The Gates Foundation and the Future of Public Schools

Please ask your bookstore and library to order this book.  No, I nor any of the other authors have made or will make a dime from it.  But it could turn into a collector's item before the ink dries if you don't demand to see copies available.  The price, itself, is ridiculous and enough to discourage sales.

Ravitch, a respected historian and established author, was turned down by 8 other publishers before she found one with the guts to publish her latest book on the Billionaire Boys' Club.  Conspiracy?  No. Cowardice?  You betcha.

Description:  There has been much public praise for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s efforts to reform public education. However, few scholars have engaged substantively and critically with the organization’s work. While the Gates Foundation is the single largest supporter by far of "choice" initiatives particularly with regard to charter school formation, it is pushing public school privatization through a wide array of initiatives and in conjunction with a number of other foundations. What are the implications for a public system as control over educational policy and priority is concentrated under one of the richest people on the planet in ways that foster de-unionization and teacher de-skilling while homogenizing school models and curriculum? The Gates Foundation and the Future of US "Public" Schools addresses this crucial, unanswered question while investigating the relationships between the Gates Foundation and other think tanks, government, and corporate institutions.

Foreword Deron Boyles. Acknowledgments. 1. From Carnegie to Gates: The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Venture Philanthropy Agenda for Public Education Kenneth J. Saltman 2. Power Philanthropy: Taking the Public Out of Public Education Michael Klonsky 3. The Gates Foundation’s Interventions into Education, Health, and Food Policies: Technology, Power, and the Privatization of Political Problems David Hursh 4. Marketing New Schools for a New Century: An Examination of Neoliberal School Reform in New York City Jessica Shiller 5. Corporatism, KIPP, and Cultural Eugenics Jim Horn 6. Disabusing Small-Schools Reformism: An Alternative Outlook on Scaling Up and Down Aimee Howley and Craig B. Howley 7. Governing Identity Through Neoliberal Education Initiatives: "Get[ting] Schooled" in the Marketplace Leslee Grey 8. The Gates’ Foundation and the Future of U.S. Public Education: A Call for Scholars to Counter Misinformation Campaigns Philip E. Kovacs and H.K. Christie 9. The Giving Business: Venture Philanthropy and the NewSchools Venture Fund Jim Horn and Ken Libby 10. Dear Bill: "Grokking’ Education Patti Lather 11. An Open Letter to Bill Gates, Jr. (With a Message to My Colleagues) David Gabbard 12. Why Current Education Reform Efforts Will Fail Marion Brady

U. S. Education Reformers' Cartoon Version of Finland's Teacher Education System

Friedman's "Teaching for America" (as in Teach for America) in the Times on Nov. 20 highlights the schizophrenia of the corporate ed reformers' approach to having their cake, eating their cake, and not paying their cake all at the same time.  As the media mouthpiece for Gates, Broad, Walmart, and Arne Duncan, Friedman encapsulates in his little op-ed an approach to reform based on syrupy rhetoric, arrogance, ignorance, and deception.

If Friedman knows anything about Finland's education system or their teacher education process, it doesn't show.  The closest he comes to advocating an American model based on what the Finns have done can be found in his advocacy for recruiting the best and the brightest into teaching.  And that's where similarity with the Finns ends.  The Finns do not take their best and brightest, indoctrinate them for 5 weeks, and dump them into the most challenging classrooms to learn to teach on poor people's children (see Teach for America).

Instead, the Finns put an "intensive investment in teacher education--all teachers receive 2 to 3 years of high-quality graduate-level preparation completely at state expense--plus a major overhaul of the curriculum and assessment system designed to ensure access to a 'thinking curriculum' for all students" (Darling-Hammond, The Flat World and Education, 2010, p. 167).

Nor do the Finns place teachers in little corporate charters run by CEOs, who may be humane and generous or tyrannical and sadistic without anyone knowing.  Nor do the Finns base hiring, salary increases, and firing on state test scores, nor do they demonize the teachers' union to which 95% of Finnish teachers belong.  And guess what: "there are no external standardized tests used to rank students or schools in Finland" (, p. 169). Nor have there been for almost 30 years!

Here is clip from a piece written for Adviser Perspectives by Charlie Curnow, sent to me by one of my students, which points out some other facts that Friedman should know before his next commissioned piece from Bill Gates:

In Finland, the country that ranked first in the world in math, reading and science on the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's most recent Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) exams, and which Guggenheim holds up as a model for a successful education system, teacher training programs recruit from the top 10 percent of high school graduates each year. Moreover, places for new teaching trainees are strictly limited by the government to match school demand, making competition for seats fierce. In the U.S., by contrast, only 23 percent of new teachers come from the top third of their class, including just 14 percent of new teachers in high-poverty schools,
according to another McKinsey report released in September. The number of places in U.S. undergraduate education programs is left up entirely to the universities. In stark contrast to the Finns, who filter their recruits up front, U.S. schools tend to wait until the hiring stage to filter out new teaching recruits, leading to an uneven and frequently flooded labor market.

Teacher qualification standards are also often higher in top-performing countries than in the U.S. All new Finnish teachers, for example, must hold a master's degree in education or in the subject they wish to teach, and must also pass two rounds of exams for literacy, numeracy, problem solving and communications skills before entering training. After all of that, there's still a third round of tests conducted after they graduate college by the individual schools at which they apply to work. Compare that to the U.S. system, where just 52 percent of traditional public school teachers and 36 percent of charter school instructors hold a master's degree or higher, according to the National Center for
Education Statistics. Many charter schools don't even require their instructors to pass state licensing exams, a minimum qualification for starting teachers at traditional public schools.

This marked difference between the teaching qualification standards of U.S. charter schools and traditional public schools may help explain much of the performance gap between them. Furthermore, this gap illustrates one reason why a unionized teaching profession actually makes sense. While trade unions in any industry can indeed flatten wages for workers with disparate performance levels, they also help enforce uniform qualification and training standards. Ninety-five percent of Finland's teachers belong to labor unions, and those teachers tend to enjoy many of the same rights and privileges (including "tenure") that unionized teachers in the U.S. do. Furthermore, the suggestion that union contracts shield teachers from any negative consequences is absurd — "rubber rooms" and other aberrations aside, even long-time teachers in the U.S. are subject to regular observation and performance reviews by administrators, and can, in fact, be fired after due process hearings.

