Klein Scrams From Bloomberg to Join Murdoch, Aarrgh

Quicker than you say Rhee is history, Klein is, too.  After eight years as Bloomberg's edu-stooge, Joel (Gradgrind) Klein is switching thrones by joining the Board of News Corp. as senior advisor to Rupert Murdoch.  Does this mean that Fox News will take the leading propaganda role in the takeover of public schools by the hedge funders and casino capitalists?  Could be.  Does Bloomberg take this opportunity to hire a schools chief who knows something, anything, about schools or education?  Don't be silly.  From the Times:

Joel I. Klein, the New York City schools chancellor, is resigning and leaving city government, and will be replaced by Cathleen P. Black, the chairwoman of Hearst Magazines, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced at City Hall Tuesday afternoon.

Mr. Klein, in turn, will become an executive vice president of the News Corporation.

The mayor called Ms. Black “a superstar manager who has succeeded spectacularly in the private sector” and added, “There’s no one who knows more about the skills our children will need to succeed in the 21st century economy.” A former publisher of New York magazine, she went on to become publisher of USA Today, and now heads Hearst Magazines, which publishes Esquire, Cosmopolitan, Seventeen, Good Housekeeping and other titles.

The developments appeared to take top Department of Education officials by surprise. One senior staff member said that aides were notified just before the press conference, and that Mr. Klein had not said anything to them about wanting a new job. The staff member, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that top aides did not know anything about Ms. Black.. . . .

Imagine in VA

No mention of facilities, but it's safe to say Imagine would be involved in the real estate.  From WAMU 88.5 FM:

Public Charter School Idea Attracts Some In Loudoun County
Jonathan Wilson
November 09, 2010 - In Virginia, Imagine Schools, a locally-based charter school company, says it wants to be the first to establish a public charter school in Loudoun County.

Loudoun County isn't known for struggling schools, like many other districts where public charters have become popular, but Imagine's Executive Vice President Roy Gamse says the county school system is running out of space.

"The student enrollment is growing so fast that the school system is having some trouble keeping the capacity up at levels to fit all the students," Gamse says.

[Continued here]

Entertainment Properties Trust, a Kansas City-based REIT that owns 27 properties used by Imagine, released 3rd quarter earnings last week.  The company recorded $6.6 million in income from these schools, up from $5.3 million in the same quarter last year.  According to a press release, capacity, enrollment, utilization rates increased.

This would be only the 5th charter school in Virginia if it eventually does open.

Unpacking the Boston Globe's Definition of Charter School

Ever since the corporate foundation tax havens and oligarchs like Eli Broad and Bill Gates have been pushing charter schools in Massachusetts, the Boston Globe has maintained its allegiance and dedication to charters in its editorializing and in its version of edu-reporting.  As the broke little sister of the NYTimes, which shares the same enthusiasms for the nano-cultural, zero tolerance segregated penal model for schooling the urban poor, the Globe functions as primary mass media face for what is most often a low-key approach to destroying public schools.  Nary or scant the negative word for these bastions of choice, innovation, and freedom for my children, or at least the freedom for my housekeeper's children.

Here is the Globe's definition of charter school in its most recent revision of its revised history of charter schools:

Charter schools are public schools, funded with public tax dollars, which operate under fewer regulatory restrictions and are usually independent of school districts. Most do not have teachers [sic] unions. Admittance may be determined by lottery. Many supporters see charter schools as laboratories for educational innovation.

Let's take that apart and look a little closer at this compact and Cubberley-esque definition.

Charter schools are public schools, funded with public tax dollars, which operate under fewer regulatory restrictions and are usually independent of school districts.  If accepting public dollars makes them public, then they are public schools.  The "No Excuses" charters like KIPP and the KIPP knock-offs attract extra funding from vulture venture philanthropists and corporate foundations that can put tax-credited dollars to work implementing social policy that effectively contain, segregate, acculturate, and psychologically engineer the poor.

