Schools Matter

Broad Inauguration Party in Washington D.C., Tuesday, Jan. 20, 2009. (Photo/Stuart Ramson)

While many of us were out busting our humps to gather up a few dollars and votes for the change we thought we could believe in, the Harvard boys were cutting backroom deals with the multi-billionaire oligarchs to fully engage their plan to corporatize American public education, beginning with the urban schools.

There is no wonder that Spellings and Paige were running around breathless and wild-eyed, even as it became clear that McCain was going down. The insiders knew the Bush charter plan would not only go forward under Obama, but it would be slammed into overdrive by the clan of vulture capitalists and tax credit leeches who paid plenty to play the high stakes game for control of American schooling.

From The Nation's Dana Goldstein, where the story picks up on Obama's decision to invite the three stooges to the White House recently to proclaim the new post-partisan victory for philanthro-capitalism, disguised neatly under the banner of civil rights--with one particularly well-paid civil rights advocate getting a half-million for his time:

. . . the single-mindedness--some would say obsessiveness--of the reformers' focus on these specific policy levers ["free market competition"] puts off more traditional Democratic education experts and unionists. As they see it, with the vast majority of poor children educated in traditional public schools, education reform must focus on improving the management of the public system and the quality of its services--not just on supporting charter schools. What's more, social science has long been clear on the fact that poverty and segregation influence students' academic outcomes at least as much as do teachers and schools.

Obama's decision to invite representatives of only one side of this divide to the Oval Office confirmed what many suspected: the new administration--despite internal sympathy for the "broader, bolder approach"--is eager to affiliate itself with the bipartisan flash and pizazz around the new education reformers. The risk is that in doing so the administration will alienate supporters with a more nuanced view of education policy. What's more, critics contend that free-market education reform is a top-down movement that is struggling to build relationships with parents and community activists, the folks who typically support local schools and mobilize neighbors on their behalf.

So keenly aware of this deficit are education reformers that a number of influential players were involved in the payment of $500,000 to Sharpton's nearly broke nonprofit, the National Action Network, in order to procure Sharpton as a national spokesman for the EEP. And Sharpton's presence has unquestionably benefited the EEP coalition, ensuring media attention and grassroots African-American crowds at events like the one held during Obama's inauguration festivities, at Cardozo High School in Washington.

"Sharpton was a pretty big draw," says Washington schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, recalling the boisterous crowd at Cardozo. Rhee is known for shutting down schools and aggressively pursuing a private sector-financed merit pay program. Some of the locals who came out to hear Sharpton booed Rhee's speech at the same event, despite the fact that her policies embody the movement for which Sharpton speaks.

The $500,000 donation to Sharpton's organization was revealed by New York Daily News columnist Juan González on April 1, as the EEP and National Action Network were co-hosting a two-day summit in Harlem, attended by luminaries including Chicago schools CEO Arne Duncan. The money originated in the coffers of Plainfield Asset Management, a Connecticut-based hedge fund whose managing director is former New York City schools chancellor Harold Levy, an ally of the current chancellor, Joel Klein. Plainfield has invested in Playboy, horse racetracks and biofuels. But the company did not donate the money directly to Sharpton. Rather, in what appears to have been an attempt to cover tracks, the $500,000 was given to a nonprofit entity called Education Reform Now, which has no employees. (According to IRS filings, Education Reform Now had never before accepted a donation of more than $92,500.) That group, in turn, funneled the $500,000 to Sharpton's nonprofit.

If one person is at the center of this close-knit nexus of Wall Street and education reform interests, it is Joe Williams, who serves as president and treasurer of the EEP's board and is also the executive director of Education Reform Now. But it is through his day job that Williams, a former education reporter for the Daily News, exerts the most influence. He is executive director of Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), a four-year-old PAC that has gained considerable influence, raising $2 million in 2008 and demonstrating remarkable public relations savvy.

