Bounty

Details of Allegations Against KIPP's Mike Feinberg

Do you remember Christine Blasey Ford's emotional and riveting testimony related to her decades-old sexual assault at the hands of Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, when he was a drunk, horny punk who enjoyed terrorizing and humiliating females? If you do, you're likely to remember, too, that institutional sexism functioned as it always has: it maligned the female victim of abuse so that the male perpetrator would never be held accountable for his criminal violence and cruelty.

You may remember, too, that Blasey Ford is a highly-regarded white middle class professional, whose testimony lacked only vital criterion required to establish its veracity: maleness.

Now picture what it must be like for a working class non-white female to go up against a privileged middle class male hero of the white male establishment, this time in a Southern state where discrimination and racism are even more systemic than in Washington, DC. 

This is what happened in April when a former KIPP student and her mother testified before two administrative law judges in Texas about a sexual assault that occurred twenty years ago when she was an 11-year old Mexican-American girl at Mike Feinberg's Houston KIPP middle school.

And even though Wilmer-Hale, the prestigious DC law firm hired by KIPP in 2017 to investigate the allegations, "found the alleged victim to be credible," the Texas judges have now concluded that they will recommend to the Texas Education Agency that the victim failed to "meet its burden to prove any such allegations," and that Feinberg, then, should retain his teaching license.

Here is the summary of the main allegation against Feinberg, who was defended during the hearing by some of the best defense attorneys money can buy.

As the factual bases for the present disciplinary action, Staff has accused Respondent of sexually abusing Student 1 during two incidents that would have occurred during the spring of 1999. At that time, Student 1 was completing the second of two years that she spent in KIPP Academy’s fifth grade while Respondent was serving as the school’s principal and as a teacher. In the first incident, according to Staff’s pleadings, Respondent “took [Student 1] into his office” at the school, ostensibly to conduct a “yearly check-up,” and then proceeded to reach under her shirt and run his fingers between her breasts and also along her back. The second incident allegedly occurred “[a] week or two later,” when Respondent “took [Student 1] back to his office,” this time under the pretense that he had “lost the file” from the earlier “check-up” and “would have to redo the exam.” Then, according to Staff, “Respondent asked [Student 1] to remove her clothing from the waist down,” “had [Student 1] sit on the desk and spread her legs,” then “approache[d] her with a Q-tip and inserted it into [her] vagina for a few seconds.”

The Texas judges did not hear the two charges against Feinberg's for sexual harassment against KIPP employees, and they did not hear allegations that Feinberg used KIPP computers to access porn.

It is be up to the State Board of Educator Certification to make the final call on whether or not Feinberg will keep his provisional middle school teaching license that he qualified for during his two year stint as a TFA recruit in the early 1990s.

Feinberg's lawsuit against KIPP, Inc. for defamation was dismissed earlier this year.

Crowds

Wishing Away Goliath, Part 4

by Jim Horn

Parts 1-3 here, here, and here.

Before I get into Diane Ravitch's role in the suppression of the Sandia Report (promised at the end of Part 3) and her subsequent silence on the issue, I need to offer some more context for my critique of Ravitch policies.  Over the years, Diane has recruited a number of eunuchs to serve as the royal protectors of her Court, so that each time a critic of her policies emerges, he or she is set upon with lambasting and accusations of ideological purity, animus toward the Queen, and aiding and abetting the enemy.  Today is no different.

Diane Ravitch's new book, “Slaying Goliath. . .,” follows on two previous books written since the lucrative reformer conversion experience in 2007, when it finally became clear to Diane that her think tank cronies had no interest in disarming the public school time bombs ticking inside No Child Left Behind (NCLB).  Even though Diane had known at the creation of NCLB in 2001 that tens of thousands of schools and millions of children and teachers would be labeled failures because of an inability to meet NCLB's impossible proficiency targets, she waited until NCLB had become a highly unpopular toxic mess to make her move.  In fact, Diane's conversion was not much of a stretch from where she had always been. Let me offer a little bit of history.