In most every other way, they are not public, for they do not abide by regulations from the State in terms of curriculum, physical plant, services such as libraries, clinics, and gyms, teacher quality, due process for employees, benefits, transportation, or length of school day even.  Nor are they governed by publicly-elected school committees who oversee financial transactions and bookkeeping matters. From the State website:

The increased freedom available to charter schools coupled with increased accountability, infuses all aspects of the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education's oversight of charter schools, beginning with the rigorous application process that groups must go through to receive a charter. Once the Board of Education has awarded a charter, the new charter school has the freedom to organize around a core mission, curriculum, theme, or teaching method. It is allowed to control its own budget and hire (and fire) teachers and staff. In return for this freedom, a charter school must demonstrate good results within five years or risk losing its charter. 

Most do not have teachers' unions.  Many do not even have teachers, if you mean by "teacher" a professional who has been educated, trained, and certified by some accrediting body.  The popular replacement for professional teachers preferred by the KIPPs is provided by Teach for America, which collects federal dollars supplemented by hundreds of millions from the same venture philanthropists and corporate foundations to recruit and "positivize" well-meaning Ivy Leaguers into a "Corps" of social missionaries who can be exploited and discarded after a couple of years of twelve hour teaching and homework tutoring days. 

These "teachers" may be dismissed at a moment's notice by a CEO principal, and they are paid, on average nationwide, 20 percent less than public school teachers.  What a deal.

Admittance may be determined by lottery.  The new charter paint jobs, national media campaign, slick documentaries, recruitment plans, and high test scores attract large numbers of urban parents who are desperate for something better than the malignantly-neglected public schools that suffer the effects of malignantly-neglected poverty.  These parents are hoping for some way to catapult their children beyond their communities that are now invisible or written off, now almost 50 years after the War on Poverty.

As schools of choice, many parents find that choice works both ways.  If their children do not live up to the expectations of the total compliance corporate code of academic and behavioral conduct in these charters, they will find themselves pushed out.  After all, the KIPPs and their knockoffs have brand or model to protect in order to maintain that marketing campaign.

Many supporters see charter schools as laboratories for educational innovation.  It's good that many "supporters" do, for most everyone else sees the same total compliance model of chain gang test prep in all the KIPP franchises and the high scoring KIPP wannabes.    If there is innovation, it is the backwards kind that produces a rigid pedagogical antiquarianism whose steroidal application of direct instruction looks more like 19th Century learning model than it does the 21st.  Ask any parent in the leafy suburbs around Boston if they would allow such "educational innovation" on their own children, who spend their days engaged in learning with real teachers, rather than being brow-beaten, force-fed, and behaviorally programmed by neophytes.

So innovation is largely restricted to the psychological programming from the corporate positivity experts who are spreading the gospel according to Seligman:  work hard, be nice and great rewards will come your way--and if they don't, there are two possible explanations--you did not work hard enough, or you were not nice enough. As the President and other Ivy League legacies like to say, No Excuses.

Top Priority of Republican House: Add $700 Billion to the Federal Deficit

If you buy the bromide that Reagan was the great communicator, you will find it even easier to see Obama as the great equivocator.  Last year during the health care fiasco, I watched Obama repeatedly fumble-fork explanations for why we need a public option.  Now he is doing the same thing with his marshmallow response to the question of continuing the Bush tax cuts for millionaires.  From the 60 Minutes interview:

KROFT: . . . Are you ready to compromise on the Bush tax breaks?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: I think we're gonna have to have a serious conversation about it. Here's an example where I'd like to think we could at least settle on those things we agree on. I think both Democrats and Republicans agree that for people making $250,000 a year or less, the last thing we want right now is to see their taxes go up. Not only would it be bad for them, but it'd be bad for the economy as a whole. Because those are the folks who are most likely to spend. And a lot of them are having trouble paying the bills. So, we don't want to make it harder on them. We want to make it easier on them to be able to participate effectively in the economy. For folks who are making more than $250,000 a year, you and me, Steve you know, the question is, can we afford to borrow $700 billion.

KROFT: That's what it is?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: That's how much it would cost over the course of ten years. To give us an extra tax break. Or does it make sense to say to us, "You know what? After the first $250,000, your tax rates are gonna go back to what they were under Bill Clinton." When, by the way, rich people were doing pretty well.

Sometimes I think this debate gets framed as if I think rich people, folks who are doing well, should be punished.. . .

Can anyone that smart really be that lame?  Or does the President believe in this issue just as much as he did the public option?

