Bloomberg's Impoverished Poverty Eradication Plan

Since finally leaving his New York mayor's throne to someone far less princely, Mike Bloomberg is spending his time jetting around the world playing big shot with his bags of cash and, like all bullies, an unhealthy disdain for anyone who disagrees with him. These days he claims to be all about giving away all his dough before he dies, but if Forbes is right, Bloomberg obviously plans to live on in perpetuity: last year he gave away $465 million and his wealth grew $6 billion to top out at over $32 billion.  But then not many of our 401Ks average have the kind of inside track to "earn" a 25% return like Bloomberg's billions.

One of Bloomberg's thought disorders that he put into action before leaving New York was an unadvertised plan in Memphis to pay the poor to do things for themselves that middle class folks do as matter of course.

. . . a new kind of anti-poverty push, less a movement than a technocrat’s dream, is quietly being tested here, a modest experiment that could help redefine a static national conversation about how to deal with intractable poverty of the sort that not only has overwhelmed the old projects like Foote Holmes, but also afflicts even the shiny new places like Cleaborn Pointe. Three years ago, Gordon-Cole was one of 600 people (most of them single mothers) selected for the Memphis Family Rewards Program, a widely watched trial that provides cash incentives to poor parents and their high school-age children for completing tasks that seem, at first glance, absurdly second nature for middle-class families. A student who compiles an acceptable school attendance record gets $40 a month, showing up for an annual dental or medical check-up means a $100 check, grades are monetized ($30 for an A, $20 for B, $10 for a C) and taking a college entrance exam like the ACT gets you a $50 check. Parents are also rewarded: Adults get a $150 monthly bonus, up to $1,800 a year, simply for working full-time.

Even though Bloomberg's one or two million per year for this novelty poverty boutique plan is not enough to even pay for the upkeep on his private jet, it is enough to earn him 8,000 words or so with Politico.  It's enough, too, to keep the corporate welfare and political pumps primed in Memphis for the next gush of cash that might appear any day from the Big House well.

Meanwhile, the impoverished recipients of Bloomberg's drips and drabs thank God or Bloomberg for the extra money to pay the rent when the transmission goes out.  Otherwise, that $1,800 a year bonus could be lost for losing that job they haven't found quite yet.

Imagine what could be done if Bloomberg, Walton, Gates, Broad, and Hyde monies were committed to creating jobs in Memphis, rather than supporting predatory privatization plans to add even more wealth to the hedge funders who are making more money than Bloomberg and his pals can give away for their own benefit.

Movers and Shakers

Dan Katzir is leaving his position at the Broad Foundation. LAUSD Superintendent Ramon Cortines will step down from his post next year. Might deputy superintendent John Deasy, a former deputy director of education at the Gates Foundation recently hired by the district, replace him as the head ed honcho in LA?

I'll conclude my three part series tomorrow. Part 1 here and part 2 here.

Foundation $$$ + i3 = ???

From its very beginning, the i3 fund, a $650 million pot of cash set aside for competitive grants as part of the ARRA, was intended to be a public-private partnership between the Federal DOE and private philanthropy. The wording of the bill specifically states the i3 grants will only be given out to those able to secure matching funds.

Today it was announced that 12 major philanthropic donors - including the Gates Foundation and Walton Family Foundation - will put up $506 million in matching grants. It was hardly a surprise to see this formally announced; the Office of Innovation and Improvement, created under George W. Bush, was designed to operate like the various venture philanthropies.

From the AP:

Foundations offer $506M to match education grants

By DONNA GORDON BLANKINSHIP (AP) – 2 hours ago

SEATTLE — A coalition of wealthy foundations is offering more than half a billion dollars to match federal grants meant to encourage education reform, taking the pressure off schools scrambling to find the matching dollars they need to get the money.

A dozen foundations plan to announce this week that they are investing $506 million in a matching fund for the $650 million federal government grant program, called Investing in Innovation.

The foundations also set up an Internet portal schools can use to apply for matching funds from all the foundations in one step, streamlining the task of seeking money from multiple sources. Schools have until May 12 to apply for the money, which will be paid out by the end of September.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan said he was ecstatic about the foundations' interest in the innovation program and called the partnership unprecedented.

"This is how we should be working together. This is how sectors should collaborate," Duncan said. "If this goes well, think of the possibilities going forward."

...

The group of foundations includes the Annie E. Casey Foundation; Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Carnegie Corporation of New York; Charles Stewart Mott Foundation; Ford Foundation; John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; Lumina Foundation; Robertson Foundation; The Wallace Foundation; Walton Family Foundation; William & Flora Hewlett Foundation; and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

More on this soon...

