Parsing SOTU

"Tonight, let's also recognize that there are communities in this country where, no matter how hard you work, it is virtually impossible to get ahead."

Obama refers to the MIDDLE CLASS 8 times in his SOTU address. WORKING CLASS, zero times. His only other mentions of CLASS are in WORLD-CLASS and CLASSMATES, one each.

He actually does use the word POVERTY 4 times and even calls for raising  the MINIMUM WAGE to $9/hr. Good, but that still leaves millions of full-time workers living far below the poverty line and without benefits.

He never mentions the words DRONES, KILL LIST, TORTURE, or GUANTANAMO for obvious reasons. Viewers may have just eaten and small children may be watching. We wouldn't want them to think...

IMMIGRATION REFORM is mentioned once along with STRONG BORDER SECURITY, MORE BOOTS ON THE GROUND and "passing a background check, paying taxes and a meaningful penalty, learning English, and going to the back of the line."

EDUCATION actually gets 15 mentions. Last year, as I recall, it got hardly any.  He's big on TAX CREDITS for corporations (do they need any more?) who provide jobs or invest in ed programs. He never mentions the words, TESTING, CHARTER SCHOOLS, SCHOOL CLOSINGS, or BAD TEACHERS even though they are the core language of RTTT.

One big change:  The past rhetoric about every student needing a college education to get a good job, has become, "...most young people will need some higher education." Maybe it's just the acceptance of the fact that college is increasingly becoming accessible only to the children of the wealthiest among us.

RACE TO THE TOP gets one mention where it's put forward as an incentive plan which "convinced almost every state to develop smarter curricula and higher standards, all for about 1 percent of what we spend on education each year." Is that even legal? Can federal funding be used to push the Common Core? Isn't he just feeding the T-baggers' claimof  too much federal interference?

Look out, high schools...

Obama says he's announcing a new challenge::

"... to redesign America's high schools so they better equip graduates for the demands of a high-tech economy. And we'll reward schools that develop new partnerships with colleges and employers, and create classes that focus on science, technology, engineering and math, the skills today's employers are looking for to fill the jobs that are there right now and will be there in the future."

No mention of CRITICAL THINKING or even TEACHING. LEARNING gets 2 mentions -- LEARNING ENGLISH and "...the sooner a child begins LEARNING, the better he or she does down the road." I guess he doesn't realize that all children begin learning as soon as they enter the world. But we'll let that slide since it was part of a push for more funding for early childhood education.

Mincing words

Obama is the great word mincer. For example, he says he doesn't want "senior citizens and working families to shoulder THE ENTIRE burden of deficit reduction, while asking NOTHING from the wealthiest and most powerful." Well, thank goodness for that. But he then goes on to claim that retirement programs threaten to "CROWD OUT the investments we need for our children."

Old sick bastards, taking food out of the mouths of their grandchildren just so they can pay for a doctor visit!

And finally GUNS are mentioned 10 times including GUNMAN AND OUTGUNNED. Having invited victims of the gun-violence epidemic to the SOTU speech was a good move. And when Obama began naming them one by one, saying, "Gabby Giffords deserves a vote. The families of Newtown deserve a vote. The families of Aurora deserve a vote..." I must admit, I stood up and shouted, "Yes! They deserve a vote."

But then I sat down and asked myself, "a vote on what?" What exactly was the prez asking Congress to vote on? No legislation was proposed and it's unclear what Obama and the Democrats are  even willing to push. Obama never mentioned the words ASSAULT WEAPONS BAN or MULTI-ROUND CLIPS. And while he did utter BACKGROUND CHECKS 3 times, two of them had to do with undocumented workers rather than gun buyers.

When it comes to gun violence (especially here in Rahmville), enough with the pretty speeches, Mr. President. Less talk, more action!

Oh, one more parse. The only time the word UNION appears is in the title, as in STATE OF THE ...

Gates uses funding to force privately-run charters on school districts

Last spring, as the Texas Legislature debated massive cuts to public schools—one of many desperate measures to close a $27 billion biennial budget deficit—10,000 protesters massed in Austin for a “Save Our Schools” rally. In the end, the damage to the state’s already-underfunded schools added up to $5.4 billion, forcing districts to lay off tens of thousands of teachers and staffers. -- American Prospect

The Gates Foundation moved on Austin and and other districts, forcing them to sign a pledge to promote privately-run charter schools in exchange for funding. Gates calls it their District-Charter Collaboration Compact under which the foundation awards the districts—14 so far—$100,000. These districts also supposedly get a shot at another $40 million worth of grants.

Last fall, following the Austin school board signed such a pledge with local charters. The agreement, Superintendent Meria Carstarphen said, would make Austin eligible for grants “from people and places that otherwise would not have given us the time of day.” A month later, the city again became a venue for protests—smaller, but equally vociferous—arguing against a new partnership.

According to Abby Rapoport, writing in the American Prospect:

It’s a story being repeated across the country. With most states cutting school funding, Gates and other private foundations are wielding outsize influence over public education, using their much-sought-after millions to fund and shape a top-down reform agenda. Like the other major (but smaller) players, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation, Gates uses its funds to encourage public schools to adopt a more corporate approach.

 Of course there's little difference the power foundations and federal funding, in this regard. Arne Duncan has also used his control of federal dollars to make competitive grants to states and school districts through Race To The Top, in exchange for a promise to close neighborhood schools and turn them over to private operators.

Power philanthropy: 'Influence peddling writ large'

Political reporter Nicholas Confessore has an important piece in today's Times, "Policy Making Billionaires" which reveals the disproportional power over public policy and institutions held by and handful of the world's richest men.

“It’s sort of influence-peddling writ large,” said Richard L. Brodsky, a senior fellow at the liberal-leaning research organization Demos and a former New York State assemblyman. “The notion that the society is better served by the super-rich exercising their charitable instincts is in the end anti-democratic.”

N.Y. Chancellor Tisch spends millions on Race-To-Top 'advisers"

Chancellor Tisch

Power philanthropy rules the schools

“Private people give money to support things they’re interested in.” -- Roger Tilles, member of the Board of Regents.

Chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents, Merryl Tisch, is contracting 13 research fellows  to advise the education commissioner and the 17-member board on how to spend its $700 million Race To The Top grant. The fellows will  be paid as much as $189,000 each, in private money; to date, $4.5 million has been raised, including $1 million donated Tisch herself. She is a member of one of New York’s multi-billionaire families.

Donors to the program will include Bill Gates ($892,000), who is leading the charge to evaluate teachers, principals and schools using students’ test scores; the National Association of Charter School Administrators ($50,000) and the Robbins Foundation ($500,000), which finance charter expansion; and the Tortora Sillcox Family Foundation ($500,000), whose mission statement includes advancing “Mayor Bloomberg’s school reform agenda.”

Tisch's bankrolling of the program is another indication of a new trend in ownership society schooling where representatives of the billionaire class directly run public institutions themselves and use tax-exempt private investment, either directly, or thorough their private foundations) to do an end run about the democratic process.  Earlier this month, Mayor Bloomberg announced that he would be running a city youth program with $30 million of his own foundation money.

NYT's Michael Winerip writes:

Public education has never been so divided, between those like Dr. Tisch, Commissioner John B. King Jr. and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg who support the Obama administration’s signature Race to the Top initiative and its emphasis on standardized tests and charter schools; and dissenters on the board, who call it a Race to the Bottom and put their faith in teachers as well as traditional public schools. The Race to the Bottom folks warn that the supposedly free fellows come at a stiff political price.

Race to the Top requires states to develop student-data collection systems. Recently the Education Department awarded a $27 million no-bid contract to Wireless Generation, a company owned by Rupert Murdoch and overseen by a former New York City chancellor, Joel I. Klein. Mr. Klein is a good friend of Dr. Tisch. The state comptroller’s office is investigating whether it was proper to award the contract without bidding.

Power Philanthropy's biggest givers & getters

A new report on foundation activity, Critical Contributions: Philanthropic Investment in Teachers and Teaching (www.criticalcontributions.org), released today by the University of Georgia and Kronley & Associates, found that foundations directed $684 million to teachers and teaching between 2000 and 2008.

The analysis, the first comprehensive examination of philanthropy activity in this area, also revealed that much of the funding came from a relatively small number of foundations.

The top 10 foundations accounted for 50 percent of all grants and include:
1.Carnegie Corporation of New York $81,969,575
2.Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation $78,167,363
3.Annenberg Foundation $36,725,000
4.Michael and Susan Dell Foundation $25,401,978
5.Broad Foundation $24,554,869
6.Joyce Foundation $23,773,256
7.Lilly Endowment, Inc. $21,224,576
8.Milken Family Foundation $20,700,625
9.Ford Foundation $17,581,716
10.Stuart Foundation $14,459,666


In addition, the study found that more than 60 percent of all foundation grants between 2000 and 2008 went to 10 organizations:

1.Teach for America $213,444,431
2.Academy for Educational Development $59,063,000
3.Northwest Educational Service District 189 $45,012,830
4.Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation $21,561,106
5.The New Teacher Project $17,955,680
6.University of California at Santa Cruz, New Teacher Center $16,642,730
7.Teacher Advancement Program $15,480,625
8.National Board for Professional Teaching Standards $12,401,350
9.Philadelphia Foundation $10,000,000
10.Teachers Network $9,441,402

Other highlights of the report include:

• Driven by investments in Teach for America, which was awarded $213 million, recruitment was the largest grantmaking category, capturing 38 percent of funding. This was followed by professional development (22 percent) and teacher preparation (14 percent). All other categories combined received less than 10 percent of grant funding.|

• Today, there is a convergence between the philanthropic sector and federal policymakers. Policies and practices developed, tested and advocated for by foundations have been included in new federal initiatives, including “Race to the Top.” Funders are now seeking strategies to leverage the opportunities provided by the new federal programs while considering whether and how these programs might be sustained when federal funding ends.

The report was developed collaboratively by a team of researchers from Kronley & Associates and the University of Georgia College of Education with support from the Ford Foundation. Arthur M. Horne, dean of the UGA College of Education, and Robert A. Kronley, president of Kronley & Associates, are co-principal investigators. Claire Suggs is the principal author, with significant input from Kathleen deMarrais. Additional members of the team included Karen Watkins and Kate Swett. The report can be downloaded at www.criticalcontributions.org.

See Valerie Strauss' piece in the Washington Post: "Where private foundations award education cash."

The Grand Coalition Against Teachers

Joanne Barkan describes the scope of the anti-teacher, anti-union network of corporate school "reformers" in this Dissent Magazine piece.

The Bush Administration launched the era of federally mandated, high-stakes testing in public schools with its “No Child Left Behind” program in 2001. Schools not making “adequate yearly progress” in raising math and reading scores risked being re-staffed, replaced with charters, or shut down. This quickly produced predictable results: teaching to the test, narrowed curriculum, and incidents of cheating. But the next step—the federal drive to use student test scores to grade teachers—came exclusively from the Obama administration.