Elmo isn't Gramsci for kids and the mythical soft bigotry of low expectations

This short essay was originally published on The Daily Censored on August 11, 2011. It would seem that all of the old works on that site are gone. That's unfortunate because I published a lot of work there. I had a teaser here linking to it, a practice I stopped doing precisely because I've learned from harsh experience that websites die and all the content is lost (like my At The Chalkface works). I was able to track down a reprint on Susan Ohanian's site, but her site is having issues as well. Ultimately, I was able to retrieve a copy of the reprint from the Wayback Machine.

I want to reproduce this last sentence from Ohanian's introduction, since she had such insight into why the essay was important:

“The hardline right wing may well love the vacuous phrase “soft bigotry of low expectations,” but let’s remember that education deform democrats love it just as much. It is mostly used to put progressive activists on the defensive.” — Susan Ohanian

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Elmo isn't Gramsci for kids and the mythical soft bigotry of low expectations

“We address the soft bigotry of low expectations so that we may ignore the hard racism of inequity.” — John Kuhn

Although this footage isn't new and commentators have already discussed it, it deserves reexamination since it illuminates one of the core false tenets of the corporate education reform canon.

Amidst the bizarre assertion that Sesame Street is indoctrinating children in some sort of insidious left wing plot, reactionary Ben Shapiro says that:

"I talked to one of the guys who's at Children's Television Workshop originally and he said the whole purpose of Sesame Street was cater to black and hispanic youths who, quote unquote, did not have reading literature in the house, there kind of this soft bigotry of low expectations that's automatically associated with Sesame Street."

Ahhh — the chimerical "soft bigotry of low expectations." As opposed to the hard bigotry of the pervasive institutional racism underpinning our economic system, which facilitates the division of workers and submerses a majority in abject poverty in order to make a small minority obscenely rich. The very same minority, by the way, that supports privatizing public education via charters and vouchers.

The dubious phrase is beloved by the hardline right. The Birchers at the Heartland Institute [1] use the phrase with reckless abandon. Cato, Manhattan, Hoover, and all the other reactionary right wing think tanks repeat the phrase "soft bigotry of low expectations" as if it's the mantra necessary to permanently bring back the gilded age they all pine for.

Of course the nonsensical phrase isn't limited to fringe right-wing kooks that also think John Galt and Howard Rourke are historical figures. Many supposed-liberals, or at the very least Democratic Leadership Council party operatives, use the phrase as often, if not more often than their teabagging counterparts.

The vile billionaire hedge fund shyster Whitney Tilson uses the phrase incessantly. Remember too that the ever obtuse Tilson helped form two of the most virulent corporate reform and privatization pushing organizations in existence: Teach for America (TFA) and Democrats for Education Reform (DFER). The latter, DFER, uses the phrase in its privatization propaganda. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has used the phrase. TFA's Wendy Kopp has had a lucrative career peddling the phrase. The snarling queen of Erasuregate, Michelle Rhee, cherishes such phrases. Los Angeles' poverty pimping opportunist Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa proudly plasters the phrase on twitter.

The unprincipled construction "soft bigotry of low expectations" is typically credited to the Council on Foreign Relations's arch-reactionary Michael Gerson, who was the speechwriter for fraudulent Rod Paige's Texas Education Miracle co-fraud, George W. Bush.

Like all the philosophically threadbare propaganda from the right, the expression is vapid and vacuous, without any real meaning whatsoever, putting it right along with "no excuses," and "working hard and being nice." Professor Noam Chomsky best addresses these types of phrases:

"It doesn't mean anything... That's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody's going to be against, and everybody's going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything. Its crucial value is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something: Do you support our policy?" [2]

The policy in question is to ignore poverty and demand a false accountability from all of poverty's victims. While there are countless works discussing this, a recent pair of essays by my Schools Matter colleague Professor P. L. Thomas, EdD, really get to the heart of this issue: Poverty and Testing in Education: "The Present Scientifico-legal Complex" part 1 and part 2.