Mayoral Control of Schools? Not So Much

A top priority of the handful of oligarchs who control federal education policy and Arne Duncan is the elimination of public governance of the public schools by ceding power to CEOs, once known as mayors, and eliminating elected school boards.  Mike Klonsky gives us a rundown on how it's going in Chicago.  Not well.  Here's a clip, but do read it all, please at HuffPo:

. . . . Duncan couldn't deliver a victory for Fenty, even while resorting to threats of pulling millions of federal grant dollars from D.C. schools should Gray win. This left many wondering if Duncan only favored mayoral control if he could control the mayor.

But now, with Chicago's schools in a state of leaderless limbo, the problems of having a single autocrat running big-city school systems have become obvious to all. After a decade and a half of Daley's top-down reform efforts, seven of those years with Duncan as the CEO, neighborhood schools remain pretty much as they were. Scores have flattened out. The so-called "achievement gap" continues to widen. Violence has reached pandemic proportions and the school system is on the brink of insolvency. Daley's pet reform project, Renaissance 2010, has been discarded and the phrase banned from usage within the bureaucracy.

Daley's appointed school board has been riddled with scandals, including probes of patronage and civil rights violations. Daley's former board president Michael Scott committed suicide when faced with an investigation of his misuse of school board funds.

The mayor's announced retirement has been followed by the departure of Duncan's successor, Ron Huberman. As the crisis deepens, both he and the mayor, it seems, suddenly want to spend more time with their families. So much for stability and strong leadership.. . .

It's Complicated, Mr. Guggenheim; Lesley Off Base

From Davis Guggenheim's recent HuffPo entry:

You can divide the education world into two camps. No, not democrat or republican. Not incrementalist or disrupter. Or even pro-union or pro-charter. The best way to know whether you are on the right side of school reform is determined by how you answer these two questions:

Do you dither?
or
Do you do?

Winston Churchill used the word "dithering" to describe his country's indecisiveness when it came to the looming Nazi threat. He was speaking to the carefully crafted but empty arguments from his countrymen which basically advocated doing nothing. The state of our public schools is also a serious threat and we too have a talented corp of ditherers. Just read the editorial pages of many newspapers and blogs and listen to those on the air. There are many experts who would rather make the issue more complicated, tangled and inspire the rest of us to inaction.

It is complicated, Davis, and your simplistic film doesn't even begin to get at some of the very serious issues facing our schools, students, teachers, and families.

This Week in Education's John Thompson left this thoughtful reply in the comments section (this is only a snippet):

The best way to help schools is to slow down, think through the issues, and stop gambling on a nonstop series of "reform." Let suburban schools deal with their problems. Focus on the problem, our failure to serve kids in concentrated neighborhoods of generational poverty. Focus on win-win solutions, even if they are modest, not win-lose gambles.

Data-DRIVEN decision-making to drive "reform" is just the latest fad, and our democractic principles will outlast it. We need data-INFORMED, evidenced-based decision-making. You call it dithering, but walk in my schools and you will see why its best for kids when adults think before they pick fights.

Well said, John. Too bad Davis will dismiss you as a ditherer. Dither on, my friend.

Meanwhile, the producer of the film (Lesley Chilcott) thinks our big problem is that there's a teacher branding problem:

Before I made documentaries like Waiting for 'Superman', I made commercials. And occasionally I still do. Advertising agencies are often charged with boiling down the essence of a message to 30 seconds, or less, which can be a difficult challenge. What is the essential message and what is the best way to communicate it? When you translate that to the issue of education, no matter who you talk to, the single most important factor in education is great teaching. This is the central message of what makes a great school.

[Two paragraphs then offer typical chatter about the need to "professionalize" teaching and the usual lip-service about the importance of the work]

Organizations like Teach for America are starting to make teaching competitive among college graduates, helping to brand teaching as a distinguished career choice. But this is only one path. There need to be many, many others.

Two years does not a career make, Lesley. And if you think teaching has a branding problem, what, exactly, in your film attempts to uplift the profession? Nothing - and, in fact, you do harm to the profession (even though you pay lip-service to it) by advocating for the expansion of charters and evaluating teachers based primarily on test scores. Keep in mind, Lesley, that teachers in charters are generally paid less, have less job security, and, surprise surprise, there is much higher turnover in these privatized versions of public schools.

