A reader, who requested anonymity, posted the following comment:
“How closely did Bennett follow in Michelle Rhee’s footsteps.” One of the first things that happened during Rhee’s reign of terror in D.C. was that she announced that there was a multi-million dollar shortfall in the education budget. Shortly thereafter, she fired 241 D.C.P.S teachers, citing the need to make huge budget cuts. After the firings, the monies were suddenly found. Rhee and her CFO, Noah Webman, said that the problem with the missing millions was “accounting mistake.”
Once the lost money was restored to the education coffer’s books, Rhee went on a hiring spree, filling many vacancies with….you guessed it!…Teach for America teachers.
Later, Webman said, under oath, in a hearing with the DC city council, that he and Rhee had devised the “accounting error.” Currently, one of the teachers fired is pursuing a fraud charge against Rhee. This past April, a DC judge has said that there is evidence enough for the case to move forward.
A cursory look at other states that are being pushed into heavy ed reform shows a curious pattern…
*Put a dubiously qualified person in as the state’s superintendent (or equivalent);
* Be sure that this person has enough charisma, brashness, wizardry, whatever to sell the public on the “Big Lie” that public schools are failing;
* “Misplace” massive amounts of money
*Force schools to make severe cut-backs (like the arts) that the public sees as failures in the schools
*Find the money….blow it on under-educated “teachers”, charters, vouchers…whatever.
How Closely Did Bennett Follow in Rhee’s Footsteps????
Diane Ravitch's blog 
That sounds almost identical to Arlene Ackerman’s reign here in Philly. She “somehow” found Title 1 money when it was announced that all day kindergarten was on the chopping block. Now we have another “Broadie” as CEO and it seems like he’s walking the same line. It makes me sick to my stomach. –Dana
This is EXACTLY the same pattern happening in Chicago too. Rahm-pelstiltskin claimed massive budgetary shortfall and a huge decrease in public school population (due to opening so many charters), hired Brizard to be his puppet, let go of tons of teachers, then let go of Brizard but with a significant monetary payout that sonehow magically materialized. Now I bet that after school starts, there will be a MAGICAL increase in the student population and the need to hire more teachers who will just happen to be young, recent grads or TFA.
It’s the ALEC-Broad playbook, pure & simple. CPS cannot account for any money or budgets (that info. is mysteriously not available!).
And the OTHER national blame-the-victims–BTW, the CPS budget shortfall is due to the TEACHERS’ underfunded pension!
Come on guys, no one here is stupid–we all know what y’all are up to, & it’s going to STOP. Yes, WE can and we WILL!!!
Hmmm . . . sounds very much like this: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1211/69937.html
And identical to the Emanuel/Brizard/Byrd Bennett reign here in Chicago.
The invented budget crisis! The manipulated doomsday scenario! Same thing happened here in Montclair NJ when the Board of Ed declared a pending budget catastrophe a few years back, then foisted a doomsday plan of cuts, only to discover a budget surplus at end of year, and at the end of the next year, and at the end of the next year as well, 3 “surprise” surpluses in a row. We now have a parents’ group at work here to see if truth instead of truthiness can prevail. False alarms and scare tactics have long-served authoritarians whose destructive policies require a fearful stampede to set them in place.
And, of course, the unspoken truth of all this is that the kids are taking the hit and our society will suffer.
Here is another question in this article… Is Hite now in Philadelphia also following in Rhee’s footsteps with massive firings, desperate pleas regarding need for money etc… Will we find that after all the firings and cut-backs and delayed school openings that suddenly money will appear and low and behold a whole new two year batch of TFA’s will be hired to fill the spots of the experienced fired teachers? We shall see how the Philly soap opera turns out! It would not surprise me down the line if there are strong parallels here too.
Reblogged this on Transparent Christina.
Unfortunately with such large budgets, it’s very easy for them to claim “incompetence” – if I worked for a business and I let 300 million sit in an account without a lick of interest for years I guarantee you someone would fire me.