Humane Expectations Devoid of any Bigotry

In my many years I've never come across an educator that had anything but "realistic expectations tempered with compassion and empathy" for their students, regardless of where they taught. Moreover, for right wing reactionaries to accuse hard working women and men that have dedicated their lives to educating inner city students of bigotry of any sort smacks of hypocrisy of the highest order. It's laughable on its face.

Of course compassion and empathy are foreign words to the rogues gallery discuss above, none of whom have ever taught in their lives. Well, with the exceptions of Wendy Kopp and Michelle Malkin — I mean, Michele Bachmann, er, — I mean Michelle Rhee (sorry it's so easy to confuse those three). Rhee is so devoid of empathy and compassion that one of the most enduring stories from her short stint as a TFA missionary is when she taped her students mouths shut with masking tape and then walked them to the lunchroom, bleeding lips and all. Kopp is seemingly less of a sociopath than Rhee, but it's clear her passion for fame and fortune outweigh any compassion she might have once had.

Access To Books

The other thing reactionary Shapiro gets entirely wrong before employing the hackneyed "soft bigotry of low expectations" nonsense, was to dismiss the Children's Television Workshop's catering to children that "did not have reading literature in the house." Access to books in the home is a major indicator of academic achievement and impoverished families have very limited access to books. This is a fact, and not something to be dismissed by a sniveling right winger threatening to "take them [Elmo and Big Bird] out back and cap them."

Another one of my Schools Matter colleagues, the distinguished Professor Stephen Krashen, PhD, has researched and written extensively on the subject of access to books. Here are a small sampling of his available short articles linking to longer works on the subject.

• Children of poverty and access to books
• IRA President: Access to books makes a difference
• Heroic First Book Marketplace Can't Do It All Get caught reading month?
• Policy: protect children from poverty before we discuss pedagogy

Given the staunch anti-intellectualism, lack of knowledge about all thing pedagogical, and academic aversion that whiny right wingers like Shapiro are known for, it's no wonder that he didn't get the whole importance of providing additional educational resources for children that "did not have reading literature in the house" like the prescient folks at Children's Television Workshop always have.

"True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity." [3]

Now that we're discussing these things, let's talk about the stark racism and classism stemming from the corporate education reform movement, which is orchestrated by the same plutocrats that aired Shapiro's television program. After all, those are the sort of things that vacuous phrases like "soft bigotry of low expectations" are supposed to distract us from.

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NOTES

[1] Heartland Institute is none other than Parent Revolution's sister organization. Word is that in addition to co-hosting school privatization forums that Ben Austin and Ben Boychuck formulate policy together.

[2] Chomsky, Noam. Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda, Second Edition. New York: Seven Stories Press., 1991. pp. 25-26.

[3] Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 30th Anniversary Edition. New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc., 2009. p. 45.

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."

Guest Post: Assumptions that 'Just Seem Obvious' to Steve Brill

By John Thompson

There is a long line of education experts exposing the factual errors in Steve Brill's Class Warfare so, instead, I set out to illuminate the assumptions underneath his brand of "reform." I was overwhelmed, however, by the number of times that Brill, and the non-educators he fawned over, discovered findings that "just seemed obvious." So, I only want to recount Brill's tale of the naive assumptions, opinions, and assertions, based on numbers from one district, that supposedly propelled Bill Gates into the experiment that Gates said was, "the riskiest thing we have ever done."

Brill begins with "Identifying Effective Teaching Using Performance on the Job," by Tom Kane, Robert Gordon, and Douglas Staiger. Kane et. al wrote, "the current credential-centered regime is built upon two questionable premises ..." They then presented evidence that was solid enough to contribute to the minor league debate over teacher certification. But then these economists made another leap, "the second premise is that school districts learn nothing more about teacher effectiveness." Without making any effort to link their data (and that assertion) to reality, Kane and company called for dangerous and revolutionary changes to the entire nation's educational systems. When I first read their opinions, I chalked them up to being academic theory.

