Profiting off the 'deliberate starvation' of Philly schools

The district has never recovered from Paul Vallas' financial mismanagement. 

Yes, schools will open on time in Philly. But only by going further into debt to the banks. According to the NYT, ("A City Borrows So That Its Schools Open On Time") the situation is not as dire yet as Detroit’s. But the problem is so severe that the city agreed at the last minute on Thursday to borrow $50 million just to be able to open schools on time. Even with that money, schools will open Sept. 9 with a minimum of staffing and sharply curtailed extracurricular activities and other programs.

“The concept is just jaw-dropping,” said Helen Gym, who has three children in the city’s public schools. “Nobody is talking about what it takes to get a child educated. It’s just about what the lowest number is needed to get the bare minimum. That’s what we’re talking about here: the deliberate starvation of one of the nation’s biggest school districts.”

The district has been victimized by state takeover, which put the schools under the control of a corporate School Reform Commission. It was the SRC that brought in Paul Vallas as CEO and Vallas left the school district in 2007 in a state of financial chaos from which it has never recovered.

Look for Supt. Hite to try and take advantage of the crisis by forcing more concessions from teachers and the unions.

Children on Medicaid are prescribed anti-psychotic drugs at 4 times rate of those privately insured

Drug makers for years have been making billions marketing antipsychotic and antidepressents for use in schools and foster homes on children with behavioral issues.

Now Barron's and WSJ report that the feds are investigating the over-prescribing of anti-psychotic drugs like Abilify (now the nation's No. 1 prescription drug) to children from low-income families on Medicaid. The children, often diagnosed with "behavioral problems" such as bipolar disorder or "irritability" associated with autism, or even kids with ADHD, are prescribed antipsychotics at four times the rate of privately insured children, according to a study by Stephen Crystal, a professor of health policy at Rutgers University, that looked at data from 2004 on 6- to 17-year-old children in seven states.

Government Medicaid data indicate that some of the prescriptions are being written for very young children. An analysis by Mathematica found that in 2008, 19,045 children age 5 and under were prescribed antipsychotics through Medicaid, 3% of recipients under 20, up from 7,759 in 1999, according to James Verdier, a senior fellow at the organization. Some were under a year old, including one listed as a month old. In New York, a spokesman for the state health department said some children between ages 1 and 2 received antipsychotics for conditions such as autistic disorder and attention deficit disorder with hyperactivity.

Dr. Fernando Siles, a pediatric psychiatrist in the Dallas area who treats many poor foster children, says he sometimes prescribes such medications to treat serious behavior problems. "A child that continues to be aggressive will be kicked out from his foster home," he says. "The antipsychotic is to stabilize the behavior of the child, to keep him from being moved and moved again."

The article doesn't break it down by race. I would like to know if children of color are being given anti-psychotics in great numbers than are white kids. What would you guess?

Rahm selling off everything that's not nailed down

I don't think so. 

Following the direction set by his predecessor, Mayor Emanuel has put the whole city up for sale. Next up on the auction block, the airports, hospitals, and port. 

Writes Mick Dumke in the Reader:

"We are taking what was an underutilized, run-down port and turning it into an engine of opportunity," Emanuel promised.

These are the times we live in: the city has to sell off pieces of public property so it can invest in them. At least that's the narrative that Emanuel is advancing out of City Hall, like Mayor Daley before him. When they say it over and over it almost makes sense, like it's not paradoxical after all. It certainly sounds a lot better than coming out and saying that the city is for sale.

There's one problem, and it's not so little: Most of the city's long-term privatization deals are put together behind closed doors, with such complicated terms that no one can tell if the public gained or got gamed until long after they're on the books. 

For Pearson CEO, measurable learning outcomes is a growth industry

Pearson CEO Fallon

“Education is now emerging as one of the major growth industries for the next decade and beyond; it is serving a huge rise in the global middle class, and we now need to be thinking of how to serve global products focused on efficacy,” says Pearson CEO John Fallon.

Our strategy is to transform Pearson into a single operating company that is sharply focussed on the biggest needs in global education and on measurable learning outcomes. With our restructuring program on track and the reorganisation of the company under way, we are making significant progress towards that goal." -- StockMarketWire.com 

Can MOOCS replace face-to-face teaching/learning?

Peter Scott, a professor of higher education studies, writes about MOOCS in yesterday's Guardian.

The acronym stands for mass open online courses, now rapidly replacing face-to-face teaching/learning in post-secondary education in Britain and the U.S.. The idea is to make higher education more accessible to the masses by uploading more and more courses to the Cloud. But the reality is that the testing and credentialing component, along with the separation of  teaching from accreditation that goes along with MOOCS, are actually making the end product even more unattainable for all but the elite.

In my view, the ones who stand to benefit the most are the big global media and testing companies, like Pearson and global online diploma mills like the University of Phoenix.

Writes Scott:

Government cuts, high fees, league-table snobbism – all point to a reinforcement of elite forms of higher education. Attempts to deliver HE-lite through further education colleges and private providers are never going to get very far. So Moocs provide the perfect cover story – "higher education for the masses" when real-world opportunities to go to university are being cut.

Scott makes the case that the debate about the potential of Moocs has to be put into a wider context, "a more fundamental debate about the nature of the university curriculum and teaching in a mass system." He asks, how can the Socratic tutorial coexist with the delivery of expert skills? How can we keep the curriculum open in increasingly industrialized "learning environments" and "managed" institutions?

There is another equally fundamental debate about "openness" more generally – the links between open-access courses and open access (good old "widening participation") and between open-source research publication and democratic science, and also between both and the need to build an open society.

Difficult stuff, writes Scott – "but far better than narrowing the debate about Moocs to a neo-liberal fix."

K12 Inc. lags far behind face-to-face schools in Florida

The thing about privatization is, there's little or no public accountability. Take for example, K12 Inc., the e-learning company that competes with traditional schools for a piece of the  multi-billion-dollar education pie.

Progress Florida also found that K12 schools are not only lagging behind in performance, but they also have “fewer students qualifying for free-or-reduced-lunch, fewer students with disabilities, fewer ELL students, and fewer minority students.” But K12's poor performance hasn't hurt their bottom line any.  In 2012, K12 Inc. experienced “a 35 percent increase in revenue to more than $700 million, the report found.”

