's were found... therefore the entire justification for taking us into that war was all a  manufactured hoax...

... writing about the 2010 Brown / Whitman gubernatorial election, and not mentioning "Maid-gate"...

What's up with that?  

To get you (and others) up to speed, here's a recap:

In a May 2nd Los Angeles Times' article, reporters Zahira Torres and Howard Blume detailed the troubling corruption and outrageous malfeasance that a state audit uncovered operating within Ref Rodriguez' charter school organization, "Partnership to Uplift Communities"(PUC).  Mr. Rodriguez founded this charter chain, and currently serves as its PUC's CEO and Treasurer.

 

Check it out here: 

 

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-puc-audit-released-20150429-story.html

 

or here, ( if, like me, you're too cheap to subscribe to the Times on-line site;-) ) : 

http://4lakidsnews.blogspot.com/2015/05/lausd-charter-group-gave-food-contract.html

Employing a wealth of documentation, the state auditors cite systemic wrongdoing and illegal misuse of taxpayer funds on the part of PUC’s Director of Business and Development, Ms. Jacqueline Duvivier Castillo, and by extension, on the part of Founder / CEO, Mr. Rodriguez, and Jacqueline Elliot, PUC's other Chief Executive.  

After all, Ms. Castillo---it should be noted---was hired by Mr. Rodriguez and Ms. Elliott, and works under their direction.  As such, Mr. Rodriguez and Ms. Elliot bear ultimate responsibility, and gave ultimate approval to the problematic purchases and decisions that that both the state audit condemned, and that the May 2 Times' article exposed to the public.
 

And exactly what did Ref & Co. at PUC perpetrate? 

Ms. Castillo willfully chose to misuse her position to award PUC's multi-year, multi-million-dollar food contract to "Better 4 You Meals", a company that, to quote the audit, is "one hundred percent owned" by Ms. Castillo (!!!).  In the process, she enriched both herself and her husband Fernando---a top executive in that company, "Better 4 You Meals."  

While the charter school laws technically require Ref to run PUC as a "non-profit", so as to prevent such profiteering by charter officials, Ms. Castillo (and perhaps Ref?) evaded this by contracting out their food service to a for-profit company that she and her husband own.   (This is a common shabby practice within the charter industry... by the time such shenanigans are uncovered, that taxpayer money that these crooks pocket is gone, baby, gone... never to be recovered... as is the case with Ref's / PUC's "Foodgate" imbroglio.)

Again, this is all detailed to the state audit report, quoted and reported on by the reporters in the Times' article.

The Times' article further states:

--------------------------------------------
"The state Department of Education, which released emails and documents about its investigation to the Los Angeles Times under the California Public Records Act, also found:

" --- Duvivier Castillo failed to properly report her financial interests in the company

" --- The company was ineligible for the food contracts because it lacked a health permit and relied on a subcontractor to prepare meals.

" --- PUC Schools did not select the lowest-priced bidder as required."

-------------------------------------------

So, in addition to the gross impropriety of the process itself, and to the heinous misuse of the taxpayer money that funds charter schools like the PUC chain, Ms. Castillo's company, "Better 4 You Meals", operates in a substandard fashion, and thus delivered a demonstrably substandard product, as the food preparation, delivery, storage, etc. "lacked the required health permit."

Since Mr. Rodriguez hired Ms. Castillo to work at PUC, he almost certainly knew of her business holdings and interests---i.e. her and her husband's ownership of "Better 4 You Meals." 

 

Might Mr. Rodriguez have profited from any secret kickback from Ms. Castillo in exchange for approving the "Better 4 You Meals" contract?  Perhaps.  We do not know.  If the answer is "No" and he knew that Ms. Castillo owned "Better 4 You Meals", then why did he approve a multi-year, multi-million dollar contract for this same company ?  To quote "THE SOPRANOS", do you really think that Ref (or Ms. Elliot) didn't "get a taste" of this?  If not, what was in it for him to do so?

Furthermore, even if you assume that Mr. Rodriguez is criminally "innocent", and really did NOT know of Ms. Castillo's conflict of interest, then, at the very least, Mr. Rodriguez most certainly SHOULD have.   That's a key part of his freakin' job, for God's sake!!!  His failure to know this, and his failure to do the due diligence necessary to discover it, and to remain aware of this when making relevant decisions reflects poorly on his abilities as an administrator.  He also should have asked and required that Ms. Castillo produced the required health permit.  At the very least, Ref is most certainly "guilty" of gross administrative incompetence and negligence.   All of this renders Ref unfit to manage LAUSD's $7-billion-dollar budget. 

To date, Mr. Rodriguez himself has refused to comment on this scandal---hoping to just lay low until the election is over, as he squeaks through to an ill-gotten victory.  Such silence on his part speaks volumes.

