One of the nation’s leaders of the privatization movement, Ted Mitchell, has been confirmed by the. u.S. Senate as Undersecretary of Education, the second most powerful job in the U.S. Department of Education.
Mitchell most recently was CEO of the NewSchools Venture Fund, which collects millions from philanthropies and venture funds and invests the money in creating charter chains and for-profit ventures.
Among his many other accomplishments, Mitchell served as chairman of the State Board of Education for Governor Arnold Schwarzenegegger, a time of unprecedented expansion of charter schools and deep budget cuts for both K-12 piblic schools and public higher education.
Lee Fang
Diane Ravitch's blog 
And guess who is replacing Mitchell as head of NSVF?
Stacey Childress who led the disastrous inBloom project for the Gates Foundation, $100M of Gates funds thankfully down the drain.
Leonie Haimson
Despite growing parent/teacher/student opposition to the Obama educational policies, this madness will only begin to end after Obama is out of office.
I hope you are right (or that it happens sooner), but, as this ed deform is a bi-partisan disaster, I don’t think anything will change no matter who gets in unless they specifically say they will work to change the direction ed is going these days!
The problem is that the people he brought with him to Washington will remain part of the skeleton of the Democratic Party. They’re destroying the public schools, the internet etc. What a mess.
The Obama administration is the most duplicitous in my memory. President Obama seems to have nothing in common with candidate (2008) Obama.
Right on, Michael.
Duplicitous is apt…and Obama seems like two different people, pre and post election…but we should have been forewarned wtih his FISA vote when he was a Senator. Watch Frontline next week on these issues.
Just one more “robber baron” to join our social regression into the Middle Ages!
I tried, I really really tried. Wrote to my Senators, tried to have a dialog with one. Her response was extremely discouraging. 😦
This is the response I got from Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD): “I believe each nominee should be judged on his or her merits. I have three criteria when I consider nominations. I look at the nominee’s competence, integrity, and commitment to core Constitutional principles. While the President may nominate the Undersecretary of Education, the Senate has a responsibility to “advise and consent” to Presidential nominations. I take this responsibility seriously. You can be sure that I carefully review the President’s nominee and will vote according to the criteria listed above.”
I replied to her that I was disturbed that “qualification for the job” was not on her list of criteria for confirmation; apparently, even after my concern, it didn’t make the list for her at all.
These form letters sent out by these criminals are an obscenity. One of these letters is the equivalent of spitting on a constituent. It says, loudly and clearly, “I don’t give a @&##&@**&!! what you feel or think,” and “I have such a low opinion of your intelligence that I believe that you will think this a response.”
Ah, I found MY reply to HER reply:
“Dear. Senator Mikulski:
Thank you for your response. I appreciate your listing your criteria for consideration of nominees. However, I am not sure whether to be merely puzzled or deeply shocked that “qualifications for the position” appears nowhere on your list.
I am very concerned that Ted Mitchell’s qualifications are not adequate for such a high-ranking position in the Department of Education, although, sadly, he’s probably better-qualified than Arne Duncan, who has never been a teacher and has no education degrees. Additionally, I question whether his financial ties would be considered a conflict of interest. For further reading on those ties, see here: https://dianeravitch.net/2013/12/20/lee-fang-obama-picks-prominent-privatizer-for-key-role-in-department-of-education/ and https://dianeravitch.net/2014/03/13/meet-the-new-undersecretary-of-education/
I do not see from Ted Mitchell’s biography that he he has ANY degrees in education, and none of his experience in the field of education (which again, far eclipses that of Arne Duncan, and yes, I’m rolling my eyes as I type that) is in a public school classroom; this is from his bio on the NewSchools Venture Fund page: “From 2008 through 2010, he served as president of the California State Board of Education. Prior to taking the helm at NewSchools in 2005, Ted was president of Occidental College, vice chancellor and dean of the School of Education and Information Studies at the UCLA, and professor and chair of the Department of Education at Dartmouth College. In addition, he serves on the board of directors of Khan Academy, New Leaders, The Teaching Channel, Education Elements and The McClatchy Company.” As a public school parent and as a double-degreed certified teacher in Maryland, I am VERY concerned that not only is none of his experience in this area, but in fact is in positions which serve to undermine public schools. While such a nominee *may* meet your criteria of “competence, integrity, and commitment to core Constitutional principles” (and given his financial ties, I am leery of the “integrity” criterion being met here), it does not necessarily make him qualified for the position of Undersecretary of the Department of Education, any more than my Masters in Music (with a pedagogy emphasis) would qualify me to be the Surgeon General.”
There is going to be a highly irate response to her vote – if the Senate confirmation vote was unanimous, I can only assume she voted to confirm – headed her way from me….. Grrr….
It really is a full-on privatization plan, and the Obama Administration are completely on board.
This is amazing. It’s about how we’re going to govern our privatized schools once we drive public schools out of business:
“The old district is hard to dispose of because it is responsible for educating a lot of kids. Over time, as the district educates fewer kids while charters and other kinds of non-district run schools educate more, there is a strong chance that remaining district schools will get worse and worse. That is, unless the district makes some kind of transition so that it can do a reasonable job educating the kids it still has, even as many are opting for new schools. (You can see the harm done in places like Detroit and Cleveland, where the district preserved its old operating system, went through many rounds of LIFO, and ended up with a very small, extremely expensive, and overall weak teaching force and worsening schools. Happily Cleveland is now changing its operating system, to the likely benefit of schools and kids.) To me, there is an ethical imperative to think about how the district makes a transition that doesn’t hurt kids. There is also a political/legal issue, as opponents can make the case that charters and other new schools are leaving out some kids and are responsible for harming them.
Another reason the old district is hard to dispose of is that it remains the provider of last resort: if nobody else offers a school for a given group of kids or in particular neighborhoods, the district has the responsibility to do so. To change this, some new entity—a new body overseeing all local school authorizers and providers—would have to take on that responsibility and have the power and control of funds to be able to fulfill it. And it would have to be accountable and pay the price if it didn’t fulfill that responsibility.”
Do you think they’ll bother to change state law to create a new public school governance system, or just do some creative rule-writing? When do you think ed reform politicians will let the public in on this, where public schools are the planned “provider of last resort”?
The arrogance is absolutely breath-taking.
http://www.crpe.org/thelens/getting-here-there-governance-reform
Chiara…thanks for the links. As you notice, Paul Hill’s education was all in political science. The young “experts” on his team are all products of elitist schools and also do not represent the middle of America. How can these people make policy based on their tunnel vision of how American public education should function? They are addicted to a corporatist view.
Ted Mitchell is close to Marshall Tuck, formerly of Green Dot, who was ousted under a cloud of financial accusations. Tuck is now running to be California Supt. of Schools and is financed by many Tea Party leaders, and also from out of state huge donations. The FIX continues.
It goes back clearly to Reagan (first as Governor of Ca, in 1968, and then as Prez in 1980) and his “kitchen cabinet” comprised of the captains of industry such as Justin Dart and Al Bloomingdale.
And then to Ken Lay of Enron/Cheney/Schwartzenegger in the late 90s. The supposedly liberal Kennedy family (the flakey Shriver is now running in LA for Bd. of Supervisors using his personal wealth to finance his campaign) interferred in California politics to prepare the way for Maria Shriver’s hubbie, Arnie the woman groppper, to be Governor, and they helped oust Gray Davis through impeachment.
Somewhat concurrently with the Davis ouster, Enron collapsed due to their huge fraud, and Clinton worked with the deregulators Summers, Rubin, Gramm, to kill Glass Steagall and impose on us the terrible legislation of Gramm, Bliley, Leach.
This organized plan has been in place for decades. It involves both Republicans and Democrats. Education is key, but it is only part of a larger plan for the future of America. As always, watch ALEC!
The oligarchs including the current billionaires, Eli Broad (read yesterday’s LA Times Op Ed interview of the new President of his Academy…you will get nauseaous), Gates, Murdoch, Petersen, Anschutz, Waltons, etc. have been working toward this takeover, in unison, for many years.
Their goal and philosophy is “let ’em eat garbage, not cake”.
“As you notice, Paul Hill’s education was all in political science. ”
I didn’t notice, but he’s the “moderate”! He’s responding to someone else who apparently wants to shut ’em all down.
This is the MODERATE ed reform view.
Like the lawmakers who drafted state constitutions, they are creating government! 🙂
It just blows me away. I think about the Ohio state code and 150 years of public education law, and they’re going to create a system on the fly. Detroit, Cleveland, wherever, same thing!
Hope you all watched Frontline part 1 last night. If not, try to watch part 2 next week. It is about how government convert spying on us has grown, and leads to Obama who out-Bushed Bush in executive orders to keep We the People from having any transparency in knowing what our government has done for many decades. It follows Nixon to now, and tells the true story on Snowden.
For 30 years Cheney has been in the background calling too many shots…and his wife rules the text book world in Texas.
What evidence is there that the Kennedy family interfered in CA politics to pave the way for Arnold? From what I recall, his wife did not want him to run, and none of the extended Kennedy family campaigned for him.
Susan..if you want to do some homework, google the whole Davis impeachment debacle. Also go to the archives of the LA Times. The story on the Kennedy prep of Arnold was big news at the time. Even after he had all the groped women come out against him, the helped protect him…they had plenty of their own experience in this.
This is also worth watching.
“As the administration continues to reshuffle its team, and confront new regulatory challenges, some view Mitchell’s nomination as a move towards greater privatization. In the coming months, the Department of Education will release “gainful employment” rules to rein in for-profit colleges, an experiment in proprietary education that many see as an unmitigated disaster.
As head of the NewSchools Venture Fund, Mitchell oversees investments in education technology start-ups. In July, Zynga, the creators of FarmVille, provided $1 million to Mitchell’s group to boost education gaming companies. Mitchell’s NewSchool Venture Fund also reportedly partners with Pearson, the education mega-corporation that owns a number of testing and textbook companies, along with one prominent for-profit virtual charter school, Connections Academy.
Jeff Bryant, a senior fellow with the Campaign for America’s Future, says it seems likely that Mitichell will “advocate for more federal promotion of online learning, ‘blended’ models of instruction, ‘adaptive learning’ systems, and public-private partnerships involving education technology.”
They’re supposed to be regulating for-profit colleges. As everyone who hasn’t been asleep for the last thirty years knows, we have a huge problem with regulatory capture in this country. So we’ll want to watch this rule-making.
http://www.thenation.com/blog/177675/ted-mitchell-education-dept-nominee-has-strong-ties-pearson-privatization-movement
Ellen: If you enjoyed Frontline, you may find this interesting;
http://www.c-span.org/video/?318762-1/challenges-facing-whistleblowers
Thanks jb2…I see that the panel includes Bob Scheer with whom I have worked on occasion. Bob is a fine journalist whom I have known for many years, and we are almost always in complete agreement. He not only runs the award winning site, Truthdig, but also teaches at the Annenberg School at USC.
Once again, Obama doubles down on the Bush legacy. This is like some bad Star Trek episode.
or like the embarrassingly bad horror move followed by the even worse sequel. NCLB. Son of NCLB.
I’m curious about LearnZillion:
“Q: Who makes your content?
A: Every year we select a pool of highly qualified teachers from across the country to create the content you see on LearnZillion.com. This “Dream Team” of incredible educators range from board certified to teachers to those with less than 5 years of classroom experience. Each of them, however, has demonstrated a deep understanding of the Common Core, the ability to create lessons that connect with students, and a hunger to continue their own learning journey. All of them are excited to broaden their impact, learn from content experts, and challenge themselves in new and exciting ways.
Q: How does LearnZillion make money?
A: Following our social mission, we offer teachers a wealth of free resources to support the creation of powerful learning experiences for students. LearnZillion makes money by contracting with schools, districts, and states for access to our premium participatory curriculum offering. For more about LearnZillion Premium, click here.
http://www.LearnZillion.com”
So do the teachers that create the “free” content that is later sold to districts own that content, or, are they paid for creating it when it’s sold under a “premium” membership?
http://learnzillion.com/about
I’m curious about LearnZillion:
“Q: Who makes your content?
A: Every year we select a pool of highly qualified teachers from across the country to create the content you see on LearnZillion.com. This “Dream Team” of incredible educators range from board certified to teachers to those with less than 5 years of classroom experience. Each of them, however, has demonstrated a deep understanding of the Common Core, the ability to create lessons that connect with students, and a hunger to continue their own learning journey. All of them are excited to broaden their impact, learn from content experts, and challenge themselves in new and exciting ways.
Q: How does LearnZillion make money?
A: Following our social mission, we offer teachers a wealth of free resources to support the creation of powerful learning experiences for students. LearnZillion makes money by contracting with schools, districts, and states for access to our premium participatory curriculum offering. ”
So do the teachers that create the “free” content that is later sold to districts own that content, or, are they paid for creating it when it’s sold under a “premium” membership?
http://learnzillion.com/about
97 teachers were “chosen” to be on the CT Dream Team. They worked a Friday through a Sunday and then more hours virtually to prepare lessons of some kind to present at a summer one-day CCS fest.
They will be paid a $500 stipend for at least fifty hours of work, while Learn Zillions received millions from Gates.
Dream team or suckers?
Also, only 134 applied for the original 100 positions. For some reason only 97 were chosen or maybe the rest backed out. By the way there are close to 50,000 teachers and the offer was made to all via CTSDE.
Wow, $500 for 50+ hours of work? That’s the future of teacher pay right there. Walmartization.
The LearnZillion lessons I’ve seen are a stultifying travesty of education.
Ted Mitchell confirmed as undersecretary of the Department for the Regimentation, Dehumanization, and Privatization of U.S. Education, formerly the USDE.
The newest member of that one-hit wonder, Arnie Dunkin’ and the Test-Tots-Ster-Tones.
We all need to start emailing and contacting our representatives about this kind of stuff.
Yes, Bob…It is also amazing that Obama is pushing for Tea Party Boggs appointment as a Federal judge, and his appointment of the other Ted to head the FCC and end Net Neutrality. This man lies without any remorse. He certainly fooled so many of us, but now we see he was a Manchurian candidate. He is so two faced, supporting NN while appointing a colluder with big business to kill it.
Mitchell is so clearly the product of Wall Street, and those banksters who defrauded everyone (but Obama and his DoJ refuse to prosecute them and he arranged to make the American taxpayers the ones to pay for their unabashed risk taking by insuring them with the FDIC). He still mouths empty words while colluding with the hedge fund managers to take over public education.
Of the candidates for LAUSD BoE in LA, most are openly pro charter schools. Last night the Charter School organization presented a candidates meeting for only 4 people…and all were proponents of charters….and also of Broad’s chosen boy, Supt. Deasy.
Sorry I often lapse into overview, and particularly economic diatribes…I am after all, a public policy educator…and endlessly angry muck raker…so please forgive my rants.
We had an Ohio House hearing on teacher evaluations and there were 20 witnesses. Of the 20, 17 were from StudentsFirst.
Obviously, they’re just gathering all the best information and reviewing it in a very fair and rigorous manner 🙂
When government colludes with corporations, it is called fascism.
Sinclair Lewis said it best: “It can’t happen here.”
Yup, we live in one fair and balanced banana republic, don’t we?
I’m beginning to think that it’s absurd to go through the pretense of having federal elections. Which marionette do you want, the one with the red cap or the one with the blue cap, asks the puppet master. But the script for the puppet show is exactly the same, the same. A lot of punching of the people in the face.
Just shameful what you thugs are doing to our once tremendous public education system. Privatization is a joke. Greedy people stealing public money and then NOT educating the kids, or better yet, running off with the money and then the kids end up BACK in the public school system but the money for that kid is some rich thugs pocket. You are a disgrace.
I just want to repeat what I read either on this blog or somewhere else: How does someone know when Obama is lying? Answer is “his lips are moving”.
“They” will only be happy when all education is online, delivered by untrained parrots. All the money saved on real estate, salaries, benefits, etc. Ka-ching. Can’t trust the democrats or the republicans. So long as the money is coming in, the 1% runs the roost.
Anyone who thinks, after Barry “The Change You Were Stupid Enough to Believe In” Obama, that there is any difference between the Repugnicans and the Dimocrats is sleepwalking or a hireling.
A Dem just sent me a quip I had not heard before. “How can you tell Obama is lying? His lips are moving.”
Yes. I’ve been saying “O” is more duplicitous as any in my memory.
And today we learn his clone, Tom Wheeler, pushed through the death of Net Neutality despite his and O’s promises to save it.
Horrible, a catastrophe!
Here is the message I would leave to President Obama for the audacity to appoint Ted Mitchell to such an important post… I have the AUDACITY TO HOPE … to hope that public school teachers, administrators, parents and students grow increasingly angry with your “privatization” education policy which is destroying are most important institution – public education. Current policy is augmenting (on steroids I might add) a parasitic relationship whereby well corporate- endowed charters take public moneys that should be going to public school institutions as if they are at war with public schools. Where charters cull students they wish to have thereby aggravating a new form of segregation (high stakes testing segregation whereby Ells, special education students and students with severe disabilities are not allowed to stay in charters even if they by miracle are allowed entrance). The strategy is a corporate one – to “win” over public schools. The strategy is not an educational one – to ensure that all students succeed.
Public school teachers, administrators, parents and students are now seeing through all the corporate spin and are starting to rise up in great numbers with the goal of TAKING BACK DEMOCRACY… oh I meant to say… taking back public education. Ted Mitchell is going to have a big fight on his hands. Teachers are shouting because they want public education back and they are going to do everything in their power to get it because they care about the students they teach. Teachers will defend their students… their right to learn to love learning … their right to be taught and assessed by professional educators and the right to be given the freedom to do their jobs.
Now let us give our under secretary a more noble mission – to work on the underlying problems hindering our nation’s title one students from learning … CHRONIC POVERTY (in addition of course to “ed reform”). Maybe this is what Mitchell should focus on for his limited term in office (however many days President Obama has left in office). My guess is that Mitchell will be very busy investigating a myriad of legal challenges at school districts around the country until this “lost period” is finally over!
Quelle horreur! What a horror, what are the Dems thinking? Dems=Repugs??
yeah. corporate money party 1 and 2.