I'm not sure which blog posting is more concerning: the film maker's complaints over ditherers making things complicated, or the former commercial producer lamenting the teacher branding problem. Guggenheim seems content to do first, ask questions later (or don't ask them - just "do"); Chilcott seems to think the teaching profession needs a cosmetic makeover. Neither, of course, is a good way to promote sound public policy. But it might be catching and entertaining, just like their schlockumentary, but there's a serious lack of substance here.

Apologies - I think I'm dithering. Time for me to do something. Maybe I'll get started on rebranding the teaching profession. That'd satisfy the desires of both the producer and director - but, of course, is unlikely to really improve public education in any meaningful way.

Preparing the Ground for the Comcast Assimilation of NBC

All across America the nonstop voices of racism, homophobia, and hate spew their toxicity on the public airwaves with the support of the corporate propaganda promulgators, whose highest trump cards remain divisiveness and nastiness.  The most recent corporate Frankenstein, the Tea Party, is a perfect example of manufactured fear-mongering and the fulmination of hate among nervous white voters who have very little left to their privilege besides color, a privilege that becomes even more important for them to maintain as economic privilege of the former white middle class is yanked away by corporate policies that export jobs to increase profits, all the while blaming illegal immigrants, liberals, or the public schools for the fact that the the majority of U.S. is quickly moving to Third World status.  Enter Fox News and the thousands of Clear Channel AM radio stations across the Land whose job it is to maintain fear and hate expressed as rage, and to fuel diversions from the real story of apolitical corporate greed run amok.

Trying to block the takeover of America by a faux-capitalist dictatorship that, by the way, mirrors the faux-communist dictatorship of China, is a shrinking element of the media that daily work to puncture the poisonous gas bags who are leading the takeover of the country for the benefit of a handful of corrupt, fascist oligarchs.  Keith Olbermann is the quintessential voice of that remaining corps of reporters and media personalities who believe enough in the Republic and the liberty for which it stands to put themselves and their families on the line every day.  As the cable monopoly, Comcast, gets ready to gobble up NBC and Microsoft-NBC in a deal worth $30 billion, the attempt to crush all  resistance in the media of complete corporatization of America has begun in earnest, and Olbermann's star status has just lost its glimmer, to say the least.  Comment by Senator Bernie Sanders:

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) “today issued the following statement on MSNBC suspending Keith Olbermann for exercising his First Amendment rights,” according to a press release.

“It is outrageous that General Electric/MSNBC would suspend Keith Olbermann for exercising his constitutional rights to contribute to a candidate of his choice. This is a real threat to political discourse in America and will have a chilling impact on every commentator for MSNBC.

“We live in a time when 90 percent of talk radio is dominated by right-wing extremists, when the Republican Party has its own cable network (Fox) and when progressive voices are few and far between. 
“At a time when the ownership of Fox news contributed millions of dollars to the Republican Party, when a number of Fox commentators are using the network as a launching pad for their presidential campaigns and are raising money right off the air, it is absolutely unacceptable that MSNBC suspended one of the most popular progressive commentators in the country. 

“Is Rachel Maddow or Ed Schultz next? Is this simply a ‘personality conflict’ within MSNBC or is one of America’s major corporations cracking down on a viewpoint they may not like? Whatever the answer may be, Keith Olbermann should be reinstated immediately and allowed to present his point of view.”

Tom Nida, DC Bankster and Charter School Board Chair

The open sewer of charter school corruption will be a major challenge for Mayor Vincent Gray's new administration in DC.  Having been run for years now as a source for loan portfolio building by the bank where the DC Charter Board President, Tom Nida, is employed, Gray must decide where to draw the line between public funding of zero tolerance charter schools and the private profits by banksters and charter school CEOs. 

In 2009, alone, the collective net profit by DC charters was $29,000,000.  In the meantime, DC children go to these total compliance corporate madrassahs without the benefit of school libraries, clinics, gyms, or even cafeterias.