But what about merit pay? Surely the top school systems must place heavy emphasis on material incentives to reward their best instructors and punish the laggards? Not necessarily, says the McKinsey report. Separate independent studies of schools in Denver, Texas and North Carolina all found no substantial gains in student performance after the institution of merit pay systems.

The more important incentives for teachers, according to McKinsey, are non-financial: high expectations, a shared sense of purpose, and a collective belief in their ability to make a difference in the educations of the students they serve. Also essential are regular check-ups to bring specific methodological weaknesses to light and the constant sharing of specific best practices, spread through their demonstration in actual classrooms.

Finland's system once again sets a good example in this regard. Instead of breeding a culture of cutthroat competition, Finland encourages its teachers to work together, and it gives instructors one free afternoon per week to plan lessons jointly, observe each other's classes, and help one another improve. . . .

Simplistic manipulation of data: Paul Thomas responds to Thomas Friedman

Submitted to the NY Times

Paul Thomas, Furman University

Nov 21, 2010

Thomas L. Friedman's commentary on Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's November 4 speech (The New York Times, November 20, 2010) reveals an ironic lesson that many people have failed to learn from Mark Twain's apt quip from the turn of the twentieth century:

"Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: "'There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.'"1

Like Secretary Duncan's August 25, 2010, speech in Little Rock, Arkansas, Friedman proceeds to reinforce Duncan's claims about education in the U.S. without mentioning poverty a single time. As well, Friedman emphasizes a "few data points" offered by Duncan as evidence.

Before examining the charges offered by both Friedman and Duncan, let's look briefly at a state-to-state comparison here in the U.S. to illustrate the folly of making sweeping claims about educational quality with a "few data points."

Two Southern states, Mississippi and South Carolina share both a long history of high poverty rates (Mississippi at over 30% and SC at over 25%) and reputations as poor schools systems. Yet, when we compare the SAT scores from Mississippi in 2010 (CR 566, M 548, W 552 for a 1666 total) to SAT scores in SC (CR 484, 495, 468 for a 1447 total), we may be compelled to charge that Mississippi has overcome a higher poverty rate than SC to achieve, on average, 219 points higher.

This conclusion, based on a "few data points," is factually accurate, but ultimate false once we add just one more data point, the percentage of students taking the exam: 3% of Mississippi seniors took the exam while 66% of SC took the exam. A fact of statistics tells us that SC's large percentage is much closer to the normal distribution of the all seniors in the state, thus must be lower than a uniquely superior population, such as in Mississippi.

In short, the SAT averages used to compare Mississippi and SC tell us little of value—and thus, the claims made by Friedman based on the speech by Duncan.

The data points praised by Friedman and used by Duncan—drop-out rates, the relationship between education and economic success, and the comparison of teacher pools among countries—appear like SAT scores to be valid data points to draw conclusions about the quality of nations' schools. But the full picture proves that assumption to be false.

One of the most damning failures of the argument is that rigorous research by Gerald Bracey has shown us little positive correlations between measured educational quality and the strength of any nation's economy. This is good political discourse, but the evidence isn't there.

The call to recruit the best and brightest students (as other top countries do, they always add) is also a compelling charge that falls apart when placed against evidence. Studies, again, have failed to show that such a simple process in fact achieves what we would expect.

Finally, the persistent refrain praising Finland and Denmark as "countries leading the pack in the tests that measure these skills" offers yet another simplistic conclusion (such as the one above about Mississippi) that is compelling but incomplete.

Finland and Denmark (according to studies from UNICEF in 2005 and 2007) have childhood poverty rates of 2.8% and 2.4% respectively, while the U.S. childhood poverty rate is 21.9%.

Further, Finland's entire population is only 5 million people, while the U.S. school system educates 50 million children with 3.2 million teachers. In short, as with Mississippi and SC, the full picture about populations reveals a "few data points" as being more about misleading than illuminating.

Do we need better schools and do our children deserve the best teachers in every classroom possible? Of course. No one refutes either of these statements.

But these lofty goals cannot be attained as long as we refuse to acknowledge the historical pattern of social failures that are reflected in (and too often exacerbated by) our schools, such as high drop-out rates for racial minorities and children living in poverty.

Throughout the world, the full picture of any nation's schools reflect the social realities of that country; when schools appear to be failures, the facts show that social failures (the conditions of children's lives outside of school) are driving the educational data.

And we certainly will never address these social failures of the truth about our schools if our political leaders and media voices refuse even to say the word "poverty" while languishing in the simplistic manipulation of data that condemns statistics to Twain's bitter assessment over a century ago.

1 Twain's ascribing the quote to Disraeli appears to be inaccurate, but Twain's actual quote is accurate

Paul Thomas, EdD, Associate Professor

Furman University

More on our "bad" math scores

Published in San Jose Mercury News (November 16).

Is it true that "U.S. lags other wealthy nations in higher math" (Page B1, Nov. 11)?

Studies show that middle-class American children attending well-funded schools score near the top of the world in math. American average scores are unspectacular because a high percentage of American school children live in poverty (20 percent; Sweden has 3 percent).

Also, some countries inflate their scores by excluding many children of poverty from taking the test. This does not happen in the United States.

Finally, the Stanford study only considered the percentage, not the number of students reaching the top level. Several countries that did better than the United States have small populations (e.g., Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Iceland). The United States had 25 percent of the world's top achievers on the 2009 PISA science test. China had 1 percent.