Where is the accountability for delivering accurate accounting? If they didn’t hire enough budget people to manage their money, shouldn’t those in charge be held accountable?
Of course, the governor originally responsible for this travesty is long gone. That the new one signed this “return excess tax revenue” to the people bill, does raise eyebrows. He should give every penny of it back to shoring up the institutions they failed to protect.
If he instead chooses to use it on some special interest pet project, then imo it’s a huge mis-allocation of funds. Of course, it isn’t seen that way since the money was never included in the budgeting in the first place – but those institutions that bore the brunt of cuts should get respective amounts back.
Everyone says nowadays we’re doing more with less – well – sometimes you can’t do more without more money and to snipe off anything else in response is to not acknowledge that the money does make a difference.
Bennett in Rhee’s footsteps or not in her footsteps (make that “hoof steps”), both Rhee and Bennett should be investigated by the authorities (DA, police, county detectives, FBI, etc) and not by some auditing firm full of statiticians and accountants.
They have both broken the law, and it warrants a full blown investigation . . . .
The anonymous commentator has Michelle Rhee’s sequence wrong: First, during the Spring and Summer of 2009, she hired approximately 950 new teachers (with official hiring dates in mid-August). The TFA contingent was probably in the range of 75 to 100.. .
She then held a large 2009 summer school, claiming that they Council had assured her that there was enough money in the budget.
Then, in early September, claiming a suddenly discovered budget shortfall, she RIF’d 266 teachers.
Much later, it was revealed that there was no budget shortfall. Wepman took the fall.for Rhee, taking responsibility for having reported misinformation to the City Council. He resigned. Recently, he was one of the featured speakers at a NYC gathering of education investors and entrepreneurs.
I doubt if this will be covered by the American news sources. Maybe AL JAZEERA TV will be a good alternative for all the news and not just the news that the powers that be want us to know about.
You all probably know this, but Obama and Duncan’s teacher evaluation scheme came right out of the American Enterprise Institute:
http://www.governing.com/blogs/view/gov-reformers-clash-over-teacher-evaluations-and-charter-schools.html
One wonders when liberals will figure they got completely played by conservatives in “school reform.” There isn’t a single aspect of Duncan’s education policy that didn’t come out of a libertarian or conservative think tank. Not one.
It’s Alice in Wonderland time. Charters and reformers are completely running the education policy that applies to public schools, they stuck us with a ridiculous teacher evaluation scheme and now they demand charter teachers not be evaluated!
You could not make this stuff up if you tried.
You know how a public school could get out from under “school reform”? Privatize. Become a charter school.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan issued the following statement today in support of Tennessee’s decision to make changes to its teacher licensure policy:
“I want to praise Tennessee’s continuing effort to improve support and evaluation for teachers. For too long, in too many places, schools systems have hurt students by treating every teacher the same – failing to identify those who need support and those whose work deserves particular recognition. Tennessee has been a leader in developing systems that do better—and that have earned the support of a growing number of teachers. Tennessee’s new teacher licensure rules continue that effort, by ensuring that decisions on licensure are informed by multiple measures of their effectiveness in the classroom, including measures of student learning. The new system also adds reasonable safeguards to make sure any judgment about teacher performance is fair.”
Chicago schools are in chaos, Detroit schools in chaos, Philadelphia schools may not open. What is Arne Duncan concentrating on? Promoting his good friend Mr. Huffman. Last week he was promoting his good friend Mayor Bloomberg.
The cluelessness is just amazing. I’d say “out of touch” but that may be an understatement. They simply don’t live in the same world we do.
““I want to . . . is fair.”
Duncan is a lying crock of caca/mierda
Rico/from Wikipedia: Pattern of racketeering activity requires at least two acts of racketeering activity, one of which occurred after the effective date of this chapter and the last of which occurred within ten years (excluding any period of imprisonment) after the commission of a prior act of racketeering activity. The U.S. Supreme Court has instructed federal courts to follow the continuity-plus-relationship test in order to determine whether the facts of a specific case give rise to an established pattern. Predicate acts are related if they “have the same or similar purposes, results, participants, victims, or methods of commission, or otherwise are interrelated by distinguishing characteristics and are not isolated events.”
