Guest Post: Tom McIver: Caprice Young and the Master of Deception

“Jed’s predecessor, Caprice Young, made over $250,000 for her work at the CCSA. Check out the cast of characters on CCSA’s board of directors.” — Kenneth Libby

These pages have addressed right-wing school privatization pusher Caprice Young before. Her early history working with Richard Riordan, predatory capitalist and junk bond felon Michael Milken, and racist, bigoted, anti-immigrant nativist Steve Poizner was discussed in a piece that also exposed her profiting from the dubious online charter school sector. What was missing from that piece is that she openly boasts of Walmart's John Walton being her mentor. Another piece addressed her taking the helm of Fethullah Gülen's failing Magnolia corporate charter chain.

Credit to Young. Two times she was able to step into situations where charter schools had squandered millions of taxpayer dollars, and make the investigations go away. Young, along with her Gülen corporate charters in Los Angeles, are currently being investigated by Amsterdam & Partners LLP.

I received a communiqué from Dr. Tom McIver in November of 2013 regarding another one of Young's unsavory colleagues, which, in turn, was another one of her charter business "ventures" (read scams). However, I had just returned to UCLA after a nineteen year hiatus to complete my BA, and my focus was on that. The email went unnoticed until recently. Checking the links led to me asking for clarification, and with his permission, his initial email, and excerpts from another email appear here:

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From: tmciver@
Subject: Caprice Young and the Master of Deception
Date November 03, 2013 17:46:35 PST
To: rdsathene@

Robert Skeels,

I came across some blog posts by you that mentioned Caprice Young. At one point, when she was supported by the Milken Foundation, she was collaborating with Al Seckel, who I know all too well. He has boasted of his partnership with her, e.g. this interview with billionaire (and convicted sex offender) Richard Epstein: http://web.archive.org/web/20101112051416/http://www.jeffreyepsteinscience.com/2010/10/jeffrey-epstein-talks-perception-with-al-seckel/

Here they are at Jeff Pulver's prestigious DLD conference joined by Arianna Huffington and CNN chief Jonathan Klein:http://blip.tv/140conf/140-characters-conference-the-democratization-of-information-2801228

Seckel is currently defendant in this fraud case: http://www.courthousenews.com/2011/03/10/34803.htm This case is just the tip of his fraud. In case you are interested, attached is timeline of his activities (including his association with Young).

Tom McIver

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I too discovered the DLD link was dead.  The whole session was on video, but no longer.  I have put my Seckel timeline online and updated it and added links: http://undeceive.weebly.com/ I do not mind attribution.  Seckel is reportedly dead, as the now timeline indicates.  Some new information has come to light, and I hope more will follow.

DLD is a global conference network (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital LifeDesign). Here is there speaker bio for Seckel (mentioning the panel with Young): http://dld-conference.com/users/al-seckel

Tom McIver

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Excerpts from McIver's original chronology implicating Young (emphasis mine), which is displayed below. His updated chronology timeline is here.

2009 Oct 29: Seckel hosts presents and hosts panel on information technology and education at internet entrepreneur Jeff Pulver’s 140-Characters conference; panelists include Arianna Huffington, Jonathan Klein (CNN chief), and Caprice Young (Milken Institute). http://blip.tv/140conf/140-characters-conference-the-democratization-of-information-2801228

2010 Oct 23: Seckel and Maxwell host G4G10 event at their “beautiful Malibu home.” Features Robert Lang and Chris Palmer origami displays and guest of honor Nolan Bushnell (Atari). Attendees include Jeff Scanlan, Catherine Mohr, Stuart Anstis, Jonathan Delbruck, Solomon Golomb, Caprice Young, Irving Biederman, Brad Templeton, Arana Greenberg, Brock Pierce, Michael Kaliski, Victoria Skye, Amy Sterling Casil, Eric Gradman, Brian Deagon, Philip Lelyveld, Richard Bilow, Glenn Kaino, Michael Naimark, Sanford Climan

2010 Oct: Seckel interview is lead item on Jeffrey Epstein’s science website. Self-promotional claims here are similar to his original Wikipedia entry. Says he got funding for “massive interactive website on thinking skills” with friend Caprice Young (Milken Institute). Claims “Tommy” Gold was his Cornell advisor, and at Caltech he was in Feynman’s “very close inner circle” with Michael Douglas and one other person, spending hours with him “almost every other day.” Claims to be very close to M. Gell-Mann, and friends with “Shelly” Glashow, Lisa Randall, Sean Carroll, and Jimmy Wales. http://web.archive.org/web/20101112051416/http://www.jeffreyepsteinscience.com/2010/10/jeffrey-epstein-talks-perception-with-al-seckel/

Gülenist Caprice Young's association with Al Seckel by Robert D. Skeels

Are standardized tests better than grades?

