Who brought Jonah Edelman amd SFC to town? Bruce Rauner

Education blogs are buzzing about Stand For Children anti-hero, Jonah Edelman, whose braggadocio has left the corrupt underbelly of corporate school reform badly exposed. But to understand this story, one has to look past Edelman because, as everyone over at the local saloon knows, behind every small-time player stands a big-time player.

In today's Chicago Sun-Times, "Braggart angers teachers' union after tough negotiations over reform bill", education writers Roz Rossi and Abdon Pallasch tell at least part of the story about Edelman's trip to Illinois, his bags packed with hundred-dollar bills in search of willing politicians (are there any unwilling in this state?) ready to abandon their traditional union base and vote for the anti-union SB7.

Enter the big-time player:

Edelman was recruited to Illinois by Bruce Rauner, a Republican venture capitalist and former client of Mayor Rahm Emanuel who helped make Emanuel a millionaire when Emanuel was an investment banker. Because Rauner is Republican, Edelman said some expected his group to fund Republican candidates. But Edelman said he realized [State Sen Michael] Madigan was the game in Illinois and so he funded six of Madigan’s Democratic legislative candidates and only three Republicans.

Billionaire Rauner who bankrolled Emanuel's mayoral campaign, is also a charter school entrepreneur with a chain of Chicago charters bearing his name. Rauner chairs the the education committee of the powerful anti-union Civic Committee of the Commercial Club and his name even appeared in local gossip columns as a possible choice for Emanuel's new schools chief. 

“Sneed hears rumbles mega-rich venture capitalist Bruce Rauner, who burps money and made certain a ton had been tossed into Rahm’s election campaign, is being eyed as the city’s new school CEO.”

With Rauner's help, and millions more coming from local billionaires with names like Pritzker, Crown and Zell, Edelman spread the money around like a horny John, outspending and out-foxing the unions at every turn. 

“They [the unions] essentially gave away every single provision related to teacher effectiveness that we had proposed — everything we had fought for in Colorado,” Edelman said in Aspen. “We hired 11 lobbyists, including four of the absolute best insiders and seven of the best minority lobbyists, preventing the unions from hiring them.”

Almost too disgusting to quote. It's no wonder that everyone on all corners of EdelGate want this thing to go away. Not a chance.

Koldyke's Chicago 'turnaround' investment

Koldyke

It all began when venture capitalist and Mayor Daley golf buddy, Mike Koldyke (Frontenac Capital) decided he could save the public school system by running it like a business. Frontenac had been a big investor in for-profit colleges like DeVry and Rasmussen College, which trained technically skilled workers for local businesses. Scrutiny of for-profit colleges by the feds has them, and everybody across the for-profit sector, examining how they measure student success and relying more and more on standardized testing.

In 2001, with lots of political clout and years of good will built up from his days sponsoring the Golden Apple Foundation, and as a trustee of  the Chicago Public Education Fund, Koldyke decided to get into the heavily D.O.E.-funded school-turnaround business by establishing his own non-profit venture, the Academy for Urban School Leadership (AUSL).

Koldyke brought in Chicago banker and corporate power broker, David Vitale to run his operation. Vitale was then tapped by Mayor Emanuel to become Chicago school board president along with another AUSL exec, Tim Cawley, coming over  to serve as CPS Chief Administrative Officer. With virtual control of the board and the central office, Koldyke can now assure a stable funding pipeline to his 19 turnaround schools, even in the midst of the current budget crisis when neighborhood schools are being starved of operating cash.

"Clearly they're very tied in to the political establishment in Chicago and they're getting opportunities in funding not available to anybody else," said Julie Woestehoff, executive director of Parents United for Responsible Education. -- Chicago Tribune

The Trib goes on to report:

The new CPS administration backs the organization but critics are concerned that turnaround schools, which are championed by President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan, get resources at the expense of neighborhood schools.

...the 19 turnaround schools — failing schools targeted for overhaul by CPS — are run by the nonprofit Academy for Urban School Leadership, which will train 90 teachers in its academies this year. The number of AUSL training academies will double to 14 within the next two years. The program partners with National-Louis University, placing graduate students in AUSL-run turnaround schools.

With those extra millions in CPS funding at its disposal, AUSL claims to have produced an 8-point rise in elementary school test scores but little or no gain in high school scores. But with the modest bump in test scores has come lots of chaos and disruption in the lives of thousands of the neediest of Chicago's school kids. Koldyke's prescription for the city's so-called "failing schools" is the mass firing of teachers and their replacement with AUSL teachers along with an accompanying movement of kids from one school to another. This disruption and break in relationship between students, teachers and their former schools, was one of the factors in the 2009 melee at Fenger High School which led to the death of Derion Albert. In a column on the Fenger tragedy published in the Chicago Sun-Times (October 2, 2009) former CTU president Deborah Lynch wrote,

“School turnarounds have turned out to be the deadliest reform of all. How could anyone expect that completely eliminating all the professionals and staff of a tough high-poverty high school could be a good thing?”