To paraphrase Harry Truman, "the buck should stop" with Mr. Rodriguez, as he is PUC's Founder, CEO, and Treasurer.  

 

Bennett Kayser's constituents (like me) can tell you that "the buck" most certainly DOES stop with Bennett, as evidenced by his diligent responsiveness to their concerns (i.e. his opposition to the I-pad purchase and resulting debacle.)  

 

The students, parents, and citizens of LAUSD District 5 can ill afford to have someone like Mr. Rodriguez to be one of only seven individuals (the seven Board Members) in charge of LAUSD finances, a solemn responsibility that Board Member Kayser---a 30-year teacher and school administrator, by the way---has approached with the utmost care and seriousness.  

In the last four years---and in contrast to Ref's record---neither Kayser nor anyone on his staff, nor anyone connected to him in any way has benefited financially from any action that Board Member Kayser has taken.  Nor has anyone been involved in any corruption of any kind while he has been fulfilling the oath that he took in July 2011.  Profiting or enriching himself is most certainly NOT why Bennett is serving on the board.  Just as in his teaching and school administrator career, it's not about him;  it's about the well-being of 670,000 students, their parents and the community as a whole for which he is responsible.  

 

Unlike Rodriguez and others, it's not a fear of being caught that drives Board Member Kayser to avoid financial impropriety, eschew personal enrichment, and remain on the "straight and narrow";  it's Bennett's own conscience and moral code.  I can vouch for this, as I've known him personally for years.  That's all part of the solemn vow that an LAUSD Board Member takes when he is sworn into office.  If re-elected, Bennett's track record on this score, of course, will continue for the next four years, and for as long as Bennett serves as a public servant. 

 

Mr. Rodriguez' actions, as detailed in the May 2 Los Angeles Times' article, call into serious question his own ability to do likewise.

Indeed, a key part of Bennett's job as the incumbent District 5 Board Member these last four years on LAUSD's board has been to manage LAUSD's budget, and know in as great detail as possible where every penny of that $7 billion goes.  This truly is a task on a par with memorizing the phonebook, but it is a job that a School Board member must be willing and able to take on. Bennett has overseen and balanced three consecutive budgets of $7 billion each, and one that services 670,000 students and the adult staff that serve them!!! Top that, will you?

 

How does Ref's track record compare to this?

 

Well, according to writer and activist Robert Skeels, "Ref Rodriguez couldn’t keep one school, with only 100 students, balanced for nine years (9) straight! This 'insolvent' bad apple is Lakeview Charter, part of the Rodriguez/PUC charter chain. Ham-handed attempts by Rodriguez’s supporter to hide the Office of the Inspector General’s (OIG) audit of the Rodriguez-run PUC Lakeview Charter School, and affiliated enterprises, have been exposed."  

Read more of Robert Skeels' article at:

http://rdsathene.blogspot.com/2015/05/ref-rodriguezs-game-of-hide-puc-audit.html

 

Again, the state audit's report clearly calls into question Mr. Rodriguez' capabilities in this area.  

Once the audit hit the news, Ms. Castillo quickly left PUC, with PUC executive Ms. Elliot making the only public comment on the matter... stating that they didn't know about the conflict of interest, and that there was no wrongdoing on anyone's part.

What about Ref's response? So far, incredibly, there's been RADIO SILENCE FROM REF RODRIGUEZ HIMSELF.  I am sorry, but the Mr. Rodriguez and the folks at PUC cannot have it both ways.  They cannot, on the one hand, fire Ms. Duvivier Castillo (or pressure her to resign), and then, on the other hand, claim---as Ms. Elliot has---that there was no wrong-doing on her or anyone else's part.  

 

If Ms. Castillo--and by extension, Ref and Ms. Elliot--- truly did nothing wrong, as PUC officials claim, there is no reason for Ms. Castillo to leave PUC, and no reason for Ref to clam up about the whole sordid affair.

 

Innocent people do not run away (like Ms. Castillo has);  guilty people do.

 

Innocent people don't clam up (like Ref has); they speak out and clear their name.

If you've got nothing to hide, you hide nothing.

VOTE FOR BENNETT KAYSER ON MAY 19TH for the DISTRICT 5 LAUSD BOARD DISTRICT SEAT

More evidence corroborating Professor Krashen and exposing the contrived skills and STEM crises

"...the impending shortage of scientists and engineers is one of the longest running hoaxes in the country" — Gerald W. Bracey

Schools Matter's Professor Stephen Krashen has been a long time critic of the media promulgated mythology that there's a shortage of qualified workers, particularly those in the Science Technology Engineering Math (STEM) fields. A quick survey of his posts here reveal his ongoing work to counter the skills/STEM propaganda that is most often used to justify some of the most pernicious corporate education reforms.