Sent to the Wall Street Journal, April 4, 2016
Supporters of the current testing program argue that standardized tests can help parents see how their children are doing in school ("Battle Lines Drawn as Student Testing Is Set to Begin" April 3). There is, however, no evidence that the current standardized testing program provides better feedback to parents than teachers' evaluations of students.
Studies done at the secondary school level show that grades are an excellent predictor of future academic success, and the results of standardized tests do not add additional information.
There are, in addition, reasons to think that teacher evaluation of students is better than standardized test scores.
The repeated judgments of professionals who are with students every day is probably more valid than a test created by distant strangers and given only once.
Moreover, teacher evaluations of students are “multiple measures," done by different teachers in different years, are closely aligned to the curriculum, and cover all subjects.
Proposals for giving students any standardized test must be accompanied by evidence showing that it provides more useful information than grades alone.
Stephen Krashen
Professor Emeritus
University of Southern California

Sources:
Studies at the secondary level: Bowen, W., Chingos, M., and McPherson, M. 2009. Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America's Universities. Princeton: Princeton University Press; Geiser, S. and Santelices, M.V., 2007. Validity of high-school grades in predicting student success beyond the freshman year: High-school record vs. standardized tests as indicators of four-year college outcomes. Research and Occasional Papers Series: CSHE 6.07, University of California, Berkeley. http://cshe.berkeley.edu

Northern Arizona U Neutralizes TFA Critique

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 Even though Northern Arizona University associate professor, Barbara Veltri, knew the State of Arizona was closely tied to the charter school industry and to Teach for America (TFA), which supplies a third of the teachers in “no excuses” charter schools, she had no idea that her published research and scholarship on TFA would ever be slighted, denigrated, and mislabeled by her own university.

A little background is in order to better understand the censorious institutional insult that Dr. Veltri experienced last week. 

The new corporate paternalists and the old line segregationists have much to gain from the spread of charter schools in Arizona.  White charter schools, which make up the 48 percent of Arizona charters, are whiter than their public counterparts; black charters are blacker; and Native American schools charters are more Indian than the public schools that would, otherwise, serve these students: 

White students left district elementary schools to enter charter elementary schools that were, on average, 10 percent more white. Black elementary school students entered charters that were, on average, 29 percent more black than the district schools they left....Native Americans across all grade levels chose to attend charter schools that had a higher concentration of Native Americans than the district schools they exited. Hispanic elementary school students were the only group that didn’t … [have] a higher percentage of students from the same ethnic group.

The State of Arizona, the state university system, and the Arizona Board of Regents are heavily invested in charter schools.  Some officials earn large incomes from the charter industry, even as they continue to work not as separate governing bodies but, seemingly, in tag teams with the legislature, which privileges policies and funding for TFA and corporate charter schools: 

·      Jay Heiler, for instance, serves as Chairman of the Arizona Board of Regents (ABOR), while he is the current President and founder of his own charter company in Arizona, the Great Heart Academies, which enrolls almost 10,000 students.

·      Governor Doug Ducey, an ex-officio member of ABOR, is a former regional board member of Teach for America.

·      To rub salt in the wounds of public educators of Arizona, the  state legislature provided $500,000 in 2015 for TFA recruiting and support, even as the community college funding was wiped out, while other higher education funding and K-12 funding were cut $100 million each in the budget deal.

·      Arizona State University is listed as a Teach for America sponsor in Phoenix, and the Mary Lou Fulton College of Education partners with TFA.

While the white/Asian charters in Arizona boast rich liberal arts curricula, the segregative charter schools that serve the poor, black, brown, and Indian children of Arizona are based on the brutal “no excuses” model, TFA temps, and never-ending test prep. As elsewhere in the U. S., Arizona’s KIPP Model charter schools have huge teacher attrition problems that could not be sustained without a constant infusion of inexperienced, untrained recruits from TFA. 

As “no excuses” charter teachers barely last two years on average before they are burned out by corporate charter management demands for higher test scores and, thus, more salable brand names, the Teach for America link is critical in the charter industry’s human capital chain.

Even with all this blurring of state and corporate lines, the special treatment she received came as a surprise when Dr. Veltri submitted her latest work to the public relations office at UNA.  Twelve other publication or conference presentations were duly noted by the PR Office on the day that Dr. Veltri’s work was publicized, and every single one, except hers, had the work's title along with the reference of where it was published/presented. 