Bill Turque has the latest installment on the continuing scam, and here is a clip that captures the moral repugnance by those who prefer to keep public schools under the oversight and governance of the public:

. . . . The debate over equity in the funding of public and public charter schools continues to simmer and is likely to get more attention in a Gray administration. Nida's banker's-eye view of the charter sector did not sit well with some school advocates, who said private financing and public schools are a toxic brew. Mark Simon, a DCPS parent, an education policy analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, said he found Nida's speech "abhorrent."

"This is the same Tom Nida, the banker who headed up the D.C. charter board while retaining his position as a bank vice president overseeing a profitable increase in his bank's mortgage portfolio due to mortgages extended to charter schools he was helping to oversee," Simon said. "The two concepts of private profit and public education should not be intertwined as Mr. Nida is wont to do. ... He represents what is wrong with mixing private profit and the management of public education." . . . .

Duncan and RTTT in England; NSVF Copy, Too?

Duncan spent yesterday in England touring a school and visiting with his British counterpart, Secretary of State for Education Michael Gove.   The Guardian interviewed the US Ed head last week.  Here's a snippet from the summary:

Duncan will meet the education secretary Michael Gove and tour a London school on Wednesday. The coalition's controversial free schools are inspired by the US charter schools movement, which often demand longer hours from teachers and impose strict discipline on children.

He said: "I just have tremendous respect for the educational work and the leadership that I've seen coming from the UK and we're all working on the same issues and have the same challenges."

The talks with Gove will focus on how to "elevate" the teaching profession, bringing in committed new teachers while ensuring bad ones are eliminated. Both Obama and Duncan have taken a tough line on failing teachers, praising education officials who fired all the staff at a school in Rhode Island in February after they refused to work a longer day.

Gove and Duncan are also expected to look at how best to evaluate teachers' performance, and how to reach "historically under-served" communities.

Duncan has a bigger budget than any previous education secretary, but has made states compete for federal cash by favouring those that are most ambitious in reforming their schools, under the Race to the Top initiative. New York got nearly $700m (£437m) after adopting a new system for evaluating teachers that took students' test performances into account.

Duncan said: "I can't speak for the UK, but I will tell you, in the United States, teacher evaluation is just fundamentally broken and over 90% of teachers receive an exceptional rating in our country." This was demeaning to teachers, he said, failing to reward good teaching or to remove those were failing. "The systems aren't working for any of the adults – I promise you it's not working for the children. It's part of the problem."

He backed a vision of "free schools" which are funded by the taxpayer but able to adopt their own teaching methods and vary the curriculum. Duncan accused critics who said these schools would flourish at the expense of existing state schools of indulging in "phoney debates".

On the same day of Duncan's visit, Gove announced a £110 school initiative aimed at turning around "underperforming" schools.  Sound familiar?  It's modeled, says Gove, after the Race to the Top.  And, like the cutting of food stamps to pay for the $10 billion education aid while staving off cuts to two prized pots of cash, RTTT and TIF, this £110 investment was made by cutting back on extensions to the free lunch program.  Here's a snippet from a recent Guardian article:

Money saved by scrapping free school meals for half a million primary school children will be used for a scheme under which groups compete for cash to improve England's worst-performing schools.

Academy sponsors, councils and headteachers with an outstanding track record will be encouraged to bid for funds to turn around struggling schools in a contest that will reward those that offer the most ambitious plans for reform.

The cash will come from an endowment fund started with £110m of public money, saved by a coalition decision to scrap an extension of free school meals to all primary schoolchildren living below the poverty line. The government plans to outsource the project to a City fund manager, who will assess the bids in consultation with education experts. The education secretary, Michael Gove, said he expected the fund to pay out up to £10m a year.

He said: "We will invite bids from people who want to turn round under-performing schools and the bids will be assessed on the degree of ambition and rigour they show.

"Are they ambitious in showing a clear path of improvement for under-performing schools, and are they rigorous in showing the money will be used either to develop already tried and tested methods of raising attainment, or pioneer new ways of raising attainment?"

The money could be spent on monitoring the performance of individual teachers, extending the school day, or providing one-to-one support for some children.

The funding, which will come on top of the pupil premium, could also lead to higher pay for teachers who generate the best results. Gove said: "My view is that, while I can think of some of these things, the purpose of the fund is to generate a greater degree of innovation." He compares the fund with Barack Obama's Race to the Top initiative, under which US states compete for federal cash.

