Will Citizens of All Political Stripes Coalesce Against the Billionaire Boys' Club?

For many Democrats and Republicans (at least the ones that Diane Ravitch likes to remember), the intrusion of the federal government into state and local education issues has been an acceptable burden to bear, since it was only the Federal government that could guarantee the enforcement of civil rights laws.  In fact, ESEA was enacted in 1965 as the carrot for Southern states to enforce the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which the apartheid South considered a big stick.

Now, the federal government under the direction of the modern day efficiency experts of the corporate foundations, incentivizes states to create segregative charter schools and ignores the goals of integrated and democratic living as a primary purpose of the public schools.  In short, there is no longer any reason for democrats to support federal intervention in education. 

The question, then, goes to Republicans, and it is asked today in an op-ed by Ravitch in the Wall Street Journal:  Is there a reason for Republicans to continue to support the federal effort to blow up the public schools, when it seems apparent that a national stranglehold on schools by a handful of oligarchs inside the federal bureaucracy will be the likely outcome of such efforts?  Interesting.

Now that Republicans have regained control of the House of Representatives, they must take a stand in the battle for control of American education. The issue today is between those who want to federalize education policy and those who want to maintain state and local control of the public schools.

Historically, the GOP has always been the party of local control, and for most of the 20th century Republicans opposed almost every effort by Democrats to expand the power of the federal government over the nation's public classrooms.

In 1965, when Congress passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, Republicans worried that it was the start of intrusive federal mandates. In time, though, they accepted that there is a legitimate federal role in providing extra funding for needy students, ensuring educational opportunity for children with disabilities, protecting students' civil rights, gathering accurate data, and sponsoring research.

Today, however, the federal government has ballooned into the all-powerful education behemoth that the GOP long feared. Ironically, the trouble started as a result of President George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation. It has saddled the nation's public schools with a regime of testing and sanctions that is burdensome, harmful and ineffective.

NCLB decreed that all students, in all states, must be proficient on state tests in reading and mathematics by 2014—a goal no state is even close to meeting. As the deadline draws nearer, schools that are central to their communities are being closed or forced to fire their staff because of NCLB requirements. The local leadership may have better ideas, but the federal government demands punishments.

President Obama's Race to the Top fund extends federal control well beyond NCLB. Last year, as part of the economic stimulus plan, Congress gave the Department of Education an unprecedented $5 billion in discretionary funds to promote educational reform. The Obama administration used the money to promote unproven strategies.
To qualify for Race to the Top money, states and districts were expected to evaluate their teachers by using student test scores, even though research consistently warns of the flaws of this method. Similarly, the Obama administration is pressing states and districts to replace low-performing regular public schools with privately managed charter schools, even though research demonstrates that charters don't, on average, get better academic results than regular public schools.

The present course is virtually the opposite of what high-performing nations do. Countries like Finland, Japan and South Korea have improved their schools by offering a rich and broad curriculum in the arts and sciences, not by focusing only on testing basic skills, as we do. These nations have succeeded by recruiting, training and supporting good teachers, and giving continuing help to those that need it. The Obama administration, by contrast, has disregarded the importance of retention and improvement of teachers, while encouraging an influx of non-professionals into the field.

The Education Department, for example, recently awarded Teach for America $50 million to scale up its recruitment of smart college graduates who agree to teach for two years. The organization now offers five weeks of training to about 8,000 prospective teachers each year. While such a program is admirable, it doesn't help to replace the 300,000 teachers who retire or leave the profession annually. The teaching profession needs large numbers of well-prepared, experienced professionals, not constant turnover.

Many members of Congress were once members of local school boards. They understand that their public schools are the heart of their community and that local problems are best addressed by local solutions.

National curriculum standards may help, if they are validated. But the ones promoted by this administration were not implemented anywhere before they were foisted on 40 states by state legislatures competing for federal dollars. Massachusetts, the highest-achieving state in the nation, dropped its own proven standards to adopt the new, unproven ones so as to be eligible for Race to the Top funding.

The question today for Republicans is whether they are a party that endorses top-down reform from Washington, D.C., or a party that respects the common sense of the people back home and their commitment to their local public schools.

