Guest Post: CJ on Kittredge And Moskowitz talking corporate charter secrets

Apparently a charter spokesman, Jeremiah Kittredge in NYC, has difficulty---or feigns difficulty in order to manipulate folks---with the statistical concept of "average."  

(Kittredge is the high-paid and top spokesman for FAMILIES FOR EXCELLENT SCHOOLS, a non-profit that is funded by the Waltons, Eva Moskowitz' husbands' group, and hedge-funder-backed PACs.)

In a WCNY radio interview, Kittredge was asked to respond to irrefutable data that charters serve significantly less-than-average numbers of Special Ed. and ELL students. He countered by comparing charters' records to that of public schools.  

His proof.

Charters' dismal record for under enrolling Special Ed. and ELL students is no big deal because... try not to laugh... "over 50% of New York City public schools" serve "a less-than-average number of Special Ed. and ELL students."

Yeah, he actually said that.

Hey Jeremiah, when "over 50%" of ANY group does something, doesn't that mean that they will ALWAYS be doing it on a "less-than-average" rate or basis?

Put another way...

51% ALWAYS does something 49% or less (i.e. a less-than-average % or percentage) of the time.

52% will be doing it 48% or less of the time.... 

...and on and on..

This quote is from the NYC BAT's video "UNKNOWABLE":  (watch it, as it presents, then analyzes these and other answers from Kittredge & also from Success Academy CEO Eva Moskowitz in her interview with the Ayn Rand-ian libertarian website REASON):

https://vimeo.com/120305258

Hmmm... what other brilliant defenses will Kittredge, Eva, and their ilk be making and publicizing next?

(Here goes my audition for THE ONION!)

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

Re: teachers' attrition & the longevity of TFA teachers (the vast majority of whom leave after two years, three at the most... RINSE & REPEAT ad infinitum) -

KITTREDGE:  "Oh... Attrition Schmmattrition.  The numbers don't lie, and they back us up here.  An impressive result from a key study indicates that up-to-49% of our TFA Corps Members staffing our charter schools have longer-than-average teaching careers, and remain in the classroom longer than their fellow TFA colleagues.  In turn, our charter scholars reap the benefits of this selfless dedication."

or

"And what about the sky-high attrition among unionized public school teachers and THEIR career length?  Nobody ever talks about THAT.  Is their record so much more impressive?  A damning statistical analysis reveals that over 50% of teachers in unionized schools leave teaching and abandon their students, on average, earlier than their fellow unionized teachers.  Just think of the resulting negative impact that is then visited upon their students.  Shame on them!  The system is broken!"

- - - - - - -

re: student attrition -

EVA MOSKOWITZ:  "We're extremely proud of our record on this issue, and never moreso than on Graduation Day.  To see the glowing satisfaction on the faces of our SUCCCESS ACADEMY scholars and parents makes all that we do so worthwhile.  Indeed, we're proving those cynics wrong, as the data incontrovertibly shows that a whopping 100% of our Success Academy scholars who are not kicked... err... 'counseled out' prior to Graduation Day actually walk across that stage to get their diplomas.  I mean, come on!  100 PERCENT??!!! You can't do any better than THAT!" 

- - - - - - -

re: co-location -

EVA MOSKOWITZ:  "This so-called 'co-location crisis' in NYC schools is way overblown by our detractors.  Indeed, 100% of the public schools that do not yet have a charter school co-located on their campus---and there are hundreds of them, mind you---report ZERO percent of the problems typically associated with charter school co-locations.  Why aren't our critics reporting this fact?"

- - - - - - -

re: charter school leaders' refusal to pay rent for the public school buildings---originally built and now maintained by taxpayers---that the charters do/will occupy -

KITTREDGE:  "Look, this is just Business 101.  It's a basic market principle:  the more you SPEND, the less you HAVE... so how can you then charge us rent, and steal money from the education of poor children?  Didn't you see our TV commercials with all those adorable Charter School kids?  How can you do this to them?"

- - - - - - -

re: enormous Charter industry executive & administrator salaries... in the mid-six-figures (i.e. Kittredge, Eva, Dave & Mike at KIPP, Deborah Kenney, etc.) -

KITTREDGE:  "Look, we don't overpay our top people.  Across the city, we see it again and again... and this needs to be reported more... over 50% of charter school executives and administrators take home a less-than-average salary in comparison to their fellow charter school administrators and executives.  The enormous amount of money saved then goes to the classroom, and to meet the needs or our scholars. Why can't our critics see this, then get off this topic, and find something new to whine about?"

- - - - - - - -

re: intensive test-prep for standardized tests, sometimes two hours or more a day (N.Y. Magazine reported this, along with a comment from a Success Academy administrator proudly describing the students as "little test-taking machines") - 

EVA MOSKOWITZ:  ""Look, what's wrong with a little practice before a standardized test?  We make it fun, and it's not even that much to begin with.  Our tracking of our scholars shows that an impressive 50% or more of our students spend a less-than-average time doing drill-and-kill test prep compared to their fellow Success Academy scholars.  That frees up time for ... what, exactly... oh... I dunno... I forget... "

KIPP, Chemical Reactions, and Character: Mapping Out the New Eugenics Agenda

A slightly different version of this review was published yesterday at Substance News.

Paul Tough, KIPP, and the Character Con: A Review of How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character
Jim Horn 

When we look at these kids and their behavior, it can all seem so mysterious….But at some point, what you’re seeing is just a complex series of chemical reactions.  It’s the folding of a protein or the activation of a neuron.  And what’s exciting about that is that those things are treatable.  When you get down to the molecules, you realize, that’s where the healing is.  That’s where you’re discovering a solution” (p. 26).  Paul Tough quoting Nadine Burke Harris

Two days before the 2012 presidential election, Rachel Maddow ran a clip from an interview with uber-conservative, Paul Ryan, who not so long ago had plans, you might recall, to be Vice-President of the U. S.  The interview was conducted by a local reporter in Flint, MI, one of the poorest and most violent urban areas of America.  Ryan offered this suggestion for solving the crime and violence problems of Flint:

            the best thing to help prevent violent crime in the inner cities is to bring opportunity in the inner cities, is to help people get out of poverty in the inner cities, is to help teach people good discipline, good character. That is civil society.

