Ref Rodriguez's school scandals unreported by LA School Report?

“Of course, the network of power and privilege that eases access to the Ivy League isn’t severed at matriculation—it supports the scions of the superrich throughout. Further emails from the Sony hack show the Lynton nepotism machine gearing up for his elder daughter, Eloise, an undergraduate at Harvard who found herself unable to get into a very popular class with Dr. Jerome Groopman, a New Yorker writer and professor of biology.” — Sam Biddle

Jamie Alter-Lynton's blog byline should read "what Deasy wants you to think is really going on in LAUSD"

Professor Diane Ravitch discussed a recent Daily News piece in her Los Angeles School Board Race: Attack Ads and Lies Aplenty. The Thomas Hines article in question rightly points out that all of Ref Rodriguez's and his California Charter Schools Association's attacks on the Honorable Bennett Kayser have been patently false, but the issues brought up about Rodriguez—like the PUC Lakeview Charter Academy Audit—are true. Of course, not every Los Angeles media outlet has covered the myriad scandals surrounding the billionaire's candidate. I addressed this issue in the following commentary.

I keep wondering when Jamie Alter-Lynton, sibling of the dubious Jonathan Alter, will have her “news” blog — LA School Report — cover either the Lakeview Audit, or the Jacqueline Duvivier Castillo (Better 4 You Meals) self-dealing scandal, or both? Alter-Lynton’s site claims that it practices “journalism in the public interest”, yet somehow misses two of the biggest Los Angeles education scandals of the year, both centering around their candidate: charter industry profiteer Ref Rodriguez.

This quote says it all: “audits… indicated charter officials [i.e. Ref Rodriguez] knew of the alleged conflict of interest” http://4lakidsnews.blogspot.com/2015/05/lausd-charter-group-gave-food-contract.html

The well heeled Rodriguez was PUC Corporation’s CEO, and then their Board Treasurer during both the Lakeview financial malfeasance and Duvivier Castillo incidents. He claims to have known absolutely nothing about either situation, the former occurring for over a decade, the latter for several years now. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, that means Rodriguez is either grossly incompetent, or criminally complicit (there are some that would posit he manages to be both). Neither of those are desirable qualities for a trustee of the nation’s second largest school district.

Maybe the LA School Report can run this piece on education and privilege?

Husband of John Deasy confidant, Jamie Alter Lynton, cashed in big on Pearson PLC's LAUSD iPad Deal

From: "Robert D. Skeels" <***@ucla.edu>
Subject: RepairsNOTiPad's alert: Husband of Deasy confidant, Jamie Alter Lynton, cashed in big on Pearson PLC
Date: April 19, 2015 at 06:43:29 AM PDT
To: [REDACTED]
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="Apple-Mail=_625E9864-12A5-4A2B-B53F-3F0A02FCDFF1"
X-Smtp-Server: smtp.gmail.com:***@g.ucla.edu
X-Universally-Unique-Identifier: D167F5C1-F6D5-42CE-BA06-EDE4999BD90B
Message-Id:
Mime-Version: 1.0 (Mac OS X Mail 7.3 \(1878.6\))

Colleagues:

I was alerted to the WikiLeaks of Sony emails early yesterday. I had a seven hour mock of the State Bar of California FYLSX exam yesterday, and have a lot of studying to do today, so I don't have much time. That said, the leaks are devastating in that they prove unequivocally that the billionaires, ideologues, charter executives, and their school board candidates all work together for their common cause of eliminating public education (and profiting thereof).

We're frequently told that we dabble in guilt by association, but then you see items like this leaked:

https://wikileaks.org/sony/emails/emailid/117253

and it confirms that we have been correct all along in our assertion that this is a well coordinated project by the ruling class (or 1% if you prefer), and their hangers on.

This email is of great import: https://wikileaks.org/sony/emails/emailid/133248

establishing Jamie Alter Lynton's husband Michael Lynton, Sony CEO, cashed in big on the major corporate player in the disgraced John Deasy's iPad scandal, Pearson PLC.

I am putting out both a call for help, and an assertion that we all need to writing about this. Both charter profiteer Ref Rodriguez, and longtime neoliberal corporate education reformer Tamar Galatzan have insurmountable funding advantages in this upcoming election, and it is the individuals discussed in this email that are bankrolling them. Here's what I need help with, and following that, is a few items that will help others with research and writing their own articles.

NEED

• Someone to go through all of Rodriguez and Galatzan's current 460 Forms looking for contributions by Jamie Alter Lynton and Michael Lynton.
• Doing the same for the various Independent Expenditures for this election.
• A time table of Deasy's iPad fiasco, including the attacks on Stuart Magruder, and when Annie Gilbertson wrote her brilliant articles about Deasy's inappropriate relations with Pearson and Apple executives.
• If the Lyntons are trying to sell off $38,099.31 of Pearson PLC  shares in March 2014, is that tantamount to insider trading, given their relationship with Deasy?
• Someone to go through all of Rodriguez and Galatzan's current 460 Forms looking for contributions by anyone on this list https://wikileaks.org/sony/emails/emailid/117253.
• Figures of how much LAUSD bond money was squandered in the Pearson deal.
• Statement from https://www.facebook.com/pages/Repairs-Not-IPads/228827333958584 Repairs not iPads representatives on their thoughts on these latest developments.

PROVIDING

Here's some helpful information for other people's articles and research.

Jamie Alter Lynton has supported the Coalition for School Reform (CSR) and its candidates—including Galatzan—in the past with obscene sums like $100,000.

• http://www.commondreams.org/views/2013/03/03/why-are-walmart-billionaires-bankrolling-phony-school-reform-la
• http://articles.latimes.com/2013/apr/14/local/la-me-adv-lausd-money-20130415/2

CSR was an anti-public education SuperPAC started in conjunction with right-wing extremists Philip Anschutz, Jerry Perenchio, Eli Broad, and Frank Baxter. These plutocrats are now funding California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) and its associated SuperPAC directly. For more on CSR.

• http://www.kcet.org/shows/socal_connected/undertheinfluence/education/the-reformers-with-deep-pockets.html

Here's some background on Jamie Alter Lynton from K-12 News Network's The Wire August 11, 2014:

The second issue is that the link in Johnson’s tweet is to the notorious Deasy School Report*, an anti-public education blog created by Jamie Alter-Lynton, a wealthy reactionary who sits as a board member on Superintendent John Deasy’s LA Fund slush 501c3. Alter-Lynton, sibling of corrupt charter cheerleader Jonathan Alter, practices Breitbart style “journalism” — feeling that outlets like the LA Times and LA Daily News weren’t planted in the the neoliberal corporate reform camp firmly enough. Her Ayn Rand leaning views on the public sector are second to her almost maniacal hatred of working class schoolteachers. One can really gauge Alter-Lynton by her letting go of both Alexander Russo and Hillel Aron. Neither of those writers would ever be accused of supporting public schools or saying anything positive about teachers, but they weren’t willing to pursue the white whale with Alter-Lynton’s Ahab-like vengeance.

The distinguished Dr. George McKenna owes nothing to Alex Johnson, the Deasy School Report, or Jamie Alter-Lynton. He is right not to respond to her constant badgering and attention seeking. The best thing we could all do is allow Alter-Lynton’s me-too-reformer blog die a deserved death of obscurity by not visiting or linking to it.

* Properly “LA School Report,” but most activists don’t call it by that very misleading name.

Eating the Golden Goose, or Corporate Consumption of Higher Ed

If the plutocrats at the corporate foundations can impose their loser strategies on higher education as they have on K12, the demise of the greatest university system in the world will then be assured.  Published at Alternet today.

EPSLP: College Ready? Alliance Charter Corporation's big scam

First published on Echo Park Patch on September 20, 2013

---

"If the American public understood that reformers want to privatize their public schools and divert their taxes to pay profits to investors, it would be hard to sell the corporate idea of reform." — Professor Diane Ravitch

"However, within this market, competition exists in several forms" — (Alliance CRPS Corporation's Business Plan, 2010 p.9)

Over a decade ago Republican venture capitalist Richard "Dick" Riordan joined forces with other profit-hungry businessmen and foundations funding several quasi-education outfits. The melding of two nonprofit industrial complex groups allowed Riordan and his cabal to blend two of their favorite things — lucrative real estate deals and school privatization. Hiring a widely despised Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) administrator named Judy Burton, who was known for instituting the Open Court (McGraw Hill) police and strict use pacing plans, the charter corporation known Alliance for College-Ready Public [sic] Schools was born. Unlike many charter corporations Alliance doesn't try to hide their penchant for big ticket real estate deals, and publishes business plans with the words "business plan" in their actual title. Rather than deny the damning exposure of financial motives revealed in the recent Forbes article entitled Charter School Gravy Train Runs Express To Fat City, the Alliance folks embrace the fact that they're in it for the money.

Wanting to muscle in on Echo Parque

Already occupying part of the Belmont High School campus, Alliance now wants to to build their own campus on a lot that will cause major disruptions to parking and safety in the community. Taking advantage of the loopholes in SB740, Alliance Charter Corporation will stick the public with the bill for everything in the end. They will then extract a premium rent from the site to their LLC, while using little of the money allotted to them from the state to actually educate students. More importantly, they will be sapping resources from our already underfunded and resource starved public schools.

That last point is very important. Depending on how one counts there are already between 7 to 9 High Schools in our attendance area. Most of them are public schools, and there are a few privately managed charter schools as well. All of these schools are under-enrolled, a problem that will be further exacerbated if the Alliance Charter Corporation is allowed to add yet another campus to their burgeoning real estate portfolio. Diverting much needed resources from our public schools so that Alliance can further expand their coffers is something our community should be opposing strongly. Moreover, there's still some perplexing legal questions about who the property belongs to if and when the charter decides to stop operating. Purchasing prime 90026 real estate at the public's expense, but not offering the title to a public entity should be an issue of grave concern.

The truth about Alliance Charter Corporation

With access to a bevy of professional marketing and public relations experts, Alliance has been able to build an unearned reputation of being "high performing," and preparing all their students for college. Like all Miracle Schools, this reputation is pure fiction and propaganda. Using selective data criteria, Alliance and their allies in the corporate media make claims that their schools are in the top of the country. Scratch below the veneer, and a very different story is evident.

What's in a name? Alliance for College-Ready Public [sic] Schools name alone bears scrutiny. First off, like all charters the word public doesn't belong in their name. It's well established by the 9th Circuit US Court of Appeals, The California Court of Appeals, The US Census Department, and The National Labor Relations Board that charter schools are private entities (eg. not public agencies). Now that that's out of the way, let's examine the College-Ready part. Despite claiming that their schools produce top college prospects, Alliance College "Ready" Schools boast 6 of the 80 lowest SAT performers in Los Angeles County, and 5 of the 75 lowest in LAUSD. (Source: "California Schools Guide." Lowest Average SAT Scores in Los Angeles County. Los Angeles Times, 01 Jan. 2013. Web. 19 Sept. 2013.).

Alliance's dismal SAT scores are in line with their astronomical remediation rates of the students they place into colleges and universities. Remediation means that students have to take remedial classes in order to become proficient enough to take 101 level college coursework. In other words, they need to take their high school classes over again. Since Alliance's Belmont colocation is too new to have statistics, let's look at their nearby Gertz-Ressler campus' figures for the past five years. The California State University (CSU) makes remediation data available for all schools sending them students.

• 2008 CSU Alliance proficiency 7% in math and 13% in English.
• 2009 CSU Alliance proficiency 29% in math and 29% in English.
• 2010 CSU Alliance proficiency 29% in math and 17% in English.
• 2011 CSU Alliance proficiency 50% in math and 33% in English.
• 2012 CSU Alliance proficiency 57% in math and 50% in English.

Their other campuses sport the same astonishingly high remediation rates. These figures put to lie their claim that they are "ensuring that less than 15% of students need remedial English or Math in college." To Alliance's credit their Gertz-Ressler is no longer in single digit proficiency, but even their best year still only sees half of their students ready to take college level courses.

