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.

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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!

Billionaire Boys Club couldn't buy L.A. School Board elections

"This is a testament to the voters. Voters put their belief in skills and expertise.... It sends the clear message that school board seats are not for sale." -- Monica Ratliff. 

Fifth-grade teacher Ratliff gave the corporate school "reformers" a real kick in the butt this week when her popular, but poorly-funded campaign for school board ended in victory. Her opponent in the race to represent east San Fernando Valley, described in the Washington Post as, "the well-connected Antonio Sanchez" received some $2 million from donors including the Coalition for School Reform, the political-action committee started by outgoing Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and  funded in large part by wealthy outside reform advocates.

Ratliff

WaPo's Valerie Strauss reports:

Ratliff and Sanchez were thrown into a run-off in March elections for three school board seats, one of which went to a supporter of school reform and the other to an opponent. Those elections were marked by  big money given to the reform candidate who lost –  despite a $1 million donation from New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and $250,000 from Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst organization.

Ratliff had no paid staff and no meaningful help from her own politically active teachers union, according to the L.A. Times. Ten to 20 faithful volunteers knocked on doors every weekend. The teachers union endorsed both candidates in the East Valley race, even though Ratliff is a highly regarded teacher and union leader at her school. The neutrality of United Teachers Los Angeles was a huge advantage to Sanchez because it cut off Ratliff from her best hope of major support.

She won anyway.

Another reason why we need an elected school board in Chicago. With all the big money pouring into elections behind corporate/reform candidates, especially since the Citizens United court decision, organization combined with a just cause can still win out. That's more that you can say for a mayor-appointed school board.

Then there was the L.A. mayor's election between Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee candicates Garcetti vs. Greuel. Garcetti, the anti-union candidate won by 4 percentage points in the most expensive mayoral race in L.A. history. The race generated a record $33 million in spending, including outside money from political action committees. It also generated one of the lowest turnouts in history.

Hmm, this seems to be a trend.

Maybe Pritzker left it in her other purse...

Obama's pick for Commerce Secretary and former Rahm-appointed Chicago school board member, Penny Pritzker "inadvertently ommitted" more than $80 million in reported income. Hey, mistakes happen. Been there, done that, says Sen. Jay Rockefeller, who was on the receiving end of a Pritzker "courtesy call" this week and who is almost as rich as Pritzker.

Emily Heil writes in the Washington Post:

That might sound like a lot of money, but it’s all relative. Pritzker, whose family founded the Hyatt hotel chain, is worth about $1.5 billion. So it’s easy to see how a few million — or 80 — could go missing. Maybe she left it in the other purse? 

According to Sun-Times columnist, Lynn Sweet:

Pritzker’s biggest hurdle toward confirmation will be Republicans grilling her on the major stain on her record, the 2001 failure of Superior Bank, a Hinsdale Savings and Loan, and tax avoidance strategies employed by her trusts and business empire.

The Pritzker family founded Hyatt Hotels, and have been at odds with UNITE HERE Local 1, the hotel workers union for years. Pritzker is on the board — she will step down if confirmed — and the union, after at first giving Pritzker a pass, in recent days has started a campaign to oppose her; an ad in Politico called her appointment “The President’s mistake.”

Pritzker is also taking some heat for sheltering millions in taxable income in offshore trusts. On financial disclosure forms, Pritzker has revealed that she received $53.6 million in income in 2012 from a trust in the Bahamas. The income is described as being paid for “consulting services.” The offshore issue is sure to bring questions from congressional Republicans, especially on the heels of a Senate hearing into tax avoidance by Apple Inc., whose chief executive defended the company’s actions this week by protesting, “We don’t stash our money on some Caribbean island.”

Pritzker's resignation left the school board with only 6 voting members left to rubber-stamp the mayor's massive school closing plan.

Learning from Prof. Joravsky about Rahm's latest TIF deal

Rahm's Choose Chicago cronies applaud the great TIF swidle.

I continue to learn from Professor Joravsky about TIF, the Mayor's own taxpayer supported slush fund. Today, the prof schools us on what might be Rahm's greatest-of-all scams, the DePaul Arena TIF swindle, by which he takes millions in taxpayer dollars that should go to Chicago Public Schools and funnels them to his rich pals and corporations. In the latest case, that means spending $55 million of your property tax dollars to build a hotel and basketball arena for DePaul, on the near-south side. This at the same time he's about to close more than 50 neighborhood schools, primarily in the city's most under-served black communities, because the city is too broke to operate them.

Writes Joravsky:

 And what do you, the taxpayers, get for this $55 million? You get a hotel that you'll probably never stay in. And an arena for DePaul basketball games that you'll probably never attend. Because let's face it—there are even fewer fans of the Blue Demons in this town than of the White Sox, who also play in a subsidized facility that doesn't often fill up.

Since the deal costs $55 million, we'll have less money to spend on schools. Which means most of them will still go without music, art, drama, intramurals, or reduced class sizes.

At this point, I should remind everyone who doesn't know that DePaul is a private university with tuition costing more than $30,000 a year for undergraduates. That means it's a long shot for average Chicagoans, unless they're willing to go into severe debt to pay for it. 

Which is exactly why I'm sharing Professor Joravsky's piece with my students who are doing exactly that.  I'd like the get their take on the great TIF swindle.

Side bar

Interesting (at least to me) was the sudden resignation of billionaire Republican candidate for governor, Bruce Rauner as chairman of Choose Chicago, the city's tourism arm. The resignation came on the eve of the announcement of the DePaul Arena deal. Rauner was named chairman of the Chicago Convention & Tourism Bureau in 2010 by former Mayor Richard Daley. When the CCTB merged with the Chicago Office of Tourism and Culture last year, Mr. Rauner became chair of the newly created Choose Chicago.

Is candidate Rauner now trying to distance himself from the DePaul deal, in case it collapses in scandal?

Rahm has named former White House social secretary Desiree Rogers, as Rauner's replacement. You might remember how Obama was forced to dump Rogers after two wannabe reality TV stars crashed the first White House state dinner, an event to honor of the prime minister of India. I suppose this was a way to give her a place to land. It usually works that way in the City the Works.

Gates on Common Core back in 2009

In his speech to the National Conference of State Legislatures, on July 21, 2009,  Bill Gates outlined a plan of action for legislators to adopt common education standards, which he claimed would help jump-start a sagging economy. “Difficult times can spark great reforms,” he stated, and the stimulus package funds present a great opportunity. With clear, consistent standards and robust data systems to evaluate teacher effectiveness, more students will have the chance to make the most of their lives.

When the tests are aligned to the common standards, the curriculum will line up as well—and that will unleash powerful market forces in the service of better teaching. For the first time, there will be a large base of customers eager to buy products that can help every kid learn and every teacher get better.

UNO charter hustlers have Wall Streeters' undies in a twist

The scandal involving the UNO charter school hustlers has Wall Street investors worrying. Today's Sun-Times reports: 

Now under investigation by two state agencies, the United Neighborhood Organization is also facing tough questions on Wall Street from investors who lent tens of millions of dollars to help pay for the rapid expansion of UNO’s charter-school network. The questions were prompted by Chicago Sun-Times reports on $8.5 million in state grant funds paid to companies owned by two brothers of Miguel d’Escoto, a top UNO executive.

As the largest charter-school operator in Illinois, the United Neighborhood Organization depends largely on City Hall and Springfield. It also borrows money — from banks and on Wall Street — to pay its bills.


Steven Levy, an executive with Prudential Financial in Newark, N.J., has been all over UNO boss Juan Rangel about the d’Escoto brothers’ deals. Levy says he's worried about the teachers union being able to exploit UNO corruption to kill millions in state grant money to pay for the group's real estate deals. Investors are losing confidence in the group's ability to pay back millions in loans.

“From what I understand, they are able to pay debt service — certainly in the near term, in the next year or two,” says Carlotta Mills of Standard & Poors. “Right now, I want to see if they are able to get the money from the state.”

Machine pols like Ald. Eddie Burke and Mayor Emanuel are putting the screws on Gov. Quinn in order to get him to turn the money spigot back on again to keep the Wall Streeters happy.

I'm pretty sure he will. When Wall St. speaks, Chicago politicians listen.

Bill Gate$ buys into Common Core

Valerie Strauss writes in the Washington Post:

For an initiative billed as being publicly driven, the Common Core States Initiative has benefited enormously from the generosity of the private philanthropy of Bill and Melinda Gates. How much? About $150 million worth. Take a look at this list of grants, obtained from their foundation’s Web site. Note not only the amounts but the wide range of organizations receiving money. Universities. Unions. State education departments. Nonprofits. Think tanks. 

AFT got $4.4 million. NEA, only a million.

"Slow Eddie" Burke wants the UNO tap turned on again. Gee, I wonder why?

From left, Gov. Pat Quinn, UNO CEO Juan Rangel, House Speaker Michael Madigan and Ald. Edward Burke at the July 2012 groundbreaking on the Southwest Side for the UNO Soccer Academy High School.

Back in the Harold Washington days, they called him "Slow Eddie" Burke to distinguish him from "Fast Eddie" Vrdolyak, as a leader of the racist cabal of 29 Chicago aldermen who stood in opposition to the city's first black mayor.

Vrdolyak is out of prison and back plying his trade in nearby Cicero. But Ald. Ed Burke is still with us and still pulling the same shenanigans. On Wednesday, Burke asked his pal Gov. Quinn, to turn the the money spigot back on for the UNO charter hustlers.

Last month, as investigations swirled, Quinn suspended the remaining payments from a $98 million state school construction grant to UNO after it was found that millions were funneled to companies owned by two brothers of Miguel d’Escoto, a top UNO executive who resigned following the reports. Quinn, worried about his own connections to UNO, asked the clout-heavy group to clean up it's mess before he would turn the spigot back on. That clean up would likely include a leadership shuffle with UNO political boss Juan Rangel stepping down.