Maddow and most other progressives were aghast when they heard an Ayn Rand conservative like Paul Ryan say such a thing.  Oddly, however, when a New York Times writer/reporter draws the same conclusion, as Paul Tough does in his bestseller, How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, the “progressive” establishment is either silent as church mice or ready to throw contributions (tax deductible) into the corporate offering plate to actively support school programs like KIPP that are aimed to do just what Paul Ryan had the temerity to admit, and for which we are rightfully indignant. 

Tough’s liberal framing of Paul Ryan’s goal to teach America’s urban poor good discipline and character is imbued with a thinly-veiled social engineering urge that is growing stronger by the day.  It is based on a messy collection of far-fetched extrapolations from a science-seeming psychological intervention that is now being employed in the education reform schools by non-professionals who haven’t the foggiest notion of what kind of damage they are doing to the children of the poor who are, otherwise, being “cured” of the ill effects of poverty. Tough is a good writer, too good to have written such an implausible promo for the kinds of neo-eugenic ministrations that he supports in this book as a solution to the “character problem” and the “executive functioning” problem of those among us who are now viewed by elites in much the same way that the grandfathers of Tough’s generation might have viewed the “culturally deprived” version of the “white man’s burden” during the 1950s and 1960s. 

There are significant differences between then and now, however, and the most obvious one has to do with money.  In the 1960s, the War on Poverty poured billions into job training programs and educational interventions like Title I, all aimed to ameliorate some of the grosser educational inequities with programs that left in place structural inequalities like segregated housing that were viewed by liberals as too entrenched and controversial to garner support for changing. Today poverty rates are higher than when President Johnson declared the War on Poverty in 1964, but the preferred solution over economic intervention is a thoroughly unproven and un-researched form of psychological programming for children that hopes to excavate new roadways in the cognitive maps of young brains in order to inoculate them from the effects of poverty, which remains a problem too expensive to fix for the elites who advocate this new form of eugenics.  Today’s concentration of social efficiency goals would make the advocates of scientific management a hundred years ago blush, with even the charity by the rich, now called venture philanthropy, turned into tax-sheltered investments with immediate returns as well as a big future payoff.  Cashing in down the road will come as a result of the systematic indoctrination of a whole generation of urban poor, to be accomplished through corporate reform schools that are given free rein to run their psychological experiments on America’s most vulnerable children.

The old eugenics of our great-grandfathers advanced the belief that those deemed a threat to the health of society, by way of inheritable behaviors, mental disorders, character malfunctions, and physical disabilities, had defective “germ plasm” that could not be improved but, rather, needed curtailing from further reproduction in offspring. That “crisis” led to 30-plus states passing mandatory sterilization laws that produced over 60,000 individual sterilizations.  The unfinished legacy of that dark episode lives on, with victims even today hoping to be somehow compensated for their sexual maiming during another “progressive” era that eagerly embraced social steering based on a crackpot pseudo-science over the rights of its most vulnerable citizens. 

The new eugenics is not nearly so pessimistic about changing the defective character of the poor.  In fact, today’s equally arrogant and misguided scheme to save poor children from their defective character is full of positivity, you might say, from the guru of positive psychology, himself—Dr. Martin Seligman.  Seligman’s pioneering work on learned helplessness and learned optimism are central, in fact, to the carving of new cognitive tracks in the malleable brains of elementary and middle school children, whose structural plasticity lends itself well to alternating jolts of learned helplessness and learned optimism—the mainstays of the new and improved post-New Age version of breaking ‘em down to build ‘em up.

And what kind of character flaws is Tough trying to find scientific justification for altering?  Well, it’s not children’s moral character that the white missionary girls from TFA are trying their darnedest to improve in these charter reform schools like KIPP; it is, rather, something Tough calls “performance character,” which is a distillation of the more expansive list of traits developed by Seligman and Peterson that, if developed fully, will create an unending psychological drip of happiness memes.  Think of it as if the power of an invisible hand had writ these qualities on every poor child’s digital tablet to carry around with them and apply as each situation demands:  grit, self-control, zest, social intelligence, gratitude, optimism, curiosity (p. 76).  Gone are those old-school character traits such as honesty, integrity, loving thy cubicle companion, etc.  Tough, in fact, attempts to make the case that moral character is based on moral law that, by necessity, is imposed by some higher authority.  In following Seligman and Peterson, Tough claims “moral laws were limiting when it came to character because they reduced virtuous conduct to a simple matter of obedience to a higher authority” (p. 59).

Moral character is traded in, then, for “performance character.”  The new “performance character” traits that KIPP co-founder, David Levin, has boiled down for child consumption focuses first and foremost on “grit,” which is to say the individual possession of a kind of crusty abrasiveness or personality pumice that may turn any barrier into “zest,” we might suppose.  According to Tough, Levin believes his approach stands far above any charge of cultural colonialism because “the character-strength approach is…fundamentally devoid of value judgment” (p. 60).  Tough doesn’t bother to explain how Levin’s derived values of grit, self-control, and gratitude are any less of an imposition than, let’s say, wisdom, justice, and temperance.  We may only surmise that Levin’s blindness to his own imposition of corporate ethics is intended to cloak any sign of force feeding for the children who are imposed upon daily to view their own mistreatment as an indicator that they, themselves, are not working hard or being good enough to be treated with dignity.  The drawing below is a copy of a worksheet that Seligman disciple, Angela Duckworth, has used in developing the performance character curriculum for poor kids in Philadelphia schools.  Note that children are taught to swallow and digest the abuse handed down by authority figures whose verbal assaults are to be viewed as sure signs of their care for children who must do better in order to avoid what children believe is deserved denigration (click image to enlarge).

Tough’s book is out to promote an abusively-deployed variety of moral colonialism disguised as character building, even if he takes the most roundabout way to reach the conclusion from which he started, which may be stated thusly for those disinclined to read the book:  KIPP and the education reform schools like it are doing the necessary work to save non-privileged, defective cultures from their own defective character, by making their children salable commodities in the future job market through a psychological regimen we would call brainwashing if it were used by a drug-crazed preacher in a faraway jungle like Guyana.   Tough’s defense of the new eugenics is built upon a shaky collection of scientific tidbits and inappropriate analogies to other more humane interventions that Tough apparently believes are not unalike the pedagogical brutality and mind alteration practices that occur in the corporate reform schools such as KIPP.  For instance, Tough analogizes from his experiences reporting on New York City’s chess champion school, IS 318, and through a number of examples of single-minded obsession paying off in the world of chess, suggests there is some lesson that may be transferred to understand KIPP’s 10,000 hours of total compliance test preparation and psychological throttling.  As in other examples that Tough employs in his book, there are more differences between KIPP’s academic rigor mortis and becoming a chess champ than there are similarities. 

The first and most glaring difference has to do with a significant word that Tough advocates for and uses a good deal in the book—volition.  Now while the great chess champions do, indeed, choose at some point in their lives to be champions, as Scottish grandmaster, Jonathan Rowson, exemplifies in Tough’s retelling, the children of KIPP do not choose an education based on an unyielding behavioral catechism enforced by non-psychologists imposing behavioral-cognitive treatments to produce total compliance and complicity by children in their own subjugation.   Secondly, if the single-minded pursuit of becoming a grand master allows one to conclude that “chess is a creative and beautiful pursuit” and a “celebration of existential freedom,” what does the manipulative pursuit of scholar dollars teach, or years of enforced silence, or the thousands of hours of lockdown test prep accompanied by endless reams of mindless worksheets?  Is there some celebration of existential freedom in this “productive” performance of KIPPsterism?

Thirdly, if 10,000 hours of chess practice makes one a master, what does 10,000 hours of KIPP provide?  A slave who has learned how to accept her bondage, along with a mediocre score that earns a seat in a third-tier university where the odds are 5:1 of washing out?  This college outcome remains a stubborn fact, even with KIPP’s river of tax-sheltered cash to provide counselors, college academic coaches, and other interventions to raise the KIPP college graduation rate. Fourthly, the “joyousness” that results from chess is produced by the analysis of a problem and application of a solution from a repertoire of proven solutions or novel ones.  How is this at all analogous to the entirely rule-bound and low-level imitative and rote anesthesia of KIPP learning?  Tough offers no clues but seems to believe that sitting these two very different phenomena side by side will somehow lead readers to assume they are similar.

Tough does something similar at other places in the book.  For instance, the subject of stress reduction among children of impoverished families occupies a significant section in the first half of the book.  Stress levels are closely tied to “executive functioning” among children, and stress overloads are predictive of low executive functioning.  Since the improvement of “executive functioning,” as defined by increased memory skills, is the Holy Grail of the education reform industry, the industry has to pay attention to stress.  According to Tough’s interpretation of the research literature, however, it is not really stress that is the problem but, rather, the body’s response to stress.  Just as poverty is not the problem, but the stressed reactions to poverty:  “It wasn’t poverty itself that was compromising the executive function abilities of the poor kids.  It was the stress that went along with it” (p. 20). Now if this distinction seems too stupid for words, stick with me for a moment.  Since poverty is not the problem but, rather, the stress that goes along with it, and since the stress is not the problem but, rather, the body’s reaction to it, it stands to reform industry reason that changing the body’s reaction may now be viewed as the way to short-circuit the effects of poverty. And, of course, to change the body, we must change the mind, which is to say, we must change the brain: 

The reason that researchers who care about the gap between rich and poor are so excited about executive functions is that these skills are not only highly predictive of success; they are also quite malleable, much more so than other cognitive skills. The prefrontal cortex is more responsive to intervention than other parts of the brain, and it stays flexible well into adolescence and early adulthood.  So if we can improve a child’s environment in the specific ways that lead to better executive functioning, we can increase his prospects for success in a particularly efficient way (p. 21).

In the pursuit of “better executive functioning,” Tough appears totally oblivious to the fact that KIPP adds another form of stress atop the ones already at work on children living in poverty.  It seems, too, that Tough finds nothing breath-taking about the neo-eugenic agenda of these new 21^st Century efficiency zealots, who prefer child brain tinkering to the more expensive structural interventions and resource reallocations required for addressing poverty.  If KIPP and the KIPP wannabe reform schools can “improve a child’s environment in the specific ways that lead to better executive functioning [better memorization skills], then who needs to be concerned, it would seem, that these new environments are segregated, total compliance reform “families” run by young, white missionary types who have been treated generously, themselves, to Seligman’s performance character regimen during their six weeks of TFA teacher training. The quote above certainly clears up what Tough meant back in the Introduction when he waxed poetic about using “the tools of science to peel back the mysteries of childhood” (p. xxiv). 

In this entirely creepy form of scientific reductionism practiced on children deemed defective by their poverty, the sociological and psychological manifestations of poverty are boiled down from actions to behaviors to neuronal reactions to molecular and protein interactions.  And these most basic interactions are, then, alterable with the right “cognitive control system” that can re-regulate anti-social urges by altering the brain chemistry that controls them.  If you think this sounds too much like a variation on Clockwork Orange, you would be right, and if you think that Paul Tough surely could not be promoting such a system, I invite you to read the book.

In the end, Tough’s zeal for pseudo-scientific psychological experimentation on children by non-professionals is driven by his own misplaced anger on behalf of poor children.  As the angry do-gooder, then, he represents the liberal element of the coalition in support of the new eugenics.  He is joined by the college presidents such as liberal ethicist and president of UPenn, Amy Gutmann and over twenty other Ivy League presidents who share Tough’s misdirected anger and who have created a special category of affirmative action for former KIPPsters.  For conservatives who support KIPP and the other learning chain gangs that emulate them, the goal of social control is as transparent as was Paul Ryan’s calloused comments in Flint, Michigan.  For liberals like Tough, however, who blame parents, teachers, and schools in these poorest neighborhoods for failures that the inequitable system of schooling has guaranteed and its high stakes testing perpetuates, the goal becomes masked by a technicist indignation and a privileged arrogance that is used by liberals to set themselves apart from the racist and classist system from which all of us privileged folks benefit.  And if Tough could make the case that he, indeed, acknowledges his own role in the system that we, the privileged, perpetuate, which would create the moral necessity to change things for the better, he fails to keep in mind that children’s brains are not things that are to be changed so that our economic privileges may be kept inoculated from the required financial sacrifices that could help us avoid, perhaps, the further rotting away of our moral fiber. 

Teachers who have taught at KIPP and who are sharing their stories know why children refer to KIPP as Kids in Prison Program.  They know about enforced silence that keeps them from getting to know and connect with their students.  They know about their screaming colleagues who rant and rave to maintain order, and they know about the humiliation children are made to feel at even minor infractions of the rules.  They know about barking orders to “Track Me,” and  they know about the constant surveillance that leaves no peace for students or teachers. They know about the special education children whose IEPs are ignored.  They know, too about the management methods that always made them feel as if the 70-90 hours they were giving each week was not enough, and they know about the sense of personal weakness they felt on those rare occasions when they had to use a sick day.  They know all about the guilt they felt for having a life outside KIPP.  They know about children who have been mistreated and abused, and they know about administrators and teachers who lost jobs because their humanity got in the way of rule enforcement to subdue children and to make them as hard as the psychological catechism they are brainwashed to live by.  They know about the children whose emotional family histories kept them from making it through the KIPP gauntlet, and they know those children blamed themselves, rather than the draconian “no excuses” school model that provides millionaire investors with tax breaks to fund the cheapest of all solutions to the problems that arise from poverty.

I think that Paul Tough is probably ignorant of all these things that teachers know, but I am not at all sure he has any curiosity to find out what teachers, children, and parents know.  I do hope the next book that he is paid to write about education reform schools goes beyond the search for evidence to support some hare-brained theory meted out upon poor children in ways that thoroughly displace the humane responsiveness and humility required to help any children, poor or otherwise, to become whole adults, rather than emotional eunuchs trained to perform, and not to think and feel.

Reference:

Tough, P.  (2012).  How children succeed: Grit, curiosity, and the hidden power of character.  New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Book banning, book burnings. Same symptoms, same system.

In the effort to vanish our books, Arizona has actually given them enormous power. Arizona has made our books sacred documents now. — Sherman Alexie

A week or so ago someone on the Southern California Immigration Coalition mailing list reprinted both an old letter and a recent essay from celebrated scholar and author Rodolfo Acuña regarding the neocolonialism and program of cultural suppression in Arizona. I had been wanting to repost them here, but with my schoolboard run and all the other activism I'm neck deep in, I've been too busy to even consider it.

For whatever reason I kept thinking about the Tucson book banning all day and at the same time I kept picturing the Säuberung (maybe because I recently accompanied my wife to the Museum of Tolerance for her school assignment). The parallels between how the early 20th century fascists handled literature counter to their false world view and today's reactionary political climate have been pointed out before. On a lark I checked the date of the Nazi book burnings and was shocked to learn they occurred on this date 79 years ago (May 10, 1933). Serendipity of sorts?

Compelled to tweet the sad fact that the state adjacent mine is engaged in unabashed racism and oppression, I included our good friends from the Zinn Education Project in my tweet. They promptly thanked me and created a facebook post documenting the event.

We need to remember that whether it's Arizona Book Banning, Texas Textbooks, or Common Core Standards, reactionaries will find ways to try and keep the oppressed from learning their agency and working for their liberation.

---

Be Careful What You Wish for ‘Cause It Might Come True

By Rodolfo Acuña

My dream was to live in Tucson. In the early 1970s I even applied for a job at the University of Arizona, but the interview invitation was withdrawn after I participated in a protest there the weekend before my interview. I woke up.

The saying, “Be Careful What You Wish for ’cause It Might Come True,” could have not have been more prophetic.

I did much of the research for my dissertation in Tucson. The pueblo’s charm was seductive and eclipsed its flaws: Whites and Mexicans rode separate bus lines and housing patterns created two Tucsons. Yet, change was possible and white and brown progressives coalesced on many issues.

In the late 1960s there were not many Mexicans at the U of A. Most professors there seemed to believe that Arizona history began in 1853 when US minister James Gadsden told Mexico, sell us southern Arizona for $10 million or we’ll take it.

Western history was Wyatt Earp and the OK Corral. A well-known U of A history professor taught his classes with six shooters holstered at his side, wore cowboy boots and had a swagger to his walk and talk.

Aside from exceptional anthropologists such as the great Edward Spicer, the U of A reminded me of what Tombstone would have looked like circa the 1880s.

Things over the years went from bad to worse and by the 1980s vigilantes on the border resembled the unshaven characters in the movie “Deliverance” that abused Bert Reynolds’ friends.

Over the years there have been changes – somewhat. An example is the outlandish statements Tucson Unified School District Board Member Michael Hicks made on the Daily Show. Hicks is important; he sets policy for the school district.  His embarrassing statements that can be heard on the internet (http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-april-2-2012/tucson-s-mexican-american-studies-ba ) are not an aberration. They are a repetition of what Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne and State Superintendent of School John Huppenthal often say.

From reading comments addressed to the Hicks interview, it seems that his remarks did not offend most Tucson viewers. They only objected that Jon Stewart had made them public. I guess they prefer the business approach of TSUD Superintendent John Pedicone and his cabal at the Southern Arizona Leadership Council.

This week Pedicone’s business style showed itself as he mimicked the baptism scene in the “Godfather.”  In a matter of hours, the SALC mob wiped out its enemies just like Michael Corleone settled family business.

The first victim was Tucson Citizen blogger David Morales, AKA “The Three Sonorans.” David is a doctoral candidate in Applied Mathematics at the UA who works in the field of anthropological genetics.

Mark Evans, the administrator of the Citizen’s bloggers, said he shut down the blog because of a “reckless disregard for the truth.”  (Evidently Evans does not read the Citizen or for that matter Arizona newspapers).

Evans explained that “This decision wasn’t taken lightly. I’ve been thinking about it for a couple of weeks after (Morales) took out recall petitions on (TUSD Governing Board member Michael) Hicks.” This is the same Hicks of Daily Show fame that has made a career of bashing Mexicans. Incidentally, he is reputedly a member of the Tea Party.

David’s departure is a tremendous loss. He stands almost alone in opposition to SALC mob. True that he has ticked off many politicians, Mexican Americans included. However, this is the nature of free speech, a free press and democracy.

Aside from my academic work, I was a columnist for the now defunct Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, the Los Angeles Times and La Opinión. I know that people in high places get perturbed — that comes with the territory. In conversations with professional journalists, I have been told that the only time you have to worry is when the advertisers get upset.

In Tucson, it is SALC who is the major advertiser in the City, controlling local institutions such as the city and county governments, the colleges and university, and yes, the TUSD, which Pedicone, a former vice-president of SALC, heads.

David upset them with his courageous defense of the TUSD Mexican American Studies Program and the Mexican community. For him, Barrio Viejo is a symbol of what is being done to the Mexican’s presence in Tucson.

The next target was the lynchpin of MAS, Sean Arce, its coordinator who has fought courageously against the censorship of books used in the program and against its dismantling.  Sean committed the sin of whistle blowing and exposing the chicanery of the system and those who run it.  He also spearheads a federal case challenging HB 2281 and is calling attention to the district’s avoidance and defiance of federal court orders.

Sean is a recognized national scholar whose program has resulted in keeping students of all colors in school. His pedagogy works. For this he has been honored by the Howard Zinn Project and supported by thousands of people nationwide.

Christine Sleeter, President of the National Association for Multicultural Education, calls Arce a “steadfast pillar of an outstanding program that was unlike what he had access to as a student.” She and other educators attest to the program’s success.

If and when the federal suit is successful Arce’s leadership will be needed to rebuild the program which is what Pedicone and company fear. To make sure that the program is not resurrected my inside sources tell me that Pedicone has put six other MAS teachers on an elimination list.

In order to mute the opposition, Pedicone is frantically trying to buy out the Fredo Corleones in the community and in the school district.

Fredos are easy to come by. People have their motives for compromising: they get tired of struggle; they rationalize that they can do it within the system; money and power seduce them.  There are very few people like David and Sean who don’t have a price.

I have been told countless times, “I have to think of my family.”  I feel like telling them, “I also have a family, cabrón.” But over the years I have learned that this does no good. Changes come about because of the sacrifices of a few. Still, I feel like grabbing their faces and screaming, “You broke my heart, Fredo.”

To sum up, I am fortunate that my dream did not come true.  I live in a state where we have unions and where academic freedom for the time being exists. Sean has been a teacher for over a decade and a half and he has to have his contract renewed annually. It is a state where academic freedom is qualified; where the Constitution is being nullified.

When I taught in the Los Angeles Unified Schools, I openly opposed the Vietnam War and was critical of the system’s race policies.  Fortunately, I was never threatened with dismissal, I belonged to a union.

In my forty-two years at California State University Northridge, I clashed violently with administrators, criticized them in the press, and appeared on television denouncing them. But, the late President James Cleary always defended my academic freedom and responded to vicious red-baiting.

The co-editor of “Robert’s Rules of Order” Cleary respected the traditions of the academy. He respected the institution. He did not bend to the CSU Chancellor or the lynch mob that wanted to fire me.

As mentioned, Hicks is not an aberration in Arizona.  He mirrors those in power who have media consultants that filter their words. They are the biggest threat to traditions of free speech that made this country different.

---

Letter to the Editor of Tucson Citizen regarding Arizona’s “Big Lie” Law, SB 1108

By Rodolfo Acuña

Letter to the Editor:

Unlike many of the present day squatters in Arizona, I have deep feelings for Arizona. My mother’s family, the Elíases lived there for centuries.

But recently I have been swimming in a sea of emails alerting me to Rep. Russell Pearce, R-Mesa, amendments to Senate Bill 1108 that would permit Arizona to confiscate books, ban Chicano studies and exclude the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicanos de Aztlan (MECHA) from Arizona’s campuses.

I am 75-years young and have lived through the McCarthy era and read about similar thought control crusades which history has exposed as idiotic. In the 1920s the words to the pledge of alliance were changed from “my flag” to the “flag of the United States” so aliens would not cross their fingers and salute a foreign flag. The present proposal ranks along side these kinds of idiocies.

If Pearce has his way, Arizona schools would ban courses “denigrate American values and the teachings of Western civilization” and would teaching practices that “overtly encourage dissent” from those values, including democracy, capitalism, pluralism and religious tolerance. Rep. Pearce who is not the sharpest knife in the box then would bar public schools, community colleges and universities from allowing organizations to operate on campus if it is “based in whole or in part on race-based criteria.” Among the books designated for burning is my book Occupied America: A History of Chicanos which has received the Gustavus Myers Award for an Outstanding Book on Race Relations in North America.

I am personally offended by Pearce’s labeling my book as seditious. Unlike Pearce I served in the armed forces and did not claim deferments. I was a full time student in good standing at the University of Southern California during the Korean War. I volunteered draft. Pearce and many of the thought control cadets took another route. Moreover, many of the statements Pearce attributes to Occupied America were in quotation marks. Having taught well prepared students from the University of Phoenix, I know that Phoenix teaches its students what quotation marks mean. .

For Pearce’s information, history is probative. It builds. That is why the content of U.S. history courses change from elementary through high school. University courses which Pearce should are much more complex.

What I am more concerned about are Pearce’s attempts to smear MECHA. Adolph Hitler was a proponent of the use of the Big Lie as a viable propaganda technique. Hitler said that the bigger the lie the more adapt people were to believe it.

Pearce implies that MECHA excludes other races and promotes racism, which is just not true. For Pearce’s information, MECHA organizations on every campus are chartered by student affairs. In order to be chartered, the organization has to be open to all students regardless of their race, ethnicity or religion. Every campus differs. I have visited hundreds of campuses throughout the country and have found that on some campuses the majority of the members were non-Mexican American.

I entered education because I wanted to give gang kids an alternative – I loved the kids but hated gangs. Many former gang members are today lawyers, medical doctors and teachers because of Chicano studies and MECHA. Indeed, in California 85 to 95 percent of all Latino elected officials are alumni of this organization. Frankly, people like Pearce relish in the portrayal of Mexican Americans as gang members rather than university graduates because they can step on us.

The Big Lie strategy of Pearce and company is effective because most people become paralyzed in the face of the Big Lie. During World War II, most Americans turned a deaf ear to the herding of over 100,000 Japanese Americans into concentration camps. As a Mexican American I am proud of 16-year old Ralph Lazo from Belmont High in Los Angeles who said that this is not right and declared himself of Japanese decent and went to Manzanar with his friends. That is in Occupied America.

Mexican Americans should realize that these attacks are today directed at them because Pearce looks at them as weak. He has not yet taken on the Hillel or the Newman Clubs on college campuses who like MECHA do fine work and incidentally have Jewish Americans and Catholics as their core members.

Hopefully, Arizonians will wake up and people like Pearce will suffer the same fate as the Pete Wilsons did in California. His attacks are race specific and based on the Big Lie. And history will unfortunately judge Arizonians.

Rodolfo F. Acuña, PhD

Chicana/o Studies Department

California State University at Northridge

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RODOLFO ACUÑA, a professor emeritus at California State University Northridge, has published 20 books and over 200 public and scholarly articles. He is the founding chair of the first Chicano Studies Dept which today offers 166 sections per semester in Chicano Studies. His history book Occupied America has been banned in Arizona. In solidarity with Mexican Americans in Tucson, he has organized fundraisers and support groups to ground zero and written over two dozen articles exposing efforts there to nullify the U.S. Constitution.

"Almost equal" in Arizona

"It think this is a great country. In some countries I might be actually locked up for teaching the way I have, but in this country, I'm just banned from doing it." — Curtis Acosta (TUSD Teacher)

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Tucson's Mexican-American Studies Ban
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Tucson's Mexican-American Studies Ban is the Daily Show's humorous, but poignent look at the racist reactionary ban of ethnic studies in Arizona.

Petrilli's polemic against Alfie Kohn: Half-reactionary, half-mendacious

"What a teacher can do – all a teacher can do – is work with students to create a classroom culture, a climate, a curriculum that will nourish and sustain the fundamental inclinations that everyone starts out with..." — Alfie Kohn

With a shameful broadside against the esteemed Alfie Kohn, Fordham's Michael Petrilli demonstrates once more why he's the darling of The Hoover Institution and all the other fringe-right think-tanks. I don't know what I found more disturbing about Petrilli's recent piece: the endless parade of straw-men he marshals, or his constant allusion to long discredited meritocracy myths.

What made me retch was this passage: "...KIPP network, which boast high student achievement and a well-rounded curriculum." As someone who writes alongside professors most familiar with the cultural sterilization and criminal attrition rates that KIPP has the dubious distinction of being renowned for, the passage was incredulous. In the end, of course, Petrilli's choice of corporate charters is proof positive of all Kohn's arguments. The latest from the KIPP front only serves to make Petrilli's shrillness on this more glaring.

In a way I was glad to see Petrilli wax honest about how there's a concerted effort to train the poor, while teaching the affluent, as evidenced by his reference to Hirsch et al. When social justice insists that testing is not teaching, we forget that the right-wing doesn't want entire swaths of the populace educated (at least in terms of critical thinking), but rather wants them trained to be compliant. In that context, Petrilli's gushing about the wonders of standardized tests for what he terms "importance of basic knowledge and skills" (read as teaching minority children to say "would you like fries with that?") makes perfect sense. This theme is compounded by Petrilli's unsubstantiated assertion that somehow the right kind of education leads to a "path to the middle class," when we know that schools alone can't fix the ills of our our society. Only Petrilli could write that the right-of-center Education Trust is "very liberal" without one iota of irony. Truth is, EdTrust—West's Arun Ramanathan is easily as reactionary as Petrilli is, maybe more so.

Near the end of his tirade Petrilli attempts to absolve the reactionary plutocrats comprising the "Billionaire Boys Club" of malfeasance by trotting out names from the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (NPIC) as supposed evidence that their funders and the rest of the corporate cabal somehow support "civil rights." Absent from Petrilli' obsequious defense of the one-percent — who are bound and determined to privatize everything in sight — is the whole fund-to-advocate paradigm that most NPICs operate under today. I touch on fund-to-advocate in NCTQ's LAUSD report's highly questionable veracity shows Bill Gates' pervasiveness and perniciousness, but a longer treatment is indicated in the near future. In Los Angeles, this trend of NPICs pedling their donors' ideologies in order to secure revenue streams is so bad, activists started the Occupy United Way! group in response.

The proliferation of cash strapped 501C3s willing to advocate any policy their donors dictate is one of the most odious and insidious ways that the "Billionaire Boys Club proper" and their like-minded counterparts with names like DeVos, Bradley, Koch, Hastings, and Scaife, control both policy and discourse. This comes with the added benefit of providing the appearance of support from groups ostensibly associated with civil rights. Naturally advocating policies that exacerbate segregation by both race and class are anathema to civil rights, but that doesn't stop opportunists nor funding hounds in the non-profit sector from being willing mouthpieces for the plutocrat class. For the real civil rights perspective on corporate education reform, see Brian Jones essays on how charter schools claiming "civil rights" is incongruous with reality.

Given the time, I'd dismantle Petrilli's entire diatribe against Kohn paragraph by paragraph. That said, I'm in the midst of my school board campaign, helping community members and United Adult Students in their struggle to save LAUSD Adult Education, assisting Micheltorena families fight a charter colocation, and providing material support for Adelanto families successfully fighting the Parent Revolution's hostile takeover of their school, so time is at a premium right now.

Must Read: Why the Racist History of the Charter School Movement Is Never Discussed

Anyone over the age of 30 should recall phrases including "school choice" were the clarion call of segregationists and southern dixiecrats. [Still are.] — Robert D. Skeels

Professor Christopher Bonastia's Why the Racist History of the Charter School Movement Is Never Discussed is perhaps the best work I've read on the modern segregation and eugenics movements that are cloaked in the rhetoric of school choice. Packed with historical precedents and an honest assessment of today's empirical data, the essay is a powerful antidote to the nonstop stream of privatization propaganda pumped out by the deep pocketed charter industry. The following excerpt provides an idea of why everyone must read the whole piece:

The driving assumption for the pro-charter side, of course, is that market competition in education will be like that for toothpaste -- providing an array of appealing options. But education, like healthcare, is not a typical consumer market. Providers in these fields have a disincentive to accept or retain "clients" who require intensive interventions to maintain desired outcomes--in the case of education, high standardized test scores that will allow charters to stay in business. The result? A segmented marketplace in which providers compete for the "good risks," while the undesirables get triage. By design, markets produce winners, losers and unintended or hidden consequences.

Read in on AlterNet and share it widely.

Sherman Alexie "Arizona has made our books sacred documents now."

"A deepened consciousness of their situation leads people to apprehend that situation as an historical reality susceptible to transformation." — Paulo Freire

The Progressive has been compiling the responses of authors whose books were banned by Arizona bigots and arch-reactionaries Tom Horne and John Huppenthal's racist HB 2281, which, among other things, banned Ethnic Studies in Arizona schools. Of course Huppenthal and Horne's vicious legislative colonization didn't actually ban ethnic studies, it just limited Arizona's curriculum to the oppressive historical narrative of "wealthy white male studies."

Today former Schools Matter contributor Kenneth Libby tweeted the response from author Sherman Alexie, which is among the most brilliant I've seen in response to the cultural sterilization and oppression that is Arizona's pogrom against brown peoples:

Let's get one thing out of the way: Mexican immigration is an oxymoron. Mexicans are indigenous. So, in a strange way, I'm pleased that the racist folks of Arizona have officially declared, in banning me alongside Urrea, Baca, and Castillo, that their anti-immigration laws are also anti-Indian. I'm also strangely pleased that the folks of Arizona have officially announced their fear of an educated underclass. You give those brown kids some books about brown folks and what happens? Those brown kids change the world. In the effort to vanish our books, Arizona has actually given them enormous power. Arizona has made our books sacred documents now.

Sherman Alexie is a poet, short story writer, novelist, and filmmaker. His book "The Lone Ranger and Tonto's Fist Fight in Heaven," was on the banned curriculum of the Mexican American Studies Program.

Yoga Comes to the KIPP Eugenics Camps

KIPP is known for its total compliance, segregated chain gang approach to test prep as school, which is the rage among the corporate foundations seeking to contain and humiliate the children of urban America.  The thing that struck me most about the video was the total flatness, or lack of affect, by these kids who must go through their sometimes entirely silent 10 hour work days of constant surveillance, monitoring, and demerits.  What is clearly needed is a school where a class in stress relief is not needed in order to get through 9-10 hours of behavioral lockdown and cultural neutering.  How many of these psychological sterilization camps do you see in the leafy suburbs?  And yet KIPP is held up as the model to emulate for the poor.

Getting a Rise from the Risible: Tilson and Buck Tag Team

Whitney Tilson was so exorcised yesterday by the post I did on David Brooks's lies about KIPP that he has made it the centerpiece of his daily email round-up of all the news that he deems of use to the corporate crusade to segregate and psychologically sterilize brown and black poor kids in corporate welfare charter schools.

Here's Mr. Tilson in his email to fellow hedge fund managers who specialize in tax-sheltered corporate giving to other corporations that are running the corporate charter schools and collecting the tax dollars to run them (what a deal):

. . . . I’ll be curious to see how Ravitch responds to David Brooks critique of her.  So far, her only response that I’m aware of is to tweet a link to Jim Horn’s blog post (http://twitter.com/#!/DianeRavitch/status/87517206040158210) entitled Lies, Damn Lies, and David Brooks, which wins the award for Most Idiotic and Demonstrably False Post of the Year (no wonder Ravitch likes it so much!).  In it, Horn questions whether KIPP students get exposure to:

“chess programs, Shakepeare [note that Horn can’t even spell it correctly], philosophy, or physics in a KIPP school.  Not even chief hedge fund KIPPster propagandist, Whitney Tilson, would make up such an obvious lie.  The amount of argument, on anything, in a KIPP school or one of KIPP's knock-offs, is between negligible and none, and if Shakespeare or philosophy is ever mentioned, it is most likely on one of the thousands of worksheets these children fill out every year.  Has KIPP ever fielded a chess team or dance team?  Not even a mention on any of KIPP's websites, much less in a news article.”

3) Fortunately, I don’t have to rebut this delusional lunacy (hey Jim, why don’t you actually VISIT a KIPP school before writing about them???), as Stuart Buck, on his blog, The Buck Stops Here, does it for me, quickly finding eight separate KIPP web sites that talk about how students are exposed to a rich curriculum, including, chess.  Here are the first three examples Buck cites:

Not a mention of chess or dance on any of KIPP's websites? How about the following:

1. KIPP's mainpage:

After a long day of hard work, KIPPsters enjoy the chance to express themselves in creative ways. Music, art, sports and dance are just a few examples of the programs available in KIPP schools across the country. Many KIPP schools have activities such as basketball, track, lacrosse, step teams and chess clubs. These extracurricular opportunities work together with our academic programs to create a well-rounded experience for our students.

A look inside the music program at KIPP Academy in New York City demonstrates the benefits of KIPP's strong arts curriculum. KIPP Academy students play everything from classical pieces to modern R&B and pop music, and the orchestra has performed across the nation. In New Orleans, KIPP McDonogh 15 has an incredible jazz band, while in Los Angeles KIPP Academy of Opportunity has an extraordinary, high-energy drum line. These KIPP schools exemplify KIPP's commitment that students will work hard while still having fun.

2. From KIPP Delta's website:

On April 17th, engineering students competed in an electric car race in Pensacola, Florida and won. There were many different participants in high school and college level.  Also on April 17th, a group of students competed in the state chess tournament. 

3. Part of a list of activities on the KIPP TEAM (New Jersey) website:

Drumline
Chess Club
Film Club
Yoga Club
Fight Club

An impressive list of five schools out of 100 with at least an example of extracurriculars for KIPPsters "after a long day of hard work," as the KIPP Home Office likes to put it.

Still nothing curricular has turned up on Shakespeare, physics, philosophy, or argument, even with the help of crackerjack grad student, Stuart Buck, who is working on a doctorate with Jay Greene and the scholars of the Walmart-funded Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas.

Buck, too, is a published author, with a book (Acting White: The Ironic Legacy of Desegregation) that, no doubt, is one of the common readers for the hedge funders' corporate education book club.

Publisher's Weekly entire review (my bolds):

Buck, Arkansas University doctoral fellow in education reform, enters the black-white achievement gap debate with a review of anti-academic attitudes among some black students, who dub school achievement as “acting white”; he finds its roots in “what was lost when schools were desegregated.” Buck fears misinterpretation (“no one should read this section as suggesting that we should go back to segregated schools”) as he delineates the costs of losing the schools as community centers, the concomitant loss of black teachers and principals as “academic role models,” and the detachment of black parents and students. “Desegregation,” he argues, then “set the stage for the 'acting white' criticism to emerge in the school setting,” as black students met hostile receptions from white students and teachers. Buck's proposed solutions are implausible—and almost risible: one, since “humans are tribal,” some students should be in “an all-black environment that includes black teachers and principals,” the other to replace individual grades with “regular interschool competitions, supplemented by small rewards for winners on a group basis.” Overstuffed with evidence showing he “examined literally thousands of sources over the past several years,” the result is a repetitive mélange of education philosophy and anecdotal history. (June)

So Whitney, you are half-way there, pal, in terms of the future Dr. Buck's dream of containing the "tribal" urges within segregated camps where the black and brown can be culturally neutered and behaviorally brainwashed with the "small rewards" from KIPP paychecks. If you guys can just figure out how to replace the white missionary temps from TFA with black ones, you will, indeed, have the final solution.

Finally, if I had a chance, I would tell Mr. Tilson the same thing I told a KIPP cultist who showed up at my presentation at AERA, asking if I had ever been to a KIPP school:  Sir, it did not take a visit to the the WW II concentration camps to understand what was going on there.  But even so, most people chose to look the other way.

Big Time Self-Plagiarism, Punked Web Lemmings, and Chain Gangs for All? Part 1

Part of my unpaid job is to sniff out the grisliest of educational abuses and to publicly ridicule them in ways that are reality-based, researched, honest, and entertaining.  That is why I spend so much time on KIPP, which I view as the greatest threat to the possibility for humane and healthy schooling for poor children. 

And if that is not enough reason to give it my top priority, then there is today's troubling coalition of both ramrod conservatives and neoliberals who embrace these segregated sweat boxes in much the same way the same unnatural allies did at about this time last century, when America became swept up in the Hitler-inspiring pseudoscience of eugenics, or How to Create a Pure and Efficient Race by Doing What is "best" for the Defectives.  Ah, Race to the Top--I get it now.

What first gained popularity through county fair contests for the best examples of the whitest and healthiest babies around 1910 (complete with blue ribbon sashes) had become institutionalized by 1925 with eugenics courses offered at Harvard, Cornell, Columbia, etc.  As a demonstration of a bad idea gone viral, by 1935 over 30 states in the United States of America had compulsory sterilization laws in effect for some categories of those with "defective germ plasm." In 1956, 27 states still had compulsory sterilization laws on the books.  It took until 2001 for the first state legislature, Virgninia, to condemn the eugenics-inspired sterilization laws.  Others followed suit 4 years ago in 2007.

Today's defectives have been identified not for their defective germ plasm, but for their equally-inheritable defective cultural traits, as the Thermstrom argument goes and that is what the No Excuses school such as KIPP and its thousands of emulators want to do:  to rid poor children, urban and rural, of their defective cultures, which keep them from working hard enough and being nice enough to some day, as the Business Roundtable mantra goes, compete in the global economy.  And so we have KIPP offering its one-two punch of never-ending test prep 10 hours a day, ever imbued with a junior police state regimen of behavioral neutering and psychological sterilization.

All of this self-blinkered white privileged social work to put a Band-Aid on the gaping wounds from the old slasher, Poverty, is supported vigorously by the entire School for Rigor contingent of non-educators, from Education MisTrust to the Manhattan Institute, from Bill Gates to the Koch Brothers, from Harvard U. to Liberty U., from the Center for American Progress to the John Birch Society, from W to Obama. 

There is so much enthusiasm, in fact, that when a Gates-sponsored report from 2010 that lauds the work of one KIPP in Lynn, MA is upgraded with a new abstract, some new references on page 1, and a brand new date, the eager supporters a more perfect and efficient corporate state rush to report it as more scientific evidence that the culturally-denuding KIPP is great for kids, while ignoring the fact that this "new report" is just this terrific example of self-plagiarism from the highest levels (Haavard and MIT):

When plagiarism is conceptualized as theft, the notion of self-plagiarism may seem impossible.  After all, one might ask: Is it possible to steal from oneself?  As Hexam (1999) points out, it is possible to steal from oneself as when one engages in embezzlement or insurance fraud.  In writing, self-plagiarism occurs when authors reuse their own previously written work or data in a ‘new’ written product without letting the reader know that this material has appeared elsewhere.  According to Hexam, “… the essence of self-plagiarism is [that] the author attempts to deceive the reader”. 

In February 2010 this paper was published, and here is the "new paper" with new date (2011), abstract, and a few new intro elements.  Everything else, even the charts that the punk'd Kevin Drum puts up at Mother Jones today, are the same ones in the 2010 report. Drum, as well as Iglesias and Kain, reference economics consultant and KIPP enthusiast, Adam Ozimek, whose enthusiasm to have Diane Ravitch get on the KIPP bandwagon will apparently go to any end.

Matthew Yglesias has this little gush after citing Ozimek:

The most scrutinized of these successful charter networks is the Knowledge Is Power Program and the latest research (PDF, via Adam Ozimek) once again shows substantial KIPP-linked gains for poor kids, especially the weakest students and special ed kids. 

Hey, Matt, you reported on this same piece of research in February 2010, and if you had bothered to look at this "latest research," you would have noted that it is the same piece today as it was then.

I have more to say about Matt's and Adam's others' enthusiasms for neo-eugenic schooling, but that will come in Part II.  This is already too long.  We'll have to let the Committee on Publication Ethics do their thing.