Many education experts point out that when charter schools have "miracle" API numbers, but awful SAT scores and terrible college entrance exam scores like Alliance does, that it means they are most likely teaching to the test to boost their APIs. At the end of the day, Alliance's claims to college-readiness are smoke and mirrors. They do these students at diservice getting them matriculated in schools without being prepared. Many students are discouraged by having to take remedial courses, and frequently don't complete their degrees.

Not educating every child

The Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates wrote in their watershed Charter Schools and Students With Disabilities Final report: "It is not legally or morally acceptable that these so-called 'schools of choice' that are concentrated in urban communities and supported with public funds, should be permitted to operate as segregated learning environments where students are more isolated by race, socioeconomic class, disability, and language than the public school district from which they were drawn." (p. 41). LAUSD's Office of Independent Monitor has consistently shown that students with disabilities (SWD) are disproportionately under-enrolled at charter schools.

When the Greater Echo Park Elysian Neighborhood Council's (GEPENC) executive committee questioned Alliance Charter Corporation on their percentage of students with special needs enrolled, they made the outrageous claim that they serve 15%. The 2009 OIM data tables (page 2) not only discredits this, but demonstrate that the SWD they do enroll are high functioning, not needing highly specialized Individual Education Plans (IEP). We are waiting to obtain more current figures from LAUSD, but experience has shown that charter corporations have not improved their special needs enrollments. What this means in practice is that while the neighboring public schools are obligated to educate every child (as all schools should be), charters like Alliance aren't. This creates a disparity in funding since the public schools are using more of their funds to implement things like special day classes, while the charters get the same amount of money per student without the associated costs.

Under-enrolling SWD, English Language Learners (ELL), and children with disciplinary issues is the hallmark of privately managed charters. Allowing Alliance to open in Echo Parque will further drain the local public school resources and further disadvantage the students enrolled there that Alliance would never accept.

Time for GEPENC to represent Echo Parque

In a calculated public relations move, Alliance Charter Corporation is asking GEPENC to approve their project to create yet another school in an area over-saturated with under-enrolled high schools. While GEPENC's role in the overall process is merely advisory, telling Alliance our community doesn't approve of them and their project would go a long way toward protecting the interests of our community and our students. The shady nature of Alliance's real estate dealings, their dismal SAT scores and CSU remediation rates, and their refusal to educate every child are all compelling reasons for our Neighborhood Council to say no. For me that last point is the most important. Allowing these private entities to cherry pick students and avoid educating the most vulnerable and needy students is immoral. Taking a strong stand as a community against that kind of discrimination sends a strong message to these corporate schools that we demand equity for all our students.

Open letter to David Welch, Eli Broad, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, and their Students Matter Astroturf

"And not merely pride of intellect, but dulness of intellect. And most of all, the deceitfulness; yes, the deceitfulness of intellect" — Leo Tolstoy

To David Welch, Eli Broad, Theodore J. Boutrous, Theane Evangelis Kapur, Theodore B. Olson, Enrique A. Monagas, and Joshua S. Lipshutz:

Your Students Matter website explicitly states "When it comes to education quality, numerous studies show that teachers have the greatest impact on student achievement."

Can you please produce even one peer reviewed study from a legitimate source that backs up that assertion?

As a person closely associated with top academicians in the field of education research and policy, I am not aware of any study that makes such a brazen and strident claim.

Indeed, even Eric A. Hanushek, an economist who shares your unfortunate politics and world view, has found that teachers account for no more than 13% of student achievement. A far cry from the declaration on your website, which, in the absence of any factual basis, is mendacious at best.

Since you're billionaires, businessmen, and attorneys it's safe to assume your knowledge on issues of pedagogy and education policy is negligible. With that in mind, I'll do you a favor and clarify your grossly erroneous statement, albeit even the correction is lacking nuance and context. What some initial studies have shown is that teachers are the largest of in-school factors impacting student achievement. I refer you to the aforementioned Hanushek findings to put that into some context.

I understand that neither your law firm, nor the astroturf public relations 501(c)(3) you created to disseminate misinformation, are interested in facts. That said, I felt a moral obligation to let you know that many community members are not fooled by your propaganda.

I taught bilingual catechism, primarily at St. Teresa of Avila Church, for a dozen or so years. One of the things we had to teach young children about was the definition of a lie. This idea was simple enough for 7-9 year olds to comprehend: "when you say something that you know is untrue, it's a lie." Sadly that concept is seemingly too complex for high powered litigators like yourselves to grasp.

Advocating public education and social justice

Robert D. Skeels

Candidate for District 2, Los Angeles Unified School District

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joanne Barkan on How Billionaires Rule Our Schools

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.

Aaron Krager begins Petitioning Progressive Sites to Stop Promoting Michelle Rhee

After I signed the petition, other petitions popped up for me to consider as a member of Change.Org.  One of them was from nation's leading teacher foe, the venomous Michelle Rhee, under the name of her corporate reform schooler astroturf group called Students First. — Dr. James Horn


Schools Matter was the first place I read about the vile and venomous Michelle Rhee and her plutocratic backers scamboozling unsuspecting activists into unwittingly signing petitions supporting reactionary causes dear to the furthest right-wing think-thanks in existence.

Rhee is a favorite among teabaggers and other disciples of Ayn Rand. Rhee collaborates with, and has even worked on the transition teams of the most reactionary right-wing Governors from Florida, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio. All of the ideas Rhee champions have come straight out of the most vile right wing think tanks including Hoover Institution, Hudson Institute, The Cato Institute, The American Enterprise Institute, The Heritage Foundation, The Heartland Institute, Manhattan Institute, and other John Birch Society derivatives.

I'd be curious as to why anyone outside of the deplorable reactionaries mentioned above would support Rhee in any fashion. After all, supporting her is tantamount to supporting the fringe right, whose end goal is not only the destruction of the public commons, but the privatization of our entire education system. So I found the idea that tricking people leaning left of center a little more than nefarious.

Yesterday I received an email from a person who decided to set up petitions on those very same sites, petitioning them to stop supporting Rhee and her astroturf union busting organization. I reproduce it here with the author's permission. Please follow the last two links in his email to sign the petitions against Rhee's deceptive tactics.

Hi,

As an avid user of petition sites such as Change.org and Care2.com I was shocked to see Michelle Rhee's Students First organization utilizing this platform. These sites promote progressive values and push for progressive change. Rhee's organization is anything but progressive. Students First advocates against collective bargaining, teacher unions and contrary to its name, does not put students first. 

I unknowingly signed a petition on Change.org's site from Students First... as a result of this deception I am asking both Change.org and Care2.com to stop promoting Rhee's pro-corporate agenda. Below are the links to my post announcing the actions as well as the links to the petitions themselves.

• Hold Progressive Change Agents Accountable
• Stop tricking progressives into signing Michelle Rhee’s union busting petitions (care2.com petition)
• Stop tricking progressives into signing Michelle Rhee’s union busting petitions (moveon.org petition)

Feel free to contact me at this email if you have any questions.

--
Peace
Aaron Krager

Comments on Lefty Parent's August 12 Diane Ravitch Post

Lefty Parent:

Thank you for your excellent essay Thoughts on Diane Ravitch's Critique of U.S. Education System.

I've been intending to write a piece on how gender bias, sexism, and rank misogyny are contributing underlying reasons for purveyors of neoliberalism to have attacked K-12 first (without question profit is their overarching reason). I'll be quoting your cogent essay at length when I do. Divide and conquer is colonialism 101, and not only have the corporate charlatans like Parent Revolution's lawbreaking and trigger-happy Ben Austin found a way to pit parents against educators, their cynical backers realized all along that "this is a predominantly female workforce" would resonate with teabaggers and other reactionaries that hate working women almost as much as they hate organized labor, people of color, and immigrants. Obviously segregating children of color into obedience camps like KIPP, where they undergo what Dr. Jim Horn refers to as "cultural sterilization," also appeals to the wealthy white males driving corporate "edreform," as it does to those they've tricked into thinking they have the same interests.

However, I find your stance on charters somewhat lacking nuance and I think we need to find another mechanism than charters to move in a direction of democratizing schools. With the understanding that not every charter experience is like that of Los Angeles, where the most vile and greedy 501C3s have succeeded at commoditizing children to the tune of millions, the potential for corporate market forces to co-opt and dominate charters too great. The endless list of scandals, the predominant profit motive, the lack of democratic control, and the capricious way they can be closed, begs a different path entirely. We need a better way to have schools with more community oversight and parental decision making, while removing any mechanisms for corporate control (non-profit or otherwise). We know the names behind the so-called charter "movement" and they certainly aren't people interested in democracy, community, or a populace with critical thinking skills.

"In the long run, charter schools are being strategically used to pave the way for vouchers. The voucher advocates, who are very powerful and funded by right-wing foundations and families, recognize that the word voucher has been successfully discredited by enlightened Americans who believe in the public sector. So they've resorted to two strategies. First, they no longer use the word "vouchers." They've adopted the seemingly benign phrase "school choice," but they are still voucher advocates." — Jonathan Kozol

As social justice advocates we need alternatives to counterpose to the charter-voucher "movement," as it is corrupted through and through by plutocrats like the Broad/Gates/Walton Triumvirate. In Los Angeles we made a call and published guiding principles for running schools differently several years ago called Community School Choice: An Alternative Way for LAUSD. What would we call schools that teach critical pedagogy and have much more community control? I don't know, but the word traditionally associated with the public contracting with private entities certainly doesn't hold much hope for me. Beyond a new word, we need a new paradigm, as charters have become a haven for finance capitalism and corporate charlatans.

Los Angeles privatization pushers take second biggest slice of reactionary Walton pie

"[T]here should be no education marketplace." — Dr. Diane Ravitch (celebrated education professor and author)


The indefatigable Valerie Strauss posted an excellent piece yesterday discussing where and how funds from the arch-reactionaries of the Walton Family Foundation were divvied out to various entities engaged in the privatization of public education. Second in funding only to the voucher dystopia and Michelle Rhee wasteland of Washington D.C. is Los Angeles, which saw the Ayn Rand worshiping Walton fortune heirs dump $11,981,508 into any organization proffering poverty pimping.

Time doesn't permit covering all of Los Angeles based privatization outfits on the list, but a cursory glance at some of our more notorious and egregious local offenders was worth compiling.

Camino Nuevo Charter Academy

It's no small irony that Los Angeles based corporate charter chain Camino Nuevo Charter Academy (CNCA), which claims that it wants its students to become "agents of social justice with sensitivity toward the world around them" is on this list. Camino Nuevo Elementary School #3 got $250,000 from the right wing extremists at the Walton Family Foundation who also fund anti-gay, anti-female, anti-union, and a host of other reactionary causes and organizations. Seems to me that you can't teach the principles of social justice if you're taking money from organizations whose entire purpose is to perpetuate and exacerbate injustice. Perhaps that's why CNCA doesn't mention the Walton Family Foundation on their donors page, they don't like being exposed for the charlatans that they are. Like all corporate charters, CNCA is slick in that they ape the language of social justice, while conveniently pouring money into their executives' pockets. Just one look at the composition of their board should remind people who CNCA really serves.

Sure enough, in practice CNCA's principles and actions reflect that of their funders. Remember this tidbit from the Broad Residency FAQ:

[P]rivate sector experience is important because there are business best practices which can improve the way the education organizations are operated.

I'm always wondering which of the three core business practices (lying, cheating, and stealing) Broadytes [1] are referring to. Well in this case it's lying. Camino Nuevo has been claiming that their newly selected principal chosen to run what was formerly a public school site recently handed over to CNCA was nothing less than a Professor at LMU's School of Education. Turns out he was nothing of the sort, but playing fast and loose with the truth is a hallmark of corporate charter chains.