Why would Dr. Veltri be treated differently than the other faculty members who submitted their recent accomplishments? Could it have something to do with the title of the chapter she recently contributed: “Teach for America’s Socialization and Manipulation”?

Instead of listing the title of her chapter, this is how the Northern Arizona University noted Dr. Veltri’s contribution:

Barbara T. Veltri, associate professor of education, had a chapter published in Work Hard, Be Hard: Journeys Through “No Excuses” Teaching. Veltri’s chapter explores supplying the needed manpower and values components required to deal with high levels of attrition in schools.

Not only did the university fail to list the chapter title, but the description is not close to capturing the focus of the critical research that Veltri shared in the chapter.  To say that her chapter “explores the needed manpower and values components required to deal with high levels of attrition in schools” would be equivalent to saying The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich was about shifting political values in Germany in mid 20^th Century.

For those seeking more information on the TFA’s contributions to educational inequity for poor children of color in the United States of America, they would never know from NAU’s pablum-atic description that Dr. Veltri’s chapter deals exactly with this problem. All the other scholarly work on the same issue that she mentions in the chapter becomes misrepresented as well by this inaccurate description, which means that NAU’s censorious cooptation is spread among other researchers who are focused on similar issues.

No one wants her work to be characterized with a summary that is unrecognizable from the work’s intent or meaning. Dr. Veltri’s chapter is not about "supplying the needed manpower and values components required to deal with high levels of attrition in schools." Only a technocrat with a desire to spare the feelings of Arizona’s corporate politicians could come up with such a disparaging and disrespectul thumbnail summary that conceals the essence of Dr. Veltri’s work.

Dr. Veltri's previous book on TFA:

NPE's Attempt to Coopt Opt Out

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The world of anti-corporate education reform is a small one, and the fiercest and most effective elements are represented by the non-negotiating and in-your-face teachers, students, and parents who comprise the high stakes testing opt out movement. 


Their disobedient presences have been the tiny drops of life in a dead sea of testing, from Long Island to Colorado, from Florida to Washington State.  But one thing is for sure: when these overwhelmingly out-financed troublemakers sweat or bleed or cry into that vast dead standardized ocean, the colors change, the sun can once again be seen beneath the surface, and the waters start to move again with life. 


In New York, for instance, hundreds of thousands of parents, in defiance of unjust laws that would require abusive tests for their children, have opted out of tests in recent years without legal permission to do so.  Last year, 20 percent of New York children refused to take the racist, classist, and, otherwise, useless tests that are mandated by law.

The end of the testing fixation, however, poses a trillion dollar threat to the testing-industrial complex, which is comprised of the textbook and testing companies, the technology companies, corporate foundations, Wall Street politicians of both parties, and the professional development and management industry with its innumerable spinoffs.  

Because the survival of the corporate unions depend upon the graciousness of politicians who owe their survival to Wall Street, the heads of the NEA and AFT have become tools of the billionaires who are interested in increasing revenue streams and pursuing "market solutions"  in public schools. The union misleaders' chief task, then, in recent years has been to present and control the false image that they are acting on behalf of students and the teachers who send them hundreds of millions of dollars every year. 

Enter, once again, their good friend, the ever-dependable Diane Ravitch, and her Network for Public Education (NPE):

After careful thought and deliberation, the Network for Public Education is calling for a national Opt Out because of the harmful effects of annual high-stakes testing on children and schools.  We enthusiastically support those parents who refuse to have their children take the 2016 state exams.  

The alleged purpose of annual testing, federally mandated since NCLB was passed in 2004, is to unveil the achievement gaps within schools, ostensibly to close them.  Twelve years later, there is no conclusive evidence that NCLB high-stakes testing has improved the academic performance of any student... 

First off, someone needs to proof the copy that the NEA and AFT lawyers have prepared for Ravitch, the historian.  NCLB was signed into law in 2002, and it has been fourteen years since that time.  

More importantly, let's look at the timing of this "call" for a "national opt out." In most states, testing is already underway or already done--as in Massachusetts.  In New York, state testing starts tomorrow.  If this were a decision arrived at "after careful thought and deliberation," would NPE have waited until testing was either done, underway, or about to happen to call for a "national opt out?"  I think not.

Then, there is this caveat offered in the NPE statement:

We acknowledge that there is a legitimate role for standardized tests, if they are limited in frequency and time, developmentally appropriate, well-designed and reasonably scaled with realistic cut scores and provide useful instructional feedback. High-stakes tests given for school accountability purposes, [sic] do not meet those standards. They are undermining the public school system that is the pillar of our democracy. We believe that opting out of state tests as an act of direct protest will help turn the tide and eliminate damaging policies.