NY Mag: Klein should be well-prepared for fixing Murdoch scandal

He took a position with News Corp. after stepping down from his education post in December, and now it looks as if he's got his first big project on behalf of Rupert Murdoch: Klein, a lawyer by training, will "provide important oversight and guidance” as the company deals with the fallout from the ballooning News of the World scandal. (Among other things, the tabloid reportedly hacked into the cell phones of a murdered 13-year-old and families of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.) -- New York Magazine

How Stand For Children, Jonah Adelman, Jo Anderson, others with millions in corp backing, took IL unions for a ride.

Stand for Children's Jonah Adelman (right).

Fred Klonsky says, "It’s too bad there is not a transcript of the Aspen video of Stand For Children’s Jonah Edelman’s presentation. It could be studied in every Local and Region in the IEA."

He says their ability to raise $3 million dollars from the Chicago corporate community allowed them to “jam it down their throats.” When they met in the lame duck session following their electoral victories, Edelman says that the IEA and the IFT were willing to discuss all the issues they would not discuss just six months earlier. In fact, he says they “gave away” in the first minutes of negotiation what it took the entire struggle in Colorado to accomplish, where they eventually destroyed collective bargaining. Edelman says the cave-in was led by the IEA. “It has a history of pragmatism,” he says. -- Fred Klonsky's blog

Go to the 22 minute mark on the video where he describes, in glowing terms, former IEA Executive Director Jo Anderson, Jo’s son who runs Chicago’s Teach for America and Audrey Soglin.

* Since this was posted, the video was pulled from the Aspen website. Here is the transcribed version, thanks to Parents Across America. 

Just what the Gates Foundation needs, another $1.5 billion from Buffett

Warren Buffett made his annual gift of Berkshire Hathaway stock to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, turning over about $1.5 billion worth of stock. The gift is the fifth installment in Buffett's plan to transfer the majority of his wealth to the Seattle-based foundation run by the Microsoft Corp. co-founder and his wife. The foundation is the world's largest with an endowment of $37.1 billion.-- Monitor

Murdoch's new fixer, Joel Klein

Reforming the "reformers"

Murdoch

Klein

Johnny-come-lately school  reform profiteer Rupert Murdoch has to deal with yet another scandal. It seems his people have been doing some phone hacking, bribing and spying on police on behalf of some murder suspects -- or something like that. Who the hell can understand this latest Murdoch mess?

So who does he call on to bail his News Corp conglomerate out of trouble? None other that fixer Joel Klein, former N.Y. schools chancellor. It was Klein who recently engineered the $27 million-dollar deal between News Corp and the N.Y. public schools. Now Klein, the former federal lawyer who helped make the Microsoft anti-trust suit go away for Bill Gates, will have to do the same for Murdoch and his News of the World chief, Rebekah Brooks.

Now Joel I. Klein, who left his post as the city’s schools chancellor in  December, has been given a task by one of the world’s most powerful media moguls: helping to oversee one of the seamier media scandals in recent memory...In a brief telephone interview on Wednesday, Mr. Klein said he was “not in charge” of handling the investigation, but he declined to elaborate on the specifics of his role. “It’s just what it said in our release today: I’m providing counsel and advice to the company,” he said. -- NYT

The Grand Coalition Against Teachers

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

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

Ownership Society News

The death of the Dodgers by corporate greed

McCourt & commissioner,  Bud Selig

Dave Zirin, writing in The Nation asks, "What does the L.A. Dodgers bankruptcy say about America?"

The Dodgers are arguably the most culturally significant franchise in the history of American Sports. It’s the team of Jackie Robinson, Sandy Koufax, Fernando Valenzuela, and Hideo Nomo. That’s more than just a tradition. That’s a Ken Burns epic From their days in Brooklyn, the Dodgers were the franchise of the immigrants, the strivers, the ones who thought the American Dream was there for those willing to scratch and bleed for it....

 ...As Harold Meyerson wrote in the Washington Post, the Dodgers now represent “a particularly vicious form of capitalism that America has come to know too well the past few decades: a new owner takes over a venerable firm and extracts what he can for himself, decimating the company and damaging the community in the process”...

...As Meyerson wrote, “I’ve long believed that kids who grew up listening to Scully got at least a 30-point bump on their verbal SAT.” Now Scully is just another person the Dodgers went to court so they wouldn’t have to pay. Now he’s just another senior citizen wondering how a California dream could become so scarred. What does the Dodgers bankruptcy say about America? Everything.

Walton money continues to flow into corporate ed reform

BENTONVILLE, Ark., June 28, 2011 -- Today the Walton Family Foundation announced investments totaling more than $157 million in education reform initiatives for 2010 – a $23 million increase over 2009, in which education reform grants totaled $134 million... Having invested more than $1 billion in education reform, the Walton Family Foundation is the largest donor to initiatives that support parental choice and competition within education. -- PR Newswire

Walton money  focuses on seven regions throughout the nation that serve high concentrations of low-income families. They include Albany, Denver, East and South Los Angeles, Milwaukee, New Orleans, Newark and Washington, D.C. The foundation started investing in New Orleans schools following Hurricane Katrina, beginning in 2006 – helping create a school system where 70 % of public school students currently attend privately managed charter schools.

In D.C., the Walton Foundation was one of Michelle Rhee's largest patrons while she was chancellor. They threatened to pull out their "investment" from D.C. when Rhee was fired. But the district continues to be the biggest target of the Walton's to a tune of about $16 million/year.

Other "strategic" Walton investments include:

• Teach For America                                      $16,652,436
• Charter School Growth Fund                       $12,533,526
• DC Public Education Fund                           $10,000,000
• KIPP Foundation                                            $8,650,000
• California Charter Schools Assoc.                 $3,940,652

Corp. sponsorship of charter schools in exchange for student slots, board seats

BATON ROUGE -- Over the objections of some public school advocates, the Louisiana Senate voted 22-16 Monday to allow corporations to sponsor charter schools in exchange for controlling up to half of the enrollment slots and half of the governing board seats. House Bill 421 by Rep. Steve Carter, R-Baton Rouge, must return to the House, where the lower chamber is expected to approve only minor changes and send the bill on to Gov. Bobby Jindal, who announced his support for the measure in January. The House approved the bill 72-23 earlier in the session.

The bill continues a recent trend of the Legislature embracing policies that redirect tax dollars away from traditional public schools to charter programs, private school tuition scholarships and tax breaks for families that pay private school tuition. A separate bill this session, which now awaits Jindal's signature, would allow a household to deduct from their taxable income up to $5,000 in private school tuition and expenses per child. -- Times-Picayune

Ohio Gov. Kasich -- 'Thanks Koch Bros."

In an "unlisted video" which Gov. Kasich recorded using state resources, he tells the Koch Industries astroturf group Americans For Prosperity: 

"... in the four months that I've been Governor, we've accomplished a lot in Ohio... in all of these efforts the strong support of Americans for Prosperity has made a really big difference. ...it's so important that Ohio's fighters for freedom, the grassroots leaders of Americans for Prosperity, continue to lend their support to the effort to get Ohio back on track." -- ProgressOhio.org

Growing share of income for the rich

Inequality in the U.S. has has grown steadily since the 1970s, following a flat period after World War II. In 2008, the wealthiest 10 percent earned almost the same amount of income as the rest of the country combined.

INCOME LEVEL		NUMBER OF PEOPLE	AVERAGE INCOME	OVERALL CHANGE 1970-2008
Top 0.1%		152,000	$5.6 million	+385%
Top 0.1-0.5%		610,000	$878,139	+141%
Top 0.5-1%		762,000	$443,102	+90%
Top 1-5%		6.0 million	$211,476	+59%
Top 5-10%		7.6 million	$127,184	+38%
Bottom 90%		137.2 million	$31,244	-1%

*Based on the salary, bonuses and stock options of the three highest-paid officers in the largest 50 firms. ** Calculated from Bureau of Economic Analysis data. NOTE: All figures have been adjusted for inflation.

SOURCES: The World Top Incomes Database and reports by Jon Bakija, Williams College; Adam Cole, U.S. Department of Treasury; Bradley T. Heim, Indiana University; Carola Frydman, MIT Sloan School of Management and NBER; Raven E. Molloy, Federal Reserve Board of Governors; Thomas Piketty, Ehess, Paris; Emmanuel Saez, UC Berkeley and NBER. GRAPHIC: Alicia Parlapiano - The Washington Post. Published June 18, 2011.

Say it ain't so, Arne

DOE Officials Accused Of Leaking Info To Short-Sellers

Marcus Barum blogs on  Huffington Post:

Did Education Department officials leak market-sensitive info to stock traders?" That's the provocative headline from Project on Government Oversight reporting on a probe by the agency's inspector general into controversial claims that may implicate Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

The Daily Caller reports:

Oklahoma Republican Sen. Tom Coburn blasted the Education Department Wednesday for what he called “very significant inappropriate behavior in tipping hedge funds on short selling private education” and called on a key Senate panel to investigate the matter. Coburn was referring to documents released last week by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a watchdog group that has called for federal authorities to investigate market manipulation by famous Wall Street short-seller Steven Eisman.

The Hill reports:

One email exchange shows a DOE employee informing a short seller of the expected date the rules would be proposed, a piece of information that then appeared in a Morgan Stanley investment report one week later.Wait! Morgan Stanley? Isn't that Bill Daley's company?

A much better way for Gates fund to spend his billions.

(Reuters) - Britain and billionaire Bill Gates pledged $2.3 billion at an international donor conference on Monday to fund vaccination programs to protect children in poor countries against diseases like diarrhea and pneumonia. -- Guardian

It's actually hard to imagine that the Gates Foundation invests 10X more than this each year in environmentally polluting profit-making ventures that often cause the health problems that the vaccines are meant to prevent.

Joel Klein hails the new order

The Broadie roster

Not so long ago, people pointed to Michelle Rhee in the District and me in New York as the major “reform superintendents.” When we left those positions in the past year, some asked whether it was the “end of an era” and questioned the future of education reform. What a difference a few months can make! -- WaPo, "School Reform's New Generation"

Is this the new face of corporate school reform?

From May 31, 2011 Business Insider:

At the end of 2010, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp paid almost $400m in cash to purchase 90% of Wireless Generation, a company that bills itself as "the leading provider of innovative education software, data systems, and assessment tools for reading, writing and math,"

On Tuesday, News Corp announced "The Future of American Education: A Presidential Primary Forum." The joint effort with the College Board will pit "all Republican primary candidates who meet a threshold level of support in national polls" against each other.

The Wall Street Journal's Paul Gigot and Joel I. Klein, former  Chancellor of the New York City Department of Education and current CEO of News Corp's education division will moderate the panel.

"Reformer" Klein is a hustler supreme

He helps land Rupert Murdoch a $27 million no-bid contract from NY schools

The money - part of the state's $700 million in Race to the Top winnings - will go to Wireless Generation, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., to develop software to track student test scores, among other things. Wireless Generation helped build a similar system in the city called Achievement Reporting and Innovation Systems, or ARIS, that has been widely criticized in the city. The contract would expand the ARIS system statewide.

In a request sent to the state controller's office in May to sign off on a no-bid process, officials cited the tight timeline for beginning the Race to the Top project and the company's record at producing results. -- Daily News

hy did the state argue for this contract? On the basis of Wireless’ record in developing ARIS, NYC’s much criticized $80 million data system. Recently, Lindsey Christ of NY1 in an award-winning three-part series pointed out the glaring deficiencies of ARIS and the far superior data system developed by NYC teachers for relative pennies. Last fall, Gotham Schools did a similar expose; we featured critical observations from a teacher about the inadequacies of the system back in 2008.  The hi-tech community recognized it a huge boondoggle and a “super mugging” when the no-bid contract was first announced in 2007. -- NYC Public School Parent

Supreme hustler Klein, who could rake in as much as $4.5 million this year at his new gig with News Corp., also will collect $34,000 annually for life after serving 8 years as chancellor. This after slamming teacher pensions as "hollowing out public education."

Higher [Hedge)ucation

Harvard and other major American universities are working through British hedge funds and European financial speculators to buy or lease vast areas of African farmland in deals, some of which may force many thousands of people off their land, according to a new study.

The company that manages Harvard's investment funds declined to comment.

"It is Harvard management company policy not to discuss investments or investment strategy and therefore I cannot confirm the report," said a spokesman. Vanderbilt also declined to comment. -- Guardian

Has America in 2011 become 200 AD Rome?

Dust-bowl refugees walk towards Los Angeles during the Great Depression. House prices have now fallen further than in the 1930s. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

British Guardian Economics Editor, Larry Elliott ponders whether America in 2011 is Rome in 200AD or Britain on the eve of the first world war: an empire at the zenith of its power but with cracks beginning to show.

The experience of both Rome and Britain suggests that it is hard to stop the rot once it has set in, so here are the a few of the warning signs of trouble ahead: military overstretch, a widening gulf between rich and poor, a hollowed-out economy, citizens using debt to live beyond their means, and once-effective policies no longer working. -- "Decline and fall of the American empire"

Gov. Walker's war on public ed

John Nichols, writing in The Nation, describes the massive resistance movement growing in opposition to Wisconsin Gov. Walker's assault on collective bargaining rights and on public education.

Yet Walker refuses to compromise. So beholden is he to political paymasters such as the Koch brothers and the De Vos family, which has steered millions of dollars into the state to promote his extreme proposals to replace on of the nation’s strongest public education systems with voucher programs and privatization schemes, that the governor continues to pressure his legislative allies to enact a biennial budget that slashes spending for education and local services.