Parent Revolution (née Los Angeles Parents Union)

Also prominent on the list is The Heartland Institute's sister organization, Parent Revolution (née Los Angeles Parents Union). The foppish millionaire from Benedict Canyon, Ben Austin, and his market minions stacked a cool half a million dollars in Wal-Mart blood money. Much of this was probably used for promoting Austin, Schwarzenegger, and Romero's corporate charter hostile takeover enabling law, the so-called Parent Empowerment Act. Many people know the law by the moniker Austin coined — the Parent Trigger — a vile name as I've discussed before:

[S]ince the wealthy Ben Austin, who lives in an affluent area that is "87.5% white and the median household income is $169,282," is blissfully unaware of how culturally loaded, and frankly racist, the word trigger is to use in conjunction with low income areas like Compton. Most importantly, [Caroline] Grannan, who is one of several experts on Parent Revolution, points out the organization is "not a parent group but was founded by charter school operators, backed financially by billionaires and corporate interests."

Parent Revolution are certainly no strangers to the kind of values and society the Arkansas Robber Barons envision, being experts in stoking "the subtle, insidious racism that fuels the charter/voucher movement."

I was puzzled recently seeing a gushing article discussing a seemingly self colonized former Teach For America and current Parent Revolution employee Christina Sánchez who described herself as an Ivy League Revolutionary. Apparently Ivy League graduates consider it "revolutionary" to take funds from the Broad/Gates/Walton Triumvirate to carry out a reactionary agenda of privatization. I suppose hosting forums with The Heartland Institute, quoting The Hoover Institutions' Andy Smarick, and pandering the wealthy westside racism are all part of the revolutionary's toolkit — if you're a teabagger.

The Parent [Counter]Revolutionaries recently attacked the distinguished Dr. Diane Ravitch, citing an another amateurish article by Matthew Yglesias — their third favorite writer after Ben Boychuck, and Andy Smarick. It's amazing what you can do with Walton Family Foundation money!

Green Dot Public [sic] Schools

The list clearly states: Green Dot Public Schools $500,000. This is remarkable, since Green Dot's well heeled CEO Marco Petruzzi stood in front of an auditorium full of students, parents, teachers, and other members of the Ánimo Justice community, a school he just closed by fiat, and said:

"We have no money. We're a non-profit. We don't have a rich guy that even [sic] gives us extra."

Seems that there is some cognitive dissonance to work out here. Since Petruzzi's salary eats up almost half of the that half a million, perhaps he really can't tell that the Walton fortune heirs are "rich guys" (and a gal) that give Green Dot money all the time, and they're not the only ones. This reliance on plutocrat funders certainly goes a long way towards explaining why the original Alain Leroy Locke Charter High School petition contained language requiring students "demonstrate a belief in the value of capitalism."

California Charter Schools Association (CCSA)

$3,940,652 of the Walton money went to the notorious California Charter Schools Association (CCSA), which was founded by right wing bigot and nativist Steve Poizner. It is currently led by serial liar Jed Wallace.

An activist from the grassroots organization Echo Park Moms for Education recently asked me for a brief description of the CCSA, so let me reproduce part of the email here:

CCSA is a trade association for charter-voucher schools, essentially a Chamber of Commerce for charters. Their primary purpose is to grow charter school market share.

CCSA is funded by both the membership dues their member schools pay, and the same plutocrat foundations that fund school privatization in general. For example The Walton Family Foundation, Broad Foundation, Gates Foundation, and others.

In addition to marketing and growing market share, the CCSA sells "products" and "services" to their constituent charter members. Insurance, consulting, loans, and the like. Even though they are all supposedly "non-profits" they sure sound like regular businesses at this point no? Of course all the businesses they deal with to provide services are for profit enterprises, so you can kind of figure out what's really going on there, given that they have a steady steam of taxpayer money pouring in. Consider this charter executive's scheme to make money, and you'll see what I mean.

Their motives are to continue to privatize as many schools as possible. Not only because the end goal of the people and foundations that fund them is to privatize (and profitize) the entire system, but because Charter Management Organizations have to continually grow market share in order to keep up with the costs associated with running schools while paying astronomical salaries to their executive staff.

Public education represents an annual 500 billion expenditure. Corporate vultures don't miss those kind of things. The celebrated author Jonathan Kozol discussed this: "The education industry represents, in our opinion, the final frontier of a number of sectors once under public control... represents the largest market opportunity... the K-12 market is the Big Enchilada." — Montgomery Securities prospectus quoted in Jonathan Kozol's "The Big Enchilada."

CCSA is the neutron star that Mayor Villaraigosa and the Coalition for School Reform funded Los Angeles Unified School District Board members orbit.

Special Mention for ICEF

Two ICEF schools are on the list for a quarter million each. ICEF, which was going to be swallowed up by a competitor, but the corporate merger fell through, has seen millions of plutocrat funds thrown at it in an attempt to save it. Moreover, neoliberal darling Caprice Young was brought in and now charter crook Parker Hudnut, a long time Broad/Gates plant in LAUSD, is going to be given a chance to navigate the sinking ship to the ocean floor. Given that millions of taxpayer dollars have vanished in addition to millions of dollars from the ideologically charged plutocrats willing to float ICEF at any price, two things come to mind:

First, with all that money missing with no explanation and former ICEF chief Mike Piscal having fled the state to a cushy charter post in Nevada, why aren't more people asking "where's the money Mike?"

Second, isn't it funny how the corporate lackeys in the reactionary Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) crowd who constantly parrot their Cato, AEI, Hoover, and Fordham mentors in saying you cannot save public education by throwing money at it, suddenly change their tune as soon as one of their privatized charter voucher schools are in trouble? If it's run by a private corporation, they're happy to throw money at it, and lots of it! Coincidence?

Mitigating Damage

In the end the damage done by years of privatization funding of this magnitude will be difficult if not impossible to ameliorate. While providing information about these nefarious foundations and their motives is helpful, it doesn't replace the dire need for grassroots organization and struggle on the ground. Los Angeles, like every other city that's targeted by the plutocrats that want to end public education, must begin to create community and parent organizations big enough to demand that the school districts remove every administrator (starting with Superintendent John Deasy) that's been planted by billionaires engaging in right wing social engineering. It means activists being able to explain to entire communities who funds astoturf groups like Parent Revolution and what their real goals are. It means community, parents, students, and teachers forming meaningful coalitions to take direct action against standardized testing and begin implementing worthwhile curriculum like project based learning, bilingual and ethic studies programs, and problem posing pedagogy. Those things would represent a true turning away from the status quo.