Whenever I see more evidence proving these skills/STEM myths wrong, I'm quick to forward them to Dr. Krashen for him to add to his burgeoning catalog of documentation. NPR's recent Are There Too Many Ph.D.s And Not Enough Jobs? is an example of the evidence contradicting all the outrageous lies by Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, David Welch, Reed Hastings, Arne Duncan, et al. The NPR piece, which cites The Atlantic, contains gems such as:

"numbers released by the National Science Foundation show that people with doctoral degrees in those technical fields are struggling to find work in their industries."

and

"Worse yet, as of 2011, approximately one-third of people graduating with a doctoral degree in science, technology, math or engineering had no job or post-doctoral offer of any kind."

Krashen posted the above piece on his facebook page, and several of us commented. Still exhausted from the LAUSD election, I had forgotten what I wrote until I saw myself quoted by Peggy Robertson and Patsy Bain Wolf. Looking at the quote, I'm sure glad they preserved it, since it gets to the heart of the matter:

The manufactured STEM crisis. Robert D. Skeels states "The manufactured STEM 'crises' has from the onset been a means to drive down the salaries of those professionals who often don't see themselves as being working class. Starting with Bill Gates' drive to grant more H1B visas to certain workers under the guise of "not enough qualified candidates." What this really means is not enough candidates willing to work on the cheap. Ultimately the same market forces that allow the owners of the means of production drive wages down are at work. Sadly, since many professionals aren't class conscious, the only things that could reverse this trend — working class push-back and unionization — aren't being discussed."

Another recent article by In These Times entitled Study Demolishes the Myth That U.S. Workers Lack Skills further puts the lie to the notion that U.S. workers are lacking in the education or skills department. The piece, which discusses a paper by University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Professor Marc Levine, contains powerful quotes like: "There are still three unemployed people for every possible job opening."

The article proper enumerates the points of Levine’s report, only the headings of which are reproduced here.

• False: The skills of the workforce somehow dropped sharply between 2007 and 2009.
• False: There is a vast pool of high-skilled jobs waiting to be filled.
• False: Employers are trying in vain to attract skilled workers.
• False: Understaffed employers must make do with the skilled workers they have.
• False: New high-skill jobs have been created.
• False: Workers with advanced degrees are more highly sought-after.
• False: The American job market will increasingly demand higher-skilled workers.

Globalization has allowed the ownership class to increasingly pit workers against each other in ways the Robber Barons could have only dreamed of. When workers compete, their boses win! A major part of the impetus behind corporate education reform is the same momentum that's created a job market were workers are increasingly expected to work harder and harder for less and less, while being required to have ever more education and training (at their own expense, of course). Nearly all of Silicon Valley's plutocratic elites' whining about a skills shortage is part and parcel a cry to drive down wages and squeeze ever more profit out of workers who are expected to "lean in."

This race to the bottom for workers is accelerated by those same forces turning teaching into an act of Taylorism as well. Race to the Top and Common Core State Standards are part of a corporate consensus intended to create compliant workers ready to accept ever more abject working conditions. The daily experience in schools today is a grim reminder of what student's adult life will most likely look like. Brian Jones' recent commentary looks at this in depth and provides inescapable analysis. The byline, which couldn't be more apropos, reads 'When Karl Marx described the despotism of the modern workplace, he could have been describing schools in the era of education "reform."' Jones' essay is replete with insights like:

"The bourgeoisie," Marx noted, "cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society."

In those words, Marx put his finger on precisely what's happening in education--the relationship between teacher and student is being revolutionized. The student is, increasingly, evaluated not by the human being he or she speaks to every day, but by a harried, low-wage test scorer (sometimes hundreds of miles away) paid per test or worse, by a machine that scans the student's bubble sheet.

It's no small irony that the selfsame students whose tests are being graded by "harried, low-wage test scorer[s]" are being prepared for such futures as well.

The neoliberal project encroaches from every side and can only be defeated by collective resistance. My heart goes out to all those at the Occupy the Department of Education 2.0: The Battle for Public Schools event right now. I am there with you in spirit. We must continue organizing against these seemingly unstoppable forces, in hopes that eventually we can get our fellows in struggle to realize the meaning of Rosa Luxemburg's famous passage "those who do not move, do not notice their chains."

Dr. Jon Saphier and the Lie That Keeps on Paying Off for His Company

Massachusetts is just one state that has approved Jon Saphier as a licensed vendor to peddle his "Research for Better Teaching" (RBT) to teachers and school leaders across the state.  Saphier's consultants, in fact, are in action tomorrow in at the RBT Conference Center in Acton, MA.  Big bucks.

At the tap root of Saphier's expensive advice is a very old and withered lie that Saphier keeps alive, told so often by Saphier, himself, that it is impossible to know if he has come to actually believe it.  From the preface of The Skillful Teacher . . . (2008):

Of all the things that matter for having good schools, nothing is as important as the teacher and what that person knows, believes, and can do. . . . Teacher effects dwarf all others on student learning.  

