Yesterday, Thomas Friedman published yet another article lambasting American public education. Every time he writes about public schools, it is a put-down. He said in one article that America is “in decline” because of low scores on international tests, because McKinsey & Co. said so. Google his name and “Teach for America,” and you will get more than 100,000 hits.
David Sirota, an investigative journalist, wondered why New York Times’ columnist Thomas Friedman always sides with the economic elites in this country and around the world, and he suggests the answer: He married into one of the richest families in America.
He wrote in 2006:
I’ve documented repeatedly how New York Times columnist Tom Friedman parrots the propaganda of Big Money, using his column to legitimize some of the worst, most working-class-persecuting policies this country has seen in the last century – all while bragging on television that he doesn’t even bother read the details of the policies he advocates for. I have always believed Friedman’s perspective comes from the bubble he lives in – that is, I have always believed he feels totally at ease shilling for Big Money and attacking workers because from the comfortable confines of the Washington suburbs he lives in and the elite cocktail parties he attends, what Friedman says seems mainstream to him. But I never had any idea how dead on I was about the specific circumstances of Friedman’s bubble – and how it potentially explains a lot more than I ever thought.
As the July edition of the Washingtonian Magazine notes, Friedman lives in “a palatial 11,400-square-foot house, now valued at $9.3 million, on a 7½-acre parcel just blocks from I-495 and Bethesda Country Club.” He “married into one of the 100 richest families in the country” – the Bucksbaums, whose real-estate Empire is valued at $2.7 billion.
Sirota thinks that full disclosure matters. In the case of Ted Kennedy, for example, everyone knew about his family and its wealth. And, furthermore, he did not advance his family’s economic interest.
As we have seen again and again, whenever Thomas Friedman writes about education, he writes with hostility towards public education, towards career educators, and with indifference to the struggles of many middle-class and poor families. He consistently writes admiringly about corporate reform policies such as high-stakes testing and Teach for America (one of his daughters joined TFA).
Sirota writes:
Friedman, unlike Kennedy, uses his position to push the very specific economic policies (such as “free” trade) that the superwealthy in this country are pushing and exclusively benefit from. That’s why his billionaire scion status is so important for the public to know – because it raises objectivity questions. If, for instance, Richard Mellon Scaife wrote articles in newspapers demanding the repeal of the estate tax – don’t you think it would be important for readers to be warned that Scaife was a multimillionaire whose family (and the few families like his) would almost exclusively benefit from the policies he was writing about? Of course. That’s called full disclosure and transparency, the very things critical to an objective free press and democracy – the very thing Friedman says is so important for other countries when he writes about foreign policy.
So the next time you read a piece by Tom Friedman telling us how wonderful job outsourcing is or how great it is to pass Big Money’s latest trade deal that include no labor, wage, human rights or environmental provisions – just remember: Tom Friedman, scion of a billionaire business empire, is just doing right by his own economic class.
EduShyster has a dream, but it is not the one that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke about in 1963 at the March on Washington.
She has a dream of Dr. King returning today to see the new “reform” movement which so often claims that it is the “civil rights movement” of our time.
He tours the “no excuses” school and sees that it is segregated. He discovers that the new “civil rights movement” is funded by many billionaires.
He might be shocked to discover that poverty is now considered “an excuse,” not something to be opposed and banished.
He might be even more amazed to discover that in today’s world, the labor unions are an obstacle to closing the achievement gap, and not–as he thought–a valued ally in his efforts to advance social justice.
As he completes his tour of “excellent” charter schools, more surprises in store for him:
Separate but innovative Tough news on this issue, reformers. Even Dr. King 2.0, now with more excellence, might have a problem with our apparent abandonment of the ideal of universal public education. In Detroit, for example, where he delivered his speech at the Great March in 1963, there are now dual school systems: one of charter schools and the other a public system that must accept all children and is rapidly becoming the last resort for the toughest-to-serve kids. And in Washington DC, where King dreamed of an equal future for children of all races, two separate systems, one for strivers, one for discards, compete for public resources. I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that even Dr. King 2.0 would not be a fan of “separate but innovative.”
Bob Braun covered politics and education in New Jersey for the Star-Ledger for 50 years until his recent retirement. He now has his own blog, which is an invaluable source of information and insight into New Jersey political doings.
Here he writes about the ouster of five Newark principals by state-appointed superintendent Cami Anderson. Four of them spoke at a public hearing about the pending closure of their public schools, which will be handed over to KIPP. The fifth was suspended because she supported the president of the school’s PTSA, who was banned from entering the school his children attended.
Here is how the story begins:
At Newark’s Hawthorne Avenue School, the test scores are up, higher than state-imposed goals—and certainly better than those of the highly touted “Renew” schools favored by the administration. The hallways are quiet. Teachers and administrators get along. And this was all done despite central office’s stripping away of faculty resources and shameful neglect of the building. So, in the crazy, bullying logic of Gov. Chris Christie’s administration of city schools, it was time to suspend the school’s successful principal, H. Grady James. He was just too good to be allowed to stay.
Time to suspend him—and to try to smear his reputation by saying he was involved in some sort of “incident” now under “investigation.” The “incident” was a community meeting at the HopewellBaptist Church last Wednesday where he spoke, praising the efforts of his students, teachers and parents.
James was one of five principals indefinitely suspended in one day by Cami Anderson, Christie’s agent in Newark. The others were Tony Motley, Bragaw Avenue School; Dorothy Handfield, Belmont-Runyon School; Deneen Washington, Maple Avenue School, and Lisa Brown, Ivy HillSchool.
Braun’s article is maddening. It all seems so unfair. These principals were ousted the way a corporation fires a dangerous or possibly criminal employee: They were called to central headquarters, where their keys were taken away, and their computer access blocked. They were told not to enter the schools until further notice.
Governor Christie and Commissioner Chris Cerf want to privatize the entire Newark school district, to make it like New Orleans. Cami Anderson is their agent. She bullied the principals the same way that Christie bullies teachers and mayors.
The corporate types who hate teachers’ unions and public schools have been running a billboard and mass media campaign in New York and New Jersey.
But they are not the only ones who know how to frame a message.
Here is a fabulous billboard posted on a major highway in Colorado by critics of the nutty testing regime imposed by No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top.
Teach for America, through LEE, hopes to take charge of the reins of power in many districts, states, and the halls of Congress.
TFA, of course, is a mainstay of the corporate reform movement, supplying the ill-trained recruits to the charter chains like Rocketship and gaining elective positions by espousing the slogans of “reform.”
Electoral work amounts to less than a third of LEE’s budget, its officials say, but it has nevertheless fueled popular accounts of the organization, mostly critical. Such accounts accuse the group of supporting candidates who espouse a particular “corporate” brand of education policy focused on expanding charter schools and test-based accountability.
Critics point to prominent TFA alumni and LEE members, such as Bill Ferguson, a state senator in Maryland, who sponsored legislation that included an iteration of the “parent trigger.” That policy permits parents to turn over the management of schools to outside operators.
LEE officials contest such depictions.
“We do not exist to propagate policy,” said Mr. Buman.
And Stephen Sawchuck’s article in Education Week adds:
The connection to TFA also appears to have given LEE-backed candidates access to an informal network that can fuel spending. Campaign-finance records from the Nevada state board races, for instance, turn up some of the same donors who have contributed to other endeavors affiliated with so-called “reform” priorities, including charter school expansion and teacher evaluations linked to student test scores.
Those contributors include Alan Fournier, who helps finance the New Jersey chapter of StudentsFirst, the advocacy group founded by former District of Columbia Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee, and Charles Ledley, a donor to Democrats for Education Reform, a political action committee.
“There’s a strong network of people who are supportive of TFA alums, regardless of what their policy or visions are for the respective school systems,” Mr. Esteves said.
In essence, the issue boils down to one of self-selection: Even if LEE itself is politically neutral, it supports candidates who by definition must take policy stands. And those who reach out for its help may well favor a certain approach after being immersed in TFA’s philosophy, Mr. McGuinn of Drew University said.
It is doubtless sheer accident that TFA/LEE-supported candidates support charter schools, test-based evaluation, and the same policy prescriptions as Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst.
Hey, I live in Brooklyn. Anyone want to buy a world-famous bridge?
Jessica B. Swencki of the Brunswick County schools in North Carolina knows a scam when she sees one. With the near total deregulation of charter schools in that state, the corporate charter chains are moving in to where it’s easy to run a school and skim huge profits.
Here’s the deal. A big for-profit operation finds a local board to act as its front during the application process.
One doesn’t have to look any further than the Eastern part of the state for a case study in how savvy companies use this loosely regulated system to pocket millions of taxpayer dollars.
Here’s how it works: A for-profit educational management organization “helps” the nonprofit board write the charter application. Once the charter is granted, the nonprofit board hires the same EMO to operate the charter school. The charter school pays the EMO sizable fees to “manage” the schools – those fees added up to over $15.7 million taxpayer dollars for one EMO in Eastern North Carolina over the past five years.
Coincidentally (or not), in at least one case, the founder of the EMO also happens to be the organizer of a second company that leases facilities and equipment to the charter school (i.e., landlord).
Now, remember, the nonprofit board hired the EMO to track and report all the financial data; and it is the EMO that advises the nonprofit board as to whether the landlord’s fees are reasonable. But don’t forget, the landlord also runs the EMO.
This deal got even sweeter for the landlord this summer when the General Assembly amended a statute. Now the landlord is no longer required to pay any state tax on the land the landlord rents to the charter school. I suppose from a business perspective nothing could be finer. Why isn’t this making headlines? Isn’t this illegal? Surprisingly, no. There is little to no public accountability for the financial decisions made by charter schools, and there is no transparency mandate from the General Assembly.
In a time of shrinking financial markets, charter schools remain an excellent marketplace for savvy corporations looking for consumers.
This teacher has an idea why the costs of American education are going up while teachers are being laid off, and teachers must pay for supplies out of their own pocket. It is no paradox to her. She left this comment:
When I think of the money that has been diverted from classrooms to testing and teacher evaluation companies, it makes me sick. The extra supports (after school programs, counseling, smaller classes, electives, etc.) have been sucked away by corporate greed. This borders on plain stupidity and theft.
This past week, the good citizens of Kansas City and Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education were graced with one of the most vacuous manifestos on education reform I’ve read in a really long time. Yes, on my blog, I’ve pontificated about numerous other vacuous manifestos that often take the form of blog posts and op-eds which I suspect have little substantive influence over actual policies.
But this one is a little different. This report by an organization calling itself CEE, or Cities for Education Entrepreneurship Trust, in collaboration with Public Impact, is a bit more serious. No more credible, but more serious, in that it is assumed that state policymakers in Missouri might actually act on the report’s recommendations.
I’ve had the displeasure of reviewing several reports by Public Impact in the Past. Their standard fare is to establish a bold conclusion, and then cite (including self citation) materials that support – with no real validation- their forgone conclusion, cite other stuff that’s totally unrelated, and cite yet other stuff that doesn’t even exist. Thus, they are actually able to construct a report with a few graphs here and there and lots of footnotes, without ever validating a single major (albeit forgone) conclusion (see for example, this one, by the same author, under a different organizational umbrella, or this one).
Is the plan original? No, he says, it is the same old song, which has no research to support it, just a mountain of assertions and assumptions. Here goes:
Here’s a synopsis – call it an advanced organizer – of the story line crafted in the report:
Urban districts don’t work (and aren’t stable)
Kansas City is an urban district, therefore, it doesn’t work (even though we find it has stabilized)
Privately operated charter schools in Newark, New Jersey, New York City, Texas and New Orleans are producing miracles – yielding incredible graduation rates and high test scores while serving comparably low income and otherwise needy children (even though they really aren’t serving similar kids, and many have far more resources)
Thus, the same can – no must – work in Kansas City (even though it hasn’t)
Somewhat tangentially, decentralized financing – driving money to schools for site based control – is necessarily good (even though reviews of the research suggest otherwise)
Therefore, the only solution is to deconstruct the entire failed urban district, turn control over to a non-government authority which shall loosely govern a confederation of private non-profit entities that shall compete with one another for students, choose which market niche and geographic space within KC they wish to serve and be evaluated on the test scores and graduation rates they ultimately produce.
None of the assertions and assumptions are true, but so what? That is what it will take to tear apart the KC school district and hoax the fools who buy the story.
After a good deal of fascinating analysis of demography and statistics about results, Baker concludes:
While the authors of this report so confidently conclude that the obvious solution is to replace the failed urban district with an under-regulated, loosely governed confederation of benevolent non-profit actors, one might easily alternatively conclude from the evidence herein… that simply put, large scale chartering in urban centers like Kansas City simply doesn’t work. It never has and likely never will. It fails to serve the neediest children because “market forces” and accountability measures favor avoiding those children and the neighborhoods in which they live.
Further, large scale chartering leads to deprivation of important constitutional and statutory rights for children, primarily low income and minority children. Meanwhile, suburban white peers are not being asked to forgo constitutional protections in order to access elementary and secondary schooling.
Finally, large scale chartering has made far more opaque financial and governance accountability as governing institutions have created more complex private structures in order to shield their operations, records and documents from full public view.
Morgan Smith of the Texas Tribune (published in thr New York Times) wrote about the secrecy that surrounds the finances of private corporations that manage schools and claim to be “public.”
They are “public” when it is time to get the money but their finances are private when asked to account for taxpayer money.
Basis, an Arizona charter chain, submitted an application to open a charter in San Antonio and this is what happened:
“On a recently approved Texas charter school application, blacked-out paragraphs appear on almost 100 of its 393 pages.
“Redactions on the publicly available online version of the application often extend for pages at a time. They include sections on the school’s plan to support students’ academic success, its extracurricular activities and the “extent to which any private entity, including any management company” will be involved in the school’s operation. The “shaded material,” according to footnotes, is confidential proprietary or financial information.”
Smith writes:
“In Texas, commercial entities cannot run public schools. But when a school’s management — including accounting, marketing and hiring decisions — is contracted out to a private company, the distinction can become artificial. Such an arrangement raises questions about how to ensure financial accountability when the boundary between public and private is blurred, and the rules of public disclosure governing expenditures of taxpayer money do not apply.”
Some of the most secretive companies run virtual schools, paid for with public money:
“When The Texas Tribune made an open-records request for employee salary records and marketing expenses at the state’s full-time virtual schools, it received responses from all but one of those connected with for-profit entities indicating either that the records were not available or were not subject to public information laws.
“The Huntsville Independent School District, which went into partnership with K12 Inc. to open a virtual academy this year, said the district did not have documents responding to the request at the virtual campus as “it contracts with a private company to handle all employment of personnel and staffing-related data.”
“In other instances, The Tribune was directed to make a request to the private company. A lawyer for Responsive Ed Solutions, a charter school that also contracts with K12 Inc., wrote that most employees of its virtual school were hired by the company and provided the email address of a K12 lawyer. A K12 Inc. spokesman then told The Tribune that “confidential information about K12’s employees” could not be disclosed.”
This remarkable article by Cassie Walker Burke with assistance from the Better Government Association details the story of Juan Rangel and the UNO charter school network, the biggest charter chain in Chicago.
It is a gripping tale about the consequences of deregulation and privatization, of creating schools that are not subject to the same laws as public schools, and of the problematic nexus between charter operators and politicians. The charter operators need the money controlled by the politicians, and the politicians need the troops controlled by the charters.
Burke writes, after a lengthy interview with Rangel last fall:
What emerged is a cautionary tale about the intersection of ambition and opportunity. UNO and its CEO thrived mainly because of gaping loopholes in the charter school system. While UNO has received a staggering $280 million in public money over the past five years to spend on education, neither Chicago Public Schools nor the Illinois State Board of Education provided enough oversight. Without that, insiders say, UNO developed a free-wheeling culture that was ripe for abuse. It collected lots of money, and Rangel amassed lots of power. But he didn’t always use them for the benefit of the thousands of kids in his charter schools…
From the beginning, Rangel operated on the notion that charters were exempt from the school district’s nepotism rules (they are allowed to write their own ethics policies) and from the so-called Shakman Decree, a consent decree put into place in 1983 to curb the patronage practices of Chicago pols (it applies to CPS but not to charter operators). As the UNO organization grew, it created plenty of jobs: teachers’ assistants, IT consultants, central office administrators, and community relations officers that Rangel and Mullins filled as they pleased…
[After dismissing its external for-profit management company], UNO…began paying itself a “management fee” of $1 of every $10 it received from local, state, and federal sources. (Some years UCSN kicked up more. In 2012, those fees totaled $5 million.) Under Rangel and Mullins, UNO had control over how that cash was spent…
A third of the nation’s charter schools pay fees to management companies—a head-scratching arrangement when you consider that charters were created as a way to eliminate bureaucracy, not create it. Few rules govern these arrangements, according to Gary Miron, a professor of education at Western Michigan University who has studied charter financing (though not UNO’s specifically). Once the charter manager collects the fee, the funds go under “the veil,” says Miron. “Basically, all of this money ends up getting paid to the management company, but we don’t know how much goes into their pockets or how much they spend on administrators, or administrators’ nephews or uncles.”
Free from oversight or supervision, the UNO organization collected millions from private foundations (like Walton) and from the government; and it was rife with conflicts of interest.
In June 2009, the state legislature awarded UNO a $98 million grant for school construction. Even charter advocates were shocked by such a staggering sum handed out to a single operator. “Very few, if any, charters [nationwide], except UNO, get that kind of state money to build schools,” says Andrew Broy, the president of the Illinois Network of Charter Schools, a lobbying and resource group.
Anticharter parents’ groups and unions immediately cried foul. “What on earth was the state thinking?” says Julie Woestehoff, the executive director of Parents United for a Responsible Education, a Chicago advocacy organization. “We have this huge budget crisis. To be giving UNO $98 million—it’s preposterous. It throws into enormous relief the political nature of this organization, the clout they have.”
UNO’s coup was the result of a classic one-two punch. The cousin of Miguel d’Escoto, Rangel’s chief organizer at the time, had bused hundreds of parents in matching T-shirts to Springfield to rally for weeks in front of the Capitol and the TV cameras. Behind the scenes, Rangel had worked Republican lawmakers— many of them charter fans—from Senate Republican leader Christine Radogno on down. To reinforce the message, he had hired a cadre of powerhouse lobbyists, including Victor Reyes and Michael Noonan, a former Madigan aide.
“They were playing the ‘Kumbaya’ chord that this was for the betterment of Latino families,” recalls Senator William Delgado, a Chicago Democrat who chairs the Senate Education Committee and voted for the grant—a decision he says he now regrets. “But it was the wolf dressed in sheep’s clothing. These guys [at UNO] weren’t responsible enough to get that much money.”
With that $98 million, UNO began scrambling to build new schools, Rangel’s two-campus Soccer Academy complex among them. No one inside the organization, it seems, bothered to read the grant agreement’s fine print. It specified that UNO “must immediately notify the [Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity, which administered the grant] in writing of any actual or potential conflicts of interest.”
As the Sun-Times would reveal in February 2013, a long line of contractors, plumbers, electricians, security firms, and consultants tied to many of the VIPs on UNO’s organizational chart got a piece of the action. Rangel spelled out in tax documents and in later bond disclosures that the construction firm d’Escoto Inc.—owned by former UNO board member Federico d’Escoto, the brother of Miguel d’Escoto—was the owner’s representative on three projects funded by the grant. Another d’Escoto brother, Rodrigo, was paid $10 million for glass subcontracts for UNO’s two Soccer Academies and a third school in the Northwest Side neighborhood of Galewood.
The vendor lists were peppered with other familiar names: a $101,000 plumbing contract awarded to the sister of Victor Reyes, UNO’s lobbyist, who helped secure the state grant; a $1.7 million electrical contract given to a firm co-owned by one of Ed Burke’s precinct captains; tens of thousands in security contracts to Citywide Security, a firm that had given money to Danny Solis, and to Aguila Security, managed by the brother of Rep. Edward Acevedo, who voted for the $98 million for UNO.
…Behind the scarlet curtain, UNO’s schools could be sloppy. Rangel rarely entered them. From 2008 until 2011, day-to-day operations fell to a strict Catholic nun, Sister Barbara McCarry, a veteran from the CPS office that vetted charters. To make up a budget gap from leaner times, UNO began stuffing more kids in classrooms (up to 30 in kindergarten and first grade, compared with the CPS average of 24) and levying “activity fees” on unsuspecting families. Expectations were high, tempers were strained, and a revolving door of principals (called directors at UNO schools) left a young and largely inexperienced crop of teachers casting about for guidance. Teachers say they felt pressure to please parents and to not draw any negative attention to the schools….
UNO’s teacher turnover rate careened toward 40 percent for the 2011–12 school year, though the network wasn’t the only charter operator in Chicago burning through staff. According to the independent Chicago education journal Catalyst,average teacher turnover at all local charters exceeded 50 percent the previous year….
[with legal troubles growing, Rangel resigned in December but UNO is still operating.]
UNO can’t count on more largess from the State of Illinois, at least until the inevitable political amnesia sets in. (In an email, a Quinn spokesperson wrote “NO” in all caps in response to the question of whether the governor would consider future UNO grants.) But the network’s authorizer, CPS, remarkably still seems to have its head firmly planted in the sand. Last February—after the Sun-Times stories broke—the board of education voted unanimously to extend UNO’s charter for another five years.