We have a lot of work cut out for us, but many people are beginning to see through the corporate smoke screens and the slick DFER opportunism. If you believe in public education and social justice, now is the time to fight. You can start by supporting the Save Our Schools March & National Call to Action. ¡El pueblo unido, jamas sera vencido!

_____
NOTES
[1] I know most people are inclined to call the graduates of the Broad Residency in Urban Education and Broad Superintendents Academy Broadies. However I prefer to call them Broadytes, since it sounds appropriately like troglodytes. Broad's vile institutions are essentially a School of the Americas for poverty pimps and privatization pushers.

NCTQ's LAUSD report's highly questionable veracity shows Bill Gates' pervasiveness and perniciousness

Reformers appeal to the urgency of confronting "failing schools," but the logic of their argument leads inevitably to students' dependence upon parents who know how to maneuver within the system to gain private advantage. This is an abandonment of the goal of a comprehensive public sector that provides equitable, universal opportunities. Such consequences are anathema to progressives when free-market ideas are applied to health care; there is no reason they should be welcome when applied to the education of the nation's children. — Kevin G. Welner (professor of education and director of the National Education Policy Center)

Early this week the Los Angeles press was awash with news trumpeting the findings of a report from an organization called the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ). The report, entitled Teacher Quality Roadmap Improving Policies and Practices in LAUSD was heralded by the corporate education reform junta as a definitive report that contained all of the answers to Los Angeles Unified School District's (LAUSD) problems. Among the biggest cheerleaders of the report was the privatization minded Mayor Villaraigosa who said of the NCTQ "I look forward to turning their research into reality..." Other agents of the corporatization of public schools weighed in as well. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation employee and LAUSD board member Yolie Flores called the paper a "a powerful road map." LAUSD Superintendent John Deasy, a former Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation employee and Broad Residency in Urban Education graduate, praised the report. One would think that amidst all of the press coverage and glowing endorsements that there would be more discussion on the background of the paper itself, the organization that created it, the organizations that ostensibly commissioned it, and ultimately who funded it and to what aim. That's what this essay intends to do.

What the report is

First, let's look at what it isn't. This is not a peer reviewed or refereed report from a university or even an unbiased source. The fact that it isn't peer reviewed is very important in that it means that no experts have been able to look at the data, assertions, and conclusions contained in the paper. How do we know it's not peer reviewed? I contacted NCTQ directly to verify. Their District Policy Director, Emily Cohen, responded to my inquiry by stating "No. It is a policy analysis." In fact, it isn't even a preliminary report, which are often published by other right wing think tanks and funding biased academics to generate media buzz, but will never be scrutinized by academics and others. The Walton Family Foundation often employs this latter technique, as seen with a recent preliminary report extolling the virtues of some other profitable corporate school reform. No, a policy analysis has all the academic authority of someone's strong opinion. In other words there are no academic credentials or even of shred of credibility behind NCTQ's findings.

Even the NCTQ press release reveals how biased and dishonest the report is. One the leading bullet points:

Only 52 percent of students graduate high-school on time; In contrast, 70 percent of students statewide graduate

Yes, let's use the phrase "on time" in order to create an intentionally woeful unbalanced comparison of percentages. As of 2009 LAUSD's graduation rate is 72.4 percent, which compares favorably to the statewide figure NCTQ and United Way's Elise Buik cite. Since they don't say how many of the 70 percent of students statewide are graduating on time, the obvious effect is duplicity and rhetorical trickery. Real investigative reporters should have picked that up right away and turned on a modicum of skepticism.

The organization that created the report

NCTQ is a right of center think tank immersed in neoliberal policy promotion. While not as reactionary or as far to the right as say The Heritage Foundation, The Cato Institute, or the Manhattan Institute, they are nevertheless ideologically charged and strongly biased. NCTQ releasing an unreviewed paper like the one on LAUSD has all the legitimacy of a policy analysis recommending the repeal of all civil rights legislation by The John Birch Society.

Dr. Kevin G. Welner of University of Colorado at Boulder School of Education recently published an important paper entitled Free-Market Think Tanks and the Marketing of Education Policy, warning of the dangers of organizations like NCTQ being able to publish non-peer reviewed papers. This quote speaks directly to so-called "reports" like Teacher Quality Roadmap Improving Policies and Practices in LAUSD:

Think tank reports have become widely influential for policymakers and the media. Their influence is due not to the superiority of their research but rather to the think tanks' proficiency at packaging and marketing their publications—many of which are of very weak quality. We have found that these advocacy reports have often attained greater prominence than the most rigorously reviewed articles addressing the same issues published in the most respected research journals. This should be a matter of concern. If all documents labeled "research" are indiscriminately received and reported as of equal worth, without review or critique by independent experts, their value is obviously not dependent on quality or rigor. These attributes are beside the point. Value is instead tightly linked to the ability of the researchers to gain attention and influence policy. Private think tanks, which produce their own in-house, non-refereed research, accordingly become sensible investments for individuals and groups hoping to advance their agendas.

The fact that none of the mainstream media are calling out the NCTQ's report as being non-peer reviewed speaks volumes to the point of the above Welner quote. It doesn't matter if the research is illegitimate. If it supports preconceived notions, the current dominant narrative, and political aims, then treat it as if it's true. The Los Angeles Times and the Daily News are quoting and discussing the report as if it was actual legitimate research. Now that's newsworthy.