Below is a more recent YouTube video where he says the same thing within the first 60 seconds:



What this lie does, of course, when applied liberally to eager or desperate school principals and superintendents who are paying big bucks in Saphier's expensive "professional development" sessions is to provide justification for expecting from teachers what other factors besides teaching makes impossible to achieve.

What the research tells us, in fact, is that teacher effectiveness constitutes the most important school-based factor to variations in test score achievement (Goldhaber, Liddle, Theobald, & Walch, 2010), with the exact percentage depending on the methodology used to measure it. [

Goldhaber (2002) found that teacher characteristics account for 8.5 percent of the “variation in student achievement,” while another analysis published, too, in a peer-reviewed journal (Nye, Konstantopoulos, & Hedges, 2004) found that “7% to 21% of the variance in achievement gains is associated with variation in teacher effectiveness” (p. 240).  

What we know,  as well, is that that other factors, both in-school and out-of-school, have much more influence on student achievement variations than do teachers.  Goldhaber and his colleagues (Goldhaber, 2002) found that additional factors involving family background, peer composition, and other social capital influences make up sixty percent of the variance in student test scores. 

References for sources just cited:  
Goldhaber, D.  (2002).  The mystery of good teaching. Education Next, 2(1).  Retrieved from 

http://educationnext.org/the-mystery-of-good-teaching/

Goldhaber, D., Liddle, S., Theobald, R., & Walch, J.  (2010).  Teacher effectiveness and the achievement of Washington students in mathematics (Working paper no. 2010-6.0).  Seattle, WA:  University of Washington, Center for Education Data & Research.  Retrieved from http://www.cedr.us/publications.html

Nye, B., Konstantopoulos, S., & Hedges, L. V.  (2004). How large are teacher effects?” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 26(3), 237-257.

So, please Dr. Saphier, stop lying.  And please, State of Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, stop endorsing Saphier's lie.  If you need additional research, try this one just published in the April issue of Pediatrics that demonstrates previously undocumented evidence that prematurity and maternal education have highly significant impacts on subsequent infant development and early school achievement as measured by test scores (my bolds):

. . . . Led by Bryan Williams, PhD, lead researcher and associate professor at Emory's Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing, the team monitored live births to Georgia-resident mothers ages 11-53 and the test results for all three components of the Criterion-referenced Competency Test (CRCT) for first graders in Georgia public schools. The aim was to determine the association between late preterm births – birth between 36-37 weeks' gestation – and first grade standardized test scores. The findings suggested that preterm birth and low maternal education increase a child's risk of failure of first grade standardized testing scores.

 "While socioeconomic conditions are frequently blamed for the "achievement gap" in educational testing, the role of prematurity in educational achievement should also be explored," explains Williams. "Our findings demonstrate that a child's academic success is much more of a function of birth history than who educates them. It is difficult to argue that a child born at 28 weeks will perform well on a standardized test by simply having a better educator." 

Williams and his team explored additional factors such as maternal age at birth, maternal education, maternal race/ethnicity, child race/ethnicity, sex of the child, and year of birth. Findings of the study suggested that, along with preterm birth, the strongest risk factor for failure of each of the three components (math, reading, and language arts) was low levels of maternal education.

 "Strategies should be implemented to promote maternal academic achievement and full-term gestation," says Carol Hogue, PhD, Terry Professor of Maternal and Child Health at Emory's Rollins School of Public Health. "This also includes proper education of the consequences of early elective inductions and the importance of addressing known risk factors for preterm birth." 

"Given the fact that the fetal brain grows by nearly one third in the last five weeks of pregnancy, it is not surprising that any injury, such as prematurity, at this stage can lead to neurodevelopmental delays," explains co-author Lucky Jain, MD, Richard W. Blumberg Professor and executive vice chairman for the Department of Pediatrics at Emory University School of Medicine. "The surprising finding in this study is the extension of these delays into early school age." 

The developmental risks associated with late preterm births were once thought to be minimal. However, studies have demonstrated that even infants who are at the margins of prematurity suffer disproportionate rates of clinical neurocognitive problems. These late preterm infants may be susceptible to early and long term academic failure. 

"Given our findings, it is reasonable to believe that prematurity could have an even longer and more substantial impact on school achievement as a child progresses through grade levels, says co-author Anne L. Dunlop, MD, MPH, associate professor at Emory's Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing. "This information supports recommendations for pregnant mothers to wait until 39 weeks or greater to deliver, when possible, and further underscores the importance of identifying and implementing interventions to address the problem of preterm birth in the United States."

Read more at: http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-03-prematurity-maternal-affect-early-academic.html#jCp