When the Brits aren't consulting with our top education official about how to improve teaching (cringe!), creating RTTT knockoffs (yikes!), they're copying one of the other staples in the education reform movement: the proliferation of organizations that spring up in this new education marketplace (hide under the desks, kids!).  The premier model in the US would be the NewSchools Venture Fund, but there are many other organization that do a combination of lobbying, funding, advocacy, consulting, PR, development, and provide other support services.  Enter the New Schools Network.  From the Guardian:

Michael Gove's education department failed to invite applications for a £500,000 grant to assist parents setting up free schools, before awarding it to his former adviser.

The New Schools Network, a charity and company run by the education secretary's former colleague, Rachel Wolf, 25, was awarded the grant by the Department for Education in June. No other organisation was asked to bid for the work, which was not publicly advertised.

The disclosure in documents released under the Freedom of Information Act could heighten some of the criticisms the new schools have attracted. The schools, which are independent of local authority control, will allow groups to create more autonomous schools with small class sizes, Gove argues, though critics say they could wreck social harmony by creating ethnic or religious enclaves. [Note: unlike charters, free schools may admit up to half of their students based on religion]

The network – which is yet to receive the money – is at the heart of the plans for the schools which were inspired by US Charter schools and has a role in the application process.

Similar organizations in different countries facing different socio/economic/political environments will have some unique differences, and it's difficult to tell exactly how Wolf's venture will pan out.  Like the early visions of charters, the "free schools" can be operated by teams of experienced teachers, parents, and community groups.  They can also be operated by top-down management organizations and for-profit providers (although the latter are excluded, I believe, from Gove's £110 million fund).  Look for Wolf to eventually push the British equivalent of CMOs: if you're looking to grow, as they say, "to scale," the CMO model is the one embraced by corporate/free-market reformers.  New Schools' webpage does say US charters can be run by parents, teachers, or community organizations, but the examples they list of groups running charters are KIPP, HCZ, and American Indian Public Charter Schools.  The rest of the rhetoric on the organization's website mirrors much of the US "reform" crowd (competition, education marketplace, business-style reforms, corporate speak), and they're likely to borrow from the deformers as the network expands.

If anything, the establishment of the New Schools Network is a nod to the perceived (and real) efficacy of NSVF.  They're a powerful network of players in the education reform field, and almost everyone in what many consider the anti-teacher/privatization movement has ties to the group.  In combination with big philanthropists and other actors, NSVF has effectively pushed the (likely) unsustainable CMO model (both financially and in terms of teaching) to the exclusion of others.  This does not bode well for "public" education, and only further delays the need to address pressing issues while further entrenching the testing/competition/standardization/privatization movement.

Rhee's Self-Serving Extravaganza

Why does an economics journo pen the HuffPo tribute to corporate education's toxic witch, Michelle Rhee?  Because he's paid to?  Because it's all about the money?  Yes and yes.

And so Barry Wood describes the big ticket event Monday night at the Kennedy Center, no less, starring Arne Duncan, middle brow establishment hack, Tom Friedman, and Mr. Entertainment, David Gregory as host.

Billed as a night of recognition for DC teachers, the night was to glorify the Oligarchs' poster girl for corporate ed reform.  The only teachers there were the ones who received the highest score (a "Four") on the deeply flawed evaluation system put together by another TFA alum who worked for Rhee.  Even so, the response to Gregory's efforts to whip up enthusiasm among the assembled guests fell flat, or shall we say, it never rose enough to fall. A priceless clip (my bolds):

. . . .The highly effective "fours" were the ones in the Kennedy Center audience. Doubts about Impact even from its winners may account for the fact that when the host asked that Rhee be given a standing ovation, only half the audience stood up.

Despite reassuring words from Rhee, her interim successor Kaya Henderson, Fenty, and mayor-elect Vincent Gray that DC school reform will continue, real doubts remain.

Education writer and Rhee biographer Richard Whitmire identifies several markers that will determine if Rhee's radical reforms continue. He puts retention of Impact at the top of the list and warns of trouble ahead if Gray appoints a panel of experts to evaluate and improve the system.

A second red flag, says Whitmire, would be the departure of Jason Kamras, a 2005 Teacher of the Year and Teach for America alumnus, who designed the Impact system. . . .