With the Supreme Court appointment of Bush II as President in 2000, Tea Party conservatism was ascendant in the Republican Party.  As has been the history of Democrats since Jimmy Carter, the DNC, having already swapped principle for opportunism under Bill Clinton, rushed further right to claim the territory once occupied by Republican moderates.  Simply by standing still, then, Diane found herself aligned with the neoliberal Third Way Democrats, not because of any change on her part, but because the DNC’s rush rightward to fill the void left by Right flight moved backwards to where Republican moderates like Diane had always been.

With the DNC's rightward march, AFT and NEA, then, became the conduits for Clintonian education priorities such as charter schools, national standards (Common Core), testing accountability, performance pay for teachers, alternative teacher certification, computer technology, edu-preneurial privatizing of school services, and Business Roundtable policy priorities. 

By the time Ravitch was ready to ditch NCLB in 2007, the only K-12 education issue of substance separating Republicans and Democrats was school vouchers, which she quickly jettisoned as if she had never supported them.  Following her conversion, Diane became, and remains to this day, the chief apologist for awful policy positions by both AFT and NEA.

Her conversion, in short, was more transaction than transformation, with less pain and much more gain.  Even so, the fact that someone of Ravitch's status would publicly denounce NCLB and its poisonous outcomes as she did in 2007-08 made her an overnight hero to educators and policy progressives uninterested in her other policy positions. 

Since 2007, Diane's positions on Common Core, charter schools, performance pay and other corporate reforms have been all over the board, as she has simultaneously presented herself as a freedom fighter against CorpEd, while at the same time leading the propaganda effort to deflect and neutralize criticism of AFT-NEA's corporate collaboration with the DNC's Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), Stand for Children (SFC), and Save Our Schools (SOS).  

Ten year ago, AFT-NEA's embrace of value-added testing, Common Core, test-based teacher evaluation, charter schools, TFA, teacher performance pay, and big data fit pretty tightly with Diane’s policy preferences at the time she announced her opposition to NCLB.  In order to stay relevant to the real resistance to Corporate Education during the last ten years, Diane's NPE and AFT/NEA have been forced to shift away from or at least disguise some of their more odious alignments with the DNC's corporate education political hothouse, Democrats for Education Reform (DFER).

This has come as a result of the effective resistance work of teachers, parents, and students demanding change and making it happen.  For instance, the uncompromising dedication and fearless leadership of Long Island Opt Out and United Opt Out constrasted sharply with the tepid and ineffective gradualism of  AFT, NEA, and their new ally, Diane Ravitch.  Teacher and parent resistance to the Common Core, for instance, led corporate union leaders to muffle their earlier enthusiasm, and Diane went so far as to publish a revised edition of The Death and Life . . . primarily to walk back her previous support for the Common Core.

Over the past 15 years, a handful of critics have supported teachers' skepticism to CorpEd reforms by repeatedly ridiculing and exposing Diane's and corporate union leaders' acquiescence to performance pay, VAM, teacher evaluation based on value-added test scores, high-stakes testing, ESSA, and charter schools.   And one by one, their support for these corporate reform priorities have fallen by the way, moved underground, or have been shrouded in position statements that require careful explication to figure out what they mean.  NPE's position on charter schools is a prime example of a policy statement that appears on the surface to oppose charter schools when, in fact, it supports the continuation of racist charter schools, while blowing smoke about some amorphous and fantastic eventual absorption of charters by public education.

Within the small world of corporate education critics, Diane Ravitch has achieved a sort of demigod status.  She has many defenders, as I have discovered during the past decade of analyzing and critiquing her Janus-faced policy schizophrenia. 

By generously offering recognition and attention to her followers who desperately seek it and by marginalizing critics with ridiculous claims of personal persecution, she has inspired a hive of vigilant rhetorical activists, where loyalty is demanded and rewarded, criticism is vanquished, and the protection of the queen is paramount.  This political devise is on full display in Slaying Goliath, as Diane offers a catalog of attaboys to every activist who has carried her water without criticism or complaint.

I am not one of those.

Liberal Redneck 2016 - Black Lives [Still] Matter

PA House Republicans Secretly Expose Dems to Covid-19: Rep. Sims on What to Do Now!

Krystal and Saagar REACT: Biden tells Breakfast Club 'You ain't black' i...