NCTQ of course, is funded by the usual suspects. Prominent corporate education reform pushers the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Edythe and Eli Broad Foundation are front and center, as are fringe right benefactors like the Searle Freedom Trust. NCTQ's Board of Directors and staff are pretty scary, but the real eye opener is their Advisory Board chock full of reactionaries, profiteers, neoliberal darlings, and corporate education reform luminaries. Just a few names should suffice: fringe right American Enterprise Institute's Rick Hess, billionaire Bloomberg's former hatchet man and New York City pariah Joel Klein, discredited and disgraced leader of the District of Columbia's "erasuregate" scandal Michelle Rhee, reactionary The Hoover Institution's Eric Hanushek, and so many more. Although there are one or two nominally liberal organizations thrown in for good measure, these advisors are by and large right wing think tanks, companies and individuals that make money off of education, anti-union advocacy groups, and a few foundation representatives like Stefanie Sanford of the, you guessed it, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

So now we know what the report is — a non-peer reviewed report, written by an highly biased organization funded by ideologically charged plutocrats that attempts to support a priori ideas already held by free market worshipping corporate education reform proponents. We also know about the organization that created it. The legitimacy and authority of the report and NCTQ should at this point be universally questioned with the highest degree of skepticism.

The organizations that ostensibly commissioned the report

NCTQ states that the United Way of Greater Los Angeles and "civil rights" groups commissioned the report. They also mention near the very end of the press release that "Funding for this study was provided by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation." Now let's bear in mind that Gates' funding of phony grassroots activity is so widespread and blatant, that even the school privatization friendly The New York Times recently published a piece entitled Behind Grass-Roots School Advocacy, Bill Gates. In this case, we will invariably see that nearly every group involved with this NCTQ "report" is also funded by Gates.

Far from the benign charity that many of us used to consider the United Way, United Way of Greater Los Angeles is a reactionary agent of the corporate agenda. They are essentially a front group for the political positions of their largest plutocrat funders. There was a time where they avoided outright public advocacy of right wing ideas, but these days they openly lobby. Recently they were at the LAUSD board meeting advocating to disenfranchise parents by taking away the modicum of input they had in an already antidemocratic measure entitled Public School Choice (PSC). PSC was the brainchild of Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation employee Yolie Flores, a woman who used her tenure on the LAUSD board to enact wholesale privatization and further enrich her wealthy connections in the lucrative charter-voucher school sector. The advisory vote was the only part of the process in which communities, parents, and other stake-holders had a voice. Although the votes weren't binding, since all those concerned were voting against the corporate charters in droves, the privatization minded LAUSD board members needed to eliminate what was becoming a public relations nightmare every time they gave away public schools to private charter corporations. They created a motion to eschew the advisory votes.

On May 24, 2011 many parents and community members pleaded with the LAUSD board members to retain the advisory vote. The one entity that argued that we should lose our fundamental right to self determination? United Way of Greater Los Angeles. The move was so reactionary and overtly in service of their corporate benefactors, that Professor Ralph E. Shaffer wrote a scathing Op-Ed entitled United Way's school stance is mistake where he rightfully lambastes them and asks the cogent question:

By what logic does United Way engage in an activity that is shunned by all the other charities?

Of course, we know what logic. They're funded by the same folks that funded the NCTQ "report" and the NCTQ itself. It will take some hours pouring through 990 forms to figure out all of the United Way's income sources, but it's clear that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Edythe and Eli Broad Foundation are the impetus behind all of this. To say Bill Gates and his foundation has unprecedented sway over the United Way is to really understate the situation. The Gates family gives so much money to the United Way's Tocqueville Society, that they were awarded the 2007 United Way Tocqueville Society Award. The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation are no slouches, they are listed as members of the "Million Dollar Roundtable" of the Tocqueville Society.

United Way of Greater Los Angeles, their shameless president Elise Buik, and her staff have become in effect, unapologetic proxy spokespersons for the Gates/Broad agenda in Los Angeles. It's no wonder that they'd be championing a non-refereed policy report from a right wing think tank to further that agenda. Rather than "creating pathways out of poverty" United Way of Greater Los Angeles is creating pathways to privatization. Poverty pimps on the highest level.

United Way also boasts of their membership in the L.A. Compact along with the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce and Mayor Villaraigosa. Among L.A. Compact's near term "big focus?" From their website:

We will be working together to jointly advocate for state and federal funding, including federal i3 and Race to the Top funds. We will be very involved in supporting and assisting the "School Choice" resolution, providing help through LASDI to help groups submitting plans to operate new schools.

The L.A. Compact works to privatize public schools in order to vie for Secretary of Education Duncan's blackmail funds, and supports a Gates Foundation employee's LAUSD resolution that gives public schools away to private institutions.

The other supposed "civil rights" groups associated with the United Way are also of interest. In fact, some of them have a well established reputation in Los Angeles of being anything but supporters of civil rights. The claim was so specious that I contacted the NCTQ again with the following question: "NCTQ's introductionary overview page for the report lists Families in Schools, and Alliance for a Better Community, and Parent Organization Network as civil rights groups. Was that how the groups described themselves to NCTQ, or was that moniker attributed to them by NCTQ?" Their District Policy Director, Emily Cohen, wrote back:

That was how the groups and our partner organization, the United Way, asked to be described. 

I wonder if I wrote NCTQ and asked to be described as the foremost education writer in the world, if they'd do that too? Let's take a brief look at these Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funded groups claiming the mantle of civil rights. I've had many opportunities to write about Families in Schools (FIS), here's a quote from a recent article of mine:

Families in Schools (FIS) is a far right-wing school privatization advocacy group with deep ties to and ample funding by the lucrative charter-voucher school industry. They are outspoken advocates for former President George W. Bush's discredited and destructive No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation. As part of their campaign to eliminate all vestiges of public schools, they were one of the leading voices in the corporate din pushing LAUSD's Yolie Flores-Aguilar's corporate charter giveaway motion, deceptively named Public School Choice (PSC).

Rather than expend too much space here on FIS, I recommend reading the above quoted article.

Alliance for a Better Community (ABC) is another charter-voucher proxy group that has orchestrated vicious smear campaigns against our local teachers' union. Their former CEO, Veronica Melvin, was the recipient of the Coors 2009 Líderes Program Award. The Coors family, like the DeVos, Walton, and Koch families are notoriously racist, reactionary, and vehemently opposed to both public education and public sector unions (actually unions of any sort, for that matter).

Parent Organization Network is actually a component of the Los Angeles Multicultural Education Collaborative (LAMEC), which is funded by British Petroleum (BP). Lastly, Los Angeles Urban League (LAUL) takes money from Fox, Anschutz Entertainment Group, and Wal-Mart. LAUL's CEO Blair H. Taylor describes himself as an entrepreneur and often works with the Milken Institute — founded by junk bond felon Michael Milken — a right wing think tank that proudly boasts "For 20 years, the Milken Institute has used capital-market principles and financial innovations to address social and economic challenges."

A clear picture should be beginning to emerge. All of these so-called civil rights groups are right-leaning astroturf organizations funded by the same corporate backers of corporate school reform. School privatization propagandists pushing policy under the guise of civil rights is nothing new. The illustrious Brian Jones, of The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman fame, deals with this phenomenon in two powerful articles, Charter Schools and Civil Rights: What Kind of 'Movement' is This? and Using "civil rights" to sell charter schools.

What the report contains

It's really outside of the scope of this essay to discuss the entire contents of the "report," and would be overly ambitious to try to argue against each and every aspect of it. Pro-public education writers like Michael Dunn are already writing rebuttals to individual points in the report, and there's sure to be more to follow. That said, the report is rife with inane opinions, outright speculation, and neoliberal conclusions. There were a few things that really stood out on first blush, that I'd like to mention in passing here.

NCTQ mentions "significant teacher layoffs and furloughs" (page 1) but doesn't question why teachers are being laid off in unprecedented numbers. They just decry policies like seniority, tenure, and such since younger teachers are cheaper teachers. Meanwhile the budget crisis in California is a direct result of the lack of political will to tax the wealthy and corporations. Obviously a neoliberal organization like NCTQ would recommend a frontal attack on working class people like teachers as a solution for a crisis created by many of the NCTQ's funders. Here's a novel idea for the NCTQ, instead of removing all protections for public school teachers in the name of retaining younger ones, lets stop slashing education budgets and we can keep all good teachers.

The report is chock full of corporate and business jargon, apropos to the real audience it was written for. For example, a teacher's educational background is referred to as "academic capital" (page 12). I know it's hard for those that look down at all working class people as a means to profitability as anything other than commodities, but human beings are not capital. Such language belies the real motives and intentions of the NCTQ and those that intend to use the report to wage a scorched earth policy against public schools in Los Angeles.

It shamelessly plugs the reactionary and elitist Teach For America (TFA) program (page 13). You'd think the smug well heeled Ivy League product Wendy Kopp was on NCTQ's Advisory Board... oh, wait, she is.

The report lauds the highly discredited LA Times Value Added Method (VAM) (page 19), only mentioning that it was controversial to publish the data online. The National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado Boulder (which publishes peer reviewed papers) effectively put the VAM issue to rest, but right wing ideas seem to keep surfacing no matter how many times they are disproved. Perhaps NCTQ is suggesting that we "teach the controversy" with VAM, which is about as absurd as some of the other ideas from the fringe right. Turns out the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funds those folks too.

Better still the report constantly quotes other, non-peer reviewed studies, published by none other than the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (pages 23 and 31). Is that some form of right wing corporate think tank nepotism? Given the utter lack of academic rigor by the NCTQ this isn't too surprising, but is the concept of transparency that foreign to these people? Are they that obtuse?

On page 34 the report talks about a lack of selectivity in teacher recruitment, going as far as to provide a table of the United States versus what are considered better performing counties while making no mention that low pay and constant disrespect, like that generated by the report itself, play a preponderant role in not attracting the top students from the most prestigious universities. NCTQ's reports will go a long way towards ensuring that situation is exacerbated. Not surprisingly, Finland, featured at the top of NCTQ's table does the opposite of all of the NCTQ's recommendations.

The report makes the bold assertion that "Research concludes that graduate coursework does not make teachers more effective," (page 38) which has now become a major theme in the corporate mainstream media. However, in very tiny print below their so-called "meta analysis" we find a fact they probably wanted to omit altogether: "The few studies that have shown a positive correlation between a teacher's degree status and student achievement are when teachers complete a degree in the subject they teach; the finding is particularly striking for mathematics degrees." You can be sure that the corporate reformers and the press will ignore that with extreme prejudice. Hopefully someone will have time to research whether the studies they cite in their "meta analysis" are actual peer reviewed academic studies, or like the NCTQ report, are just more propagandistic sensationalism.

Funding and aims

A recent Los Angeles piece on the NCTQ "report" said:

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa strongly backs suggestions in the report, whose research was paid for largely with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

In a word, that statement sums up the entire situation — this will get complicated, but here goes:

A report is commissioned by both the United Way, who is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and several other school privatization groups posing as civil rights champions, who also happen to be funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The non-peer reviewed report on LAUSD is paid for by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. NCTQ is the right of center think tank that created the report, and they are not only funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, but the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Director of US Program Policy and Advocacy Stefanie Sanford sits on the NCTQ's advisory board. The report's ultimate aim is to enable the LAUSD Superintendent John Deasy, a former executive with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to rationalize and justify an all out war on our public schools, the hard working teachers therein, and the working class organizations that provide them a modicum of protections. Do we see a pattern here? Could the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation be any more heavy handed?

Furthermore, we see Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine in its full glory here, with the neoliberal enemies of public education seizing on the manufactured budget crisis to destroy the last vestiges of the public commons. Note the timing on this "report," just before summer break, right before United Teachers of Los Angeles' contract renewal. The timing is the only thing more cynical than the specious and vapid report itself.

Despite all this, we that believe in public education must to continue to fight. Please spread the message of this essay far and wide, but remember that speaking truth to power alone will not save public schools. We have to organize on a community level to combat the overwhelming resources the privatizers bring to bear. Only through struggle can those of us that embrace social justice overcome the corporate yoke of neoliberalism. In the battle between communities versus corporations one must choose a side, like the prophet Paulo Freire said "Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral."