Archives for category: Corporate Reformers
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

What Is Legal Fraud?

By dianeravitch
July 17, 2012 //
5

A reader asks a reasonable question, perhaps wondering why states like Ohio and Pennsylvania continue to authorize cyber charters despite their abysmal results.

He brings up Michael Milken, who was convicted on charges of securities fraud and tax violation and sent to jail in 1990. According to his bio on Wikipedia, Milken made $1 billion a year and was paid out about $1.1 billion in fines and settlements of claims. One way to understand what is happening in education today is to read Connie Bruck’s book about Milken, the junk bond king, in Predator’s Ball. Junk bonds and leveraged buyouts led to lots of “creative destruction” of familiar brand names.

Today, Milken is a leading figure in the education reform movement.

He is one of the founders of the nation’s biggest cyber charter chain, K12. His foundation invests in merit pay (which as I have previously observed, never works); it gives awards annually to outstanding teachers. One does wonder if it is appropriate for an ex-felon to run schools that receive public funding. I don’t think he could work in a school because schools–at least, public schools– usually fingerprint future employees and don’t hire ex-cons. Cyber charters make a lot of money for their sponsors, but they provide a low-quality education, if you judge it by academic results.

I don’t understand the concept of “legal fraud”. Is that just reserved for corporations and some politicians?Re: CorporationsMilken owns K12 Inc and they are operating in 32 states + DC:http://www.k12.com/schools-programs/online-public-schoolsMilken is a convicted felon who admitted to and was imprisoned for fraud related to fiscal managment. Today, he typically says he’s just an investor in his companies and I believe he tries to conceal his real involvement in them by playing a kind of corporate musical chairs. At the very least, state government officials should be able to track and identify his true involvement in his companies and prevent those companies from receiving public funds on the basis of his felony convictions over money matters. I think it’s possible to do, because the feds prevented him from obtaining financial aid for a university he owned, since his felony convictions were related to violating US securities laws. Perhaps it’s because they were violations of federal laws and not state laws, but one would think the issue is more about fraud involving money, rather than jurisdiction.Re: Certain PoliticiansMy city’s former mayor of 22 years got our city into some truly terrible long-term contracts that privatized some public services, in order to cover fiscal deficits, including a 75 year parking-meter contract and a 99 year parking garage contract. Parking rates immediately skyrocketed and that is going to be lasting our ENTIRE lifetimes. This former mayor now works for the very law firm that negotiated that parking-meter deal:

http://blogs.chicagotribune.com/news_columnists_ezorn/2012/05/daley-a-year-later-no-thanks-for-the-memories.html

I just don’t get why these kinds of things look like fraud and yet might be legal. Are there that many loopholes?

It’s particularly disconcerting when the politicians who do such things are attorneys who are familiar with the law –and the loopholes, too, I guess. This mayor was previously a State’s Attorney. Our last two governors, who were also lawyers, are currently serving time in prison for crimes they commited while in office.

One has to wonder why some people manage to avoid prosecution or sanctions while others don’t. Admittedly, I’m sometimes glad when little people, with little money and little crimes that don’t have victims are not targeted, but when we’re talking about big people, with big money and big crimes that impact millions of folks, not so much.
Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, For-Profit, Merit pay, On-Line Education

Disgrace in Detroit Is “For the Children”

By dianeravitch
July 16, 2012 //
9

Remember that the emergency manager in Detroit imposed a new teachers’ contract in which class sizes would be allowed to rise to absurd levels?

Remember that the contract permits classes of up to 41 children in grades K-3, up to 61 children in grades 6-12?

Remember all that?

The emergency manager just said in an opinion article in the Detroit Free Press that “it’s a good contract for our children.”

Yes, it’s always “for the chidden.”

It’s for the children when they test them and rank them by their scores.

It’s for the children when they lay off their teachers.

It’s for the children when they lay off the school nurse and the social worker and the librarian.

It’s for the children when they close their school.

It’s for the children when they privatize public education.

No matter what you think, no matter what it appears to be: It’s for the children.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Corporate Reformers, Detroit, Education Reform, Michigan

You Should Read This Article

By dianeravitch
July 15, 2012 //
21

One of the nice things about having your own blog is that you can do things like recommend an article that appeared last November.