Everyone is giving Rhee too much credit. I know corporate ed reform is easier to grasp when one individual is blamed, and easier to solve because if she is gone the problem is gone. The thing all of the people mentioned in the comments share in common is affiliation with the Broad Foundation, including Rhee and Duncan (who was on the Broad Board of Directors until he became Secretary of Education). That is were the problem is. It’s much bigger than Rhee.
“Who is Eli Broad and why is he trying to destroy public education?”
http://www.defendpubliceducation.net/
Sorry this is very long, but I have a hunch that many people will want to know how the “austerity” lies that feed all those “necessary school closings” and teacher layoffs are created in the fictional propaganda offices of school districts across the USA — not just Washington D.C.
The “deficit” claims have to be reported (and accepted) as “fact” in order for the liars who are operating the “school reform” offices get away with all these attacks.
But: Let’s not give Michelle Rhee credit where she was only following a script that was previously written and perfected in — you’ll never guess — Chicago. As long ago as when Michelle Rhee was failing as a Teacher for America “teacher” and using masking (or duct) tape to maintain order in her classes, Chicago had perfected the process of “eternal austerity” in its education budgets. Every year (except one) during Arne Duncan’s term as “CEO” (2001 – 2008), Duncan held a press conference to announce that CPS was facing an enormous “deficit.” Duncan’s predecessors had been doing the same for a decade, concocting a “deficit” using what the former Board Secretary told me was their “magic number.”
That’s right — a “magic number.” According to Tom Corcoran, who first laid out the plan for me after his retirement, CPS officials would meet and decide what was needed to have a certain “deficit” (the “magic number”) and then arrange the preliminary numbers in the next year’s budget to create that “deficit.” Throughout the 1990s, the “magic number” every year was “$300 million!” That number then became a headline across the top of the front page of the Chicago Tribune, and was repeated endlessly until it was believed by everyone who was paying attention to the official version of reality.
Anyone familiar with a budget process knows how easily a “deficit” can be created in a future budge:
Overestimate expenses.
Underestimate revenues.
And this was the “Chicago Plan” from the days when MIchelle Rhee was still learning to “pass” her literature classes in high school thanks to Cliffs Notes.
Because the Chicago budget is projected for the next fiscal year, it’s difficult to challenge the magic number except based on history. The audited financial statements of Chicago’s public schools do not come out until six months after the end of the fiscal year, and that has been the first time the city has an accurate accounting of its school finances, since the lying about the magic number has been going on now for more than two decades.
Anyone interested can read the CAFR (the Comprehensive Annual Financial Report) of Chicago Public Schools, because they are public (by law) in December of each year. Unfortunately for the truth, the CAFR for a fiscal year comes out nearly two years after the BIG LIE of each magic number is created and spun to the public. Therefore, the CAFR for the current fiscal year we’re in in Chicago won’t be available until December (when it’s presented to the Board of Education members) and January (when we squeeze it out of CPS using the Freedom of Information Act). The FY 2013 CAFR will be available in December 2013, but FY 2013 ended two months ago, on June 30, 2013. And the Magic Number (another billion) was lied around and picked up by the corporate media in Chicago during the early months of 2012, during the first year of Rahm Emanuel’s Board of Education.
“Everyone” knows that Chicago’s public schools were facing a “billion dollar” deficit for the current fiscal year (FY 2014, July 1, 2013 through June 30, 2014). Everybody can read hundreds of stories from the past eight months in Chicago’s corporate media citing that figure. The New York Times repeatedly cited it, so, as most intelligent people knew, it HAD to be true.
BS.
The “Billion Dollar Deficit” was concocted the same way it always was, and then repeated over and over propaganda style in a way that would have been approved by the tyrants of the 20th Century.
