U.K.'s version of Duncan in bed with Murdoch, Klein

Brit Ed Sec. Michael Gove 

"I'd expect in the next [few] months we'd be making some acquisitions," Klein told the Financial Times. "There's the willingness to put in significant capital."

The most corrupt and the most powerful media man in the world is Rupert Murdoch. His criminal acts -- bribing cops, spying on innocent victims, tapping phones-- have cause great harm and have threatened his empire which is now under scrutiny both in Britain and in the U.S.

Murdoch's strategy has been to reinvent himself as an education/technology organization. He hired former N.Y. schools chancellor, Joel Klein as his fixer-in-chief, and continues to make millions in new contracts with schools systems worldwide.

At the end of summer 2010, Murdoch formally hired Klein for $2m (£1.3m) a year, plus a $1m signing bonus, to launch what he called a "revolutionary, and profitable, education division". Murdoch bought Wireless Generation, a US educational technology firm, for $360m, and gave it to Klein to run. Murdoch's vision was that he would digitise the world's so far unexploited classrooms. He told investors: "We see a $500bn sector in the US alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed by big breakthroughs." He envisaged some of News Corporation's large library of media content being beamed to pupils' terminals.

The Guardian reports that Britain's education secretary, Michael Gove (the U.K. equivalent to Arne Duncan), a former Times reporter, is now snuggling up to Murdoch and will play a key role in Murdoch's attempt to penetrate (no pun intended) the U.K. education market.

According to the Guardian: 

In a speech to the National College for School Leadership, Gove singled Joel Klein out for praise. Klein was a US lawyer then running the New York school system. But Klein was also Murdoch's own favorite US educator. His clashes with the teachers' unions and his enthusiasm for academy-style "charter schools" had caught the tycoon's interest. Murdoch planned to hire Klein himself.

Gove told his British audience on 16 June that US reformers such as Klein were insisting on "more great charter schools … free from government bureaucracy" because they were "amazing engines of social mobility".

The "Big Enchilada"

"Trying to make a killing in the charter school business"?! Yeah, that's right, the charter school business is so profitable that I'm telling all my friends in the hedge fund business that they're in the wrong business. My message: "If you really want to make a lot of money, start a charter school!" LOL! -- Whitney Tilson

LOL! indeed. In 2007, hedgefunder and charter school maven, Whitney Tilson chided me for implying that there was a profit to be made in the charter school market and that he and his group DFER were pursuing exactly that course, under the banner of school reform. It was Tilson himself, a couple of years later however, who let the cat out of the bag in a New York Times article by Joe Nocera:

Charter schools, explained Whitney Tilson, the founder of T2 Partners and one of their most ardent supporters, are the perfect philanthropy for results-oriented business executives. For one thing, they can change lives permanently, not just help people get by from day to day. For another, he said, “hedge funds are always looking for ways to turn a small amount of capital into a large amount of capital.”

A wealthy hedge fund manager can spend more than $1 million financing a charter school start-up. But once it is up and running, it qualifies for state funding, just like a public school. 

The profitability of school reform, was also pointed to by Jonathan Kozol back in 2007, when he cited a NationsBanc Montgomery Securities prospectus in his column published byHarpers, writing:

“The education industry represents, in our opinion, the final frontier of a number of sectors once under public control that have either voluntarily opened” or “been forced” to open up to private enterprise.

The education industry, the bank concludes, represents the largest market opportunity since health care services were privatized during the 1970s. While college education can offer “attractive investment returns, the larger developing opportunity is in the K-12 EMO [Education Management Organization] market,” it observed. “The K-12 market is the Big Enchilada.”

Tilson would later refer to the ed reform business as a diamond in the rough, a business the market has left for dead, "but a savvy investor could turn for a profit." A big inner-city school system, said Tilson, "is kind of like that — the General Motors of the education world. "

Even Gates doesn't like shaming teachers in public

N.Y. Times graphic

Publicly shaming teachers in N.Y. and L.A. is too much even for Bill Gates. In a NYT opinion piece, ("Shame is Not the Solution") he continues to defend the use of inaccurate, misleading, and now widely discredited, value-added formulas, as "one important piece" of ranking individual teachers. But the most powerful of the power philanthropists wants these evaluations kept out of the press. He's at least got that right.

Unfortunately, some education advocates in New York, Los Angeles and other cities are claiming that a good personnel system can be based on ranking teachers according to their “value-added rating” — a measurement of their impact on students’ test scores — and publicizing the names and rankings online and in the media. But shaming poorly performing teachers doesn’t fix the problem because it doesn’t give them specific feedback.        

Of course that's not the only problem with value-added.

Gates says he and wife Melinda were "blown away" by the system of evaluation used in Hillsborough County, Florida  public schools where, he says, teachers "receive in-depth feedback from their principal and from a peer evaluator, both of whom have been trained to analyze classroom teaching."

******

Wait! Gates takes a poke at L.A. here. But isn't Deasy his boy? The man from Gates?

Town says, "frack you" to Anschutz

Phillip Anschutz, bankrolled the anti-public school  propaganda film, Waiting for Superman. Now he's financing another film glorifying the so called, "parent trigger", a law which gives a group of parents the power to fire all their school's teachers and hand it over to a private management company. 20th Century Fox is preparing a September release for “Won’t Back Down” starring Viola Davis and Maggie Gyllenhaal. 

Anschutz is a far right-wing, evangelical billionaire who inherited his fortune from his father's oil business. He is also media mogul, publisher of the Weekly Standard, the S.F. Examiner, and owner of L.A.'s Staples Center. He was also the force behind California's anti-gay initiative. 

But his biggest profits come from his energy interests. He's the owner of Anschutz Exploration Corporation, a Colorado driller with 22,200 acres under lease in the town of Dryden, N.Y. where Anschutz intends to do hydrofracking for natural gas, a process that poses a threat to the town's drinking water. 

But in a victory for opponents of fracking, a New York State judge ruled on Tuesday that Dryden can ban natural gas drilling within its boundaries. Responding to a suit by Anschutz, State Supreme Court Justice Phillip R. Rumsey ruled that state law does not preclude a municipality from using its power to regulate land use to ban oil and natural gas production. The ruling is the first in New York to affirm local powers in the controversy over drilling in the Marcellus Shale, a gas deposit under a large area of New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio.

“The communities targeted for drilling need the power to determine for themselves when, where and if fracking is permitted,” Katherine Nadeau, the water and natural resources program director for Environmental Advocates of New York, said in a statement. She said the ruling would energize “the dozens, if not hundreds, of cities and towns concerned with industrial gas drilling.” -- N.Y. Times

Koch Bros., Gates back Heartland Inst. attack on science teaching

Leaked documents, from a nonprofit organization in Chicago called the Heartland Institute, outline plans to promote a curriculum that would undermine the teaching of science and in particular, the well-established scientific determination that fossil fuel emissions endanger the long-term welfare of the planet. The papers were published earlier this week on the DeSmogBlog website.

That's not all. The leaks reveal that Heartland, which benefits from its tax-exempt status as a non-political organization, is also involved in anti-union activities as well as defending of right-wing Wisconsin Gov. Walker who is facing a recall election. According to a New York Times report:

The documents raise questions about whether the group has undertaken partisan political activities, a potential violation of federal tax law governing nonprofit groups. For instance, the documents outline “Operation Angry Badger,” a plan to spend $612,000 to influence the outcome of recall elections and related fights this year in Wisconsin over the role of public-sector unions.

Heartland's $1.6 million campaign is being discretely bankrolled by the Koch Bros. and other major companies like Bill Gates' Microsoft.Corp. About $100,000 from an anonymous donor was set aside for an alternate school curriculum painting established climate science as "controversial and uncertain" with the aim of "dissuading teachers from teaching science". The Institute was forced to apologize to the corporate donors whose names were revealed in the leaked documents.

Sorry Bill.

Times editorial reveals legislative power of ALEC

An editorial in Sunday's New York Times exposes the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) founded in 1973 by the right-wing activist Paul Weyrich; its big funders include Exxon Mobil, the Olin and Scaife families and foundations tied to Koch Industries. Many of the largest corporations are represented on its board.

Lawmakers who eagerly do ALEC’s bidding have much to answer for. Voters have a right to know whether the representatives they elect are actually writing the laws, or whether the job has been outsourced to big corporate interests.

The privatization of war parallels education trends

I don't think so

The erosion and selling off of public space isn't limited to public education. This loss of public decision making and government transparency and accountability is the biggest threat to any democratic system of government. The latest news from the Afghan killing fields should do the privatizers proud. This from today's New York Times:

Many American generals and diplomats have private contractors for their personal bodyguards. And along with the risks have come the consequences: More civilian contractors working for American companies than American soldiers died in Afghanistan last year for the first time during the war.

That trend has been growing for the past several years in Afghanistan, and it parallels a similar trend in Iraq, where contractor deaths exceeded military deaths as long ago as 2009, not to mention the thousands of contractors seriously wounded. The biggest contractor in terms of war zone deaths is apparently the defense giant L-3 Communications. If L-3 were a country, it would have the third highest loss of life in Afghanistan as well as in Iraq; only the United States and Britain would exceed it in fatalities.

AUSL's clout-heavy "turnaround" schools among city's worst

Clout-heavy banker David Vitale,  former AUSL board chairman, now runs the Board of Education

Founded and run by Chicago venture capitalist, Martin Koldyke, the Academy for Urban School Leadership (AUS) has used its connections and political clout to become a powerhouse in the school turnaround business. Despite its schools ranking at or near the bottom of the system, AUSL has benefited from backing from former mayor Daley, current mayor Rahm Emanuel and Sec. of Ed Arne Duncan. Emanuel even selected a former AUSL top executive to oversee CPS' finances and named AUSL's previous board chairman, David Vitale, as president of CPS' Board of Education.

Koldyke, has donated heavily to political candidates, including $25,000 to Daley's re-election campaign in 2006 and $25,000 to Emanuel's mayoral fund in 2010. In total, Koldyke and AUSL board members have contributed more than $100,000 to various political campaigns since 2003, according to state election records.

Now running 19 schools, six of which are now designated "among the worst in the city", AUSL is now locked in a public battle to add six more. The group has become a force inside CPS, a virtually autonomous "district within the district" supported by millions in public and private funding, diverted away from cash-strapped neighborhood schools, according to a report today in the Chicago Tribune. 

"Yet for all the public attention, AUSL's results have been mixed; many students have made considerable progress, but as a group they still lag well behind district averages ... with many ending up on par or even below comparable neighborhood schools."

According to the Tribune report, all of AUSL's turnarounds remain on academic probation and few if any of AUSL strategies have found their way into other CPS schools.

K-12 ed market exploding, says Edweek

The flow of venture capital into the K-12 education market has exploded over the past year, reaching its highest transaction values in a decade in 2011, industry observers say. This according to Katie Ash, writing in the Jan. 31st online edition of EdWeek.

"[The common core] is breaking down some of those state-level barriers that made it challenging for folks [to achieve scale]," said Adam J. Newman, a founding and managing partner of Education Growth Advisors, an education business advisory firm in Stamford, Conn. Newman. (His firm's other founding and managing partner, Christopher L. Curran, is a trustee of Editorial Projects in Education, the nonprofit publisher of Education Week.)

Ash's piece offers little in the way of critical analysis of venture capital's surge into public ed. She relies mainly on the usual members of the edu-corporate complex as sources for this piece, including, former Gates ed chief Tom VanderArk who is now a managing partner of Learn-Capital; Kim Smith, the co-founder (with Andrew Rotherham) and chief executive officer of Bellwether Education Partners as well as  the NewSchools Venture Fund; and Robert Lytle, a head of the Boston-based Parthenon Group's Education Center of Excellence, which focuses on for-profit global markets. 

According to Ash, the hottest area for venture capitalists probling the public ed sector is "impact investing." That's where capital doesn't just buy a profitable return on investment, but also reshapes the structure and culture of public education to make it more receptive to their goals. 

"There's a small, emerging niche of 'impact' investors," says Smith, "who typically made their money in the corporate sector and now want to reinvest in a good company that will provide profitable returns, but will also have a positive social impact."

Not surprisingly, this Edweek piece is underwritten by the the biggest "impact investor" of them all, the Gates Foundation. 

ALEC Education "Academy" Launches on Island Resort

Ritz-Carlton in Amelia Island, Florida.

Yesterday, hundreds of state legislators from across the nation gathered at an "island" resort on the coast of Florida for a so-called "education academy" sponsored by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). There were no students or teachers invited to the Ritz resort. Instead, legislators, representatives from right-wing think tanks and for-profit education corporations met behind closed doors, in the words of PR Watch's' Dustin Beilke , "to channel their inner Milton Friedman and promote the radical transformation of the American education system into a private, for-profit enterprise."

You can learn more about ALEC, an extreme right-wing policy group which received funding from the Gates Foundation, at the Center for Media and Democracy's ALEC Exposed website.

Red flag flying at Davos?

Funny -- Occupiers at Camp Igloo have Davos billionaires quoting Marx. Andy Robinson, in The Nation, reports:

CEOs and private-equity fund managers—even some of the seventy Forbes billionaires attending—interrupted their search for distressed assets in the eurozone this year to attend lectures by grim-faced New York University economist and Davos regular Nouriel Roubini or Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz. More than half the 1,200 investors, analysts and traders consulted in a Bloomberg poll published on the eve of the summit agreed that inequality damages economic growth.

“Marx was right; capitalism creates obstacles to its own advancement,” said Roubini. The audience nodded in agreement and then headed off for sessions on new investment opportunities in “frontier markets” like Mongolia and Azerbaijan.

Scott Walker and ALEC plotted attack on AZ unions

Nichols

There's a good piece in the Nation this week by John Nichols, "How Scott Walker and ALEC Plotted the Attack on Arizona's Unions. Nichols writes:

After meeting with former Vice President Dan Quayle, Walker was whisked over to the Phoenician Resort in Scottsdale, where he briefed a thousand Arizona conservatives on how they could attack “the big-government union bosses.” 

“We need to make big, fundamental, permanent structural changes. It’s why we did what we did in Wisconsin,” declared Walker, who told the annual dinner of the right-wing Goldwater Institute that compromising with unions was “bogus.”

The turnaround business is booming

Reading WSJ's Market Watch, one can only conclude that the turnaround business is booming.

 In L.A. Revolution K12, a rapidly growing web-based adaptive software division of Revolution Prep, has joined with the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools to help sixteen of its middle and high schools improve student outcomes in math and English Language Arts. The Partnership is the first school system to implement Revolution K12's full product line, a $1 million investment over two years. 

In D.C. they're even turning around charter schools that were supposed to replace the "failed" public schools. What's next? I suppose there's even a market for new turnaround companies that can turn-around the turnarounds. You listening, Chris Whittle?

According to a study authorized by Mayor Gray,  more than 40 percent of the city’s 78,000 public students attend publicly funded, privately operated charter schools, the largest concentration in the nation outside of New Orleans. At current rates of growth, a majority of the city’s public enrollment could be in charters within three to four years. Gray contracted with Chicago charter school lobbyists, the Illinois Facilities Fund, to do the study, showing that despite all his anti-Rhee election rhetoric, the mayor is basically a corporate reform guy in the mold of his predecessor, Adrian Fenty.

The Washington Post describes the Chicago group as, "a nonprofit organization based in Chicago" that "will conduct what amounts to a supply-and-demand analysis....  The study’s genesis could make it controversial in a city where public school advocates say that heavy private and corporate support for charter schools threatens to marginalize the 123-school public system."

Romney, Bain took over test giant Princeton Review

One of Bain's takeover targets while Gov. Romney ran the predator investment firm, was Princeton Review, one of the largest testing and test-prep operations in the country. In 2007, Bain and Prides Capital, made a $60 million  preferred stock investment in Princeton and effectively took the company over, replacing former CEO John Katzman with Michael J. Perik, former CEO of The Learning Company (another Bain company).

Said Perik, at the time, "I am also pleased to be able to work again with Bain Capital. First at The Learning Company, then at Houghton Mifflin, and now at The Princeton Review, I have been impressed by the firm's ability to identify market leaders and its skill at building lasting value for all the stakeholders."

As an inducement to hiring Perik as CEO, the company granted him a stock option to purchase 1.7 million shares of the company's common stock having an exercise price of $4.69 per share. How nice for him. 

Davos: We don't want your millions, mister

I don't want your millions, Mister,
I don't want your diamond ring.
All I want is the right to live, Mister,
Give me back my job again.
-- 1930s union song by Jim Garland

The world's poor are not begging for charity from the rich, writes the Guardian's Robert Newman, – they're asking for justice and fairness. 

As the world's one-percenters gather for this year's World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, they can feel the presence of 99ers camped outside their doors over at Camp Igloo. As usual, the most powerful of the power philanthropists will be there, led by the "designated voice of the world's poor", Bill Gates.

Writes Newman:

Am I saying that philanthropy has never done good? No, it has achieved many wonderful things. Would I rather people didn't have polio vaccines than get them from a plutocrat? No, give them the vaccines. But beware the havoc that power without oversight and democratic control can wreak.

 But the point is that the poor are not begging us for charity, they are demanding justice. And when, on the occasion of his birthday, a sultan or emperor reprieved one thousand prisoners sentenced to death, no one ever called those pardons justice. Nor is it justice when a plutocrat decides to reprieve untold thousands from malaria. Human beings should not have to depend upon a rich man's whim for the right to life.

False Choices

By Michael Diedrich, Minnesota 2020

January 19, 2012

After experimenting with market-based, competitive education initiatives for 20 years with little statewide education improvement, it’s time Minnesota returns to what works best: proper education investment and supporting our students and teachers...

The main problem, among many, is that school systems cannot function as free markets if we want to achieve universal post-secondary readiness. Free markets produce efficiency, not equity for all. Efficiency helps maximize profit, but what about students that aren’t profitable to educate?

Download full report (pdf)
View online at Scribd

How Wall Street plundered Philly schools

Interest-rate swaps

Philadelphia, like many cities, has faced serious financial difficulties in recent years. These difficulties have forced the city government to make ends meet by cutting agency budgets, cutting services and raising taxes. The city trimmed almost $100 million off its budget during 2008 and 2009, and the school district faced a $629 million budget hole just this year, which was closed by laying off teachers and cutting programs for students.

The Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center, points to highly-speculative, risky interest-rate swap deals the city negotiated with banks such as Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs that have cost the city and school district $331 million in net interest payments and cancellation fees, according to the report, "Too Big to Trust? Banks, Schools and the Ongoing Problem of Interest Rate Swaps.” If interest rates continue to remain low, still-active swaps could cost the city another $240 million in future net interest payments.

According to the report:

These financial institutions have profited, while Philadelphians have paid the price through lost city services, lost jobs, and lost school programs. The financial institutions, on the other hand, have returned to profitability with subsidies from taxpayers—including Philadelphia taxpayers—and with multimillion-dollar contracts with the city. Moving forward the banks should respond as good corporate citizens of Philadelphia, by refunding a portion of the lucrative cancellation fees they received for terminating bad deals and renegotiate those deals which are currently active.

"Good corporate citizens," indeed.  

The Griffins -- hedge fund power couple

Ken Griffin and wife Anne, have become two of the most prominent and powerful names associated with Chicago's corporate-style school reform. As the founder and head of the Chicago-based hedge fund Citadel, Griffin is reported to be worth $2.3 billion, making him the fifth-richest Chicagoan and 159th-richest American, according to the 2010 Forbes 400.

He and his wife, Anne Dias Griffin, have been major players in the world of political money: Campaign finance records show that the Griffins have donated more than $3 million to candidates and political action committees—including $450,000 last fall to Republican Bill Brady in the tight 2010 Illinois governor’s race.

The Griffins, along with other Chicago billionaires like Penny Pritzker and Bruce Rauner, also helped underwrite the anti-union lobbying group Stand For Children, headed by Jonah Edelman.  In 2010, Ken gave $500,000 each to two different political action committees—on October 25th to American Crossroads, an organization, according to its website, “dedicated to renewing America’s commitment to individual liberty, limited government, [and] free enterprise” and on December 15th to Stand for Children Illinois.

He also contributed  $150,000 to Mayor Daley in 2006 and $200,000 to Rahm Emanuel's mayoral campaign.

Noted art aficionados, they own works by Monet, Degas, and Cezanne, and paid $80 million for a Jasper Johns painting reportedly worth $2.3 billion, Ken bundled money for both Obama and John McCain during the 2008 election. In the 2012 election cycle, the couple has given $500,000 to the Republican Governors Association, $300,000 to Rove's American Crossroads, and $150,000 to the Wisconsin Club for Growth. Bonus: Charles Koch named them as part of alist of elite donors who have pledged $1 million to his and his brother David's conservative fundraising machine.

Vouchers are the life-line for the Catholic schools

One of Republican lawmakers’ strongest allies in the fight for vouchers is the Catholic Church. With an exodus of parishioners to the suburbs and the rise of tuition-free charter schools, Catholic school enrollment has plunged 60% from its peak of 5.2 million in the early 1960s. Catholic educators view vouchers as a way to slow a resulting tsunami of school closures. Their lobbying helped convince Boehner, a product of Cincinnati Catholic schools, to revive the D.C. voucher program. -- Thomas Toch, "Vouchers Redux"

ALEC's disturbing level of influence [Video]

Anna Scholl, joins Thom Hartmann in exposing ALEC - the American Legislative Exchange Council. In case you don't know what ALEC is - it's a far-rightwing organization that brings together corporate CEOs and lobbyists with elected lawmakers to come up with custom-made legislation that benefits anti-public school  "reformers", big polluters, job out-sourcers, and banksters, and hurts unions, poor people, and voters. And apparently it's found a friend in Virginia. Gov. McDonnell and the VA General Assembly, where since 2007, over 50 different pieces of legislation have been introduced that are exact carbon copies of ALEC written legislation.



ALEC has apparently found another friend in power philanthropist Bill Gates whose foundation  recently bestowed a $376,635 grant upon this right-wing political action and lobbying group.

Romney and Bain Capital knee-deep in corporate-style reform.

Romney with Wm. Bain, Jr.

One of the few good things that came out of last night's Republican debate was the further exposure of Mitt Romney as founder of the notorious Bain Capital investment firm. In his 2010 book The Buyout of America: How Private Equity Is Destroying Jobs and Killing the American Economy, Josh Kosman described Bain Capital as "notorious for its failure to plow profits back into its businesses."

But what wasn't mentioned was Bain's connection to the world of corporate-style school reform and privately-managed charter schools -- namely KIPP.  Among those I listed in my post, on the corporate muscle behind KIPP, back in April, was Bain's managing director, Mark Nunnely. 

Nunnely is director of the KIPP Foundation. He also directs New Profit, Inc, a group of "social entrepreneurs" dominated by Bain execs like Josh Blankenstein and Paul Edgerley. 

According to Forbes, 

New Profit investors get scorecards on all organizations once every quarter. They're usually familiar with them already but, at a glance, they can tell if their money is being put to good use. Poor performers are washed out by well-run operations. 

New Profit also operates the Pathways Fund. These two groups are part of a larger network of "investors" who provide millions in funding to private operators of charter schools as well as to Michelle Rhee's Children First, Stand for Children, Teach For America and other corporate "school reformers."

Vanessa Kirsch is the founder and president of New Profit and Romney served on the board of City Year, a nonprofit co-founded by Kirsch's husband.

The firm Romney once ran, Bain Capital, has deep ties to City Year and the new America Forward coalition. "Our business is backing strong management teams with creative solutions to hard problems," explained Mark Nunnelly, managing director of Bain Capital. "I think a lot of us like the idea that you can take this same approach and apply it to not-for-profits." -- AP Wire, December 10, 2007

Virtual charter schools lag far behind

The number of students in virtual schools run by educational management organizations rose sharply last year, but the students in those schools are lagging far behind their peers in in traditional public schools. This according to a new study by the National Education Policy Center.  

About 27 percent of these schools achieved “adequate yearly progress,” the key federal standard set forth under the No Child Left Behind act to measure academic progress. By comparison, nearly 52 percent of all privately managed brick-and-mortar schools reached that goal, a figure comparable to all public schools nationally.

“There’s a pretty large gap between virtual and brick-and-mortar,” said Gary Miron, a professor of evaluation, measurement and research at Western Michigan University and a co-author of the study.

“E.M.O.’s” — educational management organizations, a term coined by Wall Street in the 1990s — now operate 35 percent of all charter schools, enrolling 42 percent of all charter school students, according to the report. “Charter schools are publicly funded and they are serving public school students,” Dr. Miron noted. “But they are increasingly privately owned and privately governed.” -- New York Times

Nonprofit E.M.O.’s have a better track record of academic success than for-profits, and smaller E.M.O.’s in general perform better than larger ones, at least defined by the federal standard of adequate yearly progress — a metric Dr. Miron called “very crude.”

A look back at Duncan's Race To The Top

This, from August 26, 2009

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said today that he plans to demand radical steps—such as firing most of a school’s staff or its conversion to a charter school—as the price of admission in directing $3.5 billion in new school improvement aid to the nation’s 5,000 worst-performing schools. (EDWEEK)

How Pearson wins their testing contracts

Steven Paine and Patricia Wright, superintendents in West Virginia and Virginia, with Mark Nieker, right, of the Pearson Foundation, in London in June 2010.

Michael Winerip, writing in the Jan. 1 New York Times ( "New Questions About Trips Sponsored by Education Publisher") reveals the secrets behind Pearson's success in cornering the market on standardized testing.

Here's how they do it in Kentucky:

In April, Kentucky’s Education Department approved a $57 million contract with Pearson. And then, over the next six months, the commissioner who oversees that department, Terry Holliday, traveled to both China and Brazil on trips underwritten by — that’s right — the Pearson Foundation.

And in Illinois:

Christopher Koch, state superintendent of education in Illinois — which has $138 million in contracts with Pearson — went to China, Brazil and Finland with the foundation. The only Pearson compensation he listed on state ethics forms was the cost of the flight to China, $4,271 for business class. Asked why hotels, meals and the other flights were not documented, a spokesman for Dr. Koch, Matt Vanover, said, “What we’re looking at is a litmus test; they just want to make sure he’s not traveling first class.”

And so it goes.

Schools starve despite Michigan's billion-dollar surplus

T-Party Gov. Snyder says:"Let 'em eat cake."

Michigan is ending the year with an estimated $1.2 billion budget surplus. But T-Party Gov. Rick Snyder is sitting on the money rather than funding the state's cash-starved public schools and rehiring laid-off teachers.

Democrats and some Republicans want public schools to get a major share of any surplus. The State Board of Education has also called for a significant portion of any budget surplus to be invested in education. Public school funding was cut more than 2 percent in the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. State aid to public universities was reduced by 15 percent. -- AP Wire

 Among the budget priorities set by the board: Financial relief to help districts cover pension costs; money to expand programs such as Advanced Placement and middle colleges, as well as more funding for professional development for educators, and a pool of funds to reward districts that are improving academically outcomes and/or their fiscal efficiency.

Pearson under investigation in N.Y.

Pearson Foundation is the tax-exempt arm of the giant, British-owned textbook and test publisher. The New York Times reports today that the foundation is currently under investigation by the state's attorney general for trying to influence state education officials by paying for overseas trips and other perks and not even being cool about it.

NCLB and current corporate-style "reforms" have states paying millions of dollars annually to companies like Pearson to develop and administer the standardized tests required under the law, tests which are now being used widely to evaluate teacher performance. Pearson has also cashed in on a provision mandating tutoring for students as well as from the expansion of virtual learning programs. Pearson recently formed a partnership with the Gates Foundation to create online reading and math courses aligned with common core standards that some 40 states have adopted in recent months.

In New York, Pearson Education most recently won a five-year, $32 million contract to administer state tests, and it maintains a $1 million contract for testing services with the State Education Department, according to state records. The last contract was awarded after David M. Steiner, then the state education commissioner, attended a conference in London in June 2010 that was organized by the Council of Chief State School Officers and underwritten by the Pearson Foundation.

“Despite a history of scoring errors, contract manipulation and corporate misbehavior, there’s been almost no public oversight of companies such as Pearson,” said Bob Schaeffer, a spokesman for FairTest, an advocacy group opposed to standardized testing. “It’s great that New York’s attorney general has now decided to examine the examiners and begin holding them accountable.”

The real problem for Pearson is that the N.Y. state investigation could uncover revelations about the foundation's lobbying on the federal level as we head towards the 2012 elections. Pearson was one of the great beneficiaries from the federal stimulus package which saw some $6 billion go into book and materials. 

Biden's brother, charter school con-man

Records show that the Mavericks in Education Florida charter schools, which have a high-profile lobbyist and cheerleader in Frank Biden, are not accredited high schools. This means their graduates may have trouble playing college sports or receiving federally funded grants or scholarships to college.  -- The Pulp

George Bush had his software swindler brother Neil who used his family connections and political clout to push his Ignite Company, which bilked schools in Texas and Florida out of millions of dollars. President Obama doesn't have a brother, but his V.P. Biden does. Frank Biden, it seems is cut from the same cloth as Neil Bush. Only instead of hustling software to schools that don't want or need it, Biden promotes his line of for-profit charter schools. He's president of Mavericks in Education Florida (what is it about Florida?) and has been working for the for-profit charter school outfit for several years. But his name did not appear on Mavericks’ state documents until December 5, 2011, after New Times’ Lisa Rab and others questioned the matter.

Now we know why. Biden is paid with taxpayer money. Yet, according to records, He owes the IRS $32,513.57 in unpaid income taxes for the years 2003 to 2005. The IRS reportedly began taking action in late 2007 and early 2008 against Biden, but the bill is still unpaid.

Now in an attempt to expand their charter school enterprise, despite low standards, non accreditation, and two lawsuits alleging the school does not offer legitimate diplomas, Biden and other Mavericks in Education members are accused of donating campaign funds to county school board members to buy their approval.

Can Chicago schools afford K12 Inc. exec salaries?

Reader J.C. (not Brizard) makes a good point. If Chicago mayor and school boss, Rahm Emanuel moves ahead with his plan to throw another large no-bid contract K12 Inc.'s way, a big chunk of that money will go towards covering boss Ron Packard's $5 million annual compensation package.

Not to mention other K12 exec salaries, including:

• Chief financial officer Harry T. Hawks earned about $544,000 — significantly less than his 2010 package, which was worth $1.8 million.
• George B. Hughes Jr., executive vice president of school services, received $717,000, down from $799,000 in 2010.
• Bruce J. Davis, executive vice president of worldwide business development, earned $686,000. The company has high hopes for overseas expansion possibilities and recently bought part of a Chinese enterprise that teaches English online.
• Chief marketing officer Celia M. Stokes earned $690,000. Stokes’s job goals included “developing branding strategies for our business units, improving marketing efficiency and developing our call center operations.”

Marie Antoinette, Meet David Vitale

As soon as one speaker was removed by security guards, another stood up to take their place.

"Moral courage comes in many forms, but sometimes not at all. Faced with adversity last week, David Vitale retreated into executive session. Mr. Vitale is a banker who was picked by Rahm Emanuel to be president of the Chicago Board of Education. And as the Missile confidently presided over a cowed City Council on Wednesday, his schools emissary co-starred in melancholy political theater that gave insight into the mayor’s ultimate challenges."  -- "Marie Antoinette, I'd like you to meet David Vitale" by James Warren, CNC

Michigan passes horrible charter law

Rep. Rudy Hobbs

Michigan's new charter school law is among the worst in the nation. While lifting the cap on charters, SB 618 gives free rein to charter operators without any safeguards against mismanagement or controls on school quality.

The bill was passed, according to State Rep. Rudy Hobbs, D-Southfield, without a clear provision mandating  comprehensive student achievement data for each charter school operator. Writes Hobbs:

If a charter school operator wants to break its contract during the school year, which has occurred before in our state, they are free to still do so. And Senate Bill 618 was passed without any safeguard that charter school operators that manage an academy in the lowest 10% of schools statewide would be prohibited from opening up another charter until they fix the substandard school they already operate. -- Detroit Free Press

K-12 Inc. stock price plummets. Should we care?

Uh oh! The speculators are speculatin' and the short-sellers are short selling. K-12 Inc. stock is in free-fall and Andy Rotherham at Eduwonk (who denies holding any shares) sound downright panicky and hedgey. While he is not currently contracting with K-12, his Bellweather consulting company has done work with them in the past. The stock market is to edu-profiteers like Rotherham, what standardized test scores are to DOE bureaucrats and big-city mayors, indicators of their future employment and marketability.

The trouble began Monday when a New York Times story by Stephanie Saul, "Profits and Questions at Online Charter Schools", called out K-12, not on its stock prices, but on how badly its "portfolio schools" like Agora Cyber Charter School are doing. 

Agora is one of the largest in a portfolio of similar public schools across the country run by K12. Eight other for-profit companies also run online public elementary and high schools, enrolling about 39,000 of the more than 200,000 full-time cyberpupils in the United States. The pupils work from their homes and often never even meet their teacher. There is no cafeteria, no gym and no playground. Teachers communicate with students by phone or in simulated classrooms on the Web. 

Problem is, nearly 60 percent of Agora's students are behind grade level in math. Nearly 50 percent trail in reading. A third do not graduate on time. And hundreds of children, from kindergartners to seniors, withdraw within months after they enroll. In other words, if K-12,Inc. was to be evaluated under NCLB or Race To The Top standards, they not only would be failing to make AYP, they would be marked for closure and replaced by -- well, er, umm, charter schools. "Kids mean money," writes Saul.

Agora is expecting income of $72 million this school year, accounting for more than 10 percent of the total anticipated revenues of K12, the biggest player in the online-school business. The second-largest, Connections Education, with revenues estimated at $190 million, was bought this year by the education and publishing giant Pearson for $400 million.

Articles like Saul's as well as a forthcoming study by researchers at Western Michigan University and theNational Education Policy Center, which will show that only a third of K12’s schools achieved adequate yearly progress, the measurement mandated by NCLB, don't exactly instill investor confidence. Neither does the potential these largely unregulated companies have for corruption and cheating. The need lots to customers to maintain profitability and it seem they're not above keeping students in the fold with some grades hanky-panky.

“What we’re talking about here is the financialization of public education,” said Alex Molnar, a research professor at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education who is affiliated with the education policy center. “These folks are fundamentally trying to do to public education what the banks did with home mortgages.”

But those like Rotherham and former Gates Foundation honcho Tom VanderArk, who are among the main salesmen for cyber learning and who benefit directly from its marketability, will no doubt try and ride to the rescue.

Writes AR: 

"I’m not a stock analyst and I don’t invest in education stocks because of other work I do, but K12 Inc.’s stock dropping 23 percent yesterday on that NYT story seems like an overreaction. Sure there is an enthusiasm bubble around ed tech and online right now but K12 is established and has a diverse revenue stream and operations (think language programs with Middlebury, AP tools, etc…) and online learning is here to stay in some form."

Another rescuer may be Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel who is getting ready to offer K12 another big contract. The Chicago Tribune reports that Rahm's hand-picked school board, "is considering awarding a share of a three-year, $1.9 million contract Wednesday to K-12 Virtual Schools LLC, a lucrative, publicly traded company that educators warn has a history of poor academic performance."

Arne Duncan, formerly the district's CEO, originally gave K-12 one of its first large no-bid contracts back in 2006. For those who don't remember, a year earlier former education secretary William Bennett, who founded the company in 1999, was forced to step down as board president after a series of racist remarks he made on the air and under the cloud of a GAO investigation. What he actually said, for those who missed it, was, " aborting black babies would result in a lower crime rate."

When Bennett was still with K-12, he let it be known that the company's curriculum had little respect for the dividing line between school and religion. In an online interview, Bennett explains:

We're centered in the Judeo-Christian tradition, we do not ignore faith and religion, we do not ignore the arguments against evolution, because there are some.

Such is the legacy of K-12 Inc. If it's stock price hits bottom, I don't mind.

Fastest growing occupations in the U.S. require no degree

'Zip-code apartheid' 

 

Edward Luce, writing in the Financial Times, reports on the changing face of the U.S. labor market. With the virtual decimation of our manufacturing sector and the flight of capital to emerging markets in the developing countries, a growing share of whatever jobs our economy is still managing to create is in the least productive areas -- the types that neither computers nor China have yet found a way of eliminating. 

 Of the five occupations forecast by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to be the fastest growing between now and 2018, none requires a degree. These are registered nurses, “home health aides”, customer service representatives, food preparation workers and “personal home care aides”.

 "The food preparation industry cannot sustain a middle class,” says Dan DiMicco, chief executive of Nucor, one of America’s two remaining big steel companies, whose company motto is “a nation that builds and makes things”.

What does all this have to do with schooling in the Ownership Society? If you look at schooling mainly in the light of the U.S. trying to maintain or regain its position atop the global economy, things look bleak. Luce writes that U.S. education and training budgets have gone in the wrong direction in the past few years. State schools and vocational community colleges derive much of their funding from local property taxes. That model brings two big disadvantages. First, it means community colleges are victims of “zip code apartheid” – the lower the property values in an area, the less money there is to train the workforce or educate the children.

“Every American is going to have to get used to the idea of a completely different work style,” says Mr Camden, whose company farms out hundreds of thousands of temporary workers around the world, from lawyers to office assistants. “What you learnt in college five years ago may already be obsolete.”

Actually, what I learned, what we all should be learning  -- how to think critically -- will never be obsolete.

Brass-Knuckle Philanthropy

"The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is big—really, really big" writes Caroline Preston in the Dec. 7, 2011 Chronicle of Philanthropy. Preston says that Gates’s $3-billion in annual giving dwarfs that of other foundations and lends it a level of influence not achieved by its philanthropic peers—or, for that matter, some governments.

Edward Skloot, director of Duke University’s Center for Strategic Philanthropy and Civil Society, agreed that Gates deserves careful scrutiny because of its size. He said the philanthropy practices a tough, “brass-knuckle philanthropy.”

A good blog post on 'Billionaire Education Policy'

'The word 'policy' makes us think of politicians and bureaucrats. But what happens when powerful policy-makers aren’t elected or appointed? Today, billionaires are shaping education policy in the United States. Buying political influence—-even legally...' -- Robin Rogers

Rogers, is an associate professor of sociology at Queens College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York (CUNY). She is the author of  “Why Philanthro-policymaking Matters” in The Politics of Philanthrocapitalism, Society 2011. In the first of two posts at the Education Optimists blog, Rogers writes about "Billionaire Education Policy," which is also the title of her forthcoming book.

Referring to Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg's $100 million "gift" to Newark Public Schools, Rogers writes:

All over the country, variations of the New York and New Jersey story are playing out: Philanthropists give money to resource-starved school systems, and in return, they reserve the right to effectively set education policy. Consultants and for profit programs present a potential conflict of interest by creating cash cows. [Mayor] Booker‘s claim that he was acting as a private citizen—and the fact that Zuckerberg’s money was just a pledge, not a guarantee of funding—raises questions. What is private and what is public? Is anyone accountable for what happens to this money? Do we need more transparency for private donations?

Rogers says that while the Occupy Movement focused public attention on inequality and the concentration of wealth and power, we rarely talk about "elite, strategic philanthropy,"  She takes note of a recent New York Times piece, “Policy-Making Billionaires”, and cites lots of great references on this important topic, but overall, she's critical of the lack of coverage of the rise of co-ordinated and strategic philanthropy by the very wealthy.

Rogers might want to take a look at our 2008 book, Small Schools: Public School Reform Meets the Ownership Society, and particularly the chapter on what we call "power philanthropy." She might also look at Phillip Kovacs'  book, The Gates Foundation and the Future of US “Public” Schools as an important source.

Bloomberg: 62 in a class is OK... for other people's children

The mayor's daughters went to Spence, where class size hovers between  10 and 15.

“Double the class size with a better teacher is a good deal for students.” -- Mayor Bloomberg

Mayor Bloomberg told an MIT crowd that if he were king, he would fire half the teachers and double class sizes. The mayor of Wall Street contends that larger class size is a no-brainer, that the research is "unambiguous." He can't understand all the fuss over his remarks, which he now claims were taken "out of context."

Michael Powell, writing in yesterday's NYT, says there's an “autumn of the patriarch” feel to Mayor Bloomberg these days. He paints a vivid picture of the devastation caused by his education policies, especially in the city's poorest neighborhoods.

Many schools, particularly those serving the poorest, remain fractured. The Daily News discovered that Grace Dodge High School in the Bronx had failed to provide 300 students with English teachers. At Taft High School in the Bronx, the dropout rate spiked to 70 percent from 25 percent in the four years before it closed in 2006.

There’s a "final oddity," writes Powell.

Among the so-called meritocratic elite, low teacher-to-child ratios are beloved. The mayor’s daughters went to Spence, where classes hover from 10 to 15. Trinity, Dalton, Riverdale, Horace Mann: All charge $35,000 or more per year, and classes rarely exceed 12 in the lower grades. These schools boast of teachers with advanced degrees. That’s true of Brooklyn Tech. Yet teachers at the latter feel like paper tossed into a receptacle.

The mayor is right in one sense. The research on class size, where it exists, is "unambiguous." The preponderance showing the benefits to elementary school students of smaller class size, regardless of the quality of the teacher. Every major study (see Class Size Matters which provides a great clearinghouse for class size research) shows that smaller is better. 

Teaching children is much more than delivering information in a lecture hall setting. If Bloomberg had ever taught he would know this. Ironically, he does know it but only when it comes to the schooling of his own kids. A comparison could easily be made with Chicago's own ownership society mayor, Rahm Emanuel, who claims there's unambiguous benefits of a longer school day with more seat time for the city's poorest children, but then sends his own kids to a private school with shorter school days and school year. 

Gates bankrolls ALEC right-wing extremists

Founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich and other conservative activists and currently bankrolled by the Koch Bros., the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is a critical arm of the right-wing network of policy shops that, with infusions of corporate cash, has evolved to shape American politics. The Gates Foundation has just bestowed a $376,635 grant upon ALEC.

The Rise and Fall of Stand For Children

Edelman's unsolicited confession

A Chicago News Cooperative story in today's NY Times, "Education Group Tries to Rebound After Diatribe," documents the crash-and-burn of the corporate reform group, Stand For Children and its national director, Jonah Edelman. The Portland-based group with pockets filled with cash supplied by the Gates Foundation and local one-percenters like the Crown and Pritzker families, along with the Citadel Group’s founder, Kenneth Griffin, made their move on Illinois laste year.

In a video, Edelman later admitted self-critically, how SFC poured millions into the campaign coffers of local politicians like State Sen. Kimberly Lightford in exchange for their backing of anti-union legislation which Arne Duncan hailed as a "national model. Edelman also revealed how SFC pressured teacher union leaders who went along with the plan at the expense of their own members, and how he fabricated talking points on the longer school day, which he and his billionaire patron, Jim Crown, then fed Mayor Rahm Emanuel. 

According to the NYT story, the group has now hit bottom and can't seem to raise a penny in this year's election cycle. The state chapter of SFC has now installed Mary Anderson, a crony of machine boss Michael Madigan as its new director to take charge of the $3 million remaining from last year's fund-raising efforts. Madigan also came off looking like a tool in the Edelman confession.

A still-willing Lightford, vice chairwoman of the Senate Education Committee, said she met with Anderson recently to discuss how they could work together to carry out the new education legislation. Lightford's only problem with Edelman was his honesty and transparency.

“For him to come to Illinois, and not understanding the politics, to suggest these things and expose private conversations was very immature of him.”

The good news is that Edelman's boasting and apologia seems to have discredited SFC and its tactics as well as the corporate reformers and easily buy-able politicians like Lightford who did their dirty work. In the long run, this may make it more difficult for them to run their game in Illinois and other states.

What is the Mayor of Wall Street smoking?

He looked like he was from another planet when he dressed as a hippie for a political show, but the mayor’s blueprint for fixing city schools have some asking “what was he smoking?” -- CBS News

In a speech at MIT, Bloomberg said Thursday he would accomplish more with less by slashing the teaching staff in half and doubling class sizes.

Michigan's 'nonpartisan' union busters caught in scandal

The Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Michigan, calls itself a "nonpartisan research and educational institute dedicated to improving the quality of life." But recently this far-right, free-market think tank has been exposed for its shady, very partisan, and possibly illegal lobbying of state politicians, aimed at nothing less than breaking the back of the state's teachers union and outlawing collective-bargaining in the state of Michigan.

According to Dave Murray, writing in the Grand Rapids Free Press, the Mackinac Center's true purposes were revealed in secret email communications with state lawmakers, including one from Mackinac's Jack McHugh to stateRep. Thomas McMillin, R-Rochester Hills, the newly appointed head of the House Education Committee. In his June 1 email, letting McMillin know exactly what was expected of him, McHugh wrote: 

“Our goal is (to) outlaw government collective bargaining in Michigan, which in practical terms means no more MEA.”

McMillin, described as a "vocal school choice and reform advocate," was named head of the Education Committee after former chairman, Rep. Paul Scott, R-Grand Blanc, was recalled by angry voters earlier this month. Before being recalled Scott had become the darling of Michelle Rhee and Michigan's T-Party Gov. Rick Snyder, after leading the charge against teachers' collective bargaining rights and raids on their pension fund. Rhee's front group, Students First donated heavily to help Scott avoid a recall effort.

Doug Pratt, the MEA’s public affairs director, said the comment reveals the Mackinac Center’s conservative, anti-union leanings that he believes are often cloaked behind glossy publications.

“It’s right there in black and white, exposing the group for what it really is,” Pratt said. “That proves that the Mackinac Center is nothing but a front for corporate special interests intent on destroying the middle class.”

When Murray's story broke, McMillin, obviously trying to avoid Scott's fate, immediately tried to distance himself from Mackinac, claiming that McHugh's emails “don’t represent my views.”

For more on the Mackinac Center see Fred Klonsky's blog and the MEA's website.
Cross posted on my Small Talk blog.