The group's six-person team works out of an East Forty-fifth Street office donated--rent-free--by the hedge fund Khronos LLC. In recent months, DFER has had a number of high-profile successes, chief among them a highly coordinated media campaign to call into question the work of Obama education adviser Linda Darling-Hammond, once considered a top contender for the job of education secretary. During the same week in early December, the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and Boston Globe published editorials or op-eds based on DFER's anti-Darling-Hammond talking points, which focused on the Stanford professor's criticisms of Teach for America and other alternative-certification programs for teachers. Less than two weeks later, Obama appointed DFER's choice to the Education Department post, Chicago schools CEO Duncan.

During campaign season, DFER donated to House majority whip James Clyburn, Senator Mark Warner and Virginia swing district winner Representative Tom Periello, among others. The organization regularly hosts events introducing education reformers like Rhee and Fenty to New York City "edupreneurs," finance industry players for whom education reform is a sideline. DFER is focused on opening a second office, in Colorado, a state viewed as being in the forefront of standards- and testing-based education reform. The group successfully promoted Denver schools superintendent Michael Bennett to fill the Senate seat vacated when Obama named Ken Salazar as interior secretary. Bennett led the school system with the highest-profile merit pay system in the nation.

During the Democratic Party's national convention in Denver this past August, DFER hosted a well-attended event at the Denver Museum of Art, during which Fenty, Booker, Klein, Sharpton and other well-known Democrats openly denigrated teachers unions, whose members accounted for 10 percent of DNCC delegates. With Clyburn and other veteran members of Congress in attendance, many longtime observers of Democratic politics believed the event represented a sea change in the party's education platform, the arrival of a new generation. While progressive groups such as Education Sector, Education Trust and the Citizens' Commission on Civil Rights have long attempted to push free-market education reforms to the Democratic Party, it is only with the arrival of DFER that the movement has had a lobbying arm with an explicit focus on influencing the political process through fundraising and media outreach.

"For a lot of groups that are dependent upon both private money and government money, there's a tendency not to want to get involved in the nitty-gritty of politics," Williams said in a March 31 phone interview from Denver, where he was meeting with Colorado politicians, setting the stage for DFER's expansion there. "Our group--what we do is politics. We make it clear: we're not an education reform group. We're a political reform group that focuses on education reform. That distinction matters because all of our partners are the actual education reform groups. We're trying to give them a climate where it's easier for them to do their work."

The education reformers who came to prominence in the 1990s, including the founders of Teach for America and the Knowledge Is Power Program, the national charter school network that fought unionization in one of its Brooklyn schools, often went to great lengths to portray themselves as explicitly apolitical. Nevertheless, "a lot of those people are, politically, Democrats," says Sara Mead, a DFER board member and director of early childhood programs at the Washington-based New America Foundation. "One of those things that DFER does that's really important is to help give those people a way to assert their identity as Democrats. It's important for those groups' long-term success, but also for Democrats, to the extent that some of these organizations are doing really good things for the kids whose parents are Democratic constituents. It's important that those organizations are identified with us rather than being co-opted by Republicans, as they were in the past." . . . .

So let's see, if I am working for a an outfit like KIPP or TFA, and I don't want to proclaim my political allegiance, I can funnel money through DFER to pay off the politicians who will make the decisions that favor the benefactors and oligarchs who are funding my programs. Is this what you might call non-identity politics??

I think this must signal the end of the two party system, since it no longer matters which party you belong to--in the end, the oligarchs will buy either.

Has Howard Dean announced for 2012 yet?? As an Independent?? He's a shoo-in.

The oligarchs running the bogus Education Equality Project paid for 70 buses to bring busloads of hornswoggled poor people to Washington, DC to watch Arne's over-the-hill gang promote segregation via charter school, all the while advocating for equality on a day marked to remember the now-esiscerated Brown v Board of Education decision.

Here's a clip from today's Washington Post with a quote from the brains of the bunch, Newt Gingrich:

"I know it's possible to educate every child from every background," Gingrich said to loud applause from the largely African American crowd that had come to Washington in 70 buses from 22 cities. "We're not telling you what the answer is. But we're telling you to keep changing until you find a solution."

