Clinton Duplicity Bolsters Corporate Colonialism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guest Post: Against Oligarchical Roundtables In Education

Against Oligarchical Roundtables In Education (and really, everywhere else too)

by Douglas Storm

If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.  Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

It’s that simple really.  All we do now is ask the wrong questions and get irrelevant answers because the questions determine the direction we’ll be heading.  The Pynchon quote comes from the stunningly simple book by Kathy Emery and Susan Ohanian called Why Is Corporate America Bashing Our Schools?  By simple I mean obvious.  When you read it you are just left with a kind of awe-struck response to the clear and obvious abuses perpetrated by that class of Americans we call “owners” or corporate managers.  They have the money, the networks, the connections, the property and the will to assert their will upon us all.  And without us even being aware of it.  If you read no other book about AMERICA–you must read this one.

Missions and Visions disguise motivations and worldview.  The Monroe County Community School Corporation is using “surveymonkey” to allow public comment on their proposed statements of purpose and “belief” (yeah, I know): gathering data, as it were, in a rather stark example of the way the world works these days.  Given that it’s likely nothing the community of parents say will matter (unless they are major contributors to campaigns or major property owners in the county) we can at least examine the proposals in a way that allows us to know what’s coming.

First, I think I’ve said somewhere that the two institutions I think of when I consider these kinds of facile exercises is the Church and the modern Corporation.  This in itself is starkly instructive.
Next, a possibly the primary point to consider: the words used tend to be “of the moment” and in effect are meaningless as to any revelation of content within said institution.  But, a big but, what they do allow is an expansive application of practices to “meet the mission” parameters.  It’s a kind of business contract that is always ambiguous and always interpreted to fit the business ideology.

Finally, we’ve arrived at a pretty clear codification of “secret” meanings over the last decade or so. The Business Agenda determines our practices.  Certain words indicate the willingness of a Board or Superintendent to put that agenda first to the detriment of the community of children and citizens.
I intended to break this down but it’s already been done by Emery and Ohanian so I’ll just insert their analysis and critique where applicable.  The primary question we are always advised to bear in mind (i.e., a correct question to ask), “Whom do these statements serve?”

Read with care…mission statements from school districts across the country.  Ask yourself why every word is there: what does it mean and what does it hide?  Ask yourself who profits.  Which statements seem to be emanating from a public relations echo chamber?  As you read each mission, put yourself in the shoes of the five-year-olds, eight-year-olds, thirteen-year-olds, and eighteen-year-olds in that district.  Does this sound like a happy place to be?  A fit place for a child you love? (Emery and Ohanian, 81)

What is clear from any number of examples is the worldview of the owners of an economic hegemony.  Here are the “draft” Vision and Mission Statements of the MCCSC:
Vision Statement: A World Class Learning Community – For Leaders of Tomorrow
Mission Statement: Maximize student achievement, working in collaboration with parents and the community, to be productive and responsible citizens, who are successful globally.

Plenty of mission statements reek of backroom cigar smoke and corporate-politico handshakes, but take heart: with world-class standards infecting so many education plans, we only found one school board intent on producing world-class children.  Of course technological society and world of tomorrow ooze their way into the rhetoric; they are all just euphemisms for the global economy, which is what this is all about.  As many have noted, it’s a mean economy, cruising the world for cheap labor. (80)

The “core beliefs” that come next all begin with the phrase “We believe…” and form a kind of creed.  See the Nicene Creed for another example of this.

Value 1: All children can learn; we can teach all students; there are No exceptions.
All children can learn what?  We can certainly teach all children that there is only business ideology and success is only to be measured in those terms.  That seems pretty reasonable, right?

Value 2: In the facilitation and development of diverse curricular and extra-curricular programs which result in high levels of student engagement, address student needs, interests, and integrate technology when appropriate.
Wow, that’s a mouthful and all beliefs there are somewhat “open for business.”  We must not see these as independent beliefs but rather beliefs that make the mission and vision possible.  These support the global economic hegemony.  It’s kind of like reading a fortune cookie and then always finishing with the phrase “in bed,” but in this case we’d need to insert a business phrase.  Try any of them and see if they work.  Maybe “to be productive” in some grammatical form works?

Value 3: Children are unique and their self-esteem will be fostered to become successful (ly productive in the global economy for the corporate class).
See, it works.

Value 4: A positive attitude creates a successful working and learning environment.
Hey, don’t even think about complaining or disagreeing with this!

Value 5. District employees are high valued resources (in the production of economic ideology).

Value 6. In an environment in which continuous improvement through Professional Learning Communities is embedded in our culture to ensure high performance.
Continuous improvement sounds exhausting!  But it’s important that we embed a business hierarchy that treats its teachers like soldiers serving the principal (getting order from) who in turn serves the Superintendent who in turn serves the (bypassed board) State economic and ideological agenda. I mean, they’re “embedded” after all!

Value 7: In a safe and secure learning environment.  (Locked Down and Monitored!  Embedded security.)

Traveling under various guises, economics pops up in lots of mission statements.  Not as the actual word but as an underlying theme.  Watch for its permutations: productive employment and productive lives, or, in billionaire Eli Broad’s words, future knowledge workers.  Such language reveals the extent to which the Business Roundtable agenda and myth making dominate school boards. (79)

Judy DeMuth, the Monroe County Community School Corporation’s Superintendent, will speak tomorrow at 7:30 a.m. to the Bloomington Chamber of Commerce to bang the economic agenda drum.  This is a natural venue for her to speak as it is to the business leaders that our schools now bow and march in lock-step to their ideology.

My impression is that business leaders don’t really care about education as a way to offer what we might call “learning and enhancement” particularly when applied to individual quality of life.  It seems to me as if there are only two goals: reduce or eliminate a public cost that they don’t want to pay, because, primarily, “my money should only serve my purposes,” and increase opportunities for market capture.

I think too that there is a real “success” bias now that is ONLY applicable to the financially well-off.  By this I mean, the wealthy only think their way is the right way and if you didn’t get there with them then you have failed at doing things the right and best and proven way.  If you are a failure at understanding and applying this right and only way of conceiving of the human goals of living then why should I (rich, socially successful person) subsidize your stupidity and cost myself (and my children) money.  Also, if you disagree with my ways why would I want to fund an education that might lead to you opposing me from a power base in the future that might harm me?

Of course, I oppose this vision, mission, and core belief litany and offer a simple replacement.

This school will protect children from poverty and coercive ideology.  This school will provide free space where all children will find all the methods of play and creativity we can think of so as to promote as much joy and common caring and understanding as possible.

Chime in.

*Movers and Shakers in “partnership” with Education in Indiana.

Jonah Edelman Spills the Oligarchs' Blueprint for Crushing the Teaching Profession

Please share this WIDELY.  Why?  Here's why in 15 minutes or less:



As Lisa Guisbond quoted Fred Klonsky, "this is an amazing video from the Aspen Ideas Festival in which Stand For Children’s Jonah Edelman explains how he, with the support of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Arne Duncan’s senior advisor Jo Anderson (former Executive Director of the IEA) out foxed the CTU, the IFT and the IEA’s Ken Swanson and Audrey Soglin into agreeing to Senate Bill 7."

For those who still believe that there is any way to trust, negotiate with, compromise with, or have any dealings with Ed Deform in any way that does not demand complete capitulation to the ed deformers, watch this video.  Play it at your next union meeting, share it with the world. 

We do know some of what goes on at the Aspen Ideas Festival besides getting a chance to smell and touch sewer rats like Rupert Murdoch.  Here is a great example of massive ego mixed with manipulative glee that was posted and quickly pulled from the Aspen site, but not before Fred Klonsky captured a copy for the world to see and hear.

In this Machiavellian masterpiece, we see Jonah Edelman of Stand for Children infamy (list of donors here) describe in great detail how great wads of hedge-fund and other corporate cash came to bear on the last legislative election in Illinois, how all the best lobbyists were bought up by Deform (including minority ones), how unions were outspent and how politicians followed the money, how teacher unions were lured to the table and how they were totally manhandled by the best lawyers and negotiators that money can buy, how union leaders became complicit, scared, weak, groveling. 

Hear how Karen Lewis, head of Chicago Teachers Union was made a fool of, how she gave up the right to strike with less than a 75% strike vote (something that has never happened, as Jonah notes).  Hear how Lewis gave the Deformer lawyers free rein to work out the details on a terrible agreement.  As Jonah swaggers, "We got to decide all the fine print."  In those details is the insurance needed to impose the same IMPACT teacher eval plan that DC has.

Hear Jonah, with eyebrows arched like Mephistopheles, brag that Rahm can make the school day and year as long as he wants in Chicago, how principals can hire and fire whomever they like, how seniority is history, how Jonah now wants to use the union capitulation in Illinois to inspire unions in other states--quickly. 

Sorry, Jonah, for having to post this again.  You arrogant twerp.



You can get to the entire video from here: http://preaprez.wordpress.com/2011/07/09/your-very-own-copy-of-the-jonah-edelman-tape/

Some quotable quotes:

"There's a high squirm factor" about the way they bought and paid for Illinois Democratic legislative leaders.

"We're already getting going. We're doing this level of work in every state. ..In Washington state, same goal. We could readily outspend the WEA. MA, very similar. It might be a ballot measure in WA. If might be we have a ballot measure on the ballot in MA, and we use it as a lever.

"By the end of this decade we're going to have ended seniority-based decision making in education in this country. It's not enough to ensure better outcomes, but it's certainly something that has been long overdue."

"If you have a longer day but terrible teachers, that doesn't do anything. It's about performance management. It's boring, it's not a silver bullet. Brizard has to hire a lot of really good superintendent level people. They've got to evaluate their principals rigorously and create pipelines of quality principals. More people would want to be principals because not only do they have the accountability but they have the authority."

"The Tribune was fantastic. They probably wrote more than 10 supportive editorials. Sun Times was good. We had a lot of downstate editorial support."

"Wisconsin was a problem, but we were able to do a side by side comparison to say the unions mantra that this was a Wisconsin style attack was baloney."

Duncan to America's Public Schools: Give Us What We Want Or You're Dead

There is a time bomb in your basement, and it is set to explode in 2014, maybe sooner.  Only two people have the ability to disarm it without it going off, and one of them is crazy and doesn't care if your house blows up with your children in it.  The other one offers to disarm the bomb if you and your family are willing to hand over a set of keys for him and his pals to do as they please at your house, whether its running your household to arranging the furniture, to deciding how you raise your kids, to deciding what you eat and put in your pantry.

So who are you going to deal with?  Do you want to lose everything or just lose your autonomy, your freedom, your soul?

This is the deal being offered now by the Gates and Broad Foundations through their "dummied-down" stooge, Arne Duncan.  Give your permission, public educators, for unlimited growth of segregated corporate welfare charter schools, sign up for evalutating your teachers to be deprofessionalized and evaluated by student test scores, pay the billionaire tech boys to stock you up with data systems for constant surveillance, monitoring and year-round testing, and dump your curriculum and instruction for the Bill Gates's national plan, and sure--Arne will come right down into your basement and make the ticking stop.  Otherwise?  Well, Arne knows how much you love your children and your job and your house.

From National Journal:

. . . Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced Sunday that the administration is preparing a new set of regulations that will offer federal waivers to states that commit to certain education reforms. The regulations will give states relief from some of the more onerous requirements under No Child Left Behind while at the same time nudging them to adopt policies similar to those the administration has championed under its Race to the Top competitive grant program.

It’s a regulatory patch job for a problem that Congress is better equipped to solve. It also illustrates the sheer frustration of people in Washington who want to see policymaking in action but are stymied by the lack of willpower in Congress.

Education isn’t the only place where this is happening. A bipartisan, revenue-neutral aviation bill (you read that right—it means people in both parties agree, and it costs no taxpayer money) has been languishing on Capitol Hill all year and has endured 19 stopgap extensions since it expired in 2005. A six-year surface transportation bill is headed for the same fate, likely needing another extension at the end of September.

When it comes to education, lawmakers on Capitol Hill have given no indication that they will come even close to meeting Obama’s deadline in drafting—let alone passing—the complex law before they go home in August. The House and Senate education committees have been talking to each other for years about such a measure, but they have since stopped. It’s hard to get a clearer warning sign that the bill is going nowhere.

Even if lawmakers showed progress on a No Child Left Behind update (which also passed on an overwhelmingly bipartisan basis), the bill could prove politically contentious if it touches sensitive sacred cows like vouchers, charter schools, or merit pay for teachers.

That leaves the administration scrambling for a regulatory scheme that accomplishes at least some of the same goals in updating the law. Even Duncan admits it’s not the perfect solution. “My top priority is to reauthorize No Child Left Behind through the legislative process,” Duncan said. On that point, at least, there is no disagreement with Congress. “I believe that the best way to address this issue is with legislation to fix No Child Left Behind and remain committed to that legislative approach,” said Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee ranking member Mike Enzi, R-Wyo.

Education Department officials say they are giving lawmakers fair warning. It will take a few months to finalize the waiver criteria for states, although it’s a safe bet that the standards will look a lot like the criteria for the Race to the Top program. In theory, Congress could get on the stick and pass something before then. . .

Duncan and BBC (Billionaire Boys' Club) Go After Ravitch

There's an old quote that comes out the early labor movement: "First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you."

From the heat coming off the attacks from ed journalism's junkyard jackass opinionator, Jon Alter, there is a fire being stoked by the Billionaire Boys Club, where an inability to buy the truth has reached a crisis point that demands that the truth tellers, now, be burned at the stake.

Long before the stakes were set and the wood piled, however, Alter was the well-worn, um, tool, shall we say, for the corporate thrusting that has long sought to degrade and humiliate those resisting the corporatization of schools.  A couple of earlier examples that would come to inspire the likes of Governor Scott Walker and Chris Christie, the first from 2008, when Alter was writing for the bankrupt rag, Newsweek:

. . . .Railing against the tyranny of tests is fashionable, but it isn't going to save our children and our economy in the 21st century. Nor will more money for important programs like art and music. The more basic problem is that we have no way of determining which teachers can actually teach. That's right: teaching is arguably the only profession in the country with ironclad job security and a well-honed hostility to measuring results.. . .

. . . .General elections are won among moderate swing voters, many of whom would respond well to a Democratic candidate willing to show he can slip the ideological stranglehold of a retrograde liberal interest group. Obama's right that the NCLB-inspired testing mania is out of control, but wrong to give teachers "ownership over the design of better assessment tools." That's a recipe for no assessment, because the teachers unions, for all their lip service, don't believe their members should be judged on performance. They still believe that protecting incompetents is more important than educating children. . . . .

This rant goes on with all the Gates/Broad/Walton talking points, expressed through Alter's tough-twerp rhetoric, but here is my favorite part, where Alter suggests holding back Title I funds (for those poorest children that Alter wants to help) as a way to bribe school systems (RTTT, anyone?) to make alterations in collective bargaining arrangements with teachers:

Obama should hold a summit of all 50 governors and move them toward national standards and better recruitment, training and evaluation of teachers. He should advocate using Title I federal funding as a lever to encourage "thin contracts" free of the insane work rules and bias toward seniority, as offered by the brilliant new superintendent in Washington, D.C., Michelle Rhee. . . .

And this from December, 2008, again reporting for his patron, Bill Gates:

He [Gates] called President-elect Obama last week and reports back cheerily that Obama "said all the right things" about including big money for education in the stimulus package and making fundamental school reform (not the fake kind pushed by teachers unions) a priority. . . . When I lumped Gates in with the "bomb throwers" on education, he chuckled and didn't disagree.

And a gem from 2010, again part of another borderline-erotic tribute to Alter's "micro-hard hombre" patron, Bill Gates:

There’s a backlash against the rich taking on school reform as a cause. Some liberals figure they must have an angle and are scapegoating teachers. But most of the wealthy people underwriting this long-delayed social movement for better performance are on the right track. 

I can see them, all former Corps (TFA) members, sipping lattes and hugging their clipboards around the table at the Gates Foundation and singing KIPP Shall Overcome.

The latest from Alter came yesterday, this poorly-written and hurried piece of drivel that recycles Alter's previously-used Whitaker Chambers insult aimed at Diane Ravitch, for whom the bonfire is now laid.  Alter was even handed a jibe to throw in from Oligarchs' chief stooge at ED, Arne Duncan:

Arne Duncan, President Barack Obama’s normally mild- mannered education secretary, has finally had enough. “Diane Ravitch is in denial and she is insulting all of the hardworking teachers, principals and students all across the country who are proving her wrong every day,” he said when I asked about Ravitch this week.

Eight pro-Ravitch comments were posted at the Bloomberg site before they stopped taking any more, even though hundreds of anti-Alter tweets have been posted.

The Oligarchs' strategy is obvious: Invite the shrinking minority of teachers at schools that haven't been blown up yet to the bonfire, where the stakes are in place for those who speak the truth.  Hope to divide--hope to conquer--burn the rest.  This came from Arne's press secretary yesterday afternoon:

EDPressSec @arneduncan: @DianeRavitch in denial & insulting hardworking teachers, principals & students proving her wrong every day me.lt/760ka

I hope everyone reading this has a hundred characters or so to say on the matter.

I was going to respond specifically to Alter's attack, but it seems that Alex Pareene at Salon has beat me to the punch.  And a good response it is:

By Alex Pareene 

AP/Bbsrock/Wikipedia

Michael Bloomberg and Jonathan Alter 

The conflict of interest inherent in having a media company owned by a powerful politician would probably be easier to explain away if that media company's new opinion arm refrained from directly attacking prominent critics of the boss. But Bloomberg View, like Bloomberg himself, doesn't care what nitpicking critics say. That's why no editor there thought it unseemly of Bloomberg View to run a Jonathan Alter piece attacking education policy expert Diane Ravitch, a vociferous critic of Mayor Bloomberg's handing of the New York City schools system.

Bloomberg View is the unasked-for opinion arm of Bloomberg L.P., the financial information company founded and owned by the billionaire mayor of New York City. Before it launched, one of its editors promised that it would run only "ideology-free, empirically-based editorial positions about the pressing issues of our time," because the ideology of the wealthy elite does not count as ideology.

There was already a minor controversy when it was reported that the opinion arm of Bloomberg's media company -- a company he is not supposed to be directly running while he's mayor -- would be located not at corporate HQ, but at the offices of the Bloomberg Family Foundation, where the mayor is allowed to participate in day-to-day operations.
Alter, formerly of Newsweek, is no lazy hack. He is smart and hard-working. Mayor Bloomberg didn't directly assign some shameless attack dog to go after one of his critics. Alter obviously sincerely agrees with the Bloomberg philosophy. But it still looks seriously inappropriate, like Mayor Mike's P.R. department firing off a response to this recent Ravitch op-ed.

And Alter's piece is not very impressive or convincing! It basically says that Alter and his friends are right and Ravitch is wrong, and it is full of very un-self-aware passages accusing her of caricature while very clumsily caricaturing all of Ravitch's arguments.

Ravitch is the author of a very good book that deflates many of the "success stories" and arguments of the very well-funded and powerful education reform movement, a movement supported by the elites in both political parties and on almost every editorial board in the nation. All the money is behind it. The only powerful institutional force that isn't gung-ho about the McKinsey-ification of public schooling is the teachers' unions, and so Ravitch is generally painted as a pawn of that particular "special interest." (Right-wing think tankers, millionaire centrist liberals, and highly paid corporate consultants are not a "special interest," they are just the people who are right about everything.)

When Alter says Ravitch "uses phony empiricism to rationalize almost every tired argument offered by teachers unions," we're meant to hiss at the invocation of the bad guy in this story. "Phony empiricism" means "data that contradict data used by pro-reform sources." Like the data that showed that the miraculous test score gains made by New York school children after two terms of complete control of the school system by Mayor Bloomberg were illusory.

But it's fine for Alter to disagree with Ravitch or accuse her of misusing statistics or insulting hard-working MBAs opening up for-profit charter schools across this great nation. It's just doesn't seem right to read this side of the argument under the name "BLOOMBERG."

• Continue reading

• Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon. Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More: Alex Pareene

Ohanian's Supplement to NYTimes Piece on Bill Gates

From Susan O.:

This is a supplement to Sam Dillon's front-page New York Times article Behind Grass-Roots School Advocacy, Bill Gates, May 22, 2011.

Mr. Gates is creating entirely new advocacy groups. The foundation is also paying Harvard-trained data specialists to work inside school districts, not only to crunch numbers but also to change practices. It is bankrolling many of the Washington analysts who interpret education issues for journalists and giving grants to some media organizations.

--Sam Dillon, The New York Times, front page, May 22, 2011

What Good News: Sam Dillon at the New York Times has discovered that "local teachers who favor school reform" are actually operatives for a national organization, Teach Plus, financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

What Bad News: For years, a number of us have been screaming about Gates buying up education policy but nobody would listen.

But let's celebrate what has happened. This story revealing Gates funding everything from the development (and evaluation) of Common Core Standards to the promotion of the public school-bashing "Waiting for 'Superman'" film was front-page news in the paper of record. And until this happened, the Gates' Foundation's wealth has put it beyond criticism--except by those of us marginalized as the lunatic fringe. In a spirit of collegiality, I offer a few notes to flesh out Dillon's account.

For starters, take a look at the way the Gates Foundation is commonly portrayed: Paul Hill's A Foundation Goes to School, in Education Next, Winter 2006.

Although the Hoover Institution publishes Education Next, the business office is at Program on Education Policy and Governance, Harvard Kennedy School. Paul Peterson,Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government and Director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University, is the editor-in-chief. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Chester Finn, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and Thomas B. Fordham Institute and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution is senior editor. Finn also lists himself as "public servant." The Next mission statement takes the high road, professing that the publication "partakes of no program, campaign, or ideology. It goes where the evidence points." That said, in February 2010 the Gates Foundation gave Next $224,030 to support their Charter Initiative.

On June 7, 2007, Bill Gates, at the time, the world’s richest man, received an honorary doctorate from Harvard.

Few Degrees of Separation
Gates operates in a small world of kissing kin. Everybody is inter-connected. Dillon doesn't mention that Monique Burns Thompson, President of Teach Plus, is a co-founder of New Leaders for New Schools. Before that, she was assistant brand manager at Quaker Oats. Heather Peske, National Director of Programs, was formerly Director of Teacher Quality at Education Trust. She launched her career in education as a Teach for America corps member.

There are plenty of Ivy League graduates on their Board of Advisors, which means:
1) They have the connections to make things happen; 2) They have both of Barack Obama's ears. Obama can't seem to say no to Ivy League pundits.

Teach Plus Advisory Committee Members
• Margaret Boasberg, The Bridgespan Group [worked extensively on strategies to increase the philanthropy of high net worth individuals]
• Stacey Childress, Harvard Business School
• Rachel Curtis, Human Capital Strategies for Urban Schools [paid $2,000 a day for services on human capital for Chicago Public Schools when Arne Duncan was in charge]
• Ben Fenton, New Leaders for New Schools [cofounder and chief strategy and knowledge officer; formerly at McKinsey & Co]
• Ethan Gray, The Mind Trust [After college, worked as a research assistant at Education Sector in Washington, DC; at Mind Trust he's in charge of "spreading entrepreneurship nationwide"]
• Ellen Guiney, Boston Plan for Excellence [Executive Director of BPE, which now focuses its efforts on "the use of formative assessments to help teachers tailor instruction to individual students, and increased data analysis to inform instructional decisions and professional development"
• Amanda Hillman, Teach for America
• Joanna Jacobson, Strategic Grant Partners
• Jason Kamras, District of Columbia Public Schools [2005 National Teacher of the Year, now director of human capital strategy for teachers in D.C. Public Schools, which includes enthusiastic support of "pay for performance"; former Teach for America corps member]
• Sandra Licon, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation [Program Officer, Education Advocacy; office located in Washington D. C.
• John Luczak, Joyce Foundation [conservative foundation gives "innovation grants" to charter schools; previously worked at US Department of Education]
• Julie Mikuta, New Schools Venture Fund [partner focusing on the firm's human capital investment strategy as well as management assistance for a variety of portfolio ventures. She serves on the board of directors of Bellwether Education Partners, Inner City Education Foundation (ICEF), KIPP DC, New Teacher Center (NTC), Pacific Charter School Development, and Partnerships to Uplift Communities (PUC); led trainings for school board and superintendent-teams of large urban districts at the Center for Reform of School Systems, through an initiative supported by The Broad Foundation; Vice President of Alumni Affairs for Teach For America]
• Talia Milgrom-Elcott, Carnegie Corporation [previously Project Director of System Transformation at the New York City Department of Education, working as part of Chancellor Joel Klein's team]
• Lynn Olson, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation [one of participants in SMART OPTIONS: INVESTING THE RECOVERY FUNDS FOR STUDENT SUCCESS; former senior editor of Education Week and project editor of their Quality Counts report]
• Elizabeth Pauley, The Boston Foundation [former Teach for America corps member]
• Ari Rozman, The New Teacher Project
• Cara Delzer Stadlin, New Schools Venture Fund
• Mary Wells, Connect the Dots
--reported at http://susanohanian.org/show_nclb_atrocities.php?id=4014 Aug. 9, 2010

NOTE: In "Michelle Rhee is 'Not Done Fighting' against public school teachers and unions,” Adam Neenan reported for Substance, Dec. 16, 2010, on one Teach Plus data-collecting strategy as they hosted a by-invitation-only discussion with educational entrepreneur Michelle Rhee.

The unnamed Washington Post blogger referred to by Dillon is, of course, Valerie Strauss. She revealed some of Gates Foundation shady funding in Gates spends millions to sway public on ed reform. She included hot links to important documents in this operation. You won’t want to miss the Confidential Letter.

Don’t you wonder why journalists are so reluctant to acknowledge the good work of other journalists? Why does Valerie Strauss remain unnamed?

In June 2006, Joshua Benton of the Dallas Morning News reported that within the Texas Education Agency, contracts often were not competitively bid but depended on whom one knew at the Gates Foundation.

Diane Ravitch was on target in a July 30, 2006 Los Angeles Times piece: "In light of the size of the foundation's endowment, Bill Gates is now the nation's superintendent of schools. He can support whatever he wants, based on any theory or philosophy that appeals to him." This was positioned as an opinion piece and there was no follow-up from the education press.

Nor was there any media mention of my heavily documented piece in Extra!, September 2010, "'Race to the Top' and the Bill Gates Connection: Who gets to speak about what schools need?"

Wanting to see which "independent experts" reporters called upon to explain Race to the Top and the Common Core standards, I examined over 700 articles published between mid-May 2009 and mid-July 2010. I eliminated cites from state ed officials, union officials and politicos. This left me with 152 outside experts quoted in 414 articles. Of the 23 experts quoted five times or more, 15 have connections with institutions receiving Gates funding and 13 with strong charter advocacy institutions. Who doesn't gets cited, raised very troubling questions. [See Appendix for whom Sam Dillon quoted in this time frame.]

Dillon's mention that National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CSSEO) received "millions of dollars" is rather like identifying half a dozen root canals as "a dental procedure." Since January 2008, Gates has shelled out more than $35 million to the Council of Chief School Officers and the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, the two primary organizations charged with drafting and promoting common standards. Daniel Goldman's Bill Gates' School Crusade (Bloomberg Businessweek, 7/15/10) was one of two articles I found revealing that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation "bankrolled the development of the common curriculum standards." Golden observed that our U. S. Department of Education and the Gates Foundation "move in apparent lockstep" on an agenda which is "an intellectual cousin of the Bush administration's 2002 No Child Left Behind law." As I said on my website, this kind of detail separates the real reporter from those who crib from press releases and call it a day.

In the Lowell Sun (7/18/10), Matt Murphy provided dollar amounts of Gates funding received by the Council of Chief School Officers and the National Governors Association Center for Best Practice, Achieve, and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, provoking Sam Smith of the Progressive Review to offer this headline (7/23/10): Is the Gates Foundation Involved in Bribery?

Sam Smith seemed to be the only one who noticed.

Vulture Philanthropy

Please Note: We--you and I--are paying for Gates' pet projects. Kenneth Saltman points out something few people seem to realize: For every ten dollars given by the Gates Foundation, four dollars is lost from the public wealth in taxes. The philanthropist’s dollars would otherwise go to the public in the form of taxes. So a big chunk of all that money Gates is spending to get teachers on script, destroy tenure, and standardize curriculum is actually OUR money; Bill Gates is using our tax dollars to mold America. And part of the plan--well on its way-- is to de-professionalize teachers. Saltman calls on readers "to stop applying business metaphors and logic to educational thinking derived from discredited market fundamentalism." Such terms as choice, monopoly, turnaround, efficiency need to be dropped in favor of public language and assumptions. Taxpayers are subsidizing (as tax-free) an organization bent on undermining their best interests. [See Kenneth Saltman's The Gift of Education: Public Education and Venture Philanthropy and Philip Kovacs' edited collection, The Gates Foundation and the Future of U. S. "Public" Schools.

You can see for yourself where your money goes: The New York Times has put excerpts from the Bill and Melinda Gates 2009 Tax 990 Form online along with Dillon's article.

Why only excerpts? The form runs 263 pages and includes about 360 education grants. If you want more details, watch for Ken Libby's work. His expertise on foundation largess is acknowledged in Dillon's article.

Dillon calls Gates' work "assertive philanthropy," surely a euphemism of our time. Usage: the Obama-Duncan era:he U. S. Department of Education holds hands with assertive philanthropists.

Dillon says another Gates pet project, the Education Equality Project, is "less well known." It did turn out to be pretty much small potatoes, but not because the usual suspects didn't try. Dillon doesn't point out that this outfit was founded by Reverend Al Sharpton and then-New York City Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein. In his June 12, 2008 story on this new group, Democrats Offer Plans to Revamp Schools Law, Dillon called "the principles" involved "prominent educators and lawmakers."

• Andres A. Alonso, Baltimore City Public Schools CEO
• Cory A. Booker, Newark, NJ Mayor
• Geoffrey Canada, Harlem Children's Zone President and CEO
• Kevin P. Chavous, attorney, author, and national school reform leader
• Arne Duncan, Chicago Public Schools CEO
• Howard Fuller, Former Milwaukee Public Schools Superintendent, Education Professor and Director of the Institute for the Transformation of Learning at Marquette University
• Peter Groff, Colorado Senate President
• Kati Haycock, The Education Trust President
• Joel I. Klein, New York City Schools Chancellor, Education Equality Project Co-chairman
• Marc Lampkin, Strong American Schools �" ED in ’08 Executive Director
• James Mtume, KISS FM Radio "Open Line" Host
• Michelle Rhee, Washington, D.C. Schools Chancellor
• The Honorable Roy Romer, Strong American Schools �" ED in'’08 Chairman
• Andrew Rotherham, Education Sector Co-founder and Co-director
• Rev. Al Sharpton, National Action Network President, Education Equality Project Co-chairman
• Joe Williams, Democrats for Education Reform Executive Director
• J.C. Watts, Jr., Strong American Schools �" ED in '08 National Spokesman

More Gates Awardees
Education Trust, another Gates favorite, needs no introduction. They received $1.5 million and change in 2007 and another million in 2010.

The National PTA received $1 millon grant to mobilize parents for the Common Core Standards in four states. -- Dec. 2, 2009

The May 18, 2011 Education Week (which gets its own Gates funding, as in $2,534,757 in 2005, another $100,000 in 2005, and $1,997,280 in 2009.) ran a ¾ page ad from ASCD. It was presented in the form on an opinion piece by Executive Director Gene R. Carter offering strong support of the Common Core. The ad doesn’t mention that The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation awarded $3 million to ASCD> "to support that group's efforts to help education leaders and educators themselves understand the standards and implement them." -- The Journal, April 5, 2011

Stand for Children Leadership Center
Date: December 2009
Purpose: to support the grassroots organization, policy development, and coalition work of Stand for Children Leadership Center focused on advancing common policy priorities in early learning and college ready
Gates lists support of the Common Core as "college-ready education."
Amount: $971,280

This was reported as a three-year grant, but the next year, Stand For Children was back with a $3,476,300 grant “to support education reforms, training, technical assistance, and tools designed to increase teacher effectiveness.”
Substance has had plenty of coverage on this outfit’s union-busting activities. Here are a few:
http://www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=1835
http://www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=2152
http://www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=2155

Jonah Edelman, identified as "intense leader of reform group Stand for Children," was the subject of an April 2011 New York Times puff piece which does not mention any Gates funding.

AFT
April 2011
Purpose: to invest in projects related to the Common Core and to assist in carrying out a Standards Rollout
Amount: $1,000,000
Term: 1 year and 3 months
Topic: College-Ready Education

July 2010
Purpose: to continue the American Federation Of Teachers Innovation Fund’s efforts to support local affiliates that engage in research-based, union-developed teacher quality initiatives and to work with a consortium of local and state affiliates�"the Teacher Excellence Collaborative�"to create and implement a comprehensive development and evaluation system based upon the American Federation Of Teachers framework
Amount: $3,421,725
Term: 2 years and 1 month
Topic: College-Ready Education

June 2009
Purpose: to support the work of a teacher evaluation task force, which is made up of progressive local and state leaders who will develop a comprehensive framework for teacher evaluation that focuses on research-based instructional practices and how to incorporate student-achievement results, to support the work of the task force, the publication and widespread dissemination of the final report, and a national conference dedicated to the framework, with some technical assistance to interested districts
Amount: $250,000
Term: 1 year and 2 months
Topic: College-Ready Education

A link to the 2008 AFT report Sizing up the State Standards is posted on the Gates website.

NEA
The NEA Foundation for the Improvement of Education
Date: March 2010
Purpose: to support an in-person meeting of the Planning Committee of the NEA Foundation Institute for Local Innovation in Teaching and Learning
Amount: $38,420
Term: 2 months
Topic: College-Ready Education

The NEA Foundation for the Improvement of Education
Date: October 2009
Purpose: to support training for local NEA affiliates to take on a leadership role in improving teaching practice and student achievement in their districts
Amount: $358,915
Term: 11 months
Topic: College-Ready Education

Just a Coincidence
In Nov. 2009, the Hillsborough County Public Schools received $100 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to radically change teacher practices. This Gates plan also involves Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Charlotte-Mecklenburg, Denver, District of Columbia, Houston, Long Beach, Los Angeles, Memphis, Pittsburgh, Prince George's County, Rochester, and Seattle. They operate under the aegis of the Gates-funded Aspen Urban Superintendents Network, which has been made possible by generous grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation.

In 2009, Gates alone gave the Aspen Institute $3,878,680.
Purpose: to continue support for Human Capital Framework, Senior Congressional Staff Network, and the Urban Superintendents Network to address common issues of teacher effectiveness, standards, and assessments

AFT President Randi Weingarten offers the AFT congratulations for the Hillsborough, Memphis, Pittsburgh seduction on the Gates website: "These Gates Intensive Partnership grants will show that when dedicated adults engage in true collaboration, the real winners are the students."

Further Reading
For those of you gasping for breath, I suggest subscribing to http://www.susanohanian.org, where such information comes regularly but in smaller doses.

Joanne Barkin's brilliant summary of the Gates-Broad chicanery,"Got Dough? How Billionaires Rule Our Schools," published in Dissent Magazine, January 2011 offers a substantial and damning read. Barkin sees fit to put on her short identifier that she is a graduate of Chicago public schools.

Christopher H. Tienken's Common Core State Standards: An Example of Data-less Decision Making," from AASA Journal of Scholarship and Practice, Vol. 7, No. 4 Winter 2011, offers a readable, coherent look at the Common Core--even with good lines as well as good research:

Size matters because size brings complexity. Finland, the country that usually ranks in the top five on international tests has 5.5 million people. In the U.S. we call that Wisconsin.

I offer a suggested topic for Mr. Dillon's next front page expose: We produce more researchers and scientists and qualified engineers than our economy can employ, have even more in the pipeline, and we are one of the most economically competitive nations on the globe.

It's staggering to realize that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had an endowment of $33 billion as of June 2010, with an additional $30 billion from Warren Buffett, spread out over multiple years in annual contributions. This makes a lot of people lose hope. Some of us don't even operate on a shoestring but on Social Security stipends. But when we don't keep shouting, when we don't insist on government of the people, by the people and for the people, then we let thugs like Bill Gates triumph. Writing in Undernews, Is the Gates Foundation Involved in Bribery? longtime political commentator Sam Smith noted:

If an individual were to influence governmental decisions with this sort of money, it would be clearly a criminal offense. Why should it be any different for a foundation?

Gates has opened the door to a manifestly corrupt approach to government where a handful of well funded groups and individuals override the democratic legislative process by the prospect of funding or the threat of losing it. If you can't go to jail now for doing this, there should be laws that make it clear that you do from here on out.

Appendix
Here's who Dillon quotes as experts on the issue of Race to the Top and/or Common Core Standards�"and how he identifies them. As you read the identifiers, remember these appeared in articles meant to inform the public about education policy.

Michael Cohen
• president of Achieve, a Washington-based organization that is coordinating the effort (Sam Dillon, "New Push Seeks to End Need for Pre-College Remedial Classes," New York Times, May 28, 2009)
• Education Department official in the Clinton administration who is president of Achieve. (Sam Dillon, "Panel Proposes Single Standard for All Schools," New York Times, March 11, 2010)
Timothy Daly
• president, New Teacher Project, which advocates for improved educator evaluation systems (Sam Dillon, "Education Grant Effort Faces Late Opposition," New York Times, Jan 19, 2010)
• president, New Teacher Project, a nonprofit group (Sam Dillon, "States Create Flood of Bills To Overhaul Education," New York Times, June 2, 2010)
• president, New Teacher Project, a nonprofit that has pressed for changes in the way teachers are evaluated (Sam Dillon, "New Tension In Obama's Tie To Teachers," New York Times, July 5, 2010)
Chester Finn
• former assistant secretary of education who has been an advocate for national standards for nearly two decades (Sam Dillon, "Panel Proposes Single Standard for All Schools," New York Times, March 10, 2010)
• president of an education research group in Washington (Sam Dillon and Tamar Lewin, "Education Chief Vies to Expand U.S. Role as Partner on Local Schools," The New York Times, May 3, 2010)
• a Republican, writer of influential education blog, Flypaper (Sam Dillon, "New Tension In Obama's Tie To Teachers," New York Times, July 5, 2010)
Frederick M. Hess
• education director at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research policy group (Sam Dillon, "States Rush to Prepare For School Grant Contest," New York Times, Nov. 11, 2009)
• a director at the American Enterprise Institute (Sam Dillon, "In School Aid Race, Many States Are Left Behind," New York Times, April 5, 2010)
Jack Jennings
• former Democratic Congressional staff member who is president of the Center on Education Policy, a research group (Sam Dillon, "Array of Hurdles Awaits New Education Agenda," The New York Times, March 16, 2010)
Carl Kaestle
• education historian at Brown University (Sam Dillon and Tamar Lewin, "Education Chief Vies to Expand U.S. Role as Partner on Local Schools," The New York Times, May 3, 2010)
Michael W. Kirst
• Stanford University professor emeritus who has studied the proliferation of remedial courses on American campuses (Sam Dillon, "New Push Seeks to End Need for Pre-College Remedial Classes," New York Times, May 28, 2009
Richard D. Kahlenberg
• senior fellow at the Century Foundation (Sam Dillon, "New Tension In Obama's Tie To Teachers," New York Times, July 5, 2010)
Leah Lechleiter-Luke
• Spanish teacher from Mauston, Wis., who is that state's 2010 teacher of the year (Sam Dillon, "States Receive a Reading List: New Standards for Education," New York Times, June 2, 2010)
The New Teacher Project
• a nonprofit group (Sam Dillon, "Dangling $4.3 Billion, Dangling $4.3 Billion, Obama Pushes States to Shift on Education," New York Times, Aug. 17, 2009)
Paul Pastorek
• state superintendent of education . (Sam Dillon, "Education Grant Effort Faces Late Opposition," Jan 19, 2010)
Rick Perry
• Governor of Texas (Sam Dillon,"Education Grant Effort Faces Late Opposition," Jan 19, 2010)
Mike Petrilli
• A vice president at Thomas B. Fordham Institute who served in George W. Bush's Education Department (Sam Dillon, "Array of Hurdles Awaits New Education Agenda," The New York Times, March 16, 2010)
Susan Pimentel
• consultant in New Hampshire who helped write the English standards. (Sam Dillon, "Panel Proposes Single Standard for All Schools," New York Times, March 10, 2010)
Diane Ravitch
• Education historian (Sam Dillon, "Dangling $4.3 Billion, Dangling $4.3 Billion, Obama Pushes States to Shift on Education," New York Times, Aug. 17, 2009)
• education historian (Sam Dillon, "Education Standards Likely to See Toughening," New York Times, April 15, 2010)
John Schnur
• education adviser to the Obama campaign who helped design Race to the Top. (Sam Dillon, "States Create Flood of Bills To Overhaul Education," New York Times, June 1, 2010)
Van Shoales
• executive director of Education Reform Now, a national advocacy group (Sam Dillon, "In School Aid Race, Many States Are Left Behind," New York Times, April 5, 2010)
Jim Stergios
• executive director, Pioneer Institute, a Boston nonprofit group that helped Massachusetts revise its state benchmarks in the 1990s. (Sam Dillon, "Panel Proposes Single Standard for All Schools," New York Times, March 10, 2010)
Kate Walsh
• president of the nonprofit National Council on Teacher Quality who has advised several states on Race to the Top strategy (Sam Dillon, "States Rush to Prepare For School Grant Contest," New York Times, Nov. 11, 2009)
Grover "Russ" Whitehurst
• director of the Department of Education's research division under President George W. Bush, now at the Brookings Institution. (Sam Dillon, "Education Grant Effort Faces Late Opposition," Jan 19, 2010)
• senior fellow at Brooking Institution (Sam Dillon, "Array of Hurdles Awaits New Education Agenda," The New York Times, March 16, 2010)
Gene Wilhoit
• executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers, a nonpartisan association of state superintendents of education (Sam Dillon, "States Rush to Prepare For School Grant Contest," New York Times, Nov. 11, 2009)
• executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers. (Sam Dillon, "Panel Proposes Single Standard for All Schools," New York Times, March 10, 2010)
Joe Williams
• Executive Director, Democrats for Education Reform (Sam Dillon, "Dangling $4.3 Billion, Dangling $4.3 Billion, Obama Pushes States to Shift on Education," New York Times, Aug. 17, 2009)
• executive director of Democrats for Education Reform, a group often critical of the teachers' unions (Sam Dillon, "After Criticism, the Administration Is Praised for Final Rules on Education Grants," New York Times, Nov. 12, 2009)

Now ask yourself this: Who's missing? For starters, noted researcher (and former New York Times education columnist) Richard Rothstein was not quoted in any of the 700 articles I studied.

Item: Let's do the numbers: Department of Education's Race to the Top Program Offers Only a Muddled Path to the Finish Line by William Peterson and Richard Rothstein, EPI Report, April 20, 2010, documents that the Race to the Top picks winners arbitrarily.

Item: A blueprint that needs more work by Richard Rothstein
EPI Policy Memo #162, March 27, 2010

That’s just for starters. Rothstein, the author of very influential work, is an acknowledged expert, and he's prolific--books, reports, papers--all relevant to the topics at hand. Yet reporters ignore him.

Likewise, David Berliner wasn't cited once in during the time period studied. So the question remains open: Why would the press shut out an expert, the co-author of the acclaimed Manufactured Crisis and Collateral Damage: How High-Stakes Testing  

Corrupts America's Schools and Poverty and Potential: Out-of-School Factors and School Success --while calling up Joe Williams and his cohort Charles Barone of the Democrats for Education Reform, a political action committee (PAC) tied to hedge fund interests, for 40 citations?

I name only two of the missing. Think of all the other experts who are missing from every press account of education policy. My "expert" tally showed Education Week sometimes quoting people from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute three times in one issue.

Duncan created a firestorm among bloggers when he told Sam Dillon and Tamar Lewin of the New York Times

Progressive Texas journalist Molly Ivins once warned (in her George W. Bush biography Shrub), "People who have read only one book can be quite dangerous." Consider the danger of allowing one foundation to dominate our education policy. I worry about the press's very deliberate avoidance of this issue, and I fear I might have found the answer in the movie Three Days of the Condor, where Joubert, the contract assassin, sums things up: "I don't interest myself in 'why.' I think more often in terms of 'when,' sometimes 'where'; always 'how much.'... The fact is what I do is not a bad occupation. Someone is always willing to pay."

--by Susan Ohanian, who was invited to write a commentary for the New York Times-- and then dis-invited because she would not withdraw her one-word criticism of Times columnist Thomas Friedman. The editor insisted that Friedman has nothing to do with education policy.
— Susan Ohanian
website
2011-05-22

(5/4/10) that his policies encounter no opposition: "Zero. There's just an outpouring of support for the common-sense changes and the unprecedented investments we're making." This outrageous claim was left to stand unquestioned in the newspaper that still claims "All the news fit to print" on its masthead. No comments were accepted online.

Parent Revolution in California Led by Steve Barr, Gates and Broad's Rottweiler

Back before the reputation of Green Dot Public School, Inc. began to crumble and before parents and students began to see the corporate writing on the walls of their schools and to feel the pepper spray on their skin, Steve Barr was CEO of Green Dot Public Schools, Inc.  There he developed his skills in exploiting poor immigrant parents by shuttling them into noisy astroturf groups for Green Dot, with bankrolling supplied by his patrons, Eli Broad ($10.5 million) and Bill Gates ($7.8 million). 

Now Barr is Chairman of the Board for another astroturf group and oligarch-funded outfit called Parent Revolution, and as you see by the website, it has the same feel as the Waiting for Superman "Get Involved" pages and the same layout as Michelle Rhee's corporate money-laundering outfit recently set up to provide tax breaks for oligarchs buying politicians who will vote to shut down public schools.  Small world.

All of this is significant because Parent Revolution represents a new attempt to undermine the democratic process by oligarchs whose patience has been exhausted by examples of real democratic outbreaks as in DC that threaten corporate ed reform's house of card.  If the morally bankrupt corporate welfare scammers cannot win the public's confidence with their hard-fisted Michelle Rhee tactics, then they will just buy the public--or so it would seem. 

As reported by the NYTimes, the new Gates-Broad strategy is at work in the first public demonstration of a new California "trigger law" to make it possible for 51 percent of parents to pull the plug on an urban public school via a petition.  With Barr pulling the strings of Parent Revolution, we are likely to see more of this kind money-managed mob action to take over public schools in California. 

At least one of the ironies in this sad, though predictable, development among the corporate ed thugsters, is that the parents' choices among the four school turnaround alternatives in Compton, or elsewhere, were derived from a select committee of insiders at Gates's U. S. Dept. of Ed., and none of these turnaround alternatives has ever been voted on by publicly-elected officials, and all of them have zero empirical evidence to support them as better alternatives to the malignantly-neglected public schools.  And thus, a fake democratic action to offer a non-public choice for purchased parents.  From NYTimes:

Organizers of the petition took dozens of parents to other schools run by Celerity, the group that will open the charter school to replace McKinley. Vielka McFarlane, Celerity’s executive director, said it was impossible to know how many of the teachers currently at the school she would hire, though “all of them would, of course, be welcome to apply.”[Note to reporter, J. Medina: your link is to the wrong Celerity.]

And who, pray tell, is Vielka McFarlane?  Well, she has an established history as a charter CEO, and she has earned the oligarchs' trust to culturally sterilize the poor children of L.A., while teaching them to work hard, be nice.  In 2007, she earned her corporate stripes during Black History Month with this racist insult and idiotic rationale for it:

Administrators [Exec. Dir. Vielka McFarlane] at a Los Angeles charter school forbade students from reciting a poem about civil rights icon Emmett Till during a Black History Month program recently, saying his story was unsuitable for an assembly of young children.

. . . .

Teachers and students said the administration suggested that the Till case — in which the teenager was beaten to death in Mississippi after allegedly whistling at a white woman — was not fitting for a program intended to be celebratory, and that Till's actions could be viewed as sexual harassment.

"Our whole goal is how do we get these kids to not look at all of the bad things that could happen to them and instead focus on the process of how do we become the next surgeon or the next politician," said Celerity co-founder and Executive Director Vielka McFarlane. "We don't want to focus on how the history of the country has been checkered but on how do we dress for success, walk proud and celebrate all the accomplishments we've made."

NCATE, Ed Week, UTRU, and Eli Broad

. . . this current effort is focused in large part on undoing the legacy of licensure and preparation decisions made more than a half-century ago.  --Rick Hess, Ed Week Commentary on the NCATE Report 11/17/10

In the first coverage by Ed Week of the big NCATE shake-up or shake-down of teacher education, Stephen Sawchuk reports the following:

The report’s main recommendation: Supervised, structured work of teacher-candidates in diverse classroom settings must be the foremost component of preservice teacher training, with other aspects like coursework embedded in that training. It draws heavily on the teacher-residency model and a handful of university-based education programs that take such an approach to training new teachers.

“The general message is that teachers have not been prepared well—or enough—and we need to make changes both on the front end, with preparation, and at the back end, with accountability,” said Anissa Listak, the executive director of Urban Teacher Residency United, a Chicago-based network of teacher-residency programs across the nation. “State interest, federal interest [in those reforms], I’m seeing it every day, at every level. I’m seeing funders getting involved in it in a way they haven’t before.”

Interesting, isn't it, that Ed Week's Sawchuk would go first for a quote to Urban Teacher Residency United (UTRU), whatever that is, rather than to NCATE or to one of the panel members or even to Ed Week's go-to guy from AEI, Rick Hess. So I did a some googling to find out about UTRU.

It seems that URTU was founded in 2007 as a non-profit outfit with lofty aspirations for "setting the standard for urban teacher preparation on a national scale."  It is essentially a modified TFA model that offers the added bonus of a mentor during the first year that their highly-recruited and closely screened neophytes are learning to teach on poor people's children.  The URTU mandate is to work "closely with school districts, not-for-profit organizations and universities to launch and support effective Urban Teacher Residencies."

Now the question is, who funds URTU?  Glad you asked.  That would be a venture philanthropy outfit called Strategic Grant Partner (SGP) founded in 2002 by fourteen unnamed families in Massachusetts.  From the website:

In September 2002, fourteen families agreed to join the collaborative Strategic Grant Partners. The families established the common mission of helping struggling individuals and families in Massachusetts improve their lives. Since that time, SGP has granted $26,000,000.


The philosophy and practice of SGP continued to develop over the years. We began with informal strategic support and business advice to potential and existing grantees. This work matured into our current model of close working partnerships with grantees. The pro bono consulting services we provide include helping grantees develop organizational strategies, theories of change and strategic plans as well as tactical support on key implementation issues.

Once an organization becomes an SGP grantee, SGP staff continues to provide ongoing advice and strategic assistance as well as hands on, practical implementation support to ensure the organization is as successful as possible. . . .

Now the person in charge of SGP's portfolio of educational ventures such as URTU is a former English major with an MBA from Cornell named Barbara Sullivan. She is no doubt young and full of enthusiasm, with the added benefit of her own residency (2004-2006) at Eli Broad's training camp for edupreneurs, the Broad Center. Small world, isn't it?

While at the Broad Center, Sullivan had a residency with Boston Public Schools, where she "served as Special Assistant to the Chief Operating Officer and spearheaded the redesign of the district’s student assignment process."

Sullivan's Broad-sponsored work is the same segregative student assignment plan that BPS Superintendent, Carol Johnson, has been trying to get replaced since 2009:

Johnson had been scheduled to submit a revamped proposal to the School Committee next month after parents, educators, and civil right activists raised concerns that the original plan would leave low-income students with fewer options to attend high-quality schools.

Instead, Johnson said she plans to study how other urban districts maintain the economic and racial diversity of their schools without spending huge amounts of money on busing.

A new proposal may not be ready for another year. The district applied for a $230,000 federal grant Friday to fund the study and expects to hear in October about approval.

“We are committed to opportunities for children to attend schools where they work with a diverse student population,’’ Johnson said in a meeting with reporters yesterday. . . .

Try as Dr. Johnson may, Broad's lemmings don't seem to be a hurry to end the segregation and containment that they helped put in place.  And we may guess who really runs BPS.  The lack of movement, transparency, and public involvement has been so bad, in fact, that three civil rights organizations (read the letter here as a pdf)  withdrew their participation from the process in July:

. . . . School officials were informed of the decision in a letter sent by e-mail Monday by the three organizations — the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice at Harvard Law School, the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law of the Boston Bar Association. 

“We have reached this decision based on what many perceive as BPS’ lack of meaningful engagement with the community during this process,’’ the organizations wrote in the letter, which they provided to the Globe yesterday.

Superintendent Carol R. Johnson called the severed partnership unfortunate and surprising. She disputed the lack of community engagement, saying that she has been gathering public opinion as she speaks to parents, students, and other community members on a variety of issues confronting the district. 

“I think it’s unfortunate they decided not to work further with us,’’ Johnson said. “I think these are very difficult sets of questions and conversations to have about student assignment. That’s why we reached out to them in the first place.’’

According to a new timeline, the district plans to formally consult parents and students on student assignments next January, while the School Committee would vote later in the year on a resulting plan so it can be enacted for Fall 2012.

So the inner and invisible workings of the Oligarchs continues in every public domain, shaping policies to fit the agendas of corporate America to reward the haves and to contain and control the have nots, all the while creating a new class of arrogant, ignorant, and blind technocratic and positivized do-gooders whose own lack of understanding allows them to believe they are doing good by bringing corporate control to public institutions.

The question, however, remains for Mr. Sawchuk of the "objective" Education Week:  how did he choose a rep from an outfit created and funded and managed by the corporate education reform industry as the lead quote on a big story about changes to teacher education accreditation??  Now THAT is transparency!

Pledge to See a Movie During This National Emergency

Jim Horn

If you are a teacher with 28 children in your class this Fall, four of them live in poverty.

On Thursday the Census Bureau released a report showing that 1 of 7 Americans now lives in poverty.  That’s 44,000,000 people who, if they live in a family of four, have a family income that is less than $22,000 per year.  If it were not for unemployment benefits, another 3,300,000 would be included in the poverty figures.  Even with such impressive numbers that exceed the levels of poverty for when President Johnson declared the War on Poverty in the 1960s, higher numbers of people are without health insurance, which now stands at over 50,000,000 for the first time since records have been kept. 

What has been the national political response?  The Republicans have not mentioned it, preferring instead to continue to hammer their talking points on maintaining the Bush tax cuts for those making more than $250,000 per year.  The Democrats are more interested in the middle class who vote, with the President on Friday making the case from the Rose Garden for middle class tax cuts without mentioning the historic poverty report released the day before.  In a Washington Post story on Thursday that asked a pundit from each political party what should be done in the face of this accelerating devastation, the Republican urged poor people to make sure they get married, and the Democrat urged the continuation of the surviving patchwork of social welfare programs that are already entirely swamped by the deluge of the poor.

Without comment on poverty reports, however, wealth continues to accumulate for those with the wealth to make it happen.  We know this not from any disclosures from the privileged, but from the public disclosures by large investors such as university endowments and retirement funds.  Last week brought news that Columbia University has recouped much of what was lost in the most recent Wall Street debacle, with a 17 percent return this year on investments that remain undisclosed.  We can only imagine the astronomical returns that the hedge fund gamblers are bringing in for the casino capitalists of Wall Street if a university endowment is able to collect 17% on its investment. 

On the other coast in California, a Bay Citizen story published by the New York Times reports that a review of the University of California shareholder voting records show a pattern of disregard for UC’s long-standing investment policy “to promote human rights, environmental sustainability and efforts to fight discrimination.”  It is as if the acrid whiff of economic collapse has placed conscience and moral argument on the losing side of a zero sum game, a sentiment expressed in remarks by a UC Davis law professor who argues that UC must keep in mind the “ultimate beneficiaries:” “Do they want to be socially responsible or do they want to have retirement money when they retire?”

There are those among us, however, who feel as though they will have their cake and will eat it, too, and have more cake as a result.  And thus we see the great outpouring of interest and even tears among the wealthy and well-heeled lining up for the new documentary feature on the un-caped crusaders of the corporate education reform movement depicted in “Waiting for Superman,” a film amply funded by philanthro-capitalists, those irrepressible investors who do well by doing good from their unique capacity to spot a business opportunity where the rest of us just see the cancerous effects exuding from the malignant neglect of poverty.  From what I can learn from the well-oiled promotional machine that, beyond the “Superman” website, is funding op-eds, newsy articles, interviews, and TV specials to generate support for the movie’s corporate-approved educational solutions, the film hopes to push over the top an educational revolution of sorts that will sweep away poor children’s failure as easily as plans to sweep away teachers and schools where poor children score the lowest on tests. 

This new corporate poor children’s crusade will not be constrained by burdensome adult work rules, union agreements, due process considerations, or even children’s work rules or due process, for that matter.  The model chain for corporate school reform, KIPP, works students and teachers 10 hours a day, and then they are on duty for 2 to 3 hours of homework every night.  Plus Saturdays.  Though costly for students and teachers alike, who must cut short other life activities such as family and friends (and sleep), the new crusade will be accomplished apparently without the need for addressing the many, otherwise, expensive social and economic challenges where poor children live and score poorly in crumbling schools with shortages of decent learning materials, libraries, health care, parent jobs, housing, transportation, equal opportunity, or the diverse social capital that enables healthy cultures to  interact and thrive.

What this new “civil rights” crusade based on segregated containment and a “no excuses” mantra disguises is a very old ideology based on blaming the poor for their poverty and blaming public schools in order to dismantle them for corporate benefit, with both unacknowledged goals carried out while diverting attention away from the economic canyon that divides the poor from the rich who now plan to get richer by exploiting the poor in ways that leave them even more contained and invisible than before. 

The heart-tugging and anger-pumping machinations of “Waiting for Superman” mask a cynical excuse to impose a cheap form of punitive social triage through a total compliance penal form of schooling for the poor that carries with it the added benefit of a huge financial dividend for the philanthropic investor class that Diane Ravitch has termed the “Billionaire Boys’ Club.”  Though costly for students, parents, and teachers alike, none of these constituencies are even present in strategies for this new crusade, unless they are recruited to serve as passive audiences for lectures by Bill Gates or Arne Duncan.   They did have their presence felt last Tuesday in DC, however, and no doubt they will have it felt again.

Trying to turn poor children into middle class ones without the benefits of the family wealth or access to social capital to go along with the psychological and behavioral modifications of the KIPPs will be do untold damage to children and their families that will not be judged kindly by history in the long term, or by voters and civil rights advocates in the short term.  It will be of minor consequence to the wealth of the wealthy, however, even if it all falls flat.  If this brand of apartheid testing camps were to become the model for urban education, however, corporate education reform would make many of the wealthy even wealthier, with an added social dividend. For if the psychological alterations of the poor are as effective as the corporate “positivity” consultants would have it, we may assume that these poor children, once successfully modified, will become as blind to poverty as the white, and black, missionary types who are lined up for a ticket to feel good about believing that poverty is no longer an excuse for being poor.

Meanwhile, 5 of 35 school children in every overcrowded classroom in America remain impoverished, with nothing on the political horizon or from Hollywood to change that reality or even to challenge it.

DC Voters Repudiate Education Deform

The prognosticators on CNN like David Gergen and Paul Begala are already shaking their heads and clucking about the smashing of the Fenty/Rhee front for the corporate education machine.  Begala is urging the audience to see the big money propaganda film, "Waiting for Superman," a documentary made by a director who gets totally snookered by producers who are funded by the billionaire boys' club. Gergen nods, yep.  Another of the talking heads, a black one, notes that Fenty lost the black vote, even though he was trying to "save the schools."   All three nod.  And so it goes.

Will the pundits ever ask the voters why they soundly rejected the arrogant, hateful, anti-union, anti-teacher, anti-parent, anti-public school approach to reform that sees the solution to urban education as cheap charters with uncertified white short term teachers and no libraries or services for students with special needs?  Cheap charters with high-priced CEOs running them, cheap charters that are based on a no excuses total compliance anti-cultural model of penal pedagogy that treats children as potential test scores who must be behaviorally and psychologically modified. Will the pundits ask the parents and the teachers and the children, all who want a say in how their public school run and their monies are spent, rather than being treated like enemies that have to be conquered?

Will Mr. Gray talk with the voters to see what kind of public school the public wants, rather than reporting to the Broad Foundation and the Gates Foundation and the Walton Foundation?  Parents and teachers don't want schools to prepare mind-scrubbed test-takers and obsequious drones for the corporate state.  Teachers want to be treated like respected professionals, and parents want to be treated like the people who love their children and who pay your salary, Mr. Gray.  Mayor Gray.  I like that.  Let's see what you can do with it.  I'm hoping your people are preparing a pink slip right now for one of the stars of that new documentary on that popular new education reform movement in DC.

Last updated 12:35 am with this:
26,915 now. Gray 56.37%, Fenty 42.11%

Goodnight, Michelle. 

Fenty/Rhee Announce Teacher Bribes Ahead of Tuesday's Vote

Looking to complete a Hail Mary that might turn around a losing game late in the fourth quarter, Rhee's corporate coaches have have decided that it is time to offer the $65 million in pay-for-score funds collected from the Waltons, Eli Broad, and former Enron kingpins.  And remember teachers, if Rhee Fenty is defeated, that money will go to some other school system desperate enough to be bought by the corporate testocracy. 

Does the brain trust on the sidelines really believe that some dirty money can "incent" teachers into the top quintile of test score generators?  Having all teachers performing as "highly effective" on DC's pay for scores evaluation scheme is the equivalent of having a baseball team where everyone is hitting .300--all the time.  Excuse the mixed metaphors.  From WaPo:

. . . the performance bonuses are targeted toward the highest-evaluated among them. If a teacher received highly-effective evaluations for two years in a row, his or her base pay could rise by as much as $26,000 a year in addition to the bonus pay.

Sixteen percent of the city's teachers were ranked highly effective last school year. . . . .

Karen Lewis and Lois Weiner on Democracy Now

Right-wing = neo-liberal and/or neocon:

D.C. Voters Poised to Send Historic Message to Oligarchs Who Manage Fenty/Rhee

Does it come as a surprise that the wealthy districts of DC are the only places where Fenty is polling ahead of Gray?  If your entire arrogant administration has been executed to serve power and privilege and to arrogantly throw a few crumbs elsewhere, could it not be predicted that the chickens would come home to roost in a city short on privileged voters?  A few clips from WaPo's piece today:

. . . .With early voting beginning Monday in the Sept. 14 primary, Gray is clearly ahead, leading Fenty 49 to 36 percent among all Democratic voters surveyed. Gray's advantage swells to 17 points, 53 to 36 percent, among those most likely to vote in the primary. . . . .

. . . .Education is the top voting issue in the poll and one that works toward Fenty's advantage, particularly among whites. White voters overwhelmingly see the District's schools as better than they were four years ago. But black voters are as apt to say schools have deteriorated as improved.

Talk of Rhee's performance and future is a constant on the campaign trail, but the deep polarization over the chancellor does not give either candidate a clear advantage. In the latest poll, 41 percent of Democrats say her record is a reason to vote for Fenty; 40 percent say it is a factor against Fenty. Among white voters polled, 68 percent say Rhee is a reason to support Fenty, but 54 percent of African Americans consider Rhee a strike against him.

Marilyn Barrette, 43, a Capitol Hill resident with three children in public schools, said she will vote for Fenty because of the work he has done on education. "I've seen some improvements in the facilities themselves. As far as the curriculum and bringing in Michelle Rhee, things are moving in the right direction," said Barrette, an elementary school teacher in Prince George's County who has taken time off to be with her children.

But McDonald said Fenty lost her vote after Rhee fired 266 teachers and gave what she considered a misleading reason for their dismissal. "He really plucked my nerves when he messed with the schools and fired the teachers," said McDonald, who holds Fenty and Rhee responsible for the firings.

Beyond the schools, Gray wins among voters who emphasize most other issues, including the economy and jobs. . . .