Mercedes Schneider follows an interesting story.
How did it happen that “the states” agreed to create common standards?
What was the federal role?
Who led this effort?
How did it work?
Was it really led by the states?
How did it happen that the United States has national standards that so few people are aware of?
If this a good thing?
Commissioner John King made the mistake of treating parents with disrespect. He doesn’t listen. He cannot lead. He was hired to serve the public. He can’t and he won’t.
A statement just released by parent groups in New York:
New York State Allies for Public Education Calls for the Resignation of NYS Commissioner of Education John King
Billed as an opportunity to “gather information, ask questions and share concerns with NYS Commissioner of Education John King”, the NYS PTA sponsored Town Hall Meeting on the Common Core and privacy issues was anything but. After speaking uninterrupted for 1 hour and 40 minutes, Commissioner King allowed parents 20 minutes to speak. During this time, parents expressed concerns and attempted to share stories regarding the impact that the CC has already had on their children. Commissioner King repeatedly interrupted parents and refused to answer parent questions or address their concerns. Commissioner King subsequently cancelled all future scheduled town hall meetings, called concerned parents “special interests groups” and stated that the forum was “co-opted by special interests whose stated goal is to ‘dominate’ the questions and manipulate the forum,” King went on to state that “Essentially, dialogue has been denied.”
When a public official such as Commissioner King refuses to participate in the democratic process and refuses to hear the concerns of parents while simultaneously carrying out educational policies that affect thousands of children, he is no longer fit to carry out the duties of the NYS Commissioner of Education. Commissioner King, we would argue that it is because of you that “dialogue has been denied.”
According to award-winning Principal Carol Burris of South Side High School in New York, last week’s Town Hall meeting in Poughkeepsie, NY highlighted the fact that “The New York State Education Department has lost its moral authority.” Burris states. “One might imagine that if John King had first been a principal of a New York City public school, or the superintendent of a district, he would have become skilled in dealing with emotional and boisterous groups….. Leaders must listen deeply, learn and respond. They must be willing to consider alternative courses, and even in loud crowds, hear truth.”
Anthony Cody, nationally recognized educator, public speaker and writer for Education Week says, “Speaking truth to power, as these parents did, is an intoxicating thing. It delivers to both speaker and witnesses a shiver, an awakening to the fact that we do not need to suffer in silence, or allow our children to suffer without objection. Those in power may cancel future hearings, but these parents’ voices are ringing out, like a bell that cannot be un-rung.”
We would say to Commissioner King that in this age of apathy, you should be proud to represent a state where parents have taken the time to inform themselves about the current education reforms and have taken the time from their busy schedules to engage with public officials such as yourself. Aren’t these parents the kind of critically thinking, involved citizens that our public schools hope to create? We would argue that a competent leader does not run away from concerned parents, or call them a “special interest group.” Commissioner King, you are a disgrace to the field of education. It is not surprising that in NYS, your lack of teaching experience would not allow you to be granted tenure in a public school.
The NYS Commissioner of Education sends his own children to a private school, a school that is not legally bound to carry out the same testing and data sharing mandates that he is subjecting thousands of public school children to. He has stated, “I believe that every parent should have the right to choose the school that is right for their child.” Commissioner King subjects public school students to harmful practices while maintaining that parents do not have the right to refuse these mandates. This certainly does not afford all parents “the right to choose the school that is right for their child.” Commissioner King is guilty of promoting inequitable education policies that essentially create a different set of educational opportunities and experiences available to those with the means to afford private school and those who attend public school. This is an attack on the freedoms and rights that are afforded to every American citizen and on public education itself.
New York State Allies for Public Education calls for the immediate resignation of Commissioner of Education John King as he is unfit to carry out the duties of his position competently and he is no longer able to conduct himself in a manner that is consistent with the principles and ideals of the American democracy. NYSAPE urges parents, educators and concerned citizens to:
Spend 10 minutes adding the attached emails and phone numbers to your contacts
Call, email, and fax Governor Cuomo DAILY
CC all emails to Senator John Flanagan, Speaker of the House Sheldon Silver, Senator Dean Skelos, Assemblywoman Nolan and Senator Jeffrey Klein and the entire Board of Regents
Call your local Regent
Let them know that:
*New Yorkers deserve a COMPETENT leader who listens to and engages his or her constituents
*New Yorkers deserve a COMPETENT leader who can handle the concerns and dissenting opinions of educated and involved New York parents.
*John King has let abusive testing and data sharing practices dominate the implementation of the Common Core Learning Standards
*John King runs away from the public.
*John King calls concerned parents “special interest groups.”
*John King is not competent to be the NYS Commissioner of Education
Western New Yorkers for Public Education statement on canceled town hall.
Western New Yorkers for Public Education expresses its disappointment in the cancellation of a
series of town hall forums on the Common Core sponsored by the New York State PTA. Locally a
meeting was scheduled for October 24 at Williamsville North High School. Families, the ultimate
stakeholder in public education, deserve to have to their voices heard by state education officials.
“NYSED Commissioner Dr. John B. King, Jr. blamed ‘special interests’ for dominating a recent forum in
Poughkeepsie, when it was the commissioner who controlled the first hour and a half of the meeting.
When parents began to make critical statements about the impact of state education policy on their
children, Dr. King tried to interrupt the limited time allotted to the speakers,” stated Chris Cerrone,
Springville parent and Hamburg teacher.
Molly Dana, a West Seneca parent, reacted to Commissioner King’s comments “The only special
interests in the town hall meeting held in Poughkeepsie, were parents! So who is denying dialogue?
Commissioner King has canceled the rest of his town hall appearances because he doesn’t like what he
is hearing from parents. Commissioner King, every time you attempt to silence parents, our voices
only grow louder.”
Eric Mihelbergel, a KenTon parent, replied, “If John King thinks parents everywhere in the state are a
special interest group, then we are likely the largest special interest group in the history of the
world.”
“It’s disturbing to see that an official with so much power over the day to day lives of our students
and teachers will refuse to meet with concerned parents in a public setting. Commissioner King’s
tone deaf actions are having the effect of mobilizing thousands of parents to take a more vocal and
active role in advocating for their kids, in spite of NYSED’s lack of leadership and fear of ‘special
interests.’ My children are my special interest,” stated Kara Kane, SpringvilleGriffith Institute Board
of Education member and parent.
Cerrone added, “Commissioner King’s actions during the forum in Poughkeepsie showed a lack of
leadership. The commissioner’s lack of composure is a poor reflection on the New York State
Department of Education and our entire public school system.”
Western New Yorkers for Public Education calls for new leadership at NYSED that will listen to the
families of New York State. WNY4PE will be joining New York State Allies for Public Education on
Tuesday October 15 in a day of action where individuals across New York will be contacting their
elected leaders and Board of Regents members about their lack of confidence in the New York State
Education Department.
For more information visit http://www.wnyforpubliced.com
Aaron Pallas, one of our best sociologists of education, looks at the terrible scores of teachers in Syracuse.
“The summary evaluations reported by Superintendent Contreras [of Syracuse] were striking: Just two percent of Syracuse teachers were rated highly effective, and an additional 58 percent were deemed effective. Seven percent were classified as ineffective, and 33 percent as developing, categories that suggest low levels of teaching performance, the need for teacher improvement plans, and the threat of eventual dismissal. Not a single elementary or middle-school teacher in the entire district was rated highly effective.”
Pallas writes:
“I wonder how State Commissioner John King, Jr. would like it if his performance evaluation were based on the same criteria applied to teachers in Syracuse. The percentage-point increase in students statewide scoring at level 3 and 4 in ELA from 2012 to 2013? Well, that actually fell from 55 percent to 31 percent. The Commissioner gets a zero. The percentage-point increase in students scoring at level 3 and 4 in math? That fell from 65 percent to 31 percent. The Commissioner gets a zero. The percentage-point decrease in students statewide scoring at level 1 in ELA from 2012 to 2013? That actually increased from 10 percent to 32 percent. The Commissioner gets a zero. And the percentage-point decrease in students scoring at level 1 in math? That rose from eight percent to 33 percent. The Commissioner gets a zero.
Just for the heck of it, let’s also allow the Commissioner to score some points if the average teacher growth percentile across the state increased from 2012 to 2013. But because that’s constrained by definition to be 50 each year, there’s no growth there, either. Sorry, Commish! Another zero.”
Judged by the same metric, the leaders of New York State have failed.
Who will hold them accountable for imposing tests and standards for which no one was prepared?
State Commissioner John King of Néw York has created an educator evaluation system that is untested, one if those planes built in mid-air by uncertified mechanics and unlicensed engineers. If the plane crashes, too bad.
But not every teacher will be subject to King’s burden of paperwork and test-based evaluation! If you happen to work on the boot-camp no-excuses charter chain that King founded, known as Uncommon Schools, you are exempt
More proof that charter schools are not public schools. !
We previously posted Joanne Barkan’s stunning article about the way our plutocrat philanthropists are undermining democracy.
In this post, EduShyster interviews Barkan about her central theme of plutocrats-gone-wild.
An excerpt. EduShyster asks whether the billionaires–surrounded by sycophants– understand that they are not getting much ROI [return on investment] from their failed ventures, and Barkan responds:
Once upon a time these mega-foundations would set a goal and then seek out experts to do independent research to help them figure out how to achieve it. But that’s really fallen by the wayside. Today the foundations start with a preconceived notion about the social problem and its solution. And they fund researchers who are likely to design studies that will support their ideas. It’s very much as though a big philanthropist who has never been to the ballet decides to back a ballet company and says you can have all of this money—it will save your company. But there are a few rules: you can only perform Swan Lake, the orchestra can only play violins and all of your dancer have to be below 5’5”. None of this makes any sense but the “study” that the philanthropist is also funding will show that it’s a success.
When John King was booed at his first parent meeting, he got angry. He expected parents to listen to his wisdom, gleaned from his three years in a no-excuses charter school that is known for kicking out non-conforming students.
Most state superintendents understand that they are public servants, meaning they serve the public. John King thinks he was chosen to give orders to schools, teachers, principals, and superintendents. He confuses leading the State Education Department with leading a no-excuses charter school, where he can suspend or expel anyone who doesn’t follow his orders.
But the parents did not get the message. when he sternly lectured them about the glories of the Common Core and Common Core testing, the parents booed and jeered him.
He canceled all future meetings with parents so he can stay in Fortress Albany. There, his employees know how to take orders.
Mark NAISON, co-founder of the BATs, says King should resign. Now. He has made it clear that he doesn’t like children other than his own, and that he knows nothing about education, only testing.
New Jersey has 180 private schools that receive public funding for students with disabilities.
They operate with little or no state oversight.
Governor Chris Christie and his State Commissioner Chris Cerf are big supporters of privatization.
They rant about the high salaries of public school superintendents, but say it is none of their business if the publicly-funded private schools have even higher salaries.
They don’t care about nepotism or self-dealing.
Hey, it’s the private sector.
Christopher Baxter of the Star-Ledger reports on a two-month investigation of private schools that spend public money in ways that would be illegal in public schools.
Baxter writes:
The payroll at Somerset Hills School reads like a family tree, with 10 relatives sprinkled throughout. Four of them earn six-figure salaries.
The cafeteria serves up a nice profit, paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for food to a company founded and owned by the school’s executive director.
Even the land and buildings are worth big bucks. The school paid nearly half a million dollars for rent in 2012, mostly to a company owned by its former executive director.
Tucked away amid lush green meadows in Warren Township, Somerset Hills is one of about 180 private schools across the state where more than 10,000 severely disabled children go for an education when their public schools can’t handle them.
Though Somerset Hills is privately owned and run, it’s like a public school in one simple way: You pay for all of it.
And more:
In an era when public schools are under intense pressure to do more with less, the newspaper’s review showed nepotism, high executive salaries, generous pensions, fancy cars and questionable business deals are common in parts of this more than $600 million New Jersey industry.
Of course, Governor Christie would not tolerate such practices in the public schools.
But here are more findings:
• While Gov. Chris Christie rails about the pay of public school superintendents, top employees at these schools live in another world, spared from his rancor. Nineteen directors were paid the maximum allowed salary — $225,734 — to oversee schools with anywhere from 30 to 327 students a day. And 52 people at these schools took home more than $175,000, the most superintendents are allowed to earn in public schools with up to 10,000 students.
• About a third of the schools did business with companies owned or controlled by the same people who run the schools, or their relatives or associates, oftentimes at a higher cost than other schools pay. The deals ran the gamut from real estate to bus rentals to food.
• Nearly one-fifth of schools had instances of nepotism. One school had four related directors, three of whom earned the maximum $225,734. Another employed a part-time classroom aide related to the director who earned $94,000 in 2013, three times other aides’ salaries.
• Three dozen schools offered generous pension plans paid for by the public but requiring no contributions by employees, in stark contrast to public school teachers and administrators’ plans. At one school, a former official collected retiree health benefits after she served time for ripping off taxpayers.
• Twenty-two cars — including two BMWs, a Land Rover, three Lexus and two Mercedes — were charged in part to taxpayers despite being used for personal transportation by officials. School disclosure reports show many cars were kept at officials’ homes.
Consider that Governor Chris Christie want more privately managed charter schools, which will enjoy the same lax supervision as the private schools for children with disabilities.
Expect more outlandish executive salaries, akin to Eva Moskowitz’s $475,000 in New York City, where her schools enroll fewer than 5,000 students (she is an attorney, not an educator). Expect more nepotism, as is now common when charter schools (like those in Arizona) are unregulated. Expect more elaborate real estate deals, where the charter operator buys the real estate, then pays his corporation outlandish rent.
That’s the future, New Jersey. Governor Christie believes in it. So does Chris Cerf. They are pushing as hard as they can to privatize schools in every city in the state, which will operate with minimal oversight.
Bruce Baker continues to be one of our most valuable academic scholars of educational madness.
In this post, he explores and explodes the claim by certain economists that teachers should not get a pay increase for anything except higher test scores. This is the only value that they ever add to a school.
On the basis of this absurd claim, states are now passing laws to deny teachers any salary increment for masters’ degrees. The theory, based on the work of aforesaid economists, is that additional education does not increase test scores (except in mathematics).
So, the teacher who wants to deepen their knowledge of science or history or obtain a degree in special education will see no salary increment. The not-so-subtle message from the state legislators is: Getting extra education is worth nothing to this state! Forget education, just produce higher test scores! At some point, maybe the legislators will just turn the schools over to test prep companies and forget about teachers altogether. If they find that high school students can produce higher test scores, they may stop requiring a college degree for future teachers.
Baker writes:
It may be entirely reasonable for local public school districts to provide additional compensation for teachers seeking graduate credentials that expand their possible involvement in district or school activities, such as achieving additional training to work with special needs populations, or additional content certifications, or for that matter additional training to engage in all of the new teacher observations [Tom] Kane and others now seem to think are necessary for getting rid of bad teachers (even though his own work on MET did not support his own conclusion in this regard). That is, you might want to have the salary differential available for the utility player.
It may also be an entirely reasonable approach for school districts to view providing additional compensation for furthering one’s education as a useful tool for retaining teachers – especially those who themselves show interest in expanding their own knowledge/learning.
In both this, and the previous case, the additional degrees or credentials obtained may actually have no direct relationship to the current primary responsibilities of the teacher. Does that mean they are entirely useless? That they should not be in any way associated with differentiated compensation not only until they are used, but until they are used in such a way that we can estimate that the additional credential has led to test score gains?
That’s just freakin’ asinine.
And this reductionist thinking really needs to stop.
This article appeared in the Wall Street Journal. It reports a trend among states to pay teachers for “performance,” meaning student test scores, not for masters’ degrees. So a history teacher who wants to get a degree in history gets no salary increment. The science teacher who wants to learn more about science will get no salary increment. The message to teachers: More education doesn’t make you a better teacher. Or, the less education our teachers have, the better for the district. Isn’t this an argument against education itself?
Of course, with the rise of online “universities,” there are a lot of dubious masters’ degrees being awarded. Wise school districts should be able to award higher salaries to those who deepen subject matter knowledge or who learn more about educating children with special needs or who earn a degree that makes them better teachers.
See the post that follows this one, written by Bruce Baker.
Here is the WSJ article:
Pay Raises for Teachers With Master’s Under FireByline: Stephanie.Banchero@wsj.comThe nation spends an estimated $15 billion annually on salary bumps for teachers who earn master’s degrees, even though research shows the diplomas don’t necessarily lead to higher student achievement.
And as states and districts begin tying teachers’ pay and job security to student test scores, some are altering—or scrapping—the time-honored wage boost.
Lawmakers in North Carolina, led by Republican legislators, voted in July to get rid of the automatic pay increase for master’s degrees. Tennessee adopted a policy this summer that mandates districts adopt salary scales that put less emphasis on advanced degrees and more on factors such as teacher performance. And Newark, N.J., recently decided to pay teachers for master’s degrees only if they are linked to the district’s new math and reading standards.
The moves come a few years after Florida, Indiana and Louisiana adopted policies that require districts to put more weight on teacher performance and less on diplomas.
“Paying teachers on the basis of master’s degrees is equivalent to paying them based on hair color,” said Thomas J. Kane, an economist at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and director for the Center for Education Policy Research.
Mr. Kane said decades of research has shown that teachers holding master’s degrees are no more effective at raising student achievement than those with only bachelor’s, except in math. Researchers have also shown that teachers with advanced degrees in science benefit students.
Mr. Kane and other critics suggest that schools alter pay plans to reward teachers on other accomplishments, such as advancing student achievement.
Teacher unions aren’t necessarily opposed to changing how teachers are paid. But they worry administrators will craft pay schemes too reliant on student test scores, or that they will slash the master’s bump and not replace it with other methods to move up the pay scale.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second-largest teachers union, said districts and local unions should create contracts that reward teachers for master’s degrees that are relevant to classroom instruction.
“What is so ironic to me is that the same people who keep telling kids that it is really important to gain additional knowledge are the same ones saying ‘not so much,’ when it comes to teachers,” she said.
In North Carolina, teachers were incensed when the state chopped the extra pay for master’s degrees. Kirsten Haswell, a high-school English teacher at Charles B. Aycock High School in Pikeville, N.C., said she is working toward an online master’s degree in instructional technology at East Carolina University, in part because she needs a raise. She has been stuck at $30,000 for her entire five-year teaching career there. But mainly, she said, she enrolled to learn how to use technology in the classroom.
“I have learned a lot of new tools that really help my kids,” she said. “If people feel the master’s programs are weak, than they should change them, not punish us for trying to advance our knowledge.”
About 52% of the nation’s 3.4 million public elementary and high-school teachers held a master’s or other advanced degree in 2008, compared with about 38% of private-school teachers, according to the most recent federal data. The national average salary for a teacher with five years of experience and a bachelor’s degree was $39,700 in 2008, compared with $46,500 with a master’s, according to the federal data.
About 90% of the master’s held by teachers come from education programs, according to a study by Marguerite Roza, a research professor at Georgetown University who specializes in school finance.
For decades, U.S. teachers have been paid on a salary scale known as “step and lane,” which awards automatic pay bumps for years of service and advanced degrees. In general, the raises come on top of annual increases negotiated through collective bargaining.
Advances in data collection have allowed researchers and state officials to link student achievement more directly to teachers. The data reveal wide variations in teacher effectiveness and have shown, for example, that educators improve rapidly during the first few years in the classroom, peak at about 6-10 years of experience and then level off.
The data have prodded leading policy makers, including U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, to push for new teacher-pay plans.
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a Democrat, tried unsuccessfully last year to replace the old step-and-lane structure with one based more on classroom effectiveness. The union pushed back and went on a two-week strike over the issue and others. Philadelphia officials are currently locked in negotiations with their union over a similar idea.
The master’s bump cost school districts an estimated $14.8 billion during the 2007-2008 school year, the most recent data available, according to Ms. Roza’s research. While the master’s pay represented only about 2% of what districts spent, Ms. Roza argues it would be better directed toward paying teachers for classroom effectiveness or recruiting highly talented educators.
Of the 730,635 master’s degrees awarded in U.S. colleges in 2011, about 25% were in education, the second highest percentage of any field, behind only business, according to the federal data.
State and local policies drive those numbers. Eight states, including New York and Oregon, mandate teachers earn master’s to move from provisional to full license, and 15 require extra pay for the advanced degrees, according to the National Council on Teacher Quality, a nonpartisan research and advocacy group. Hundreds of districts award the pay raise even if state law doesn’t mandate it.
But some districts are starting to experiment. The Douglas County School District in suburban Denver, for example, recently implemented a salary scale that pays teachers based on market rate. Positions in high demand, such as chemistry, pay more than those in positions of low demand, such as third-grade teacher.
The Newark contract, negotiated in 2012 between district and union leaders, including Ms. Weingarten, replaced the traditional step and lane with one that awards salary increases based largely on teachers’ classroom performance. A $100 million grant to the district from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg helped pave the way for the agreement.
Under the contract, teachers can get a master’s bonus, but only if it they earn the degree from a district-approved program aligned to the district’s priorities or the Common Core math and reading standards adopted by 45 states, including New Jersey.
Superintendent Cami Anderson said the policy “creates an incentive” for colleges to tailor degree programs to what teachers need to help raise student achievement. “We want to reward outcomes instead of inputs,” she said.
Colleges of education have been under assault recently by critics who say they have lax standards and weak curricula. Many, including the Obama administration’s Mr. Duncan, have called for drastic overhauls.
Sharon Robinson, president of the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education, said master’s programs can help teachers become more effective in the classroom and boost their “intellectual development,” but noted some are not getting the job done. “The public should not pay for credentials that are unrelated to educators’ work because doing so would inflate operating costs for schools with no obvious benefit to students,” she said.
Crack investigative journalist David Sirota takes a close look at the gangster tactics that billionaires are using in New York City, D.C, and Denver.
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Hostage-Taking In The Classroom
By David Sirota
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For all the hype about America’s renewed obsession with zombies, the walking dead have lost their status as the favored metaphor du jour. A quarter century after the Iran standoff and seven months after “Argo” won the Oscar for best picture, the preferred metonym is now the hostage, in all his metaphorically hogtied and blindfolded glory.
Over on the East Coast, for instance, Washington politicians and news bureaus are colluding on “Government Shutdown” – an epic multi-day television miniseries of political pirates, ransom demands and overwrought hostage cliches. Over on the Left Coast, Hollywood is set to capitalize on the zeitgeist with its own scripted look at piracy and hostages called “Captain Phillips.”
Meanwhile, few have noticed that off camera, the ascendant hostage meme has quietly transformed from insipid political shorthand and fleeting pop culture fad into the day-to-day governing ideology of the ultimate symbol of Americana: the schoolhouse.
In this standoff, the hostages are public school children. They are being held captive not by a rag tag bunch of Somali buccaneers nor by Tea Party loons with that distinctly wild-eyed serial killer look in their eyes. No, a generation of youngsters is being held instead by pinstriped corporate executives, buttoned-down foundation officers and the local school board officials those aristocrats buy and sell.
Reminiscent of Hans Gruber’s high-class crew, this smooth-talking team of bandits is armed with billions of dollars of “charitable” – and therefore tax-subsidized – cash from both brand-name corporate behemoths and individual plutocrats like Microsoft’s Bill Gates, insurance magnate Eli Broad, media titan Michael Bloomberg, Enron billionaire John Arnold and Wal-Mart’s Walton family. With school districts refusing to adequately fund their education systems, and with a tax code boosting the plutocrats’ anti-public-school activism, this rogues gallery is now calling the shots – and demanding ransom. If a community pays the ransom by letting these distant marauders do what they want to the local school, then the perpetrators won’t purposely harm any hostages, even though their policies may inadvertently maim a bunch. But if a community defies these moguls’ wishes, then open threats against the cute little hostages commence.
The commercial application of this extortion scheme is straightforward. In shock-doctrine-like fashion, the corporate community that typically lobbies against higher taxes to fund schools makes a business opportunity out of schools’ subsequent budget crises. Specifically, corporations offer cash to budget-strapped school districts, claiming they are motivated by an altruistic desire to help preserve educational services for the community. But the cash is often contingent on letting those corporations use the public school to advertise products to those kids. If education officials later realize it is a bad idea to turn schools into corporate advertising weapons aimed at captive child audiences, then – poof! – the hostages are harmed as the corporate funding vanishes.
Less straightforward but equally insidious is the concurrent extortion scheme run by politically motivated foundations. More interested in making local schools petri dishes for their half-baked “free market” experiments and their ideological crusades against unions, these foundations masquerade as apolitical charities, while using their vast tax-subsidized resources to strengthen the already outsized political power of their namesake benefactors.
Three of the best examples come from Washington, D.C., New York City and my home city of Denver, Colorado.
Washington, D.C.: “It’s Not a Democracy”
Thanks to the boom in lobbying and government contracting, the nation’s capital is no longer a town of middle-class bureaucrats – it is now one of the wealthiest places on Earth, and one of the planet’s most unequal cities. With the Beltway’s rich typically sending their kids to private havens like Sidwell Friends, the D.C. public school system ends up serving a disproportionately low-income student population, which means it needs a lot of money if it has any chance of succeeding. That’s because economic status is such an enormous factor in educational achievement and because successfully combating poverty’s deleterious effect on educational achievement requires extra resources for “wraparound” services. To help raise that capital, private foundations in recent years swooped in with resources.
It sounded great – suddenly, there seemed to be no need to raise taxes on the cash-bloated multinational corporations stationed in D.C. The celebrated philanthrocapitalists were in the nation’s capital to save the day! Except for one problem: the foundation money came with an implicit and then-unprecedented threat. Championing the punitive, unproven and often counterproductive pedagogical agenda of standardized testing, draconian school shutdowns, mass teacher firings and union-busting charter schools, the conservative foundations gave Washington, D.C. residents the hostage-taker’s ultimatum: if they and their democratically elected city councilors did not obediently submit to the corporate “reform” agenda of then-Chancellor Michelle Rhee, then there would be consequences. More specifically, if they ever removed Rhee from her public office, then the foundation money would be summarily withdrawn, and kids would be harmed.
Backed by these corporate heavies, Rhee told residents who were critical of her destructive and cheating-plagued term that when it comes to public education policy in her city, “It’s not a democracy.” The result of the hostage taking thuggery? As PBS Frontline reported, after Rhee’s tenure, Washington is “still among the worst in the nation and D.C.’s high school graduation rate dead last.” And yet while the hostages suffered, Rhee has been handsomely rewarded for her loyalty to the hostage takers, as the same plutocrats bequeathed her a high-paying job and a well-financed corporate front group all for herself.
New York: King Bloomberg’s Permanent Reign
In New York, a different but equally harsh hostage situation has been engineered in order to guarantee the permanent dominance of outgoing billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s agenda, even after Hizzoner leaves office. The billionaire media titan and his cronies want to cement his polarizing agenda of demonizing teachers and promoting union-busting charter schools, even though those schools often deliver worse results than traditional schools. As the Wall Street Journal reports (emphasis added):
The fundraising arm of the New York City public-school system brought in a record $47 million in pledges in the past year, a sign that donors want to extend the effects of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s policies past the end of his third term…
While the fund has paid for some traditional projects—such as grants for libraries and after-school programs—it has also quietly bankrolled potentially controversial pilots of new curriculum standards, teacher evaluations and the School of One, an experimental method of using technology to teach math.
Using private money instead of tax dollars enabled the mayor and chancellor, who were wrangling with the United Federation of Teachers in court and on the airwaves, to sidestep controversy while experimenting with new methods. But some critics say this process still cuts out public participation…
“It adds yet another layer of distance between open public decision-making processes and how policies are set in the district,” said Sarah Reckhow, an assistant professor in urban politics and education at Michigan State University.
“Experimenting with new methods” is Wall Street Journal-ese for anti-union aristocrats like Bloomberg using children as pawns in an ideological scheme to turn more of the public school system into union-free – and failing – charter schools.
If that wasn’t bad enough, get this: though the Journal notes that the Bloomberg-aligned fund finances programs in public schools, “is located inside Education Department headquarters, and the schools chancellor is its chairman,” its executives nonetheless refuse to release basic information about who is donating and what it is actually funding. In other words, inside a public school system already plagued by corporate cronyism and a grotesque revolving door culture, there exists a secret privately financed slush fund that is permitted to operate without any public scrutiny at all.
Slush fund officials defend this as an earnest commitment “to safeguarding donors’ privacy” – but such saccharine platitudes obscure bareknuckled political motivations. Basically, Bloomberg and his rich buddies don’t like the idea of local communities – especially in liberal pro-union New York City – having control over the city’s schools. Thus, they’ve make a two-fer opportunity out of the city’s inadequately funded public school system. Knowing city schools are already being held hostage by meager budgets, they make huge “charitable” donations to the public education system, but make the money contingent on a two-pronged ransom demand: 1) they insist their ideological agenda be followed regardless of whether it actually improves educational results and 2) they insist their specific funding priorities being implemented by the public school system but without any democratic input from the public that is supposed to be controlling that system.
Acquiesce and the hostages are helped. Ask questions and the child hostages are made to suffer.
Denver: Explicit Threats to Harm Kids
Before you can understand the education hostage-taking in the Mile High City, you have to understand that the Denver Public School system is enmeshed in a thick web of corruption. In fact, even calling it a web is wrong. The school system here (as I first learned when my wife ran for school board a few years ago) is more accurately described as being covered in a rancid blob of radical ideology and corporate “reform” propaganda – one that has delivered tragic academic results. This blob is so massive it is hard to know where the private sector stops and the public sector begins.
One way to see this blob is to just behold the absurd amounts of corporate and right-wing money that have been spent to buy the city’s recent school board elections. Though school board positions are unpaid, the typical Denver school elections now feature CEOs throwing $25,000 checks at candidates who pledge to suck ever-more public money out of public schools and plow it into the privately run charter school industry – the same industry that has an illustrious history of discriminating against children with special needs.
Another way to see this blob is to look at the school board’s breathtaking self-dealing and its rampant conflicts of interest. For example, its current president is paid by a private foundation whose stated goal is to put more public money into privately run charter schools. The board’s immediate past president resigned to go work for a private education foundation that does business with the school district. Another of its board members runs a foundation that gets money from the school district. A previous board member went from the board to run a group looking to bring more corporate influence into the school system. And now another leading candidate for a board vacancy, the pro-voucher former lieutenant governor Barbara O’Brien, says that even if she wins the board seat, she will ignore concerns about self-dealing and remain the paid executive director of a pro-charter foundation to which the school board gives public money.
Considering this hideous record, it is hardly shocking that this same school board a few years ago agreed to a Wall Street financing scheme so corrupt it landed on the front page of the New York Times. Orchestrated by then-superintendent Michael Bennet after a stint as a corporate raider for right-wing billionaire Phil Anschutz, the scheme enriched the financial industry that later bankrolled Bennet’s U.S. Senate campaign. It also blew a $177 million hole in the school system’s budget at a time when that system was already being crushed by the state’s pathetic education funding levels. That’s when – on cue – the plutocratic ideologues waltzed in to Denver, publicly portraying themselves as benevolent saviors, but privately brandishing political axes.
As the Denver Post reports, since just 2009, “DPS has received $77 million in gifts and grants from private foundations, corporations and individuals” – much of it with ideological strings attached. Bill Gates’ foundation, for example, gave the public schools $10 million. The cash was given in exchange for the school board’s guarantee that the schools would build a punitive teacher “evaluation” system that conservatives hope will help blame teachers for the school system’s systemic problems and then create the rationale to bust the teachers’ union.
Likewise, the Walton Foundation gave $8 million to help the city’s public schools with budget shortfalls, in exchange for the board reclassifying more traditional public schools as “innovation” schools. To the notoriously anti-union Walton family, that was a great political victory, as the “innovation” classification allows the board to tear up a school’s union contract and make teacher’s at-will employees.
Not surprisingly, many people in the city are today sufficiently pissed off about what’s been going on. So with another board election coming up in just a few weeks, the public threats to harm the hostages have begun.
These aren’t just any old threats couched in sententious language, mind you. As a recent piece in the alt-weekly Westword showed, these are egregiously explicit and menacing promises to harm children. In that article, investment banking aristocrat Bruce Hoyt – shocker! a former Denver school board member – issued this stunningly brazen threat to voters:
Hoyt also points out that the district has received millions of dollars in grant money from national foundations over the past several years “because people have such confidence in our reforms.” If the district switches directions, “I could see a lot of that money drying up and causing budgetary problems for DPS,” he says.
The message from this politically connected financial industry snake is clear: if Denver voters dare even think about challenging the destructive privatization agenda in their own school system, corporate foundations will exact even more painful revenge against the city’s children.
There are, of course, plenty of other examples of this hostage-taking extortion. In New Jersey, for example, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg gave Newark Mayor Cory Booker a secret education slush fund. Booker somehow found time away from leveraging his office for personal cash to then use the money to neuter the local school board and weaken the teacher’s union. At the same time, down the road in Trenton, following foundations’ efforts to strongarm voters into keeping particular politicians in public office, insurance kingpin Eli Broad’s foundation threatened to cut off its education funding for the state’s kids if voters dare vote anti-union Gov. Chris Christie out of office.
Across the country in Los Angeles, the hostage taking tactics are even more invasive, as they operate at both the political level and at the school personnel level. As Dissent magazine’s Joanne Barkan recounts in her recent must-read article:
Private foundations have used another tactic to exert influence on the Los Angeles Unified School District: they paid the salaries of more than a dozen senior staffers. According to the Los Angeles Times, the privately financed “public” employees worked on such ed-reform projects as new systems to evaluate teachers and collect immense amounts of data on students. Much of the money came from the Wasserman Foundation ($4.4 million) and the Walton Family Foundation ($1.2 million); Ford and Hewlett made smaller grants. The Broad Foundation covered the $160,000 salary of Matt Hill to run the district’s Public School Choice program, which turned so-called low-performing and new schools over to private operators. Hill had worked in Black & Decker’s business development group before he went through one of the Broad Foundation’s uncertified programs to train new education administrators.
A Times editorial on January 12, 2010 asked, sensibly, “At what point do financial gifts begin reshaping public decision-making to fit a private agenda?…Even the best-intentioned gifts have a way of shifting behavior. Educators and the public, not individual philanthropists, should set the agenda for schools.”
Once again, the threat is clear: if the community tries to do something other than the foundations want, the foundations will exact financial revenge on kids by pulling funding from the cash-starved school district.
Barkan notes that in all these hostage situations, there is a symbiotic self-reinforcing relationship between corporatists’ anti-tax crusades and their desire to dominate public education policymaking. The less tax revenues that are generated, the less public revenues schools have and the more private foundations can use their money to enact their anti-union, pro-privatization agenda.
“The mega-foundations use their grants as leverage: they give money to grantees who agree to adopt the foundations’ pet policies,” she writes. “Resource-starved states and school districts feel compelled to say yes to millions of dollars even when many strings are attached or they consider the policies unwise. They are often in desperate straits.”
Over time, as this threat-retribution-acquiescence cycle is institutionalized and as corporate campaign contributions cleanse school boards of pro-public-education voices, a kind of Stockholm Syndrome develops in which substantive questions about failed “reform” policies are no longer even asked. Ultimately, the public is removed from its own public education system and faraway moguls turn education policy into their ideological plaything, consequences be damned. Worst of all, the hostages are left to suffer – and have no hope of ever being released.
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