Donald Trump: A Study in Leadership

Wishing Away Goliath, Part 3

Jim Horn

Last updated May 17, 2020

Parts 1 and 2 here and here.

In Part 3, I probe Diane Ravitch's continuing neglect of the historical origins of NCLB, which was signed into law in 2002.  I also provide examples of her persistent soft-pedaling of the roles played by conservative think tank dwellers and education industry consultants with whom Ravitch worked during thirty years as a Republican education policy insider joined, as she was, in an aggressive, well-funded effort to sabotage public education in the United States.

Based on Diane's account from 2010, her support for No Child Left Behind "remained strong" until she attended an AEI conference on November 20, 2006, which Checker Finn and Rick Hess had put together to examine "whether the major remedies prescribed by NCLB — especially choice and after-school tutoring — were effective."

According to Diane, it was only when she left that meeting in 2006 that she had the dawning realization "that the sanctions embedded in NCLB were, in fact, not only ineffective but certain to contribute to the privatization of large chunks of public education."

She follows that recounted flash of insight with this: "I wonder whether the members of Congress intended this outcome. I doubt that they did."

Well, yes, many did intend that outcome, Diane, as has been documented in several books, numerous magazine articles, and ample policy analyses.  Congress did know about the NCLB's intended privatization, and to assure that outcome, a majority of legislators 1) approved the requirement that 100 percent of school children would be "proficient" in reading and math by 2014, and 2) included charter school conversion as a central remedy for failing schools.

As George W. Bush's Assistant Secretary of Education, Professor Susan Neuman, told Time Magazine in 2008, NCLB was a "Trojan Horse for the choice agenda — a way to expose the failure of public education and 'blow it up a bit'."

During the months leading up to NCLB passage, a number of hair-on-fire warnings were issued.  Did education policy maven, Diane Ravitch, miss the Staiger and Kane op-ed in the New York Times in the late summer of 2001 prior to Congressional passage of NCLB?  Doubtful, since Diane edited a volume in 2002, which included this piece that echoed the 2001 op-ed:

Thomas J. Kane and Douglas O Staiger, "Volatility in School Test Scores: Implications for Test-Based Accountability Systems."  In Diane Ravitch (Ed.), Brookings Papers on Education 2002.  Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2002.

Two clips from that Kane and Staiger NYTimes op-ed:

The central flaw is that both versions of this bill place far too much emphasis on year-to-year changes in test scores. Under either, every school in America would have to generate an increase in test scores each and every year or face penalties like having to allow its students to transfer to another public school, being converted into a charter school or being taken over by a private contractor.

Both bills would be particularly harsh on racially diverse schools. Each school would be expected to achieve not only an increase in test scores for the school as a whole, but increases for each and every racial or ethnic group as well. Because each group's scores fluctuate depending upon the particular students being tested each year, it is rare to see every group's performance moving upward in the same year. Black and Latino students are more likely than white students to be enrolled in highly diverse schools, so their schools would be more likely than others to be arbitrarily disrupted by a poorly designed formula.

As we noted not so many years back, academics weren't the only people worried about what was about to unfold in 2001:

As White House staff, congressional aides, and a small contingent of think tank insiders huddled in Washington during the summer of 2001 to compile the final version of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLBA), state policymakers worried about new accountability demands that the legislation was to include.  In July, Missouri’s assistant commissioner of education, Stephen Barr, had described the 12-year window for achieving 100 percent student proficiency in reading and math as “an impossible dream,” and in the same article from The New York Times, Pennsylvania’s secretary of education, Charles Zogby said, “It’s unrealistic to think that in some places where 90 percent of the children are below basic that we’re going to turn this around in 10 years. And then everybody is going to throw up their hands and say none of this is possible” (para 29).

Elizabeth Debray's (2006) excellent ed policy history notes that two months earlier in April 2001, Dr. Joseph Johnson, who served as compensatory education director for the Bush Administration,

. . .  told the National Association of Federal Education Program Administrators in April 2001: "People are looking at the data and saying, 'This is going to be catastrophic because there are going to be so many low-performing schools and this isn't going to work'." Though Johnson himself urged a more positive response, by June he had submitted his resignation.

Even with an abundance of proof to the contrary, all of Ravitch's three books written since 2010 have essentially recycled the same gloss on No Child Left Behind, which repeatedly depict NCLB advocates as innocently misguided, strategically shortsighted, and/or naively well-intentioned individuals. 

In Slaying Goliath, which represents Diane's latest retelling of the story to save public schools from the onslaught of corporate education reform, she continues to proclaim a weird kind of erroneous innocence for those front-line ideologues in the No Child Left Behind school privatization scheme.  In an unfortunate example of self-plagiarism in Slaying Goliath, Diane recycles a paragraph from a letter she wrote to Lamar Alexander, originally published at Huffington Post in 2015:

. . . . I remember a panel discussion in early 2002 at the Willard Hotel soon after NCLB was signed. You were on the panel. I was in the audience, and I stood up and asked you whether you truly believed that 100% of all children in grades 3-8 would be “proficient” by 2014. You answered, “No, Diane, but we think it is good to have goals.” Well, based on goals that you knew were out of reach, teachers and principals have been fired, and many schools — beloved in their communities — have been closed.

In the recycled version that ends up (without citation) in Slaying Goliath, Ravitch writes: 

At the time, I attended an event in Washington, D.C., at the Willard Hotel, sponsored by the conservative Hoover Institution, where my former boss in the George H. W. Bush administration, Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, was on a panel discussing the new law.  I stood up in the audience and asked whether he truly expected that 'every student' would be proficient by 2014.  He responded, 'No, Diane, we don't expect that, but it's good to have goals.'  Little did he know that many school would be closed and many teachers and principals would be fired because they could not accomplish what was patently impossible (p. 20).

Little did he know?  Lamar Alexander has long served as providing the "velvet gloves" for handling bare-knuckled policies developed by the likes of Checker Finn, Bill Bennett, the Manhattan Institute, and the Bush family. (As Thomas Toch recounted in 1991, one of Alexander's aides once told a reporter, "Finn's ideas are a lot more palatable in Lamar's velvet gloves.")

There are a couple of things that are striking about Ravitch's recollection of the Willard Hotel incident from 2002. The first is Diane's acknowledgement that she knew in 2002 that NCLB was setting schools up for failure with impossible proficiency targets.  The second is that, even though Diane knew this in 2002, she continued to support NCLB until late 2006.  And third: Diane is on the record in her 2010 book as saying that she only figured out in 2006 that the sanctions written into NCLB would lead to "privatization of large chunks of public education." 

Is that clear?  I know--it makes my head hurt, too. 

What is clear, however, in the 10 years of publishing since the Ravitch conversion is Diane's repeated attempt to portray the crowd she once ran with as having failed in well-intentioned efforts to improve education. What she ignores are the facts that 1) corporate education reform has not failed, and 2) corporate education reformers' initiatives were never intended to improve public schools but, rather, to make them weaker and more susceptible to the disease of corporate parasitism.  Rather than having failed to achieve the good, corporate education has succeeded in achieving the bad.

By continuing to miss this crucial distinction, Diane persists in a charade that has the effect of protecting the purveyors of privatization and, thus, her own complicity in their evil schemes, both past and present.  And by whitewashing the past, Diane denies history its purgative power, thus assuring that her salvation remains as incomplete as her heavily-edited confessions. 

Meanwhile, Diane's readers are left with bad information and false hopes for illusory victories built upon erroneous impressions. 

In Part 4, I will examine the real story behind the suppression of the Sandia Report in 1991, which occurred when Diane was Assistant Secretary of Education and Counselor to Secretary of Education, Lamar "Velvet Gloves" Alexander.  Diane was at the original briefing when researchers at the Department of Energy shared their findings on the condition of American public schools, which ran contrary to the lies and distortions that Reagan/Bush insiders had manufactured to beat down public schools and open the door to school vouchers and other forms of privatization and monetization.  In Slaying Goliath, Diane finally comes as close as she ever has yet to acknowledging the lies and deceit for which she earned the designation as the conservative talk show host of the corporate education reformers.

Mourning in America