"muscular philanthropy"

Muscular philanthropy--that's what Fred Hess calls the kind of Walton-Broad-Gates phalanx that has as one of its goals the charterizing (rhymes with cauterizing) of American public schools, beginning first in the urban schools where voucher efforts have been unsuccessful so far. Bill and Melinda, the darlings of the neoliberal set, are a bit queasy regarding vouchers, having the ongoing history that they do with the education establishment. See, too, "How Many Billionaires Does It Take to Fix a School System," NY Times Magazine, 3/9/08.
Now charter schools are a different matter, particularly as we have elements of the AFT and the head of the SEIU, Andy Stern, on board with Steve Barr, Eli Broad, and the Gates Foundation to craft a corporate-controlled version of public schools for the poor and working classes at a 20 percent savings to the taxpayer (and a 20% cost to teachers). Bill and Melinda's, in fact, gave $7.8 million to Green Dot Public Schools, Inc. last July. That's a nifty complement to the $20+ million already dished up by the Broad Foundation for the LAUSD charter takeover.

(Photo: Andy Stern (SEIU) looks on as Steve Barr, CEO of Green Dot Public Schools, Inc. presents Eli Broad a plaque for his $10 million given at the first annual Green Dot Ball, November 2007, Los Angeles).

Now I don't know if you would label corporate control of the public schools as social control. I guess some would call it corporate socialism or just plain fascism. For those, however, seeking more evidence of Bill's boyish, if slightly creaky, charm applied to using private billions to buy the public good, here are a few additional links here, here, here. I wish I had time to summarize them for Dr. Anonymous, but I am going the beach in few minutes.

The saddest part of all this is that the corporate media outlets offer ample opportunity for Broad and others of his ilk to pump the KIPP charter chain gangs (Bill and Melinda gave $7.9 million to KIPP in 2004) as the modern day solution to the "negro problem." Ed Week has only a slightly more nuanced approach, as Tmao Essj points out in this blog entry from last June:

The June 13 issued of Education Week published an article on student attrition at KIPP schools, particularly the two in San Francisco and one in Oakland, that didn't bury the lede as much as it pretended it didn't exist. Somewhat surprisingly, all manner of bloggers and commenters performed the same intellectual sleight-of-hand.

The article is trapped behind a subscription wall, making it unlinkable, but Ed Week correctly reports that fewer than half of the kids that begin the Bay Area KIPP schools as 5th graders in 2003 make it to 8th grade in 2006. In the Oakland incarnation, the attrition rate climbs to 75 percent. The article ignores the fact that these lost students are overwhelmingly African-American males. The three Bay Area KIPPs lost 77, 67, and 71 percent of its Young Black Males (YBMs) during this time period.

That's the story Ed Week. That's the story Eduwonk. That's the story, KIPP PR fixers.

There's more Black males on the KIPP website than in the KIPP. . . .

Admittedly, these attrition rates for KIPP in the Bay Area are not as bad (or good) as they were at the Hampton Institute in 1900 in Virginia (or the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama), when one out of five students who entered those industrial education/teacher training camps earned certificates to permit them to brainwash black children throughout the South in the "dignity of labor," but you have to admit the KIPP numbers are pretty impressive stats. The washouts, of course, have an economic function, too, providing as they do the future customers in the privately-managed prison industrial complex that the technocrats have devised to replace, yet another, civic responsibility.

You can be sure, however, that those black and brown KIPP-sters who make it through the direct instruction gauntlet are no less ready than the Hampton graduates to do, as Booker T. Washington did, the work that is offered by the overseers whose respect must be earned--repeatedly. WORK HARD, BE NICE--indeed.

Low Prices for Education the Walmart Way

In 2005, Doug Smith with the Arkansas Times had an in-depth piece on the vast sums going from the Walton family to the University of Arkansas. Smith focused on the millions that the Waltons forked over to found the Department of Education Reform within the College of Education and Health Professions. Chaired by Manhattan Institute conservative propagandist, Jay P. Greene, the department has five faculty members, each of whom occupies an endowed chair as full professor, and each of whom shares Greene's commitment to vouchers, charter schools, high-stakes tests, bonus pay for test scores--the low-prices-every-day model of school reform. You have to love it: the Endowed Chair of School Choice and the Endowed Chair of Education Accountability. Wow.

Now Jennifer Barnett Reed has picked up the story for the Arkansas Times where Doug Smith left off. In Reed's piece, we get a closer look at how the Walton millions are performing political miracles in Arkansas and elsewhere. Do read it all, but here are some choice clips:

Published 4/10/2008
For good or for ill, it's safe to say that the educational landscape in Arkansas would be drastically different today if Sam Walton hadn't been born in Bentonville.

The Waltons, individually and through their various family foundations, are by a large margin the largest donors to conservative education reform causes in the country. They've donated hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars to educational causes nationwide, including the start-up funding that allowed the national private-school voucher movement to get off the ground more than a decade ago.

But they haven't neglected their home state. The two Walton family philanthropies, the Walton Family Foundation and the Walton Charitable Support Foundation, gave at least $390 million to educational causes in Arkansas between 1998 and 2006, according to tax returns and the Walton Family Foundation's web site (2007 figures are not yet available publicly).

That doesn't count individual expenditures, such as the hundreds of thousands of dollars Jim Walton has spent to fund lobbying efforts on behalf of the conservative school reform causes originally championed by his late brother, John.

What's that much money bought? More charter schools, and a looser law to regulate them. Merit pay experiments in Little Rock. The University of Arkansas's Department of Education Reform and its nationally known chair, former Manhattan Institute scholar Jay Greene.

. . . .

Walton money also paid for half the cost of establishing the UA's Department of Education Reform and hiring Greene. The Manhattan Institute, where he was a fellow, is a conservative think-tank and a strong supporter of “reform” measures like charter schools and vouchers.

The department conducts research on education reform projects — including initiatives also funded by the Walton Family Foundation, a situation that, the researchers' claims of objectivity notwithstanding, has raised questions with some critics in the state's education community.

. . . .

n 2006, the Walton Family Foundation proposed a district-wide merit pay pilot program in Little Rock, which it would have both funded and paid to have evaluated by the Department of Education Reform. Little Rock teachers rejected the plan here; in Rogers, the school board ultimately rejected a different merit-pay proposal from the foundation that would have also included an evaluation by the education reform department.

While both those proposals were rejected, the Waltons had more success promoting merit pay at the state level.

Jim Walton is the primary funder of Arkansans for Education Reform and Arkansans for Better Schools, twin organizations whose sole employee is former State Board of Education member Luke Gordy and whose sole purpose is to lobby for causes like charter schools and merit pay at the state level.

In the 2007 legislative session, Gordy worked to get a bill passed that authorized school districts to use state tax money for merit-pay programs. The final bill was a hard-fought compromise that brought business interests together with the Arkansas Education Association to create rules that limited how the programs could work. Districts had to apply to the state Department of Education for approval; only one district and two individual schools had done so by the March 8 deadline.

. .. .

In 2007, charter schools were at the top of Gordy's agenda. He lobbied for a change in the state's charter school law to raise the number of charters allowed from 12 to 24, and to remove restrictions on how many charter schools could open in each congressional district.

One thing that's not on his agenda, Gordy said, is taxpayer-funded vouchers to send low-income students to private schools. It's been a major focus of Walton giving nationwide, but Gordy said he's had “zero” conversations with his bosses about vouchers in Arkansas, and doesn't think he will anytime soon.

“Anything's possible,” he said. “The conversation could be started, but it's going to be a long time before that gets any traction in Arkansas.”

It's hard to get a handle on just how much money the Waltons sprinkle around the legislature — campaign finance reports submitted to the Secretary of State's office aren't searchable by donor, and each legislator submits multiple reports during the course of each campaign.

One lawmaker who's benefited from Walton money, and who's been a reliable friend on their education priorities, is Steve Bryles, a Democrat from Blytheville.

Bryles got $4,000 from Walton enterprises during the 2007 campaign: $2,000 from Jim Walton, $1,000 from Arvest Bank's political action committee, and $1,000 from Wal-Mart. Bryles led the effort to loosen the charter school laws, and is supportive of other school choice issues, but said he'd feel the same with or without those donations.

“I look for allies — I don't care if they're left, right or in between,” he said. “If they can be supportive of what I've outlined to you, then I'm going to latch onto them.”

But state Sen. Jim Argue, outgoing chair of the Senate Education Committee, downplayed the Waltons' influence on education issues in the legislature — especially compared with the influence of the Supreme Court's Lake View decision on school financing.

“I don't think it was the Waltons,” he said. “We've had a tremendous six years in terms of school improvement, but it was all spawned by the court decision in 2002.”

Besides lobbying for friendlier charter school laws, the Waltons have provided crucial financial support through the Walton Family Foundation to charter schools in Arkansas. It provided about two-thirds of the initial $800,000 three-year pledge to start the Arkansas Charter School Resource Center, whose director, Caroline Proctor, helps would-be charter school administrators design their schools, put together their applications, and progress through the sometimes lengthy approval process before the state Board of Education. After the resource center opened, charter school applications jumped from one or two a year to more than a dozen.

The foundation also provides $10,000 planning grants to charter school applicants, and another $10,000 in start-up money to schools that are approved. Once they're up and running, schools can also apply for much larger grants. LISA Academy, for instance, has received more than $150,000 from the Walton Family Foundation; the Arkansas Virtual School, the Benton County School of the Arts and Haas Hall, a Farmington charter school that's faced serious financial problems, have all gotten $250,000. The foundation is also supporting the e-STEM charter schools, set to open in July in downtown Little Rock, although the amount hasn't been made public.

In all, the Walton Family Foundation gave about $1.7 million to proposed and existing charter schools between 1998 and 2006.

Proctor said the money is vital for charter schools — giving them necessary start-up funds, but not enough to operate without other outside support.

“The amount is just perfect,” she said. “No school is going to survive forever on it but it's enough to get somebody started.”

.. . .