This is so classic NEA/AFT that it could have been written by either legal team.  In fact, the same caveat was offered when NEA and AFT embraced NCLB testing and value-added testing for teacher evaluations.  Sadly, of course, we know that the majority of the tests were and are junk tests, and that corporate union stipulations meant nothing, either then or now, except, of course, as a way to remind angry members that the unions never really endorsed the awful system that came to be but, rather, a fair system that didn't. 

And then there is this invitation to not opt out but, rather, to speak out:

We recognize that some parents will find it difficult or impossible to have their children refuse the exam due to punitive state laws or district policies.  We urge those who cannot opt out to speak out and demand their right to do what is best for their children in the face of harmful testing. The brunt of testing for school accountability is falling on children. Our elected leaders must address this broken accountability system and provide relief. 

For those who can, we ask that they break ranks, join us and not comply with testing. Policymakers cannot ignore the voices of the public when we speak together. Opt Out gives us that voice.

What's amazing about this "call" to opt out, at least where "punitive state laws or district policies" preclude such action, is the sheer meaningless of the rhetoric, since the ESSA, which Ravitch supported until after it was passed, requires states to have 95 percent of their students to take the tests.  Any "punitive state laws or district policies" will be necessarily aligned with the federal requirements that Ravitch and the unions supported all the way to passage.

The time to urge parents to press their elected officials was last year during the writing of ESSA.  Unfortunately, that was when Ravitch was pressing for passage of the Alexander plan, and there was no mention by Ravitch, FairTest, NEA, or AFT about including a statement on the rights of parents to opt out.  Nothing. 

Now that the ESSA is a done deal, are parents supposed to call their congressmen and begin asking for change??  Changing the law that Ravitch and FairTest embraced just a few weeks back that had the 95 percent testing requirement in it?  Or are the brave parents now supposed to defy the law that NPE supported? Or maybe that would be too "difficult or impossible," in which case parents may come to Raleigh later this month to speak with Diane about their plight.

This kind of counterproductive nonsense may satisfy the autograph seekers and the hangers-on that make up Ravitch's network that she has put together to benefit NEA and AFT, but those who are in this fight to end testing, segregation, and corporate control will not be appeased.

In the end, this NPE "call" for a "national opt out" represents another attempt by the corporate union and their spokesperson, Diane Ravitch, to water down and coopt the opt out movement by presenting a false and confusing image of testing resistance. 

Ravitch surely knows our elected leaders will only change when they have to, and the most effective way to force change is to defy the unfair and immoral laws that require children to take these tests.  And that is exactly the required action that NPE seeks to tamp down with more circuitous rhetoric and bullshit proclamations.

Help a New Teacher Avoid a Big Mistake

This showed up in the comment box today:

I'm about to graduate in May and after receiving an invitation to interview at a KIPP school recently, I received a folder of candidate resources where essentially all of their procedures were spelt out. I was confused by whether I was looking at a juvenile detention center or a school? I started doing some research and came across your blog, wow. How can these places exist?

Discount has been extended by publisher--20 percent off Rowman & Littlefield price or at other online booksellers.  The perfect, and potentially career saving, gift for that new teacher about to graduate. Use promo code: RLEGEN16

Bilingual education has the data and the research!

Sent to the Dallas Morning News, April 2, 2016

"Pioneers in bilingual education to reunite at TWU in Denton" (April 1) concludes with an important statement by Prof. Martha Morolez-de Anda: “We have the data, the research, and the skills, but not enough bilingual education teachers.”
The public is not aware of how right Prof. Morolez-de Anda is. Studies done over several decades have shown that bilingual education works: students in bilingual programs outperform students with similar backgrounds in all-English programs on tests of English reading. 
The data and research supporting bilingual education is stronger than ever. In a recent study, California State San Marcos Professors Grace and David McField reviewed all previous studies comparing bilingual education and English immersion. Their conclusion: when both program quality and research quality are considered, the superiority of bilingual education for promoting English literacy is substantial, considerably larger than previously reported.
Stephen Krashen
Professor Emeritus
University of Southern California

Original article:
http://www.dallasnews.com/news/columnists/mercedes-olivera/20160401-pioneers-in-bilingual-education-to-reunite-at-twu-in-denton.ece
Source: McField, G. and McField, D.  2014. "The consistent outcome of bilingual education programs: A meta-analysis of meta-analyses." In: The Miseducation of English Learners, edited by Grace McField, and published by Information Age  Publishing.

Whose Schools? THEIR Schools!

Except that we pay for them!

A new report from the Annenberg Institute for School Reform looks at charter school governance in Massachusetts.  You may expect other states to be even more corporate friendly.  A clip:

The dominant voices--31 percent--on charter governing boards in Massachusetts are from financial and corporate sectors.  Professionals from the financial sector alone--executives at banks, investment companies, or hedge funds, for example--represent 12 percent of all trustees. 

In some schools, the board of trustees is striking for its lack of educational expertise....

Michelle Alexander on Politics and Race

Please take 14 minutes to watch and listen and learn.

California charter school industry bill attempts to eliminate only source of public oversight

“…charter schools have used their public characteristics to qualify for public funding under state constitutional law, while highlighting their private characteristics to exempt themselves from other laws that apply to public schools.”—Professors Preston C. Green and Joseph Oluwole

School privatization promoting Nonprofit Industrial Complex (NPIC) EdSource has long been a source of both political cover, and highly biased "journalism" on behalf of the lucrative charter school industry. Their pay-to-advocate paradigm is evidenced by a donor list that is replete with the usual suspects of ideologically charged (read reactionary) billionaires and foundations. On March 30, 2016 they posted a puff piece on behalf of the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) regarding AB 2806, a bill that would further block oversight of charter schools, and impede any investigations into charter school wrongdoing. Trade association CCSA, essentially a U.S. Chamber of Commerce for the lucrative charter school industry in California, has increasingly used its seemingly endless source of lobbying funds to push the bill.

My comments are reproduced here:

The lengths these revenue hungry charter school executives will go to avoid any and all oversight is astonishing. The Office of the Inspector General (OIG) and the Office of the Independent Monitor (OIM) are the only organs of public oversight that come close to the de minimis scrutiny these privately managed schools should be subject to. As a legal scholar whose research into the various misrepresentation and malfeasance perpetrated by the charter sector, I depend on access to information gathered by the OIG/OIM. I would find impossible to discover facts that would otherwise remain undisclosed by the secretive charter industry without these bodies. I am not alone in this regard. The United States Census Bureau is on record for not being able to report information on charter schools because of their private nature (US Census Bureau. (2011). "Public Education Finances: 2009 (GO9-ASPEF)". Washington, DC: US Government Printing O ce. Print. vi).

It is in the public interest that charter schools be subject to a modicum of oversight. One would think that it would be public policy that any organization that takes public money should be subject to public scrutiny. AB 2806 would severely hamper the OIG's already minimal ability to investigate an industry that essentially runs with no other public oversight or control. The charter industry's attempts to eliminate this one mechanism for holding them accountable is unconscionable, but not unexpected.

The irony of well-heeled charter school executives like Caprice Young decrying the OIG should not go unnoticed. In defense of her beleaguered Magnolia charter chain, Young has written several Op-Eds. In them she discusses a 2015 audit of the schools claiming it was "financially solvent", but omits that scores of previous audits found the chain insolvent. For instance, the 2014 audit revealed them "operating on a $1.7 million deficit" and that there multiple instances of "missing, misused funds" (SPRC, 2014). This misrepresentation by omission alone impeaches Young's credibility beyond any reasonable standard. Moreover, it demonstrates why public agencies like the OIG and OIG are so critical. AB 2806 is further evidence of the lucrative charter school industry's revenue-first agenda, and their ongoing efforts to avoid any oversight is another example of how they harm both their own students, and the students in our public schools.

Defeat AB 2806 & Empower the LAUSD Inspector General's Office

Ravitch Apologizes for ESSA Support

This morning, Diane Ravitch and representatives from FairTest announced a 10-city tour aimed at apologizing for their long-standing support of the corporate education blueprint, the Every Student Succeeds Act.

Accompanying Ravitch on her apology tour will be lawyers and body guards from the home offices of NEA and AFT.  The first planned stop will be New York City, where public school parents and teachers are invited today to hear Ravitch explain her reasons for supporting legislation that she has since admitted is a terrible law that ushers in more charter schools and machine teaching and testing.

When asked this morning why she had admittedly misled her many followers who hang on every word she speaks, she shrugged and said, "I guess I just had a moment, or maybe it was that feeling of knowing, when other people don't, what is best for the education world.  It was a very elevated feeling, the same one, now that I think about, that I used to have when I was working in the Bush Administration." She added wistfully, "I sometimes miss that."

FairTest's Monty Neill also apologized during the press conference, while urging the small gathering of reporters to give generously to FairTest.