If Brill's account is trustworthy, though, I was naive. Either Brill was loose with his words, or he was celebrating a classic "bait and switch." According to Brill, the authors asserted that the need for "paper qualifications" is a "bedrock of public education." Worse, Kane et. al supposedly claimed that the second core assumption of our system is that "districts can learn nothing more of teaching effectiveness after the initial hire," and "this was why almost all teachers initially receive satisfactory evaluations." (emphasis mine.) Even worse, they successfully convinced Bill Gates that a "surprising" lack of volatility in teachers' performances, measured by standardized tests, was grounds for overturning decades of social science research on teaching and learning, and the way that organizations change.

Rereading the paper, I fear that Brill accurately reported the authors' true intentions. Now I see the report as a grab bag of political soundbites. Kane et. al predicted an impending shortage of teachers, which would be most damaging for high-poverty schools. Their solution - based on the presumption that the lowest scoring teachers should be fired using a methodology that is systematically biased against teachers in high-poverty schools - would supposedly attract talent to those schools!?!?! To their credit, Kane and company recognized the need to adjust for circumstances beyond the teachers' control. For example, if construction was going on outside the window on testing day... But, they argued that test score growth models that would be used for evaluations should not be controlled for poverty.

Fortunately, the Gates team has subsequently distanced themselves from their initial overreach, but it still raises a huge question. What did they not know about peer effects and when did they not know it?

If Brill is accurate, having assumed that there is a single simple explanation for the sorry state of evaluations, the theorists did not need to search for other reasons why inner city schools have a hard time attracting and retaining talent. Having reached the shocking discovery that, "some teachers are better than others," Gates and company thus decided that the path to school improvement must go through their version of instruction-driven, standardized test-driven reforms.

According to Brill, Bill Gates bought the hypothesis that the lack of volatility in test scores meant that their version of teacher quality had to be the focus of reform. After a two-hour discussion, supposedly, Gates became increasingly frustrated that educators ignored a solution that "seemed so obvious."

I will leave it to the experts to analyze how stable or volatile test scores are. Subsequent research by Gates' scholars has been used to argue that teacher performance is no more unstable than major league baseball players' performance - as if that has much to do with fixing schools. My point is that their assumption could only have been made by people with no knowledge of the logistics of schooling. As I have explained, if Brill, Kane, or Gates had had a rudimentary knowledge of how schools are actually run, they could not have jumped to such a weird conclusion.

And that gets to other assumptions. When I was in school, Kane would not have begun such a paper with a mischaracterization of his opponents' positions. A reader used to assume that a scholar would start his argument by honestly summarizing what his evidence was and was not able to prove. In polite discourse, a summary of opposing arguments was always presented in a fair manner. Kane would have been honor-bound to summarize the record of longstanding evaluation methods such as the Toledo Plan, the Teacher Advancement Program, and other successful peer review and mentoring efforts, as well as National Board certification. Had Gates been briefed on the strengths and weaknesses of those union-endorsed methods, perhaps he would have chosen to fund efforts to better incorporate data into those holistic systems, or perhaps he would have financed a scaling up on those methods of improving teacher quality.

The bad news is that education, and educators, are held in such low esteem that revolutionary reforms are mandated by non-educators, based on what seems obvious after being exposed to a sliver of information. Too often, it presented only by self-interested parties who represent a small minority of scholars. The good news is that snap judgments can be reversed. Smart people have changed their minds when introduce to better evidence.

This era of primitive test-driven hypotheses reminds me of the rookie mistakes made by first generation econometricians such as Robert Fogel, Stanley Engerman, Alfred Conrad, and John Meyer. One even earned a Nobel Prize, showing that a bone-headed error, born of inexperience need not be a mark of shame. Back then, however, there were more checks and balances in regard to academic assertions. When I was in school, these economists made the daring, and soon-to-be-proven-silly proclamations that the building of the railroad system did not accelerate economic growth and that slavery was profitable. Those mistakes are humorous now, but then again, we did not cite their speculations as reasons to tear apart our railroads or reinstate slavery.

And we should remember a key reason why an econometric model, based on data from one state, reached such inaccurate conclusions about slavery across the nation. To the Harvard economists, it seemed obvious that half of Kentucky's mules must be momma mules and half must be daddy mules. Not knowing that mules are sterile, they assumed the profits due to mule reproduction.

If Gates and Kane would be more open about what they do not know, and listen to actual practitioners, they could still be a powerful force for good. But they need to listen to educators with concrete knowledge of how schools are run, and understand the power of peer pressure.

Dr. John Thompson was an award-winning historian, lobbyist, and guerilla-gardener who became an award-winning inner city teacher after crack and gangs hit his neighborhood. He blogs at thisweekineducation.com, and huffingtonpost.com, and is writing a book on 18 years of idealistic politics in the classroom and realistic politics outside.

Guest Post: The Facts Not Included in Steve Brill's Tell All

By John Thompson

Steve Brill’s Class Warfare is full of breathless accounts of the rich and powerful that are reminiscent of the biographies of Kitty Kelly. Ironically, the most valuable part of his Class Warfare may be his accounts of dramatic decisions to undertake risky and revolutionary "reforms" based on minimal evidence and some strange assumptions.

According to Brill, "Identifying Effective Teaching Using Performance on the Job" by Tom Kane, Robert Gordon, and Douglas Staiger was used to convince Bill Gates and President Obama that "teacher quality," measured by standardized tests, must be the focus of reform. According to Brill, they argued that tests showed, "remarkable consistency among teachers," and that "obviously" this suggested that the person in front of the classroom was the key to closing the achievement gap. Gates was supposedly told that the "surprising" lack of volatility in the test scores of one district meant we could trust algorithms to drive the firing of teachers. If we believe Brill, because of the stability in the charts that Kane and Gordon presented to Gates, we should presume that 25% of teachers with the lowest test score growth should be fired.

Perhaps I should make no assumptions, and use my 90% low-income district to explain Urban Education 101 for reformers. In our six magnet and charter high schools, the attendance rates never drop below 95%, while our seven neighborhood schools struggle to reach an attendance rate of 80%. When you add in the far lower enrollment rates and the far higher suspension rates in the neighborhood schools, their students attend class at a rate that is 1/4th to 1/3rd less than their peers in selective schools (and far less than their previous three years in middle school.) It would take a superhuman effort for neighborhood school teachers, with kids who are five to six years behind grade level in reading, to meet growth targets that were not controlled for school selectivity.

By the way, those patterns are all stable. Should we thus assume that the teachers in the magnet schools are better than the teachers in neighborhood schools with deplorable scores?

Neither would anyone with firsthand knowledge of actual classrooms assume that a relative lack of test score volatility within schools justifies the "reformers’" extraordinary conclusions. I would assume that Kane, at least, would know that even when student assignment policies are stable, students are assigned differently to tested and non-tested classes. I wonder how he would address a stable pattern in my district where middle school "Science" classes are taught to the names, dates, facts, and figures of the benchmark tests, producing pass rates ranging from 70 to 73%. Then freshmen Biology students have a pass rate that fluctuates from 30% to 51% to 41% on tests designed to measure scientific thinking. Since the Biology teachers’ growth targets would be based on middle school tests, would Kane support the mass firing of those teachers for failure to meet targets generated from the results of different tests?

Recognizing that districts differ, let us take some more obvious examples of stable patterns from my school system. As 5th graders, the kids of Zip Code 73120 attend schools with poverty rates ranging from 23%, 50%, 69%, and 76%, with the special education populations ranging from 5.5% to 14%. The number of suspensions are 0, 14, 33, and 86. The pass rates for 5th grade Reading range from 81% to 95%.

Between 5th and 6th grade, the district's student population drops by nearly 1/5th as the numbers of special education and ELL students increase. In 73120, the decline is more remarkable as the majority of their students move to magnet, enterprise, and charter schools, including four that have gained national recognition. So, the 6th graders arrive at a school with 2,020 disciplinary actions, which lost its middle class students after the campus policeman was hospitalized in a riot, and where 1/4th of their class are on IEPs. Should the 6th grade teachers to be blamed for a Reading pass rate of 44%? Is it reasonable to expect those teachers to meet test score targets based on the three previous years of performance in very different types of classrooms, with incomparably different peer effects?

Similarly, a non-educator might be unaware that the challenges facing an Algebra II class are radically different to those of an Algebra I class next door. The demographic differences between the two math classes, however, are just as stark as the unbelievable differences between our 5th and 6th graders. My school was the lowest-ranked secondary school in Oklahoma, but the percentages of poor and at-risk juniors in Algebra II were not dramatically different to the percentages in many suburban schools. After all, 1/3rd or more of the freshmen Algebra I students drop out before reaching their 11th grade year. (By the way, 9^th grade is the year when the enrollment rate reaches rock bottom, with the average freshmen being in school for less than 2/3rds of a year, and when the truancy and suspension rates explode. Should we fire most, if not all inner city Algebra I teachers for not raising the performance of students who do not attend class?)

Worst of all, the Gates shop has given no indication that they have become aware of the difference between a student with a math or a reading disability, as opposed to a conduct disorder or serious emotional disturbances. Neither have they dealt with the effect of federal policies on how schools are allowed to handle those students, and the implication for schools where 35 to 40% of their students are on Individual Education Plans.

In other words, they do not have the background knowledge to comprehend the scenario described by Paul Tough where an inner city class of thirty kids, because it has 8 to 10 kids who have been traumatized to the point where their brain circuitry has been altered, degenerates into a culture of hitting and fighting. Otherwise, how could Kane and Gates assume that teachers with those sorts of classes would have a chance of hitting their growth targets?

Unless these theorists assumed that Seriously Emotionally Disturbed students are distributed evenly throughout our diverse nation's classrooms, they betrayed a basic misunderstanding of peer effects in urban schools. A class where a third of the students are well- behaved kids with cognitive differences, can not be compared to a class with a critical mass of children who have been victimized to the point where they can not control their behavior. And if the theorists have that level of ignorance, perhaps they also are unaware that schools facing an impossible load of the most difficult-to-educate students tend to turn certain classes into dumping grounds.

Brill’s Class Warfare included 19 pages of sources and endnotes, but there is no indication that he read any of the immense body of social science on teaching, learning, and schooling. According to Brill, Gates gave the go-ahead for his Measuring Effective Teaching effort after two hours of discussion. There was no indication that Gates was exposed to scholarship that contradicted the hypothesis that teacher quality must drive reform.

Had Gates been briefed on the way schools are organized, and the need for early education, a concentration on reading comprehension and socio-emotional skills before 3rd grade, the need for high-quality curriculum, and the promise of community schools that turn education into a team effort, I doubt this smart man would have assumed that there was only one way to fix urban schools.

If Gates, or for that matter, if President Obama (who later adopted the Gates agenda) had been provided a full and fair briefing by educators as well as economists, it would be no skin off Brill's nose. There are still plenty of Kitty Kelly-type books out there begging to be written by a person with Brill's confidence that he obviously knows all of the answers.

Dr. John Thompson was an award-winning historian, lobbyist, and guerilla-gardener who became an award-winning inner city teacher after crack and gangs hit his neighborhood. He blogs at thisweekineducation.com, and huffingtonpost.com, and is writing a book on 18 years of idealistic politics in the classroom and realistic politics outside.

Occupation of Logan Street School Rooms by a Corporate Charter Continues

"[C]reating a 'separate and unequal' education system through the co-locations of charter schools in public school buildings." — NYC Parents' Lawsuit

Photos by Lisa Baca-Sigala

A day after the Echo Parque community learned that Gabriella Charter Corporation had ended their week long occupation of Logan Street Elementary School's auditorium, evidence that Gabriella had merely taken over another room and moved their furniture into that room once they had emptied it of its existing contents came to light.

Greater Echo Park Elysian Neighborhood Council's (GEPENC) CIO Lisa Baca-Sigala took photographs and notified the Los Angeles Unified School District's (LAUSD) Office of the General Counsel that Gabriella Charter Corporation had not only seized Logan Street School's Room 32, but had moved the contents of that room into Room 31 without permission or even the courtesy of notifying Logan's principal, Mr. Luis Ochoa. Moreover, the impromptu move damaged the rooms in question and some of the items that were moved.

GEPENC volunteers had spent a great deal of time and resources preparing the Logan Street School rooms for quickly approaching school year. This quote from their letter to LAUSD speaks volumes:

Both of these classrooms were part of the six classrooms painted and deep cleaned by the Greater Echo Park Elysian Neighborhood Council with the community and parents volunteers last year for the SPECIFIC USE BY LOGAN STUDENTS not the Gabriella charter school office administration or students. Additionally, you may recall that LAUSD also invested funds to replace the new floors in both of these classrooms for the use by the Logan DISTRICT SCHOOL STUDENTS.

The volunteers requested LAUSD make Gabriella Charter Corporation pay for the damages caused by their activities under Article 14.2(C) of the Colocation Agreement. Additionally, some local parents are asking for Gabriella Charter Corporation's colocation agreement be revoked.

In an attempt to provide Gabriella Charter Corporation with an opportunity to explain themselves, I've left several voicemails on their general office phone (213) 413-5741, and emailed them. They've made no effort to return my calls or emails. When I personally visited the Logan campus on Wednesday, August 24, 2011, classroom 32 was still occupied. Given Gabriella Charter Corporation's past behavior and flaunting of the colocation agreement (including last year's Room 51 incident), there's a very good chance they have no intentions of relinquishing their latest annexation.


More frightening still, was evidence that confirmed rumors we had heard from several neighborhood parents about wealthy white Wendy Kopp's Teach for America (TFA) missionary corps establishing a beachhead in our neighborhood. When I circled around the campus from the outside to take a photograph of Gabriela Charter Corporation's main building, a white board stood to the side boldly proclaiming "Welcome Teach for America Office." Perhaps we know now why Gabriella needs more office space. I know several very principled people, including some prominent activist teachers, who are TFA alumni. That said, I know far more who are entirely unprincipled, and more to the point, I have observed TFA's overall function in leveraging neoliberalism and providing a scab force for districts trying wholesale privatization. Rather than get into my own lengthy critique of TFA, I offer a handful of other peoples' essays which address some of my concerns:

• A new look at Teach for America
• Why TFA is Dangerous for Our District (or any other)
• Teach for America
• Teach for America: The Money Just Keeps Rolling In
• Why I Hate Teach for America

Gabriella Charter Corporation must do the right thing and return to the space allocated to them under their charter colocation agreement. Please contact Gabriella Executive Director Liza Bercovici at (213) 487-0839 liza@gabri.org and the LAUSD Board President Garcia at (213) 241-6180 monica.garcia@lausd.net and let them know that the occupation of our public school's rooms must end.


For a background on this story please see: Gabriella Charter Corporation further encroaches Logan Street Public Elementary School. There is a gallery of photos related to these articles.

On Democracy Now! "Poverty Is the Problem": Efforts to Cut Education Funding, Expand Standardized Testing Assailed

The Democracy Now! team discusses recent developments in New York's assessment plans, the U.S. Department of Education's controversial No Child Left Behind waiver extortion scheme, and other topics with celebrated education professor and author Dr. Diane Ravitch and New York City schoolteacher Brian Jones (The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman).