Anything to avoid the real problem of poverty, he thought.

In a display of moral blindness that ignorantly ignores the re-segregation of American schools while, yet, clamoring for the "No Excuses" apartheid chain gangs of KIPP, political relics like Gingrich, Sharpton, and Bloomberg are parading their tough guy solutions around Washington today in hopes a generating a grassroots movement for the corporate takeover of American schools. If anything could be more ridiculous, I can't think of it.

There was this reaction Thursday by Errol Louis in the New York Daily News:

Thursday, May 14th 2009, 2:08 PM
Fifty-five years after the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that struck down laws segregating public schools by race, there's intense pressure by local and federal authorities to close the persistent education gap between white students and their black and Latino counterparts.

The fight is about to shift into high gear, with the White House pledging $5 billion to turn around 5,000 failing schools and the Education Equality Project co-founded by the Rev. Al Sharpton and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein holding a rally in Washington this weekend framing the struggle to fix schools as a continuation of the civil rights movement.

It's a commendable goal that, I fear, will not be reached as long as we continue to ignore the 800-pound gorilla in the room: the entrenched segregation in housing and employment that leads, as day follows night, to concentrated poverty and separate-but-unequal test scores and dropout rates.

So long as we accept segregated cities, suburbs and workplaces as the natural order of things, there isn't much point in being surprised that barely half of all black and Latino kids graduate high school (compared with 78% of their white counterparts).

All available evidence shows that leaving black and brown families in isolated, impoverished neighborhoods creates a dense thicket of social problems - including educational failure - that resist easy solutions. That is why the struggle for civil rights was always understood to be a sprawling, multifront attack on laws, commercial practices and cultural attitudes.

But the broad movement of the past has been replaced by a relatively narrow education discussion in which the price of admission for those who want to be taken seriously is to say as little as possible about race, injustice or discrimination.

Leaders of the education equity fight end up going through mental and political contortions to argue that America can and must end one system of racial injustice - while leaving all others untouched, unchallenged and intact. There is no discussion, for instance, of the disgraceful residential segregation that leaves so many urban neighborhoods - including here in New York - virtually all-white or all-black.

You rarely hear about government agencies enforcing the fair housing laws or working to reduce employment discrimination. On the contrary, the Bloomberg administration continues to battle in court against the federal Justice Department, stubbornly defending the hiring practices that created New York's 92% white Fire Department.

"America's thinking about education has taken on a strangely pre-Brown quality," writes Richard Kahlenberg, a fellow at the Century Foundation. "There exists a solid consensus among researchers that school segregation perpetuates failure, and an equally durable consensus among politicians and policymakers that nothing much can be done about it."

Another educational skeptic, James Forman Jr., son of the civil rights leader, says that we too often fixate on a model project like the Harlem Children's Zone or the KIPP charter schools while ignoring the question of whether there is even close to enough political will and money to take the models to scale.
"For too long, I am afraid, the answer has been to trumpet the success of a spectacular school or teacher and shout, 'No More Excuses,' or 'It's Being Done.' But that alone will not work," Forman writes in the current Boston Review. "There are more than 19 million low-income students in this country. That is the problem we have to solve."
I have the greatest personal respect, and highest hopes, for the efforts by Klein, Sharpton and the new education secretary, Arne Duncan, to improve public education. But they and the rest of us have to stop kidding ourselves about what it will take to end inequality in America.

(AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
No, no, not Curly, Moe, and Larry--those guys were hilarious.

I am talking about the distinctly not-funny have-beens, Al, Mike, and Newt, who have been serving as front men for the Business Roundtable's hoax they call the Education Equality Project.

The Washington Post was so eager yesterday to print the story about the "post-partisan" pimping for the Gates/Broad urban apartheid education agenda that they posted the news before it even occurred--but then, when your corporate media empire is built on the backs of children bowed by the growing testing burden, you can't be too eager to make sure this effort to universalize urban reform schools across the nation succeeds.