According the report:

“…Notably only 27.7 percent of K12 Inc. schools make adequate yearly progress—a national metric of measuring student achievement—and this figure is merely half nearly half the rate achieved by public face-to-face schools. The on-time graduation rate for K12 Inc. schools is 49.1percent, compared to 79.4 percent for all students in the states in which K12 Inc. operates.”

 Lisa Larson-Walker (Slate)

Speaking of Florida, Tea Party Gov. Rick Scott's regime is awash in scandal and corruption. Not only has he lost his privatizing school chief, Tony Bennett, to a grade-changing scandal, but now his biggest outside campaign contributor, Bill Edwards, has been caught swindling Florida military families and veterans.

Ironically, the one's crying the loudest over the Bennett resignation, besides Jeb Bush and his GOP pals, are the so-called Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) and Obama's ed chief, Arne Duncan.

Who says there's no bi-partisanship?

The selling of Chicago

CFO Lois Scott refuses to reveal specifics of  Midway privatization. 

Like Daley's selling of the city's parking spaces, Rahm is doing his sell-off of Midway Airport in the dark, until after the deal is done.

He's using the manufactured pension crisis to justify the further looting and burning of Chicago the same way that Daley used the city's debt crisis to cut his parking meter deal and the selling off of the Skyway before that. Neither deal did anything to get the city back on sound financial footing.

The victims of all this is what's left of public space -- schools, clinics, mass transit, and housing projects, none of whom will benefit from the Airport deal.

Fran Spielman at the Sun-Times reports:

In a meeting with the Chicago Sun-Times editorial board to discuss the city’s financial crisis, Chief Financial Officer Lois Scott refused to discuss specifics of the competition or the potential for a $2 billion windfall. Nor would she say when final bids are due or even confirm that only two bid teams remain. 

 The only question is whether a reluctant City Council would go along with the idea.

Of course they will. When have they ever said NO?

Last week, Bloomberg reported that the Midway sweepstakes was down to two bidding groups and that a contract could be awarded as soon as this fall. The rivals were identified as Great Lakes Airport Alliance — a partnership between Spain’s Ferrovial and Macquarie Group, which leased the Chicago Skyway for 99 years — and a team that includes Industry Funds Management of Australia and Manchester Airports Group.

Best quote comes from Ald. O'Connor:

“Any time one talks about privatizing a municipal asset, immediately the next words out of their mouth is, ‘parking meters.’ 

Ya think?

Who's making out on the great DePaul Basketball land swindle?

Just in case you thought Rahm's DePaul Arena land grab was about basketball -- it ain't. Rather it's nothing less than one of the great taxpayer rip-offs in Chicago history. The deal enriches a web of the mayor's clouted friends using millions in TIF funds that should have gone to bail out a bankrupt school system. It is the culmination of massive kickbacks and political contributions from investors, bankers, and lakefront property owners to Gov. Quinn, Ald. Burke, Mayors Daley and Emanuel.

While everyone has lately had their eye on the penny-ante shenanigans of the Chicago machine boys, like Boss Madigan's hiring of his pals and relatives over at the RTA, Tribune writers Kathy Bergen and Bill Ruthhart were documenting the major league stuff in last Sunday's business section. 

Best and funniest quotes:

"This isn't some clout project," McPier CEO Jim Reilly said. "That isn't how we do business."

Emanuel spokesman Tom Alexander said the mayor's chief lobbyist, Matt Hynes, also has recused himself in any negotiations connected to the project because of his father's involvement with DePaul but said "there would have been no conflict or rules violation" had Hynes chosen to work on such a deal.

"The city has one interest and one interest only when it comes to negotiations — to find the best deal for taxpayers."

 Like Reilly, the mayor has no concerns about potential conflicts of interest, and Alexander said "the notion of any conflict is preposterous."

In a statement, [Gov.]Quinn spokeswoman Brooke Anderson said, "The governor has zero tolerance for any conflicts of interest," but she did not elaborate on whether the Democratic governor had concerns that any such conflicts could exist with the McPier project.

"He expects board members to fulfill their fiduciary duty and make these decisions based on the best interest of taxpayers," Anderson said of McPier's land acquisitions. "The process should be open and transparent."

[Lakeside Bank Pres. Vincent] Cacciatore said his record as a donor to DePaul is irrelevant. 

"God knows how many thousands of donors there are," he said. "Does that mean that no property owners who are donors to DePaul — that the city couldn't buy their properties?"

[CenterPoint co-founder John S. Gates] said he recused himself and left the room whenever the legal proceedings came up for discussion. "It's not that I had to — I had no financial interest," he said. "But there could have been an appearance of conflict of interest because CenterPoint is a company I was involved with for a long time."

I'll stop now. I'm laughing too hard. 

Peter Buffett has no taste for the 'Charitable/Industrial Complex'

Warren Buffett's son Peter, gets a seat at the power-philanthropy table. But he doesn't like what's being served up. He calls it, "Philanthropic Colonialism".

As more lives and communities are destroyed by the system that creates vast amounts of wealth for the few, the more heroic it sounds to “give back.” It’s what I would call “conscience laundering” — feeling better about accumulating more than any one person could possibly need to live on by sprinkling a little around as an act of charity. 

 And with more business-minded folks getting into the act, business principles are trumpeted as an important element to add to the philanthropic sector. I now hear people ask, “what’s the R.O.I.?” when it comes to alleviating human suffering, as if return on investment were the only measure of success.

Peter Buffett's problem is, he's stuck in the middle of the "Charitable-Industrial complex" and can't seem to find a way out.

 I’m really not calling for an end to capitalism; I’m calling for humanism....My wife and I know we don’t have the answers, but we do know how to listen. As we learn, we will continue to support conditions for systemic change.  

Refreshing!

Hedge-fund billionaire Cohen big player in charter schools. Fraud scandal could bring him down.

Whenever I read about some crooked hedge-fund billionaire mired in scandal, I always check to see if and how they're involved with charter schools. I rarely come up empty. The latest is possibly the biggest fish and the dirtiest one in the hedge-fund swamp.

Hedge-funder Steve Cohen

Steve Cohen, whose personal wealth is estimated at close to $10 billion, is the founder of the supposedly too-big- hedge fund,  SAC Capital Advisors. Cohen's firm, which once managed more than $15 billion in assets, is at the center of one of the biggest insider-trading fraud cases in history. Four employees have already been criminally charged with insider trading – two of whom have pleaded guilty. And an SAC affiliate has agreed to pay $615 million to settle SEC charges of insider trading.

Federal prosecutors have served grand jury subpoenas on Cohen and others at the firm seeking their testimony but Cohen took the 5th and refused to testify.

Cohen, who lives in Greenwich, Conn., is one of the highest profile figures in American finance and one of the world's richest men. He is among the handful of upper-tier hedge fund managers who pull in about $1 billion a year in compensation.

Now he faces possible fines and could be barred for life from managing investor funds.

According to NewsTime,

He's seen at least nine of his trusted associates charged or implicated in a rapidly metastasizing insider trading scandal, one that has cost his firm a record $616 million regulatory settlement and can be felt from hedge fund row on Connecticut's Gold Coast to Wall Street.

As I suspected, Cohen and his wife Alexandria, turn out to be big players in the charter school world. Through their tax-sheltered family foundation, they have given $35 million to "school choice" projects and more than $10 million over the last six years to Achievement First, Charter Network,as a way of pushing the development of  charter schools across Connecticut. Cohen, who strikes me as anything but a Robin Hood, is also on the board of the Robin Hood Foundation, which helped spawn Achievement First.

He has also given $40 million to support his six charter schools operating in the Bronx.

The Cohen's are sponsors of the Amistad Academy in New Haven, which is described here as, "a charter school serving minority students...using chants, rewards, and consequences."

I'm not sure what it is about hedge-funders like Boykin Curry of Eagle Capital, Whitney Tilson of T2 Partners, David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital, Michael Novogratz of Fortress Investment Group, Carl Icahn and the rest that attracts them to the charter world. But I suspect it has more to do with free-market ideology than anything to do with teaching and learning.

Rahm's Civic Committee pals pushed Moody's & S&P to lower IL bond rating

Rahm Emanuel claims that he's been forced to close schools, demolish school budgets and fire thousands of teachers because the city is broke. Why is the city broke? Rahm says it's because of a pension crisis with retired teachers and public employees unwilling to take cuts in their pensions and health care benefits. All this, says the mayor, has led to rating companies lowering Chicago's bond rating, making it even more expensive for the city to borrow money to keep public schools running.

But as Pres. Kennedy once said, "Things do not happen. Things are made to happen."

Now we learn that Moody's and S&P didn't just lower the state's bond rating. They were pressured to do so by Rahm's patrons over at the Civic Committee. In Chicago, the mayor runs the schools. But the mayor doesn't say, "boo" without a nod from the powerful Civic Committee.

How do we know that the Civic Committee made the call to S&P? The Civic Committee's Ty Fahner admits it. This from Capitol Fax:

If you go to about the 47-minute mark, you’ll hear an unidentified questioner say this to Fahner… 

“Maybe sometimes you gotta be irresponsible to be responsible. If a political solution really doesn’t produce a favorable outcome, maybe you really need a market solution. And a market solution, I don’t mean bankruptcy, I mean actually talking down the state rating even further so the state’s bonds essentially become below investment grade. And it drives up the borrowing cost to the state and all of us to a significant level enough that you really feel the public pressure…” 

* Fahner’s response…
“The Civic Committee, not me, but some of the people that make up the Civic Committee… did meet with and call - in one case in person - and a couple of calls to Moody’s and Fitch and Standard & Poors, and say ‘How in the hell can you guys do this? You are an enabler to let the state continue. You keep threatening more and more and more.’

“And I think now we’ve backed off. We don’t want to be the straw that broke the camel’s back… It hasn’t been irresponsible, but we have told them that we thought they were being irresponsible. But we stopped that a couple of months ago.”

h/t Brother Fred & Glen Brown

More problems with Rheeform

It was only a couple of years ago that Michelle Rhee was flying high on that broomstick of hers. Despite being booted by popular disdain, from her D.C. Supt. job, Rhee was being wined and toasted at N.Y. and Washington cocktail parties by both liberal and conservative elites as the new queen of corporate-style school reform. She even starred in a Hollywood movie, Waiting For Superman, before being hired as a union-busting consultant by Tea Part governors in Florida, Wisconsin, and Michigan.

Her rump Students First organization was promised a billion dollars by power-philanthropists like Eli Broad, Bill Gates, and the Koch Bros., the money to be used to bankroll anti-union political campaigns nationwide.

Lately however, some of the shine seems to be fading from Rhee's apple. Not only has Rhee been exposed for her role in a D.C. test-cheating scandal,  Politico reports that Rhee's group isn't even close to achieving its fund-raising goal.

Rhee’s group initially pledged to raise $1 billion in the group’s first year, but it has only posted nearly $30 million in its second year — a hefty sum for a single-issue advocacy group but far short of their initial fundraising ambitions.

And these days, $30 million will only buy a handful of elections, leaving Rhee's organization as thin at the top as it is at the bottom. According to Politico, Student First Pres. Kahlil Byrd is "stepping down" after less than a year on the job. Politico describes Byrd as a "longtime Republican — previously was head of Americans Elect, which sought to put a credible third-party ticket on the ballot in the 2012 election."

StudentsFirst has seen an exodus of Democratic staffers: Former Democratic National Committee spokesman Hari Sevugan, Democratic lobbyist Ximena Hartsock and former Democratic fundraiser Tali Stein all left the group for other opportunities. Since its foundation, the group has had a high staff turnover. Byrd is the latest in a string of staff departures since the group was founded in 2010.

The Democrats may be starting to Rhee as political  baggage with mid-term elections coming up.

L.A. performing arts school principal -- "I've had it!"

"No one has found a way to fund any of the programs that are ongoing," Isaacs said in an interview. "We have a $65-million theater and no money to run it.

Norman Isaacs, the Cortines School of Visual and Performing Arts' fifth principal in four years, has resigned over the district's lack of arts funding. The school fails Deasy's and Broad's funding test because it's a mainly-neighborhood school, not a charter.

Isaacs tells the L.A. Times:

 "We have a $65-million theater and no money to run it. It got to the point where I could not get the support from the district that was so very important, and I needed to call attention to that." 

When the school board decided that 70% of enrollment must come from the low-income neighborhoods adjacent to the school, wealthy funders, led by billionaire power-philanthropist Eli Broad, withdrew their support. Broad wanted the campus entirely removed from district control.

The Times reports:

...building interest in the school is difficult because, during tight budget years, the district reduced elementary and middle school arts programs that could feed students to the high school. Nearby Virgil Middle School, for example, had a highly regarded orchestral music program and later added a dance program. But budget cuts terminated both efforts, officials said.

It's $20 million no-bid for Supes-to-Nuts with Gary Solomon in Chicago

The men who run Supes have, shall we say, a somewhat questionable track record. And all this in a city where major, well-respected universities already train principals, where 49 schools have shut down and others are losing teachers, classroom aides, clerks, lunch ladies and other workers and programs right and left, to the tune of $68 million in cuts -- or $82 million, depending on whose math you believe. -- Lorraine Forte at Huffington

A few principals attending the Chicago Supes training now in progress are texting me, telling me what a joke it is. It's not that the sessions are all that bad. It's that the principals themselves have taken it over. They are running it -- "sharing stories," they text me.

"Inmates have taken over the asylum," says one south-side principal. The joke is that BBB has given huckster Gary Solomon and his team a $20 million no-bid contract to run this thing. Supes, she says, brings nothing to the table. Any one of a number of local groups or university people could have easily facilitated.

Another text: We (the intellectually and skill bereft cohort) are now creating the sessions. 

So why does this Wilmette-based, Broad funded, pro-charter Supes Academy land the largest no-bid contract awarded in years for professional development?

Well, that's an easy one.  Byrd-Bennett worked for the company as a coach up until the time she came on board at CPS as a consultant. According to Catalyst, "There’s also conflicting information about Byrd-Bennett’s involvement with another company owned by the same individuals who run the Supes Academy."

Writes Catalyst's Sarah Karp:

Up until April 2012, Byrd-Bennett worked as a consultant to the Supes Academy. At that time, she was brought on at CPS as the chief education advisor to then-CEO Jean-Claude Brizard, a contract position for which she was paid $21,500 a month.

In addition, Byrd-Bennett is listed as a senior associate for a superintendent search firm called PROACT Search, in documents dated August 2012—four months after taking the position with CPS. PROACT is run by the same individuals who lead Supes: Gary Solomon, the executive director, and Thomas Vranas, the president. (Another Supes founder listed on its website, Tim Quinn, is managing director of the Broad Foundation; Byrd-Bennett worked as an executive coach for Broad through this past April.)

Byrd-Bennett is one of four contacts listed in the proposal for services submitted by PROACT in its bid to do a superintendent search for the Norwalk, Connecticut, school district. She has an e-mail address listed in the proposal. When PROACT won the contract, an official for the company was quoted in the local newspaper touting that Byrd-Bennett, who by that time had been named as Chicago’s CEO, was a contractor with the firm.

You can read the rest yourself. I'll defer to the new federal prosecutor to determine the legality of all this. But if the $96 million UNO charter deal was legal, and the Zimmerman shooting was legal, then this is probably legal also. Most of our cynical and corruption-hardened citizenry might just shrug offKarp's excellent Catalyst expose as just more-of-the-same, to go along with UNO charter chicanery, pension demagogy, TIF-type slush funds, and Rahm's DePaul basketball swindles of the taxpayers. And of course they'd be right.

But there are a few things I found unusual in this latest boondoggle. One, is the response by UIC's Steve Tozer, quoted in the article. You would think that UIC's ed school (of which I am a proud grad and former employee) would be upset that they didn't get the contract and that BBB went out of town to bring in her old cronies. Instead we have principal trainer Tozer saying things like $20 million “is an okay price to pay if Chicago can produce good leaders.”

Tozer says the University of Illinois, which has a well-regarded training program for urban principals, would have looked into bidding on the contract had the process been open. Tozer had not heard of Supes until the organization had already been hired. 

But Solomon has been hustling business here for years. He's a Broad guy who also worked with Paul Vallas and ran his Synesi consulting company which has been trying to get back into the city ever since Mayor Daley sent Vallas packing off to Philly.

Solomon ran Vallas' consulting company

The $20 million contract is the fourth awarded to Supes since October of 2012. The three other contracts include two for $2 million each and a third for $225,000 for consulting services. In 2011-12, the Chicago Public Education Fund paid for training of Chiefs of Schools and Network Chiefs.

Karp writes:

Solomon went on to be a sales associate and then a vice president for the Princeton Review, a test preparation company, and counted CPS as one of his clients.
In 2005, he ventured out on his own and created two companies, one focusing on consulting and the other on web development. In Philadelphia, he marketed the consulting company as using the “Paul Vallas method of school reform.”

Maybe Tozer is just being a team player, hoping UIC gets a subcontract down the road. After all, it doesn't look like Supes has the talent to handle this by themselves.

They could end up like the dog that caught the bus.

Cross-posted from Mike Klonsky's Blog

Rahm's great TIF school rip-off

David Orr

The city should send any extra development funds to the public schools, says Cook County Clerk David Orr.

"How do we explain to school kids that gym, music and art classes are canceled while profitable businesses are tapping into the city’s tax base?" Orr said Thursday in an annual report on Tax Increment Finance districts. -- DNAInfo

CPS Liar-In-Chief Becky Carroll jumps into the fray.

 "No combination of one-time fixes is going to address a structural financial deficit at CPS that has built up over decades and currently stands at $1 billion, including $400 million from increasing pension payments," said CPS spokeswoman Becky Carroll. "We have made more than $600 million in cuts to the central office while doing everything we can to protect critical classroom investments. 

So Wendy Katten  calls her on it -- what $600 million in cuts?

“It just makes me laugh,” says Wendy Katten, who runs the parent advocacy group Raise Your Hand. “If [the savings] are true, they should show us the line items.” 

L-I-C Carroll responds -- um, errr.

 CPS spokeswoman Becky Carroll admits it would be impossible to find evidence of the reductions in the official budget book. “It is not the way it works,” she says... In other cases, the district saved money in one area, but paid more for something else-- and therefore, Carroll says, the reduction is not reflected in a line item. -- -- Catalyst

And she does all this with a straight face.

The 147 companies that run everything. It's only 'natural'

The 1318 transnational corporations that form the core of the economy. Superconnected companies are red, very connected companies are yellow. The size of the dot represents revenue (Image: PLoS One)

For some reason, the scientists who have suddenly "discovered" that a relatively tiny group of corporations, funds and banks have amassed enourmous wealth and power, find a need to distinguish themselves from the Occupy Movement which has been saying the same thing for years.

The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere. But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world's transnational corporations (TNCs). -- New Scientist

But we're scientists, not ideologues, says one of the scientists.

"Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it's conspiracy theories or free-market," says James Glattfelder. "Our analysis is reality-based."

One thing won't chime with some of the protesters' claims: the super-entity is unlikely to be the intentional result of a conspiracy to rule the world. "Such structures are common in nature," says another.

Concentration of power is not good or bad in itself, says the Zurich team that made the discovery.

Okay. So it's not a conspiracy and your discovery of the extreme concentration of wealth and power is complicated and transcends ideology. Agreed.

But neither a good nor bad thing?

It's the "natural" order of things?

Really?

Sounds ideological to me.

Murdoch's Wireless Generation, education's NSA?

I'm half anticipating that a techie or two over at New Corp's ed division will jump ship and flee to Hong Kong after whistle-blowing Murdoch hacking of U.S. students' families. Maybe a Wireless Generation competitor like McGraw-Hill or Pearson, will offer them asylum on one of their privately-owned islands.

Former N.Y. schools chancellor, Joel Klein became Murdoch's go-to guy on damage-control after the company’s News of the World tabloid in Britain had hacked into the phone of a murdered 13-year-old, Milly Dowler. London hearings soon revealed that Murdoch's criminal enterprise was bribing officials and  hacking phones and internet (including police) nationwide.

In 2010, News Corporation paid $360 million for a 90% stake in Wireless Generation, a company based in Brooklyn that specializes in education software, data systems and assessment tools to help teachers analyze student performance and customize lessons.Once the British scandal died down (what short memories the "wireless generation" has), Klein led his company’s aggressive push into the U.S. education market.

Murdoch soon became the darling of U.S. corporate school reformers and keynoted Jeb Bush's 2011 Education Summit. Hundreds of cash-strapped public school districts (including Chicago) were encouraged to fork over hundreds of millions of dollars in no-bid contracts and have handed Murdoch's people control of all student records and family information. Murdoch/Klein's on-line teaching program, Amplify, is also a top industry seller.

Review from a former Wireless Generation employee-- "A lot of poor quality work passed off as final products, most everything is worked out in production leading to many hot fixes and more long hours. Little respect for teachers or end-users in many within the company.... No, I would not recommend this company to a friend."

The school data-mining business is very competitive and includes Gate-funded operation, inBloom. Aside from accessing student records, it is also being used to spy on teachers and violate their privacy in many ways, ultimately replacing them altogether in the classroom.

I'm not opposed to online teaching/learning or record-keeping and think the new technology has much to offer, especially in the area of integrated and personalized learning, pacing and remediation. But there's no evidence that Murdoch's products are a successful application of if Klein is just a good (well-connected) huckster.

I do know that Murdoch and Klein are the last guys, outside of Booz, Allen, Hamilton and the NSA, that should have their hands on student records and school information.

Just waiting for that whistle to blow.

The Chicago money man behind Rahm

Michael Sacks, far right, then-Deputy Mayor Mark Angel. 

I call Rahm the "Little Emperor" because of his bullying approach to management. But the emperor doesn't say boo without getting the nod from his big-money patrons in the Civic Committee. Chief among those is behind-the-scenes operator Michael Sacks, CEO of Grosvenor Capital Management, one of the world's largest hedge funds.

Sacks has known the Little Emperor since Rahm left the Clinton White House in the late 1990s to become an investment banker.

Word is, he's the link between Mr. Emanuel and the Daley camp, "alert to potential friction when the mayor, while not mentioning predecessor Richard M. Daley by name", shifts blame for problems he inherited, from the “rotten” meter contract to underfunded pensions. Sean Conroy, Mr. Daley's son-in-law, is a director at Grosvenor, where he has worked since 2004.

Sacks, who actually brokered Rahm's latest parking meter deal, is featured in a recent Chicago Tribune piece.

When Chicago aldermen wanted answers on Mayor Rahm Emanuel's new parking meter deal, they heard the details not only from a City Hall lawyer and administrator but from a rich and influential businessman who has no official city job at all. 

People tied to Sacks' Grosvenor Capital Management firm donated nearly $450,000 to help get Emanuel elected, including $100,000 from Sacks personally. He has paid for sports tickets, meals and transportation for his friend since then, though neither man will detail the gifts.

Sacks is the Vice-Chairman of World Business Chicago board  and is also a big player in managing the $39 billion teachers pension fund. Grosvenor has provided investment management services for Illinois teacher pension funds as well as Los Angeles County public employee retirement funds. Grosvenor's fund of funds is second in size only to New York-based Blackstone Group L.P.'s. It routinely vies with the likes of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. for the business of big pension funds and other institutional investors.

There's also a revolving door between city and county government and Grosvenor. When Kurt Summers left his job as Cook County Board Pres. Tony Preckwinkle's chief of staff last November, he was immediately hired by Grosvenor as senior vice-president.

Sacks is a big promoter of charter schools and serves as a mayoral adviser on the topic. He also sits on the board of After School Matters, Mayor and Maggie Daley's cash-cow after-school program which was used as back entrance to the old City Hall patronage system.

According to the Tribune:

He is vociferous in his praise of Emanuel's leadership, but always vague when asked to describe his own role in city affairs.

Student college loan rates will double next week. Another win for Wall St.

Despite all the big talk coming from administration ed bureaucrats about college readiness, 21st-Century learning, and Common Core Standards, a college education is becoming a more distant possibility for all but the wealthiest students and their families. 

Congressional action that would keep student loan rates from doubling on July 1 seems ready to die on the Senate floor, blocked by Dem. Majority Leader Harry Reed. Barring a last-minute breakthrough, 7.4 million university students will see rates on their federal Stafford loans jump to 6.8 percent from 3.4 percent on July 1.

Democratic leaders, once convinced they could win a clear victory over Republicans, were reduced Wednesday to arguing that allowing interest rates to double would be better than fixing loans to fluctuating market rates.\

“I don’t know,” Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Democrat, said with a shrug. “Student groups said: ‘Let it double. We’d rather see it double to 6.8 than the alternatives we’ve heard.’ ”

Student groups???

Is this the face of the future of public ed?

Deborah Duazzo

Chicago Magazine's headline on Whet Moser's piece, reads: "The New School Board Member Is a Glimpse at the Future of Education." They are referring to Deborah Quazzo, Rahm Emanual's latest hand-picked school board member. 

Quazzo, a white, wealthy investment banker, replaces billionaire heiress Penny Pritzker, Obama's new Commerce Secretary.

Quazzo's company, GSW Advisors has this view of education:

In the venture capital world, transactions in the K-12 education sector soared to a record $389 million last year, up from $13 million in 2005. That includes major investments from some of the most respected venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, according to GSV Advisors, an investment firm in Chicago that specializes in education.

The goal: an education revolution in which public schools outsource to private vendors such critical tasks as teaching math, educating disabled students, even writing report cards, said Michael Moe, the founder of GSV.

Moser's takeaway:

Quazzo is merely one vote, and comes from a similar background as Penny Pritzker, who was heavily invested in the school reform movement. Instead, it's more interesting as a look at the broader state of the education industry—how the rise of the technology and financial sectors, along with governmental interest in privatization during a time of strict budget cuts have integrated with school reform, creating a burgeoning market that's not limited to the hip MOOCosphere, but is making inroads in public education.

He's right.

How many more of these studies do we really need?

Well, it's another week and there's another study showing once again that charter schools fail to perform better than the traditional public schools they are being touted to replace.  Of course the whole premise behind comparing and rating large categories of schools, based on a selected group of standardized test scores makes no sense and needs more debunking.

This latest study, coming out of Stanford's CREDO group finds:

56 percent of the charters produced no significant difference in reading and 19 percent had worse results than traditional public schools. In math, 40 percent produced no significant difference and 31 percent were significantly worse than regular public schools.

Pearson

Charters actually come out slightly better in this year's CREDO study then they did in 2009. But charter school cheerleaders like Scott Pearson, are downright giddy over reportedly (I always add in that word when talking about D.C. test scores in the post-Rhee era) improved charter reading and math scores in the District. Pearson, who comes out of Arne Duncan's Dept. of Education, gets paid $180,000/year to say stuff like this:

“We’re popping the champagne corks here,” said Scott Pearson, executive director of the D.C. Public Charter School Board. “We think it’s a very strong affirmation of the power of charter schools when they’re done right.”

Yes, Mr. Pearson. All schools do better when "done right". Such are the research-based inanities of the champagne-popping charter hustlers.

Side note about Pearson -- he's a former executive at Mitt Romney's Bain Capital. Perfect!

Privatization and the Snowden affair

With all the talk about Snowden, it's easy to lose sight of the real issue here --- the surveillance and collection of massive amounts of information on US citizens – from emails, to telephone calls, to videos, under the Prism program and other Fisa court orders.

As juicy to the media as the Snowden escape story, or his pole-dancing girlfriend  might be, his story is just a sideshow to the real debate his whistle-blowing has opened up around the government's violations of its own citizens constitutional rights vs. national security requirements.

The Guardian, which has done most of the heavy lifting and risk-taking (especially ace reporter Glenn Greenwald) on this story, is also doing some of the best analysis. An excellent piece by Valerie Plame Wilson and Joe Wilson appears in today's Guardian ("The NSA's metastasised intelligence-industrial complex is ripe for abuse"). You might remember them from Plamgate, where CIA Operations Officer Plame had her identity leaked by conservative journalist Robert Novack and State Dept. official Richard Armitage as payback for her husband's role in debunking the WMDs rationale for the invasion of Iraq.

Plame and Wilson make an interesting assessment of the trend towards privatization and government sub-contracting of its most essential public-sector functions, ie. security and education.

The roots of this trend go back at least as far as the Reagan era, when the political right became obsessed with limiting government and denigrating those who worked for the public sector. It began a wave of privatization – because everything was held to be more "cost-efficient" when done by the private sector – and that only deepened with the political polarization following the election of 2000. As it turns out, the promises of cheaper, more efficient services were hollow, but inertia carried the day.

More problems with N.Y. testing privatization madness. T(est) for Texas

Columbia University's Teachers College held two Masters convocations on May 21. During the ceremonies students held up signs that read "I am not a number" and "not a test score."   Photo by George Joseph

From today's Daily News 

McGraw-Hill will pay overtime to teachers to work nights and weekends to catch up on grading the high school exams after a scanning glitch prevented the educators from scoring the tests soon after they were taken. The Education Department said that seniors who haven’t received their scores can still participate in graduation ceremonies, but won’t be able to immediately receive their diplomas. 

 The city awarded a three-year, $9.6 million contract to McGraw-Hill to run the operation — but the company failed to pick up the exams from a warehouse and upload them into a computer system to be scored on time.

This is the first year city teachers were barred from grading their own students’ Regents exams as part of a statewide effort to crack down on inflating scores.

Pearson rules 

In 2010, when the state, long known as a beacon for its strong curriculum standards, was formulating its new standardized “Common Core” program, lawmakers handed Pearson a, $32 million contract to administer tests, in addition to another $1 million for helping the state Education Department with testing services. Having seized control of standardized testing in states like New York, Pearson has also made its own costly textbooks essential for teachers under pressure to turn out high-test scores, thereby turning additional profits while transforming classrooms into Pearson test-prep centers.

Last month the city was considering severing ties with Pearson after it was revealed that the gaffe-prone agency made yet another scoring error on the entrance exams to gifted and talented programs that affected more than 300 students. Also, nearly 3,000 were told they did not qualify for such programs, only to later learn that they did.

T for Texas Testing 

But none of this has stopped Texas from agreeing to pay Pearson $90 million/year to run their state testing program, top-to-bottom. Texas’ $468 million contract with Pearson dwarfs the company’s contract with New York State by more than ten times. New York’s contract, also lasting five years, is worth a paltry $32 million.

By the time a current student in Texas public schools graduates, she will have taken at least fifteen standardized tests. This means Texas has the most frequently tested students in the nation.

Another attack aimed at colleges of education

That great "revolutionary" thinker Arne Duncan, set the stage back in '09, when he discredited all colleges of education, labeling them as "mediocre" and calling for "revolutionary change—not evolutionary tinkering."

Now the National Council on Teacher Quality has taken Duncan's cue and has come out with what it's calling "the first comprehensive review" of university-based teacher ed programs, which it labels as "an industry of mediocrity," that churns out teachers ill-prepared to work in elementary and high-school classrooms.

But a look at who's running NCTQ should raise flags about the political intent of the study and who such degrading language really serves. A brief scan of the board of directors and advisers brings up a host of names associated with current corporate-style "reform" efforts, ownership-society politics and privately-run charter schools, with the likes of Chester Finn, Joel Klein, Wendy Kopp, Eric Hanushek, and Michael Feinberg on board. Bankrolling the study are some of the major anti-teacher, pro-privatization foundations, like the William Penn Foundation, Broad, Dell, Kaiser, Anschutz, Bradley and on and on.

If Kopp's 5-week-wonder program at Teach For America is the standard-setter, it's no wonder that 99% fail to meet it. And that's a good thing, in my book. The broad-brush debasement of nearly all of the country's colleges of education opens the door for the new cottage industry of so-called alternative certification programs like TFA and those currently  flourishing in Texas. 

It's not that I think teacher preparation in this country is all that, or that big improvements couldn't or shouldn't be made to the ones with which I'm familiar. It's just that NCTQ's study focuses mainly on written materials, like course syllabi, rather than considering what the graduates do in the classroom once they become working teachers. It rates colleges of ed with a 1-4 star system, like you might rate a movie or restaurant. The ratings are based upon a simplistic evaluation of syllabi, textbooks and other teaching materials. Only four programs, Vanderbilt, Furman, Ohio State and Lipscomb (a private Christian college in Nashville) in the entire U.S. received four stars.

The study also echoes the unsubstantiated claim that poorly-trained teachers are to blame for poor student performance and ignores the influences of poverty on measurable student achievement. Of course the study offers no explanation for how this same teaching force has produced such high results in the nation's wealthy schools.

Yes, prospective teachers need to spend more time outside the classroom and out in the field (as do all students), coupled with experienced mentors. Yes, teacher preparation programs need to recruit the best and the brightest (I would add, with special emphasis on African-American and Latino candidates). But to attract and sustain these pre-teachers, there must be stronger tuition assistance programs with emphasis on support for urban and rural teachers. Teacher programs must become more community-based (a point ignored by NCTQ). The study calls for more selectivity in admission of students to teacher training programs, and I agree. But "selectivity" now is based on ability to afford skyrocketing tuition. We don't need more of the same.

The NCTQ study, like Duncan's waving the red flag of revolution, is simply a bash job on nearly all colleges of ed. In response, officials from 35 education schools sent a letter to NCTQ prez Kate Walsh, criticizing the study's evaluation tool for some of the same reasons I listed above. Many colleges refused to cooperate with the study, which limited the number of schools the council could rank to fewer than half the roughly 1,450 institutions of higher ed that have teacher training programs.

Hopefully, the study will prompt some real discussion about how best to prepare the nation's teachers. A good start would be dumping the NCTQ study in the circular file and picking up works by Linda Darling-Hammond, Deborah Meier, Sir Ken Robinson, Bill Ayers, Dennis Littky, Elliot Washor, and Pedro Noguera, just to name a few.

From the Wall Street Journal: 'The marriage between companies and the state'

The June 10th WSJ calls the Snowden affair, "a wake-up call for Booz Allen and us." I'm not sure who the us is here, but they do make some great points.

In the increasingly intimate marriage between companies and the state, Mr. Snowden is emblematic of many things: For business, he signifies the liabilities that companies doing intelligence work for the government have inherited. For government, he's an example of what can happen when operations become so complex, and technical capability so constrained, that agencies must outsource key intelligence analysis to contractors.

 And for the rest of us, he raises this question: Exactly where does government end and business begin?

J.P. Morgan: The Portuguese connection

Marching against austerity

I just got back from Portugal where austerity imposed by the IMF and other international creditors is crashing peoples' standard of living and destroying public space, including public education. As usual, the alternative to public space and public decision making is privatization and Portugal is no exception.

Guess who's pushing privatization and re-engineering Portuguese society? It's J.P. Morgan, the same investment bankers and hedge-funders who helped crash the economy here.

Reuters reports:

Portugal appointed J.P. Morgan as financial advisers in the planned privatization of the national postal service...The privatiszation is part of a wider state property sell-off by Lisbon ordered under the country's 78 billion euro EU/IMF bailout.

There a strong Chicago connection in all this. It's Bill Daley, brother of the ex-mayor, who just announced he's running for governor. Daley was a V.P. for J.P. Morgan who made a cool $8.7 million the year before becoming Obama's chief-of-staff.

I'll be looking for news about the upcoming general strike called by the country's biggest unions on June 27th. 

Booz Allen Hamilton helped set Chicago on its path to corporate school 'reform'

If anyone doubts the power of an individual taking the high moral ground when confronting injustice, look no further than Edward Snowden.

Snowden, by all accounts an ordinary guy working for the powerhouse consulting group Booz Allen Hamilton, reached the point where he could no longer accept his role and the role of this giant corporate entity and his own government in violating the rights of his fellow citizens. At the risk of  his career and his freedom, Snowden turned working-class hero like Pfc. Bradley Manning did before him, and leaked details of the National Security Agency's secret PRISM data-mining program to the Guardian, (see this morning's great interview with Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald), helping to expose the administration's secretive and duplicitous role in depriving all of its citizens of their basis rights.

******

But with all the talk and debate about Snowden, I couldn't help but think back to the days in the early '90s, when the same Booz Allen Hamilton firm was brought in by the Civic Committee and the big ed foundations to help "re-engineer" Chicago Public Schools. They did a lot of the early financial analysis that led to the reorganization of the CPS central office.

Obama's Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper,  is a former Booz Allen exec.

At the time, Chicago was becoming a laboratory for corporate-style school reform, including mayoral control of the schools. There was lots of debate about where the power should lie to make decisions about the construct and conduct of public schools. Many of us favored the downsizing of the bloated and dysfunctional  public school bureaucracy, including the passage of the 1988 School Reform Act which decentralized the system and created the popularly-elected Local School Councils.

But to the corporate reformers, the financial crisis and organizational mess that was CPS, wasn't a disaster --it was an opportunity. That first wave of school reform was soon taken over by the corporate reformers and privatizers. Booz Allen Hamilton was one of the major consulting groups that helped design and engineer corporate-style reform and set Chicago Public Schools on its current path.

The company had cut its teeth on privatization work in the former Soviet Union. It would grow globally, reaping enormous profits while taking advantage of the trend towards privatization and government subcontracting (which we described in our book, Small Schools: Public School Reform Meets the Ownership Society).

Soon they would become to national security what Halliburton and Blackwater were to the war in Iraq.

As the New York Times reports:

Booz Allen Hamilton has become one of the largest and most profitable corporations in the United States almost exclusively by serving a single client: the government of the United States...Thousands of people formerly employed by the government, and still approved to deal with classified information, now do essentially the same work for private companies.

As evidence of the company’s close relationship with government, the Obama administration’s chief intelligence official, James R. Clapper Jr., is a former Booz Allen executive. The official who held that post in the Bush administration, John M. McConnell, now works for Booz Allen.

Booz Allen Hamilton is now in many ways more powerful that the governments with which it contracts. The company is now majority owned by the Carlyle Group, a giant US-based investment fund with $176 billion in assets. Edward Snowden revealed that at Booz Allen, he had the authority to spy on any U.S. citizen, including the President.

But it's worth noting that they got their real start in corporate-style school reform right here in Chicago.

A look at Philly layoffs from Lisbon

At Lisbon University: "General Strike"

It's a strange feeling sitting here in Lisbon, reading about austerity in Philly.

Philadelphia Superintendent William R. Hite Jr. announced Friday that the School District had begun mailing layoff notices to 3,783 employees, informing them they will lose their jobs July 1 because of the district’s financial crisis. The list includes 676 teachers, 283 counselors, 127 assistant principals, and 1,202 noontime aides. -- Inquirer

Change the names of the cities and the school administrators and the same story can be read in papers here, or in Madrid, or in Athens. Why would anyone think this has anything to do with education reform?

Mass school closings along with thousands of teacher and staff firings are part a global crisis which the one-percenters are taking advantage of to reshape society. Their goal is nothing less than the erosion of public space (including public education) and public decision-making.

Here in Portugal, in Greece and Spain -- not to mention Turkey -- there are signs of sharp resistance. The unions in Portugal have called for a general strike on June 27th. What will the response be in Philly, Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles?

It was Frederick Douglass who said it best:

Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.

In L.A. a shift at the top of school takeover group

Broad-trained Sullivan takes over as head of L.A. "turnaround" group

Outgoing Mayor Villaraigosa pulled a fast one on newly-elected mayor Eric Garcetti. He brought in a new manager, trained by the Broad Foundation, to run the corporate reform/school privatization group,  Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, less than a month before Garcetti was to be sworn in as mayor.

Joan Sullivan, currently Villaraigosa's deputy mayor for education will replace the embattled Marshall Tuck, as head of the group. Sullivan comes out of the Broad Institute and was at one time, the head of a New York charter school.
PLAS is a big-money player in the school turnaround business, taking over struggling neighborhood schools and turning them over to private management companies.

While public ed suffers, private D.C. contractors ask, 'What sequester?'

Life in the Ownership Society

Public education and the public sector in general is being devastated by sequester's budget ax.

But today's WSJ reveals how private sector federal contracting has created a new "gilded age" and  a new class of super-rich in and around the nation's capital. Journal writer Elizabeth Williamson describes an incredible mansion built in the suburbs of D.C. by technology billionaire Frank Islam who shrugs at the word sequester.

The sprawling compound is a product of Washington's Gilded Age—a time of lush business profits initially fueled by government outsourcing and war. Some demographers predicted the boom here would ebb as federal spending shrank amid troop withdrawals from the Middle East and efforts to trim the deficit...The explosion in government outsourcing has shoveled federal dollars from Capitol Hill to mirrored high-rises dotting the Beltway.

 Seven of the nation's 10 wealthiest counties are now in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan region, compared with only two in the New York metropolitan area, and none in Silicon Valley. Census data from 2010 show median household income was $84,523 in the D.C. area, compared with $83,944 for Silicon Valley's wealthy San Jose region. D.C.'s inner city is being whitenized as public housing is leveled, public schools closed and privatization replaces public sector jobs.

'Illinois is open for business...' No revenue for pensions. Millions for new basketball stadium.

“Today, with this bill, Illinois is open for business,” said state Sen. Toi Hutchinson (D-Olympia Fields), the chief Senate sponsor.of the $173 million DePaul basketball arena bill. 

With the failure last night, to pass a bill that would have given Chicago Public Schools another pension holiday, the IL State Legislature ended it Spring Session failing to do anything to provide either the state or Chicago with any new revenue to solve its ongoing pension crisis. But it had no problem finding  $173 million to help pay for Rahm Emanuel's latest boondoggle, (that's what Sports Illustrated is calling it) a new 10,000-seat basketball arena for DePaul, the nation's largest private Catholic university.

According to Crain's, Rahm is counting on the sale of 22 luxury suites in the arena at $45,000 each per year and 300 club seats to account for near $500,000 in operating income. But there's little hope of filling the new arena with city basketball fans. DePaul's program abandoned Chicago back in 1980. This year's team roster included not one player recruited from Chicago's public schools.

CTU V.P. Jesse Sharkey calls the boondoggle yet another reason why we need an elected school board in Chicago and an end to mayoral control of the schools:

The mayor has demonstrated a lack of leadership and his appointed Board of Education has done a miserable job governing the district. They have closed 50 elementary schools without a plan and now they will have to deal with a looming budget issue. But rather than finding additional revenue, the mayor pushed through spending for the DePaul basketball arena, millions for Navy Pier development, and extended TIFs that were set to expire. Now more than ever we must demand an end to mayoral control and push for an elected representative school board. -- Fred Klonsky's blog

Amen!