One of the features of that “Billion Dollar Deficit” was that Chicago had “zeroed out” its “reserves.” That part of the big lie was part of the story told by Penny Pritzker and others on Rahm’s Board during that first year (leading up to the Chicago Teachers Strike of 2012). “Everyone” knew that CPS was facing a “Billion Dollar Deficit!” just by reading the newspapers and the quotes, from the Chicago Tribune through The New York Times. Blach Blachhhh Blahhhhhhh…
Suddenly, on July 24, 2013, CPS announced that its proposed budget had eliminated that Billion Dollar Deficit! — partly by “finding” more than $600 million in “reserves” it didn’t have. Of course, the July 24 report to the Board took place after Barbara Byrd Bennett and the Board had ordered the closing of 49 of the city’s real public schools (because of the need to save money because of that “Billion Dollar Deficit!”) and fired about 3,000 school workers (most of them, teachers) because everyone knew CPS was facing a “Billion Dollar Deficit!”
Anyone who wants to read the Power Point that shows how CPS “balanced” its new budget after telling the latest version of Magic Numbers for six months, with the help of the city’s (and nation’s) corporate media can go to the CPS Website:
http://www.cpsboe.org/meetings/meeting-videos/15
where there are videos of the presentations of the Board meetings.
In the third video, national readers can witness Tim Cawley, who currently serves as “Chief Administrative Officer” for CPS, and Barbara Byrd Bennett, who was brought to Chicago after helping destroy the public schools of Detroit, do a Power Point about that FY 2014 proposed budget. The public can also download that Power Point to have while watching the video of Cawley reading carefully from his scripts.
Cawley is just the latest in a long line of CPS officials who have presented the Magic Numbers with a straight face to an uncritical public.
Not one of the city’s corporate media noticed that a “reserve” that had been “zeroed out” supposedly 13 months earlier had not only fattened up, but reached a historic high — more than $600 million. And “everyone” who was reading the papers (including as I’ve said, The New York Times) knew that CPS had been facing a “Billion Dollar Deficit!”
The difference this year is that leaders of the Chicago Teachers Union began studying how CPS budgets in the room from which I’m writing this five years ago. We began, not with news clippings or CPS “Proposed Budget”, but with the CAFRs. Each year, we were able to track the same lies.
This year, as everyone read on the front page of The New York Times, the reason for the “Billion Dollar Deficit!” is the teacher pensions! And just in case The New York Times missed it, Tim Cawley repeated that over and over and over in his presentation the you can view on line.
But just so people reading this know, the New York Times reporters who did that front page story about the CPS “pension crisis” never called the Chicago Teachers Union or the Chicago Teachers Pension Fund to check the facts they were reporting — as “news” — from Rahm Emanuel and his allies and minions.
While it would be nice to say that Michelle Rhee was responsible for the “austerity” nonsense that drives all those teacher layoffs (and not, “pension reform”) and other “reforms” (close 49 “underutilized” schools, as in Chicago), as a matter of historical fact, one of the place that invented this whole scam was Chicago. Back when Michelle Rhee was honing her mendacity skills in elementary and high school.
Again:
All you need to reach a “Magic Number” for a “deficit” is to:
First: Underestimate revenues and
Second: Overestimate expenses…
And…
MOST IMPORTANTLY:Enjoy the services of a corporate media trained to treat a quote from an authoritative “source” (Michelle Rhee; Tim Cawley; Jean-Claude Brizard; Barbara Byrd Bennett) as if it were a “fact” even when the facts contradict the words oozing out of the mouth of the latest talking heads of “school reform.”
But you don’t have to believe me. Just read that front page story in The New York Times from a month ago about how Chicago’s schools will be broke because of the high price of all those teacher pensions. Here we go again…
Here it is, directly from the source:
School Closure Guide
Updated 9/15/2009
For more information or district contacts, email: tools@broadfoundation.org.
Click to access school-closure-guide1.pdf