Gingrich and Bloomberg we could have predicted to lead the charge on this U. S. Chamber of Commerce/Civil Rights cause of the 21st Century, but Sharpton?? Everyone knows he is an equal opportunity opportunist, but can a black man who has often spoken eloquently about Civil Rights really lead a march on May 16 that makes a mockery of Brown v Board of Education? When the Supreme Court declared 9-0 fifty-five years ago that separate schools are "inherently unequal." Sharpton yesterday, as reported in the NYTimes blog, The Caucus:

“Fifty-five years after Brown versus the Board of Education, there’s still a difference in how students get up in the morning and go to school,” Mr. Sharpton said. “Some are treated differently. Some are funded differently. Some face different principles [sic], different teachers. There is a difference in the quality of education.”

I would look worried, too, Al. Does Sharpton really believe that his peers and history, alike, will not harshly judge his complicity in the re-institutionalization of apartheid schools, where black children, this time around, are manhandled under a punishing and de-humanizing regimen of behavior control, intellectual sterilization, and cultural castration in cheap corporate charter schools that save the Bloombergs of the world 20% of their education tax bill? Will Sharpton feel the ground move under his feet as Dr. King and all those who died for an integrated and equal society roll en masse in their graves?

The New York Times had the story about the recent neo-lib and neo-con party in New York to put together a strategy so that profiteers of all political stripes can cash in on part of the Dunc's $5 billion that is up for grabs in the Race to the Cash contest sponsored by ED. The front group is called the Education Equality Project, and if the odd political bedfellows such as Newt Gingrich, Al Sharpton, Joel Klein, and Randi Weingarten have their way, the poor in this country will be equally subjected to a universal change-the-child punitive pedagogy that puts the full weight of altering our racist and classist society on the shoulders of children, teachers, and parents. Meanwhile, the casino capitalists and their apologists accumulate tax money to fund the corporatization of American public schools. Here is a clip from the Times:

. . . .Now Mr. Klein and Mr. Sharpton “have rounded up Education Secretary Arne Duncan, several big-city mayors and former Clinton nemesis Newt Gingrich to appear with them at a convention this week,” Ms. McAdoo said, “where they will surely move to create a national presence for themselves as the defenders of children against, oh, say, the teachers’ unions.”

Back to strange bedfellows: Ms. McAdoo’s criticism notwithstanding, the teachers’ union president, Randi Weingarten, was on stage with Mr. Duncan, Mr. Sharpton and Mr. Klein at Thursday’s conference, which the union had helped to sponsor.

“Nobody is supporting us more financially than Randi Weingarten,” Mr. Sharpton said.

Ms. Weingarten said that the union had given about $10,000 a year for the last eight years to the National Action Network, Mr. Sharpton’s civil rights group — not to the Education Equality Project.

It is heartening to see others writing about the takeover of education by the oligarchs. Clay Burrell has this:

It hasn't been a good week for NYC Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and the Education Equality Project (EEP) he co-founded (under suspicious circumstances) with Al Sharpton. (The EEP is the "test the students, silence the parents, close the schools, blame the teachers, ignore the socio-economic factors" wing of education reform.)

Not quite the party they'd planned? They held a conference this week - their biggest ever platform for the EEP, according to the pre-conference fanfare - that didn't seem to go over very well. Arne Duncan was met with boos when he announced his support of Mayor Bloomberg's control of NYC public schools. Al Sharpton himself backed away from supporting Klein's boss. A Q&A session featured critiques of Klein's claims of improvement and calls for his dismissal. See New York City Public School Parents for a good summary and web roundup about the event.

The EEP website doesn't pass the test for accuracy and rigor: Aaron Pallas at Gotham Schools saved me the labor of fact-checking the Education Equality Project's website, and here's the score: out of its 8 featured facts about the achievement gap, Pallas finds four are false, two are "toss-ups," and two are true. By my count, the Klein-Sharpton site would score 25% if this were a test. (Since two are toss-ups, I might make excuses for them and inflate the grade to a 40. But that goes against the "no excuses" mantra.)

Shades of AIG in NYC schools fiscal management: Klein's status as poster-boy of Eli Broad's "business administration" solution to urban school district administration may have taken a hit if the report by City Comptroller Bill Thompson on $700 million in contracting overruns for a two-year period is even partly accurate. (Thompson is running for mayor against Bloomberg.) Fred Klonsky highlights some whoppers:

• Contracts for goods and services that have exceeded their cost estimates by nearly $700 million over the past two years.

• A single $1 million contract with Xerox to lease copiers that ended up costing the DOE nearly $68 million.

• A contract for cafeteria equipment that ballooned from roughly $15,000 to $850,000.

• A software deal that went from $135,000 to $5.5 million.

And Sharon Higgins has this most recent addition at Education Notes Online to the growing literature on the misanthropic oligarchs, or as she calls it, vulture philanthropy:

From Sharon Higgins

Here’s a scholarly and informative article to share with you: "The Politics of Venture Philanthropy in Charter School Policy and Advocacy," by Janelle Scott (Associate Professor at UC Berkeley, formerly NYU) and published by SAGE. It will take a while to read (32 pages), but I believe it will be worth your time.

Scott explains the billionaires' strategy to push charter schools onto communities and how they are maneuvering their immense foundation-giving to achieve this result. She also describes the not-always-well-intentioned, and/or misguided, history of foundation "giving" which has targeted communities of color in the past.

The foundation-giving programs of today require an important trade-off from the local communities: namely, the relinquishment of interest and power over their own public schools to the public education notions of a few immensely wealthy oligarchs. What does it tell us that the communities where this is occurring necessitated first being placed under authoritarian rule?

Scott’s article explains how the "gifts" of these foundations are going to a broad range of charter advocacy groups, pro-charter research organizations, alternative teacher and principal training programs, charter school development organizations, etc. EdVoice, Center for Education Reform, TFA, NewSchools Venture Fund, NewLeaders for New Schools, KIPP, Green Dot, Democrats for Education Reform, and the EEP are just the teeny tiny tip of the you're-going-to-have-charter-schools-if-you-want-them-or-not iceberg.

Scott describes the flow of money to these organizations with the intent to have them work as a network in unison to further the billionaires' goal. Very few of the donations go directly to individual schools and their students, but just enough to make them look a lot better than their traditional school neighbors. The majority of the dollars go toward advocacy, propaganda, and the building of a national pro-charter school structure.

I've recently learned how Broad has bought off large, important portions of PBS, and how Ms. Gates is on the board of the Washington Post. The extent to which the media has been co-opted by this force would be a good topic for someone to track. We know how heavily they have influenced the White House.

I was especially interested to learn that one of the official techniques used to push charter schools, and described in a 2004 Philanthropy Roundtable donors guide, is "...the sponsorship of efforts that put parents of color out front instead of 'rich, white Republicans.' " The technique is exactly described here and here.

This general strategy may also explain why a deeply-in-debt-to-the-IRS Al Sharpton was persuaded to join the pro-charter force.

Another small item that may be of interest to some of you is that the Broad Foundation paid the Century Foundation $100,000 (in 2004) and $29,973 (in 2007) to "support research on the late union leader Albert Shanker." You may view The Broad Foundation 990's here.

Perhaps this is the "why" it has come about that pro-charter forces mention Albert Shanker so frequently for being responsible for the idea of charter schools. They use this statement to both justify the existence of charter schools, and to attempt to disarm the teachers' union complaints about them.

The details of these maneuvers are extensive, and won’t be easily grasped by the American public, not to mention the lesser educated parents in the communities now being targeted. The word about what is really going on desperately needs to get out more broadly.

Download the article here. But you have to register first. I have the pdf. Email me if you want a copy.

Related:

Susan Ohanian reports on Broad takeover of Phi Delta Kappan

Note: These are the people Weingarten and the UFT/AFT want to partner with.