Stephen Krashen

Gates, Duncan, Friedman: Connecting the Dopes

Kevin Lamarque/Reuters (I would call it "Invisible Strings")

As the corporate education deform ship tacks following the grounding of the Oligarchs in DC, it is clear already that their new lay line is bound to take the Billionaire Boys Club into shallow waters once more.  The new strategy is based on using the current economic Depression to leverage the continued crushing of the teaching profession by paying all-powerful school CEOs a bundle and by further cutting teacher pay, while basing the remainder on test scores. Gates has some experience with this kind of management, even before the Bankster Revolution. From 2005:

Microsoft's compensation moves have created a haves-vs.-have-nots culture. Newbies work for comfortable but not overly generous wages, while veterans have a lucrative treasure chest of stock options. Now a new pay scheme, scheduled to go into effect this fall, threatens to make the gulf even wider. If they meet incentive goals, the 120 or so vice-presidents will receive an eye-popping $1 million in salary a year, and general managers, the next level down, will get $350,000 to $550,000, according to a high-ranking source. But the rest of the staff is paid at market rates.

The pay disparity is exacerbated by Microsoft's rating system. The company uses a bell curve to rate employees in each group, so the number of top performers is balanced by the same number of underachievers. But Microsoft has a long history of hiring top-notch computer science grads and high-quality talent from the industry. Under the rating system, if a group works hard together to release a product, someone in the group has to get a low score for every high score a manager dishes out. "It creates competition in the ranks, when people really want community," says a former Microsoft vice-president. 

Still, Microsoft workers have a sweet deal when compared to public school teachers.  This from 2006:

On top of the very competitive salaries and perks, the health care and benefits package, which is 100% free for all full time employees, easily adds $20K to an average mid-level professional's salary at Microsoft. Still need more convincing that this is a company you should pursue for long-term employment? Check out these additional perks:

Investment Benefits - Savings Plus 401(k) Plan -Defer up to 50% of pretax salary dollars. Company matches 50 cents on every dollar to a maximum of 6% of employee contribution.
Employee Stock Purchase Plan - 1% to 15% of after-tax salary to buy Microsoft stock at a 10% discount.
Group Legal Plan - Provides assistance with routine legal services such as real estate, adoption, divorce, bankruptcy, and wills.
Employee Assistance Program - Confidential counseling services for employees and family members.
Prime Program - Discount savings on products and services, including automotive services, computers and electronics, home and garden, restaurants, and travel.
Tuition Assistance Program - Reimbursement of tuition fees and textbooks for work-related courses.


Quoted directly from the Microsoft Employee website: "At Microsoft, people are the source of our energy. Creative people from all types of backgrounds, bringing passion and new ideas, meeting challenges, and realizing their potential. Our benefits plan and resources are designed to keep our most important assets - our employees - healthy, happy, and moving ahead at optimal speed. Microsoft benefits are generous and personalized; to give our employees the coverage they need to keep them healthy and happy."

Now, let's take a closer look at two of the most common occupations at Microsoft -

Software Design Engineer

Software design engineers work in a supportive network, sharing a passion for pushing the limits of technology in order to enable customers. The work completed by SDE's at Microsoft influence the lives of millions. Some duties include coding and designing new software, and constant team collaboration to create and build products. Annual Salary: $107,300 USD plus full benefis.

Administrative Assistant

An administrative assistant is involved in a wide array of tasks and projects including event planning, customer liaison, and website updating. This position provides an opportunity to take action, use strong problem-solving skills to bring about change, and make a positive impact. Annual Salary: $47,000 US plus full benefits

Prerequisites: Some office experience, complimented by an ability to use email and Office suite of products. Possess strong time management and team building skills. Knowledge of basic website management skills is considered a strong asset.

Polish up your resume, press your best interview garb and check out the Microsoft website. Currently, there are more than 300 openings posted nationwide and you can conveniently apply online.

Now this past week the real Secretary of Education, Bill Gates, sent out his flunky secretary, Arne Duncan, to talk about getting more "bang for the buck" as a way to push for further teacher bashing and the further basing of teacher pay and job security on test scores.  Meanwhile, the puppetmaster, himself, was in Louisville spouting the same message to state school officials:

School systems will have to find the money for merit pay from within existing budgets, Gates said. He suggested shifting money set aside for rewarding teachers on the basis of seniority or from those who attain advanced degrees. To study and develop effective ways to award merit pay, the Gates foundation is investing $290 million over seven years in the Tampa, Florida; Memphis, Tennessee; and Pittsburgh school districts, as well as a charter-school consortium in Los Angeles. . . .

. . . .Schools may also save money by increasing class size, Gates said. U.S. student-teacher ratios dropped to 15-to-1 today from 26-to-1 in 1960, without improving student results, according to the foundation. Schools would save more than $10,000 per classroom by increasing class size by four pupils. They could use the money to pay the best teachers more, according to the foundation. . . . 

Now what we know about teacher pay now before these proposed "reforms" is that teacher pay is woefully inadequate already, and one of the small tangible rewards that teachers have counted on in the past is the step increase built into salary schedules across the nation.  As an example, below is a salary schedule for 2010-2011 from St. Louis, MO.  

First off, 14 percent of the beginner's $37.5K salary goes into a state retirement plan, whose eventual payouts are being slashed each year.  So the real beginning salary before other deductions is 32,250.  And Missouri teachers, like teachers in a number of other states, do not pay Social Security, which means, of course, that they will not collect it, either.  From a piece earlier this year in the Post-Dispatch:

Unveiled at last week's work session, the draft aims to reduce pensions for teachers hired after June 30, 2013, by roughly 15 to 20 percent, Yoakum said.

For example, after 30 years of service, current teachers draw 75 percent of their compensation, which includes salary and board-paid health insurance, as a pension. Under the proposal, new teachers would draw 60 percent of salary and insurance after 30 years. That would drop the pension for a $60,000-a-year teacher to $36,000 annually, down from $45,000.

Note, too, that after 10 years of teaching in some of those challenging schools in America, a St. Louis teacher makes the same as a starting administrative assistant at Microsoft in 2007.

DEGREE	STEP	ANNUAL
BA	A	37,500.00
	B	38,500.00
	C	39,000.00
	D	39,400.00
	E	40,153.00
	F	42,040.00
	G	43,467.00
	H	44,771.00
	I	46,115.00
	J	47,360.00
	K	50,358.00
	L	55,570.00

Bill Gates and Arne Duncan want to get rid of these meager step increases by eliminating them entirely.  They want teacher raises (in St. Louis or Syracuse or anywhere else) to be based on student standardized test scores.  And they want to increase class size at the same time.  

Of course, the Oligarchs' ultimate solution is to turn both St. Louis and Syaracuse and every other urban system into segregated corporate welfare charter school systems, where charter CEOs can be paid hundreds of thousand per year like Canada, Moskowitz, and New Orleans corporate welfare queen, Kathy Reidlander, all the while doing away entirely with salary schedules and due process protections in hiring and firing.  

 

In North Carolina, where the charter cap just came off after a sweep by Republicans at the state level, one newly elected pol is already crowing about all the money that will saved when the state goes charter:

"Charter schools just make sense," explained Senator Elect Goolsby.  "They operate on 70 cents out of every dollar that go to the government run public schools and they give parents choice and education freedom.  They do everything great and they do it at 70 cents on the dollar."

What part of that 30 cents on the dollar that does not come from eliminating school libraries, art, music, drama, sports, etc. comes from cuts in teacher pay (as documented by an AFT nationwide study in 2007 that found that "the average charter school teacher salary was $41,106--nearly $10,000 less than that for traditional public school teachers." 

 

Now at the other prominent orifice of this corporate reform monster plops the chief middle brow scholar of all things corporate, Tom Friedman.  And while Mr. Friedman may be able to paint a convincing canvas of a Lexus under an olive tree, Gates has provided him now with an even more difficult picture to render: one that shows how these crushing realities and punishing planned funding "reforms" can be put alongside the ethereal rhetoric of building a teaching profession equal to that of Finland. The op-ed title, itself, "Teaching for America," mirrors the thought disorder that Friedman exhibits in this smelly gush of mental diarrhea:

Duncan’s view is that challenging teachers to rise to new levels — by using student achievement data in calculating salaries, by increasing competition through innovation and charters — is not anti-teacher. It’s taking the profession much more seriously and elevating it to where it should be. There are 3.2 million active teachers in America today. In the next decade, half (the baby boomers) will retire. How we recruit, train, support, evaluate and compensate their successors “is going to shape public education for the next 30 years,” said Duncan. We have to get this right.

To label such bullshit as fanciful would be flattering.  What it is, in fact, is an insult to the capacity, even, of any of the unfortunate psychologically-sterilized borderline illiterates that the segregated corporate charter is likely to turn out with a teacher corps built on ignorance, rather than knowledge and skill and professional competence.  Do these fools think anyone is believing this stuff besides the corporate media's editorial boards?

Avoiding a Return to the Dark Ages of Democracy

On Tuesday the limos will be lined up with their motors running outside some undisclosed Manhattan location while Bloomberg's hedge funders oversee voting by the hand-picked pawns and patsies chosen to sign off on the State waiver that is required for a non-educator with no credentials to become head of the largest ostensibly-public education system in America.

It is the new Gilded Age fully realized, and champagne corks are popping in every penthouse suite of Manhattan as another cold dark winter settles in for the surrounding millions of unemployed who will be trying to keep the lights on this holiday season, even as the purchased politicians try to pull the plug on unemployment and offer the wealthy another tax cut.

A hearing for Cathy Black?  A public hearing?  You've got to be kidding--no one wants to go back to the Dark Ages of democracy, especially when there are still plenty of public institutions to be disrupted and turned into corporate welfare enterprises to benefit the mega-rich.

An excellent piece by Billy Wharton:

Charter schools have had something of a coming out party lately. While public education supporters have loudly opposed Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s appointment of Cathie Black as Schools Chancellor, charter school owners have run a very public campaign in support of Black and the Mayor.  Charters are privately owned and publicly funded enterprises that have taken to combining splashy media appearances with behind the scenes influence to shape many of the decisions that effect public education.

Bloomberg’s bypassing of democratic norms such as public hearings, town hall meetings or a transparent selection process allowed the charter school owners to appear as authoritative sources in the realm of public opinion.  This was, however, something more like an echo chamber since the charters were in on the Cathie Black appointment from day one.

The Charter Schools Speak!
Chief among the charter spokespeople is Deborah Kenny, the founder and CEO of the Harlem Village Academies.  Kenny squared off with New York Public Advocate Bill DeBlasio on the popular FOX morning show Good Day New York after Bloomberg announced the Black appointment.

DeBlasio made the rather tepid demand that a public hearing be held where Black could lay out her vision for the school system and take questions from opponents.  Kenny wasn’t having it.

She called the proposals that Black have a background in education “extremely disrespectful to teachers” who, she argued, didn’t need pedagogical direction from above.  In addition, a hearing, “takes us back into the Dark Ages” before Mayoral control where everyone had an opinion, but nothing was done.  Kenny described Black as “an excellent leader” and emphatically stated that she trusted Bloomberg’s judgment.

Not surprisingly, DeBlasio caved quickly by swearing allegiance to Mayoral control.  He then followed this by saying that he himself was not opposed to the Black appointment per se.  He just wanted to hear her present her ideas.  So much for the opposition.

The FOX News anchor was a bit feistier.  He pushed Kenny by indicating that appointees at the Federal level also face public confirmation hearings where they are forced to lay out their plans.  A snide smile from Kenny was followed by, “And how much do we get done at the Federal government level?”  Sensing he had gone too far out on a liberal branch, the anchor recoiled.

Kenny was successful in tying the appointment to the larger issue of Mayoral control, demonizing an attempt at public accountability and staking her claim as an authority capable of evaluating such an issue.

When the Privatizers Attack!
Eva Moskowitz, CEO of the Harlem Success Academy, took a different tact on the Black appoint by choosing to lay out the charter’s vision of the future in print.  The debate offered Moskowitz an opportunity for mass ideological education, charter style.

Drawing on claims that presented Black as a “no-nonsense leader” and “bold manager,” Moskowitz presented a “to-do” list in a Daily News op-ed.  Top of the list, no surprises here, is “parent choice.”  In charter school new-speak this means even more privatization of the public education system by opening up the number of charters that are available.

The second was even more openly ideological with a few dashes of racial overtones thrown in.  In Moskowitz’s mind, “middle-class parents” want in on the charter school craze, but these institutions mostly exist in “low-income communities.”  Expanding charters is her next step following “our focus on crime in the 1990s made the city more livable.”  This could “take city living to the next level.”  Presumably, white flighters from the suburbs would roar back into the city once the charter schools clean things up educationally.

The final points on the list involve a direct assault on public schools, public school teachers and the United Federation of Teachers (UFT).  “Charter schools,” she argued, “need to be treated like the public schools they truly are… [not]… routinely targeted and attacked as private entities.”  She called for increased funding per-pupil to make the public and charter schools equivalent, a move that would certainly bankrupt the system and shift the advantages even more in the direction of charters.

Finally, Moskowitz urged Black to confront the UFT.  She presented the union contract as serving to, “prevent the city from attracting and retaining talented educators who want schools organized around teaching and learning, not the interests of grownups.”  Presumably, grownup interests include trivialities such as healthcare, vacation and job security.  Are there any talented educators that are not concerned about these issues?

Autocratic City Hall – Where the Charter Schools Breed
While Moskowitz and Kenny took their conservative message to the masses via the media, Geoffrey Canada, the CEO of Harlem Children’s Zone, worked in place more familiar to charter school owners – the political shadows of City Hall politics.  Canada admitted that he was the only “educator” consulted about the Black appointment by Mayor Bloomberg.  No surprise since the Mayor recently described Canada as “the most important living New Yorker.”

Despite the revelation, Canada still played it close to the vest in an interview with the New York Times.  He refused to relay any details regarding his conversation with the Mayor and towed the company line by saying he was “thrilled” by the choice while deflecting notions that he himself had been a leading candidate.

Then again, Canada has bigger fish to fry then the New York political scene has to offer.  He has vaulted himself onto a national stage as a leading voice for “educational reform” in the form of charter school privatization.  The heavily pro-charter documentary “Waiting for Superman” has solidified his national profile and open the door for presentations such as recent one made at the US Department of Education.

Tea Partiers in Suits?
Kenny, Moskowitz and Canada are the public faces of a deeply conservative political force in New York City.  Flush with funds hijacked from the public sector and skilled at manipulating terms like “reform” and “empowerment,” these are not your Tea Party type conservatives.  Nonetheless, the goals seem quite similar – annihilate the public sector, break the strength of unions and exert political authority outside of democratic norms.

They have clearly found a champion in Cathie Black, a corporate manager skilled at asset stripping, downsizing and violating rights on a local and global basis.  The social power of the charters has been exercised in her defense.
The hope is that the sheer arrogance of this maneuver by Bloomberg will awaken some spirit of resistance amongst the people of this city who are served by the public schools.  If not, the trends toward privatization and autocratic political authority will accelerate, leaving behind students in increasingly desperate need of a good education and a society in equally urgent need of grassroots democratic renewal. . . .

Do read on.

Bloomberg Is Not Tone Deaf: He Simply Doesn't Give a Rat's Ass About What the Public Thinks

With the appointment in jeopardy for the Prince's personnel-slashing expert, the only plutocratic thing to do: stack the State panel to make sure there is no wavering on the dreaded waiver vote for Cathy Black.   From the NYTimes:

New York State’s top education official on Friday named an advisory panel of eight experts, at least half of them with strong connections to the Bloomberg administration, to help him decide whether to approve Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s controversial choice to run the city’s school system.

Three panelists selected by David M. Steiner, the state education commissioner, worked as senior officials at the city’s Department of Education.

One of those three now works at a foundation that was, for many years, the vehicle for Mr. Bloomberg’s personal charitable donations.

A fourth panelist is the head of a museum that has received almost half a million dollars from Mr. Bloomberg in donations since he took office.
. . . .
The panel is scheduled to hold its first, and probably only, meeting on Tuesday in private in New York City.  Education officials say that only the panelists, the commissioner and staff members will attend. . . .

It would be great to see 10,000 voters in the street outside the meeting.  Oh, I forgot, this is an undisclosed location.

Learning About KIPP: Lesson 3, Social Justice in Blackface

Update November 22, 2015:  My new book, Work Hard, Be Hard: Journeys through "No Excuses" Teaching is available now for pre-publication ordering.  It will be published February 2016.

Below is Part 3 of this chapter on KIPP.  Here are links to Parts One and Two.

. . . . KIPP’s organizational compliance model

In response to an extensive New York Times Magazine article by Paul Tough (2006) that lavishly praised KIPP and its methods, researcher Howard Berlak (2006) reported at the online discussion group, Assessment Reform Network (ARN), his recent own visit to a KIPP school in San Francisco:

When I was there children who followed all the rules were given points that could be exchanged for goodies at the school store. Those who resisted the rules or were slackers wore a large sign pinned to their clothes labeled "miscreant." Miscreants sat apart from the others at all times including lunch, were denied recess and participation in all other school projects and events.

. . . . I've spent many years in schools. This one felt like a humane, low security prison or something resembling a locked-down drug rehab program for adolescents run on reward and punishments by well meaning people. Maybe a case can be made for such places, but I cannot imagine anyone (including the Times reporter) sending their kids there unless they have no other acceptable options. What is most disturbing is the apparent universal belief by KIPP staff and partisans that standardized tests scores are the singular and most important measure of a truly good education.

While reporters like Paul Tough and Jay Mathew would, no doubt, balk at Berlak’s comparison to a prison, low security though it may be, their own descriptions of KIPP’s harshness are not inconsistent with what Berlak found, and the documentary reports of others (Smith, 2005; Brancaccio, 2007) offer visual evidence that readers may judge for themselves in terms the Berlak’s accuracy.  As noted below, even researchers friendly to the KIPP cause have found this picture to be accurate as well.

KIPP-notizing

            The three weeks that KIPP students spend in summer school is devoted to an intensive socialization and enculturation process for new students soon to begin fifth grade, and for other students who are learning the compliance demands of the next grade level.  New students must learn the SLANT rules, which means to “sit up straight, look and listen, ask and answer questions, nod to show understanding, [and] track the speaker” (Browne 2008, 58). They must learn that any rule infraction will bring an instant corrective response, and they must learn that the smallest misdeed will be no more tolerated than the most egregious offense.  New recruits practice walking, getting off the bus, sitting in the cafeteria, and going to the bathroom the KIPP way.  Students must learn that KIPP rules apply inside and outside of school.  “Miscreants” must learn, for instance, that isolation and ostracism from the KIPP family is total as long as the punishment lasts, and children who talk to “miscreants” at or away from school risk the same punishment if apprehended.   In fact, it becomes the duty of other students to report offenders who are associating in any way with “miscreants.”  If they do not, they, too, risk the same punishment.  New recruits, then, learn compliance through the exercise of coercive power and constant surveillance.

New students must also learn by the remunerative power of the “paycheck,” and at KIPP, the “paycheck” accompanies student at all times, thus offering any teacher a handy way to keep track of student academic and behavioral performance in other classes, which may cause dollars to be added to or subtracted from a student’s paycheck (Jones 2004, 38-39).  At the end of each week, students may use accumulated KIPP dollars to buy KIPP gear or candy in the school store, or they may apply earnings toward future “field lesson”[i] participation.  At the completion of the three weeks of intense KIPP-notizing, students are properly tuned for the culminating normative power exercise embodied in the ritual to grant the KIPP uniform shirt (Browne 2008, 58).  This symbolic reward and acknowledgement of new students becoming part of the KIPP team or KIPP family marks the conclusion of the initial indoctrination into a new school life that will be characterized by “choosing” total compliance or, else, an abbreviated enrollment. Some uniform shirts will carry the message, “Work Hard, Be Nice;” other will read, “No Shortcuts, No Excuses.”

As reported in the New York Times Magazine, Dr. Martin Seligman’s influence has been and continues to be central in shaping the “non-cognitive” behaviors described by the KIPP compliance model as self-control, adaptability, and patience (Tough 2006):

Toll and Levin are influenced by the writings of a psychology professor from the University of Pennsylvania named Martin Seligman, the author of a series of books about positive psychology. Seligman, one of the first modern psychologists to study happiness, promotes a technique he calls learned optimism, and Toll and Levin consider it an essential part of the attitude they are trying to instill in their students. Last year, a graduate student of Seligman’s named Angela Duckworth published with Seligman a research paper that demonstrated a guiding principle of these charter schools: in many situations, attitude is just as important as ability.

Not mentioned in Tough’s laudatory piece on KIPP and the bold reformers who back KIPP are the historic experiments conducted by Dr. Martin Seligman in the 1960s and 1970s that demonstrated “animals receiving electric shocks, which they had no ability to prevent or avoid, were unable to act in subsequent situations where avoidance or escape was possible” (Gale Research 1998).  Dr. Seligman’s unexpected finding brought behavioral assumptions in psychology face to face with a phenomenon that behaviorism could not explain, a phenomenon Seligman termed “learned helplessness.” Dr. Seligman’s role in developing the KIPP instructional model surely deserves further investigation, and central to that research should be this question: how does one tell the difference between a manifestation of learned helplessness and a display of self-control, or self-regulation, particularly when the depressive effects of learned helplessness could be masked by continual ministrations of its antidote, “learned optimism,” through the happiness training (Hedges 2009) of positive psychology?

And so it is, then, that KIPP children are initiated into a state that may be easily mistaken for learned helplessness if it were not for the KIPP promotional literature (Tough, 2006) that labels it “self-control.”  However we choose to characterize the resulting submissive detachment that these KIPP children exhibit, it is achieved by unrelenting and constant surveillance, harsh and sure verbal castigation, public humiliation and labeling, manipulative reinforcement, and ostracizing isolation. From this depressive state of total dependency, KIPP then applies ample and on-going doses of Dr. Seligman’s (Seligman 2007) “learned optimism” techniques that aim to instill resilience and to temper reactions to the unalterable compliance mechanisms by encouraging the illusion of individual choice. By doing so, any anger or resentment among students arising out of punishments becomes internalized and accepted as the resulting consequences of improper individual choices and actions, rather than being directed outward toward questioning the organizational structure of total control and constant surveillance. 

            Students are converted, then, from potentially bad actors to good audiences, from recalcitrant resistors to eager, hard workers, from a former state of victimization to a kind of delusional empowerment masking the full embrace of total submission to KIPP compliance demands. And if things don't work out for these children in terms of not working hard enough or being nice enough to survive in KIPP, as is the case for over half the children in the Bay Area KIPP schools, then perhaps they will at least have learned along the way that they can blame no one but themselves for their own shortcomings and  failure. No excuses. No shortcuts. Work hard, be nice.  Hedges (2009) sums it up this way for those whose efforts fail to attract the best things in life, which is the promise that positive psychology makes to those who try hard enough or wish hard enough to earn that attraction: “for those who run into the hard walls of reality, the ideology has the pernicious effect of forcing the victim to blame him or herself for his or her pain or suffering” (119).

As long as the focus remains on fixing the insides of children's heads while ignoring the conditions that these kids must return to after their 10 hour days of working hard and being nice in their apartheid schools, all manner of indoctrination and extraordinary educational renditions may be deemed necessary and appropriate to achieve KIPP goals. At its unacknowledged core, KIPP remains an intervention aimed at cognitive and behavioral control that occurs when we use the happy talk manipulations of corporate psychology as a means to turn poor minority children into the white Ivy League teachers' version of middle class children. In the meantime, poor children are taught to turn away from their communities, rather than learning to change them by challenging the system of privilege that now proclaims their liberation while embracing a renewed form of segregated confinement. The KIPP charter phenomenon and its imitators represent the corporate colonization[ii] of urban America, with all the zeal that we might expect from missionaries looking to save souls by shaping their converts to openly accept the omnipotent forces emanating from the Market’s invisible hand.

Even though our history should save us from shock, it remains, nonetheless, a breathtaking expression of blind hubris and Orwellian irony that the wealthiest in our society should come to embrace KIPP’s self-serving educational shortcut as the preferred way to pay down our vast educational debt to those oppressed by poverty and discrimination for the past 400 years.  The longer KIPP’s abusive and extreme measures are allowed to function as a palliative, or excuse, for our society’ refusal to act against urban poverty, apartheid schools, and racism, the closer that this dominant culture comes to the forced moral bankruptcy that awaits those societies that proclaim equality while practicing torturous interventions against the children of its least equal citizens as an inexpensive shortcut to preserving the façade of equal opportunity.

For white philanthro-capitalists, the KIPP charter schools offer an urban reform solution based on non-stop behavioral control, cultural sterilization, and psychological character interventions aimed at producing compliant, delusional, and hard-working children who will offer “proof” that the effects of poverty can be overcome by interventions less expensive[iii] and easier to control than the public schools.  KIPP, then, remains the billionaire philanthropist version of social and education reform on the cheap, where a dubious economy of scale is more important than the children who are sacrificed through the unethical and experimental excesses that are imposed under the shredded banner of equal access to quality education.  There are humane ways to run schools and increase academic achievement at the same time. KIPP is not one of them. In fact, KIPP and its imitators represent the antithesis to education reform based on caring and fairness, quality and equality.  As such, KIPP offers us a policy version of social justice in blackface, an institutionalized caricature whose legacy and ultimate cost we cannot yet begin to fathom.

---

[i] KIPP prefers “field lesson” (Mathews 2009) to field trip,” as “field lesson” conveys to students the fact that the larger world is an extension of the KIPP classroom, thus reinforcing the bubble effect that helps to sustain the total control that the KIPP organization demands of its charges.

[ii] Where KIPP and most of its “no excuses” knockoffs limit their direct indoctrination to character building and psychological control, The American Indian Public Charter School in Oakland openly disparages multiculturalism and openly advances the philosophy of Milton Friedman.  Consider this teacher recruitment ad from the AIPCS website that became part of a story (Landsberg 2009) in the Los Angeles Times: "We are looking for hard working people who believe in free market capitalism. . . . Multicultural specialists, ultra liberal zealots and college-tainted oppression liberators need not apply."  And this ad is not intended as a self-parody.

[iii] An AFT report (2008) found that charter schools in the forty states that have charter laws pay teachers, on average, 20 percent less public schools.  This is a rarely acknowledged reason that politicians of both parties find charters so attractive, especially for the urban poor.

 References for Lessons 1-3:

References

Alter, Jonathan.  2008.  Bill Gates goes to school.  Newsweek, December 6.

         http://www.newsweek.com/id/172572 (accessed July 3, 2009).

American Federation of Teachers.  2008.  Survey and analysis of teacher salary trends 2007.  Washington, DC:  American Federation of Teachers.

         http://www.aft.org/salary/2007/download/AFT2007SalarySurvey.pdf (accessed July 23, 2009).

Anyon, Jean.  2005.  Radical possibilities:  Public policy, urban education, and a new social movement.  New York:  RoutledgeFalmer.

Barton, Paul.  2003.  Parsing the achievement gap:  Baselines for tracking progress. Princeton:  Educational Testing Service.

         http://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/PICPARSING.pdf (accessed March 2, 2009).

Barton, Paul and Richard Coley.  2009. Parsing the achievement gap II. Princeton: Educational Testing Service.

         http://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/PICPARSINGII.pdf (accessed June 1, 2009).

Berliner, David.  2005.  Our impoverished view of reform.

         http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/Resources/Berliner.pdf (accessed January 30, 2009).

Black, Edwin.  2003.  War against the weak:  Eugenics and America’s campaign to create a master race.  New York: Dialog Press.

Burrell,Clay. 2009.  Framing teachers: Bill Gates’ Disturbing TED rhetoric.

         http://education.change.org/blog/view/framing_teachers_bill_gates_disturbing_ted_rhetoric (accessed June 1, 2009).

Brancaccio, David.  2007.  The report card and lending a hand. NOW with David

           Brancaccio.

           http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/325.html (accessed February 15,2009).

Browne,  Lamont West.  2008.  A character education approach to founding a KIPP college preparatory charter school.  EdD executive position paper, University of Delaware.

Carnoy, Martin, Rebecca Jacobsen, Lawrence Mishel, and Richard Rothstein. 2006.  Worth the Price? Weighing the evidence on charter school achievement.  Education, Finance, and Policy 1(1): 151-161. Posted Online March 29, 2006.

         http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/edfp.2006.1.1.151 (accessed March 2, 2009).

Dewey, John.  1938/1998.  Experience and education, 60^th anniversary edition.  Indianapolis, IN:  Kappa Delta Pi Publications.

Duxbury, Sarah.  2008.  Businesses invest in charter school innovation.  San Francisco Business Times, July  18-24.

         http://www.kippbayarea.org/files/2008_07_18_SF%20Business%20Times.pdf (accessed March 9, 2009).

Etzioni, Amitai.  1961.  A comparative analysis of complex organizations:  On power, involvement, and their correlates.  New York:  Free Press.

Gale Research.   1998.  Learned helplessness.  Encyclopedia of childhood and adolescence.  Farmington, MI:  Gale Research.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_g2602/is_0003/ai_2602000349/ (accessed July 23, 2009).

Gladwell, Malcolm.  2008.  Outliers:  The story of success.  New York:  Little, Brown and Company.

Grannan, Caroline.  2009. Excerpts from report on Fresno KIPP school: Abuse, cheating alleged.  Examiner.com, February 21.

http://www.examiner.com/x-356-SF-Education-Examiner%7Ey2009m2d21-Excerts-from-report-on-Fresno-KIPP-school-Abuse-cheating-alleged (accessed March 23, 2009).

Hedges, Chris.  2009a. America is in need of a moral bailout.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/print/20090323_america_is_in_need_of_a_moral_bailout/ (accessed June 20, 2009).

Hedges, Chris.  2009b.  Empire of illusion:  The end of literacy and the triumph of spectacle.  New York:  Nation Books.

KIPP Foundation.  2009.  Five Pillars. KIPP Foundation.

http://www.kipp.org/01/fivepillars.cfm (accessed June 1, 2009).

Horn, Jim.  2003.  LEAP-ing toward accountability?  Ideology, practice and the voices of Louisiana educators.  Qualitative Report 8(2):  224-250.

http://www.nova.edu/ssss/QR/QR8-2/horn.pdf (accessed January 12, 2009).

Jones, Sarah.  2004.  Studying “success” at an “effective” school:  How a nationally recognized public school overcomes racial, ethnic and social boundaries and creates a culture of success. PhD diss., University of California, Santa Barbera.

Kozol, Jonathan.  2005.  The shame of the nation: The restoration of apartheid schooling in America.  New York: Crown Publishers.

Ladson-Billings, Gloria.  2006.  From the achievement gap to the education debt:  Understanding achievement in U. S. schools.  Educational Researcher 35(7):

3-12.

         http://aera.net/uploadedFiles/Publications/Journals/Educational_Researcher/3507/02ERv35n7_Ladson-Billings.pdf (accessed June 1, 2009).

Landsberg, Mitchell.  2009.   Lessons from Oakland’s American Indian Public Charter Schools. Los Angeles Times,  June 1.

http://www.splicetoday.com/on-campus/lessons-from-oakland-s-american-indian-public-charter-schools (accessed June 22, 2009).

Lombardo,  Paul.  Eugenic sterilization laws.  Cold Springs Harbor, NY:  Dolan DNA Learning Center, Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory.

http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/html/eugenics/essay8text.html (accessed June 11, 2009)

Marquard, Odo.  1987.  Farewell to matters of principle: Philosophical studies.  New York: Oxford University Press.

Mathews, Jay.  2008.  Inside the Bay Area KIPP schools.  Washington Post, September 19.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/19/AR2008091900978.html (accessed March 1, 2009).

Mathews, Jay.  2009.  Work hard, be nice:  How two inspired teachers created the most promising schools in America.  New York:  Algonquin Books.

Mosle, Sara.  2009.  The educational experiment we really need:  What the Knowledge Is Power Program has yet to prove.  Slate, March 23.

http://www.slate.com/id/2214253/pagenum/all/#p2 (accessed April 20, 2009).

NCES.  2008.  NAEP 2008 trends in academic progress.  Washington, DC:  U. S. Department of Education.

http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pdf/main2008/2009479.pdf (accessed July 1, 2009)

National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.  2008.  Measuring up 2008:  The national report card on higher education.

http://measuringup2008.highereducation.org/print/NCPPHEMUNationalRpt.pdf (accessed July 11, 2009).

Perlstein, Linda.  2007.  Tested:  One American school struggles to make the grade.  New York:  Henry Holt and Company.

Rosen, Christine.  2004.  Preaching eugenics:  Religious leaders and the American eugenics movement.  New York:  Oxford University Press, USA.

Rothstein, Richard.  1998.  The way we were: The myths and realties of America’s student achievement.  New York: Century Foundation Press.

Rothstein, Richard.  2004.  Class and schools:  Using social, economic, and educational reform to close the black-white achievement gap.  New York:  Teachers College Press.

Seligman, Martin.  2007.  Learned optimism:  How to change your mind and your life.  New York:  Vintage.

Smith, Hedrick.  2005.  Making Schools Work:  KIPP.  Public Broadcasting System:  New York.

http://www.pbs.org/makingschoolswork/atp/transcript.html (accessed January 23, 2009).

Teach For America.  2007 annual report:  Teach for America.

http://www.teachforamerica.org/assets/documents/TeachForAmerica_Annual_Report_2007_000.pdf (accessed January 2, 2009).

Thernstrom, Abigail, and Stephan Thernstrom.  2003.  No Excuses:  Closing the racial gap in learning.  New York:  Simon and Schuster.

Selden, Steven.  1999.  Inheriting shame:  The story of eugenics and racism in America.  New York:  Teachers College Press.

Tough, Paul.  2006.  What it takes to make a student.  New York Times Magazine, November 26.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/magazine/26tough.html (accessed June 1, 2009).

Tyack, David.  2004.  Seeking common ground:  Public schools in a diverse society.  Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press.

Tyack, David, and Larry Cuban, 1995.  Tinkering toward utopia:  A century of public school reform.  Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press.

Vanneman, Alan, Linda Hamilton, Janet Anderson, and Taslima Rahman.  2009.  Achievement gaps:  How black and white students inpublic schools perform in mathematics and reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.  Washington, DC:  U.S. Department of Education.

http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pdf/studies/2009455.pdf (accessed August 9, 2009).

Vogell, Heather.  2009.  Charter school faces withdrawals over punishment.  Atlanta Journal-Constitution, March 22.

http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/atlanta/stories/2009/03/22/kipp_school_withdrawals.html (accessed July 2, 2009).

Woodworth, Katrina, Jane David, Roneeta Guha, Haiwan Wang, and Alejandra Lopez-Torkas.  2008.  San Francisco Bay Area KIPP schools:  A study of early implementation and achievement.  Menlo Park, CA:  SRI International.

http://policyweb.sri.com/cep/publications/SRI_ReportBayAreaKIPPSchools_Final.pdf (accessed March 23, 2009).

NCTE passes sense of the house motion disapproving of national standards

Sense of the House Motion

Passed, November 19, 2010

National Council of Teachers of English

The NCTE expresses disapproval of the concept of national standards to be applied to all students and of the specifics of those written by the National Governor's Association.

NCTE will alert its members to the dangers of expending major efforts on standards and tests, which make meaningful teaching impossible.

Submitted by:

Stephen Krashen

Carol Mikoda

Susan Ohanian

Joanne Yatvin