Ms. Ravitch, who served as assistant secretary of education in charge of research in the George H.W. Bush administration, is a research professor of education at NYU.

Councilman Barron Calls for Parent Boycott of NY Schools Until Qualified Chancellor Is Appointed

From Gothamist:

. . . .Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries and other city pols say they will file a temporary restraining order to block her [Black's] appointment, which Jeffries said state Education Commissioner David Steiner didn't want to approve anyway. "Commissioner Steiner appears to have made this decision in the back room with Mayor Bloomberg whispering in his ear. By all accounts he was not comfortable with the appointment of Cathie Black, but he appeared to bow from immense pressure from City Hall and the mayor's rich and powerful friends to strike a compromise that is not in the best interest of our children."


At a protest in Brownsville, Black critic City Councilman Charles Barron urged parents to keep their children out of schools until a "qualified chancellor" is selected, and said having current Performance and Accountability Chancellor Shael Polakow-Suransky helping her out wouldn't change anything. "We question the legality of her riding on someone else's credentials," he said. "Mayoral control is out of control. The mayor is disrespectful, the mayor is abusive of the power the system gave him. And Cathie Black is unqualified to teach in a classroom, nevertheless [will] run the largest education system in the country." . . .

Black Advised Corporate Welfare Queen, Deborah Kenny, on Management and Book Deal

There is reason for Deborah Kenny to be smiling.  As CEO of Harlem Village Academies charter school in charge of 450 students in total, she raked in $442,000 this past year.  Connection to Cathie Black?  Nothing having to do with education, it seems, even though Black touts her connection to Harlem Village as the source of her cred on all things educational.  From the Daily News:

City schools chancellor nominee Cathie Black insists she's connected to public education via a highly touted charter school - but a close look shows she's had no contact with students, parents or teachers there.

Officials at the Harlem Village Academies admit the school's National Leadership Board, which Black joined just five months ago, has never met.

That board "has no operational or governing authority" over the school and exists for "support purposes only," the school said in response to Daily News questions.

Black primarily advised the school's CEO, Deborah Kenny, on "management, leadership, and the development of a book" Kenny is writing, the school said.

Harlem Village parents and former employees had little knowledge of Black, who is expected to get a state waiver that will allow her to take the job despite having almost no education experience.

"No, no, no, she's not with us," said the parent of a sixth-grader. "She's not on our board. We have a lot of people who give money, lots of very famous people come here. That could be what it is."

A second parent added, "I've heard of Cathie Black from the papers, but she's not part of this school."

Black's link to Harlem Village appears to be her only connection to New York public schools.

She went to Catholic school, sent her children to a Connecticut boarding school and spent her career in the publishing business.

Far from the average school
A former Harlem Village employee said Black visited the school in 2009 at Kenny's invitation as a possible donor. After that, the former employee never saw Black again.

Harlem Village officials said Black started on the board in July, a month after she lost her job as president of Hearst Magazines.

It's not clear when Mayor Bloomberg first approached Black with the idea of becoming chancellor.

Whatever Black's role there, Harlem Village has little in common with the average public school.

Kenny, who oversees 450 students, is paid $442,000, including a $140,000 "bonus" and $27,780 in "other" expenses.

The schools chancellor gets $250,000 to oversee 1.1 million students. . . . .

Sounds to me Kenny ought to advising Black.

 

 

Educational Planning, Parts I and II

Planning in the City, pre and post Cathie Black.  Get your pencils laptop IPad ready:

Oprah and Eli

For some it has been a mystery why someone with Oprah's public image would be up to her neck in corporate education reform built on planned segregation and exploitation of the poor and the brown.  Yet her recent 60-minute infomercial with Gates and Guggenheim to pump Waiting for Superman is indicative of her aggressive parroting of the corporate welfare charter meme.  Same with the televised love fest she sponsored for New Jersey's loudmouthed governor, Newark mayor's Cory Booker, and the billionaire twink, Zuckerberg.

But as Bracey always said, just follow the money to find the source of the heartfelt commitment.  Most of us forgot or never noticed that Oprah became a member of Eli Broad's economic family when she hired Eli's chief invesment officer (another billionaire) to oversee her own proliferating billions back in May of this year.  So Oprah does, indeed, know where her bread is buttered and also who can get her even more bread. 

The article from Street Insider.com, and the chart (click it to enlarge) is from Muckety (btw, Lee Bass is an oil tycoon and former Bush Pioneer):

May 20, 2010 1:51 PM EDT
Oprah Winfrey has hired a chief investment officer at Eli Broad as the first member of a team she is putting together to aid in the handling of her personal investments and fortune made from television, magazines and movies, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal today.

Billionaire and philanthropist Peter Adamson will be the first piece in the full investment organization surrounding Winfrey, who is estimated to be worth $2.4 billion -- making her one of the richest African Americans of the 20th century.

Adamson, 47, has served as the investment chief since 2001 and is considered a strong addition to the family office that will manage Winfrey’s wealth. She came to hiring Adamson through her longtime law firm, Ziffren Brittenham LLP, according to the WSJ's sources.

While working for Broad, Adamson has a record of making 3-4 percent above the indices, while managing $2.5 billion in investments for the Broad Foundation.. . .

Responding to Thomas Friedman: Poverty, not teachers' rank in graduating class

November 27, 2010

Letter in the NY Times

Raising Performance in Our Schools

Response to Friedman, Teaching for America, Nov. 21: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/opinion/21friedman.html?_r=1&ref=opinion

• To the Editor:

Thomas L. Friedman notes that in countries like Denmark and Finland that outperform the United States in education, teachers graduate in the top one-third of their classes.

But there is another explanation for why the United States lags behind: poverty. The percentage of children living in poverty in Denmark and Finland is under 3 percent. In the United States the percentage is 21.

Poverty means poor nutrition, substandard health care, environmental toxins and little access to books, all of which have a strong negative effect on school success.

Middle-class American children attending well-financed schools outscore nearly all other countries. But our overall scores are unspectacular because we have such a high percentage of children living in poverty.

Increasing pressure on teachers and parents will not significantly improve achievement, but if we can protect children from the effects of poverty, American tests scores will be at the top of the world.

Stephen Krashen
Los Angeles, Nov. 22, 2010

The writer is professor emeritus at the University of Southern California Rossier School of Education.

John Walton: DFER Catalyst?

John Walton: DFER catalyst? So says Whitney Tilson in an interview from his documentary, A Right Denied. Here is a snippet:

[DFER was started] …with a few other friends that are involved with a couple other other charter schools, and they were money managers like me involved with a couple similarly high-performing charter schools, we finally decided to create a little guerilla movement within the Democratic party. Interestingly, it came about as a result – what really catalyzed it – was a conversation with John Walton, who passed away a couple years ago in a plane accident, as you may be aware. But he, through his foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, has been one of the most generous supporters of KIPP and other charter schools and school reform in general. And he was a big backer of a group called the Alliance for School Choice. So we saw him speak at the Harvard Club, a couple of my friends and I, went to talk to him afterwards and he invited us to come join this organization and so we participated in a few calls. And what we discovered was that we were the only Democrats on the call or in the room, and it was largely backed by well-known Republicans like John Walton and Wal-Mart and so forth, and they were quite successful at persuading Republican politicians to support whatever legislation and so forth but were having a lot more trouble getting traction with Democrats. And the reason became clear to us very quickly. It was because their sources of funding and who they were – all Republicans – when they came to talk to Democrats, the Democrats were sort of like, “What are you doing in my office and why should I listen to anything you have to say? And this is some sort of Republican conspiracy to kill our schools and voucherize everything and harm the Democratic party. The real problem, politically, was not the Republican party, it was the Democratic party. So it dawned on us, over the course of six months or a year, that it had to be an inside job. The main obstacle to education reform was moving the Democratic party, and it had to be Democrats who did it, it had to be an inside job. So that was the thesis behind the organization. And the name – and the name was critical – we get a lot of flack for the name. You know, “Why are you Democrats for education reform? That’s very exclusionary. I mean, certainly there are Republicans in favor of education reform.” And we said, “We agree.” In fact, our natural allies, in many cases, are Republicans on this crusade, but the problem is not Republicans. We don’t need to convert the Republican party to our point of view, and this is an issue that for decades, the intrenched forces of the status quo have successfully resisted change by making this issue a Republican vs. Democrat issue, and it’s not. It’s a people who like the existing status quo and will fight fiercely to preserve it vs. people who are looking out for the kids that are not being served well by the status quo. That’s the real issue here. But in order to even have that conversation, in order to change peoples’ minds on the Democratic side, you had to be a Democrat yourself. So we told John Walton, “Thank you, you’ve inspired us to do this and we’re going to create an organization with quite a similar mission to what you’re doing, not voucher focused so much, but a broader mission, but we can’t take any of your money.” That’s probably the first time in his life anyone had ever said, “You’re our friend. We’re doing something you would support, but we can’t take a penny of your money.” Because the moment we take any Wal-Mart money – that’s anti-union, etcetera, etcetera – then it becomes a partisan issue again.

[Also posted at DFER Watch]

Perplexed; Imagine in FL

Recently, the state of Indiana released a list of schools that failed to make AYP.  I'm not going to discuss the (de)merits of AYP; instead, I'm going to point out something that, as the title of this post suggests, has me a bit perplexed.  Two of the four Imagine-run schools in the state made the failing APY list.  Here's the summary provided by the Journal Gazette, which also notes the reasons why the school failed to meet AYP:

Imagine MASTer Academy: English performance overall and by black, Hispanic and white students; English and math performance by special education students; English participation by black and special education students.

Imagine Schools on Broadway: English and math performance overall and by black and low-income students.

And here's what has me scratching my head: Imagine's 2010 annual report, recently posted on their website, ranks both schools an A- based on Imagine's internal measurements of student achievement.  Imagine MASTer Academy is described as "Making Unprecedented Gains!" The school, Imagine claims, "exceeded the authorizer's expectations in student growth in Math, Reading, and Language Usage in 2009-2010," and, "Met the exceeding growth category for all subject areas."  The other school, Imagine Schools on Broadway, is described as having a "Laser-like focus on Academics [that] Led to Significant Growth for All Students."  D'oh!

Meanwhile, in the state with the most Imagine-run schools (Florida - 17 schools), the company is receiving more negative publicity for the way one of their schools, Imagine Schools Land O'Lakes, is doing business.  Here's a snippet from a recent article, courtesy of the St. Petersburgh Times:

The school's enrollment has declined by 50 students — down to 485 — since the fourth week of classes. Its waiting list has shrunk to a fraction of what it was when the charter school first opened two years ago, with seats available in almost every grade level. Its governing board has experienced almost a complete turnover.

Pasco County school district officials found several areas of concern in their recent review of Imagine, including problems with financial reporting, governance, non-profit status, teacher certification and monitoring of student progress. The school's delay in filing one set of papers with the state has jeopardized about $75,000 in funding that was expected to pay for textbooks.

And more concerns (my bolds):

Scowcroft [the district's charter school supervisor] harbors a concern that has aired nationally about the non-profit status of Imagine. The state requires charters to be run by non-profit entities, yet Imagine corporate headquarters in Virginia has yet to secure that status from the IRS.

Also mirroring other complaints about Imagine across the country, Scowcroft notes that the local charter sends nearly 40 percent of its state money to the company rather than putting it into the school. The school has run two years of deficits, meanwhile, covered only by Imagine's corporate coffers, she said.

Moreover, the school's board of directors has what Scowcroft called limited power. Most of the members have turned over in the past year, and the decisions they make are largely controlled by the parent company, she said.

It was just a few weeks ago that another FL district approved a charter for Imagine.

White Knuckles Among Corporate Education Reformers

(Click to enlarge. Photo: Patino for News) With the Daley/Duncan reforms in Chicago so poisonous that Ron Huberman is in flight even as "Ren2010" has been eliminated from the City bureaucracy's vocab, and with Michelle Rhee repudiated and dismissed in DC, and with the empirical evidence piling up that nearly all of the federal (Gates/Broad) K-12 initiatives have no support among scientists, humanists, or serious researchers, and with parents around the country quickly coming to realize that charter choice means choice without a voice, and with teachers reclaiming their own voices from the whore union leaders who have been selling teachers down the river, and with students the world over openly confronting the Oligarchs who want to eliminate the public space for education and to make it a multinational corporate enterprise, with all this going on, the challenge to Bloomberg's corporate dictatorship in the City was a big deal.  Even Arne called the corporate stooge, Steiner, to give his blessing to the "deal."

The deal, of course, centers on the appointment of Polakow-Suransky as Cathie Black's obsequious tutor on all things educational.  Until July 2009, Polakow-Suransky had remained a utility infielder and gofer within the City's ed bureaucracy.  When the heat from the fraudulent test score scam got too hot for accountability chief, James Liebman, forcing him back uptown to resume his professorial role at the Columbia Law School, the unknown Polakow-Suransky was brought to absorb the public's rage as the testing house of cards came tumbling down.  Polakow-Suransky, who has been properly schooled by the Broadies, now reaps his reward for loyalty to the Borg.

Today's installment in the continuing saga from the Times:

. . . . Mr. Bloomberg viewed Dr. Steiner’s challenge as a critical test of his authority over the school system. The mayor told people involved in the negotiations that a rejection of Ms. Black would undermine the model of mayoral control and set a dangerous precedent.

At one point while the negotiations were under way, Mr. Bloomberg said publicly that the law requiring the schools chancellor to hold education credentials was obsolete and should be abolished.

Mr. Bloomberg had initially believed he could build enough public pressure to force Dr. Steiner to approve Ms. Black, according to the person with knowledge of the negotiations. Business executives, former mayors and celebrities like Whoopi Goldberg flooded Dr. Steiner’s offices with messages in support of Ms. Black.

But Dr. Steiner remained skeptical, and he said on Tuesday he would consider her appointment only if Mr. Bloomberg installed an educator at her side.

The talks with the mayor about that possibility grew more serious after an eight-member panel advising Dr. Steiner on Ms. Black’s qualifications on Tuesday mustered only two votes unconditionally in support of her, unexpectedly throwing the selection process into disarray.

Mr. Bloomberg typically loathes intrusions into his management of the city. But throughout the negotiations for the waiver, he showed an unusual willingness to compromise to preserve Ms. Black’s candidacy. To the surprise of his own associates, he held his tongue in public, refusing to challenge Dr. Steiner and the panel that rebuked his choice for chancellor.

The reaction to the deal, and to Mr. Polakow-Suransky’s appointment, was mixed on Friday.

State Assemblyman Hakeem S. Jeffries, a Democrat who has helped coordinate the opposition to Ms. Black, said he would pursue a legal challenge, arguing that the appointment of a chief academic officer does not compensate for Ms. Black’s lack of educational experience.

Sol Stern, an education researcher at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative research group, said he thought that the deal was a victory for Mr. Bloomberg, and that Mr. Polakow-Suransky’s appointment would not be a serious check to Ms. Black’s authority. “He will be treated by the mayor and Black as a gofer,” Mr. Stern, a frequent critic of the mayor, wrote in an e-mail. “This is a farce.”

Underscoring the high-stakes nature of Ms. Black’s fate, even the federal secretary of education, Arne Duncan, spoke to both Dr. Steiner and Mr. Bloomberg during the negotiations.. . .

Tax Free Corporate Billions Leveraged to Take Over Social Policy Making

The new Gates Foundation financials are out, and things look much improved in 2009 following the 2008 meltdown.  When you click on this chart to enlarge it, you will see that the Gates Foundation now has nearly 30,000 millions of dollars (that's 30 billion) to use as it sees fit to bribe, to silence, to shape, to destroy, to seed, to alter, to maintain, to transform, to extort, to buy quiet, to build out of thin air any social policy that the Foundation wants, and all of it is tax-free.  Well, not quite.  In 2009, the Foundation paid $60,000 on $30 billion.  Damned excise taxes. 

Thirty billion dollars, by the way, represents 7 Races to the Top.  We can see how just one of them threatens sanity in schooling all across the nation.  Can you imagine what a widespread disaster 7 of them would bring.  This, however, is the real and potential power of the numerous corporate foundations that are going all in to transform American schools for the masses into corporate data hubs designed to breed compliance, fear, non-thinking, anti-culture, consumption, selfishness, ahistoricism, and limited technical skill.  The Oligarchs are determined that the road to ecological apocalypse at least will be orderly.