I recommend this article by Lee Fang that was published in The Nation.

It is a stunning piece of investigative journalism about the corporate reform movement, its leaders, its methods, its goals.

The article centers on events in Florida but the context is national.

It is a shocking story, well documented, and very important.

When I read it, I tweeted it.

It deserves to be read and widely circulated.

Categories ALEC, Bush, Jeb, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, For-Profit, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, On-Line Education

Who Knows Naomi Klein?

By dianeravitch
July 12, 2012 //
23

A reader thinks that Naomi Klein should revisit the Louisiana story and see how the “shock doctrine” has progressed:

Diane, I too have a passion for Louisiana, and a couple of friends there who also keep me in the loop.Your tireless efforts to tell the truth about what has happened in Louisiana since Milton Friedman decided to use “Shock Doctrine” to his advantage is very important to stopping Jindal from his merciless destruction of public education and democracy itself!

For those who are not familiar with Naomi’s introduction to “The Shock Doctrine – The Rise of Disaster Capitalism”- here is a brief excerpt from her intro:

“Over at the shelter, Jamar could think of nothing else. “I really don’t see it as cleaning up the city. What I see is that a lot of people got killed uptown. People who shouldn’t have died.”

He was speaking quietly, but an older man in line in front of us overheard and whipped around. “What is wrong with these people in Baton Rouge? This isn’t an opportunity. It’s a goddamned tragedy. Are they blind?” A mother with two kids chimed in. “No, they’re not blind, they’re evil. They see just fine.”

One of those who saw opportunity in the floodwaters of New Orleans was the late Milton Friedman, grand guru of unfettered capitalism and credited with writing the rulebook for the contemporary, hyper-mobile global economy. Ninety-three years old and in failing health, “Uncle Miltie”, as he was known to his followers, found the strength to write an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal three months after the levees broke. “Most New Orleans schools are in ruins,” Friedman observed, “as are the homes of the children who have attended them. The children are now scattered all over the country. This is a tragedy. It is also an opportunity.”

Friedman’s radical idea was that instead of spending a portion of the billions of dollars in reconstruction money on rebuilding and improving New Orleans’ existing public school system, the government should provide families with vouchers, which they could spend at private institutions.

In sharp contrast to the glacial pace with which the levees were repaired and the electricity grid brought back online, the auctioning-off of New Orleans’ school system took place with military speed and precision. Within 19 months, with most of the city’s poor residents still in exile, New Orleans’ public school system had been almost completely replaced by privately run charter schools.

The Friedmanite American Enterprise Institute enthused that “Katrina accomplished in a day … what Louisiana school reformers couldn’t do after years of trying”. Public school teachers, meanwhile, were calling Friedman’s plan “an educational land grab”. I call these orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities, “disaster capitalism”. ~Naomi Klein, “The Shock Doctrine – The Rise of Disaster Capitalism” [2007] ~ read the excerpt as taken from here: http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/excerpt

I would like to see three media sources come to do a follow-up on Naomi Klein’s introduction to her world renowned book: “The Shock Doctrine – The Rise of Disaster Capitalism”.

Can we get Naomi Klein to do a follow up?

How about teaming up with Joanne Barkan who wrote, “Got Dough” [see link to this article here: http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/dissent/v058/58.1.barkan.pdf ] in Dissent Magazine?

And of course, how about teaming up with Ed Shultz? Cant he three of them get together with you to increase the public’s awareness of the unconscionable crimes being committed against Louisiana’s children, against their own state constitution? Gotta love, Ed! I’m so glad he had you on his show. I want him to invite you as a REGULAR guest! Still wish Maddow would wake up and bring you on too, but I digress.

I think the 4 of you could do some real good together as partners to help Louisiana get out of “disaster capitalism” and spread that healing to the nation, ridding us of the marriage between Neoliberalism and Neoconservativism through corporate education reform that is destroying public education and democracy!

Thank you again for helping the children, families, teachers, and communities of Louisiana by shining a light on the horrors of corporate education reform in this state.


 
Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Louisiana, New Orleans

What Is the Boston Consulting Group?

By dianeravitch
July 12, 2012 //
10

There is a new scandal in New York City. It seems the New York City Housing Authority paid $10 million to the Boston Consulting Group to write a report that is not available to the public that paid for it. According to the article in the New York Daily News, the report was commissioned by someone at the Housing Authority who used to work for the Boston Consulting Group.