Burke has five UNO schools in his ward and UNO helped his brother Dan defeat progressive Rudy Lozano in a close 2010 election. Burke’s daughter-in-law, Jacqueline Burke, has worked for UNO since 2009, according to UNO payroll records. Also, about $1.67 million from the state grant to UNO went to Windy City Electric, which was operated by top Burke precinct captain Anthony Burke, to help build the charter elementary school that UNO operates next to the future Soccer Academy High School.

Burke has also raised a ton of money for Quinn who needs Slow Eddie's backing if he has any chance of being re-elected in the upcoming governor's race. And so it goes. The ties that bind.

According to the Sun-Times:

Burke — who attended the school’s groundbreaking last July, along with Quinn and House Speaker Michael Madigan — called himself a “big fan” of Juan Rangel, UNO’s chief executive officer, who also co-chaired Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s mayoral campaign. Burke called Rangel a “man of honesty, integrity and good purpose.”

All this, just as Pres. Obama was turning National Teacher Appreciation Week into “National Charter Schools Week" and calling privately-run charters, "learning laboratories". I'm sure Slow Eddie's family, Rangel, the d'Escoto brothers, Madigan and Rahm will all be joining in the celebration.

'Blowing up the system' -- Roberts confesses

Roy Roberts was told to "blow up and dismantle" Detroit's school system 

When Michigan'sTea Party Gov. Rick Snyder brought in Roy Roberts in May, 2011, to replace the Robert Bobb/ Barbara Byrd-Bennett school management team in Detroit, he was told to, “blow up the district and dismantle it.” At least that's what the Detroit Free Press reported in an article that has since been revised and no longer includes such comments.

Roberts, a former GM exec, who was managing director of the Chicago-based private equity investment firm Reliant Equity Investors,.began his smash-and-grab assault on the schools by throwing out the collective-bargaining agreement and imposing top-down authority, using the power given him by SB4. He announced this week, that he is leaving the district.

Roberts' statement brings to mind the opening line in A Nation at Risk, written 30 years ago as the seminal document of the modern corporate school reform movement:

“If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war,” the report said. “

I would paraphrase it this way: If a terrorist group threatened to "blow up and dismantle" our public education system, we would most definitely consider it an act of war. Roberts' now-deleted unsolicited confession shows corporate reform has declared war on public education. .

They come and they go

Catalyst follows the comings and goings of the cogs in Chicago's corporate reform wheel. The latest to catch my eye is Oliver Sicat, who leaves CPS to become the CEO and president of Edvocate, the charter management organization overseeing USC Hybrid High School in Los Angeles.

Sicat

Sicat was the founder of University of Illinois at Chicago College Prep, a campus of the Noble Street Charters Schools.  USC Hybrid High, now in its first year, is a charter school authorized by the Los Angeles Unified School District and designed and built by the University of Southern California Rossier School.

He was hired by Rahm to run the charter school wing of the mayor's school-closing operation. You know how that goes -- close a neighborhood public school, claiming it's "underutilized" and then open 3 charter schools around the corner, run by private companies. It's an economic and political win-win for the mayor and the corporate guys. And Sicat was the guy brought in to make it work.

Rahm even invented a new position of chief portfolio officer specifically for his rising star bureaucrat.  So why is he leaving a position created just for him? Don't know. Rahm likes to keep the revolving door revolving. It keeps any one department from getting too much power. Plus he's had to make room in the bloated school-closing/charter bureaucracy for new blood, like ex-marine colonel and hostage negotiator, Tom Tyrell and for Ald. O'Connor's sister, Catherine Sugrue.

Much like the military-industrial complex, where operators slide easily from the government bureaucracy to corporate board rooms, so it is with the edreform-corporate complex.

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One group that sticks around is the corporate patrons of charter schools themselves who also keep Rahm on a short leash.

From the Chicago Tribune:

Yet the mayor's kitchen cabinet of advisers includes political donors from the strata of high finance in which he himself made millions of dollars. Those advisers, many active in promoting charter schools, include Michael Sacks, the CEO of Grosvenor Capital Management, who also heads Emanuel's World Business Chicago economic development panel; Kenneth Griffin and his wife, Anne Dias Griffin, who each run hedge fund firms; and venture capitalist Bruce Rauner, a likely candidate for the Republican governor nomination. 

Michael Milken treating schools like junk bonds

Good post at Modern School blog, describing the great K12Inc. public school  heist engineered by  indicted racketeer and securities fraud purveyor, Michael Milken. Despite K12’s lack of success in terms of improving student achievement, the company has been a cash cow for Milken and his fellow investors.

According to MS:

Milken, as you may recall, was indicted on 98 counts of racketeering and securities fraud in 1989 as a result of his insider trading and junk bond scamming. As part of a plea deal, he admitted guilt to six securities violations, but was never convicted of any of the racketeering charges. Sentenced to 10 years in a tennis club prison for white collar crooks and permanently banned from Wall Street, he ultimately served only 22 months, paid a hefty $1.1 billion in fines, but bounced back in better shape than the vast majorities of Americans could ever dream of, with a net worth of over $2 billion in 2010.