[click here if can't view this video]

Gabriella Charter Corporation further encroaches Logan Street Public Elementary School

"Colocation is eviction... It doesn't mean sharing, it means displacement." — NY State Sen. Bill Perkins


Gabriella Charter School Corporation continues to blatantly disregard the rights of the public school community at Echo Park's Logan Street Elementary School. Not content with having exceeded their allotment of space by several rooms, last week the well heeled executives of the corporate charter decided to forcibly annex Logan's entire auditorium. Here's an excerpt from one of the witnesses:

[We] looked into the school auditorium to discover that the Gabriella Charter School had moved its entire front office into the Logan auditorium. That includes desks, sofas, file cabinets, end tables and other various office paraphernalia. It was not there for storage. It was set up for business.

Set up for business indeed. As one can see from the photograph taken by a witness, this isn't furniture placed temporarily as if being rearranged, these desks are set up for use with lamps plugged in, papers and such at the ready. Moreover, none of Logan's administrators had been notified that their school's auditorium was appropriated by the adversarial charter corporation.

This egregious act by the corporate charter currently leaves Logan Street ES with no assembly space for their students or parents, and is part of a pattern of encroachment and disregard for the public school community that Gabriella occupies. Gabriella Corporation already caused Logan ES to cease offering any pre-school program because the charter took the two pre-kindergarden rooms. While LAUSD's legal department did contact the corporate charter and told them they needed to move their "office" out of Logan's auditorium, such notifications haven't done much in the past, as Gabriella has systematically violated its space cap several times in the past.

Shockingly, when Los Angeles Unified School Board President Monica Garcia was contacted regarding Gabriella Corporation's latest violation, she claimed she:

"Had to stay neutral in a case like this."

Community members and social justice activists are curious as to why our LAUSD trustee, whose district encompasses both Gabriella Charter Corporation and the public school it occupies would need to remain neutral when the charter is clearly violating the civil rights of all the public school families at Logan Street Elementary School. Echo Parque community members are encouraged to contact President Garcia at (213) 241-6180 or monica.garcia@lausd.net and discuss this incident with her.

Gabriella Charter School Corporation originally was able to gain a foothold on our neighborhood public school's campus under the insidious colocation provisions of Prop 39. Prop 39's colocation provisions were created by the deep pocketed California Charter Schools Association and their plutocrat backers in order to help undermine public schools and saddle taxpayers with the expenses of privately run charter schools over which they have negligible say or oversight.

It shouldn't surprise anyone that Gabriella Corporation's governing board (Gabriella Axelrad Education Foundation) sports several dubious non-educators with some experience with displacing the public commons in favor of private interests. Anyone familiar with the tragic tale of urban farm destruction documented in the Academy Award nominated film The Garden, will recognize the names of those board members responsible.

While Los Angeles communities and social justice activists are just beginning to learn how to fight back against charter school colocations (read occupations), in other cities there are established movements actively doing so. In New York City, groups like the Grassroots Education Movement engage in this struggle, and there have even been lawsuits against charter encroachments. Some of these struggles are documented in the inspiring film The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman, a must see for public school supporters. In our local struggles, we need to place political pressure on Gabriella Charter School Corporation to stop encroaching on our public school, and to pressure LAUSD to enforce the civil rights of all the families enrolled at Logan Street Elementary School.

Elmo isn't Gramsci for kids and the mythical soft bigotry of low expectations

We address the soft bigotry of low expectations so that we may ignore the hard racism of inequity. — John Kuhn


What do Ben Shapiro, Whitney Tilson, The Heartland Institute, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, The Hoover Institution, Wendy Kopp, The Manhattan Institute, and Democrats for Education Reform all have in common? They all shamelessly use the meaningless and hackneyed phrase "soft bigotry of low expectations."

Elmo isn't Gramsci for kids and the mythical soft bigotry of low expectations looks at the far right's bizarre assertions that Sesame Street is indoctrinating children in some sort of insidious left wing plot and that Children's Television Workshop's providing additional educational resources for children that "did not have reading literature in the house" is somehow tantamount to bigotry.

In the end, we know that access to books in the home is a major indicator of academic achievement and impoverished families have very limited access to books. That is where we should focus our efforts.

Published 2011-08-11 on The Daily Censored, please read it there and share widely.