Now, readers of this blog may recall that the Boston Consulting Group was paid over $1 million in private funds to draft a short little paper recommending the privatization of a large number of public schools in Philadelphia. It was also hired (not sure the price tag) to draft the plan for the Transition Planning Commission that merges the schools of Memphis and Shelby County, moving a large number of children and $212 million into private hands.

Who are these guys? Who elected them to redraft the meaning of public education in urban America?

Their role in reshaping education is becoming more noticeable but I still have no idea where they are coming from.

They usually advise major corporations. Why are they now redesigning urban school districts?

What does Boston Consulting Group know about education? For that matter, what does McKinsey, Alvarez & Marsal, and Bain Capital know about education? Are these corporate strategists imposing corporate practices on a public service that belongs to the local community? Are they turning our schools into mirror images of corporate America?

Will we be stack ranking teachers and children like GE and Microsoft? Will we close low-performing schools and replace them with start-ups? Uh, yes, we are doing it now thanks to NCLB and Race to the Top.

What is their expertise? What is their experience? Do they know everything? Who advises them on education?

I read on the BCG website that Margaret Spellings is a senior advisor. Who else is giving them direction about how to transform public education by giving it to private entrepreneurs?

Categories Boston Consulting Group, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Privatization

Why Does Ohio Governor Kasich Treat Teachers as Public Enemy #1?

By dianeravitch
July 12, 2012 //
17

A reader writes in response to the post about New Jersey Governor Christie:

When you solve this mystery please come and help us in Ohio to uncover why Gov. Kascich has made teachers public enemy number one. We may have defeated his infamous House Bill 5, but he and his cronies are managing to slip in most of the laws and regulations in the back door .

Are there any Republican governors who are not at war with the teachers in their state? If so, please let me know. Maybe something happened at the Republican Governors’ conference in 2011.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Tenure

Can TFA Save Itself from the Impending Disaster?

By dianeravitch
July 10, 2012 //
24

Gary Rubinstein told me a year or so ago that the corporate reform movement was living on borrowed time.

He believes that its ideas are so destructive and ill-conceived that it is certain to implode as failure after failure drags it down and as the public realizes that its public schools are being ruined.

In this post, he tries to figure out how Teach for America might salvage its reputation as the ship goes down. He explores his own hope that the original idea of TFA—recruiting top college graduates to teach–might survive.

He suggests that there are two different TFA legacies: One is the privatization/testing group (Rhee, John White, etc.), and the other consists of realists who have joined the education profession or found other ways to be constructive. He looks to the latter group as a saving remnant when the great ship Corporate Reform founders, as it inevitably must.

I find it hard to share Gary’s sunny optimism. I agree with him that corporate reform is a disaster and that it will collapse and die, weighted down by its failures and its inability to achieve its goals. But TFA has benefited so handsomely from the “reforms” and has produced so many of the leaders, that it is hard to see how the one good idea that launched TFA gets disassociated.

But I would like to believe. Is Gary right? Will he be the one who helped save TFA?

Categories Broad Foundation, Corporate Reformers, Teach for America TFA

Where Power Resides

By dianeravitch
July 7, 2012 //
10

A reader sent this list of the board of directors of the Broad Center for the Management of School Systems for 2009.

The center is part of the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, which runs a training program for urban school superintendents.

Some (many?) Broad-trained superintendents have been involved in controversy, due to their non-collaborative management style.

Joel Klein, Chair, Chancellor New York City Department of Education
Barry Munitz, Vice Chair, Trustee Professor California State University, Los Angeles
Arlene Ackerman, Superintendent of Philadelphia Public Schools
Richard Barth (Chief Executive Officer KIPP Foundation)
Henry Cisneros, Chairman of City View America, former U.S. Secretary of HUD
Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education (on Board until Feb. 2009)
Louis Gerstner, Jr., Retired Chairman and CEO, IBM Corporation
Maria Goodloe-Johnson, Superintendent Seattle Public Schools
Dan Katzir, Managing Director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation
Wendy Kopp (CEO and Founder of Teach for America)
Margaret Spellings, President and CEO of Margaret Spellings and Company, former U.S. Secretary of DOE
Melissa Megliola Zaikos, Autonomous Management and Performance Schools Program Officer, Chicago Public Schools
Michelle Rhee, Chancellor District of Columbia Schools
Lawrence Summers, Director National Economic Council
Mortimer Zuckerman, Chairman and Editor-in-Chief, U.S. News & World Report; Publisher of the New York Daily News
Categories Broad Foundation, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Klein, Joel, Rhee, Michelle

What the Microsoft Culture Is Doing to Education

By dianeravitch
July 7, 2012 //
19

Paul Thomas has written a blog that explores the destructive nature of the Microsoft culture and how that culture is now affecting and demoralizing public education. Thomas is reacting to an article in Vanity Fair that is a must-read.

The “cannibalistic culture” that Thomas critiques is derived from a method of employee evaluation called “stack ranking,” where every unit is required to rank everyone in the unit, to identify the best, the average, and the worst, no matter how good everyone might be. By design, someone loses.

This competitive culture has not been good for Microsoft and is wreaking havoc on American public education, whose goal is equal educational opportunity, not the survival of the fittest. It is ruinous for collaboration, on which good schools depend.

It turns out that “stack ranking” is also known as “forced ranking,” and that it is a common practice in some big corporations. It was popularized by Jack Welch of GE. The idea was that you rate your employees from best to worst, and fire the worst. If all of them are really doing a terrific job, that’s too bad, you fire the bottom batch anyway, and repeat the process again next year.

One of the reasons I strongly recommend that you read the article in Vanity Fair is for the comments that follow. Here are a few samples:

I worked for IBM for a long time, and I definitely agree that “stacked ranking” in a company immediately and effectively kills all creativity in a team. No matter how brilliant anyone (or even everyone) on a team is, the majority of them will be relegated to mediocre-to-poor ratings year-after-year, while one or two of their higher-profile counterparts take the top rankings. Depending on the team, these top-ranked may truly be the best in the group, or they may just be more friendly with the manager or have a role within the team that gives them more exposure to their superiors. These rankings, as meaningless as they are, then affect every aspect of an employee’s career, from raises and bonuses to advancement opportunities, to job security during periods of layoffs. When I left IBM I promised myself I would never work for another company engaging in this absurd practice.

Taking platform developers and throwing them against hard goals and deadlines kills your ability to adapt. Management and project stakeholders end up making too many decisions about the technology away from the people who know it best – the people building it. To show progress and keep management happy, engineers shift their focus to tangible deliverables and ignore the pieces management can’t understand, like the underlying architecture. You start going down the path of building lots of bells and whistles, but nothing solid that you can competitively leverage.

Stack ranking is where they throw all the people in a work group together in a pit and let them eat each other. Afterward, the survivors are ranked according to ability by people who don’t actually work with them directly, thus permitting the lead to apologize in a credible fashion when someone who has been an excellent employee for at least 12 years (rarely less – and if you’ve been there over 15 years, you have a bullseye on the back of your head) given gleaming gold stars for performance for the last six months, suddenly has a big fat goose egg review and is escorted out the door for nonperformance issues.

At Enron, the same practice was called “Rank and Yank.” The traders who made the most money were ranked at the top. The ones who made the least were  yanked. And we know what happened to Enron.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates

Keep Following the Money in Philly, part 2

By dianeravitch
July 6, 2012 //
3

The Citypaper in Philadelphia learned that the city’s major foundation (William Penn) is funding the privatization forces, and the foundation didn’t like it. It launched pushback in other media.

What appears to be unquestionably true in the offensive and counteroffensive is that powerful people are mobilizing to turn many public schools in Philadelphia over to privately run charters or even to voucher schools. This move was predictable in the wake of the report by the Boston Consulting Group, one of those big management consulting teams that prefers private management to public government control. Wherever you find the advice of Boston Consulting Group, you will find a plan to privatize public schools.

Despite loud public demonstrations in support of community schools, the wealthy philanthropists and businessmen of Philadelphia do not like to be thwarted. It annoys them when unimportant people who send their children to public schools have the nerve to oppose their plans to “save” those children. How dare they? Who cares what “the little people” say? Why don’t they just listen to their “betters”?

Categories Boston Consulting Group, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Philadelphia
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »