Chicago school closings run on 'family values'

Catherine O'Connor Sugrue (Left) at CPS Board
meeting.  (Substance photo by George N. Schmidt.)

Catherine Sugrue, sister of Rahm's City Council floor leader, Patrick O'Connor, holds the newly created title of CPS director of school transition, reporting to Tom Tyrell, the retired Marine charged with safeguarding 30,000 displaced students. You follow?

According to the Sun-Times:

O’Connor noted that Sugrue is a former teacher who spent 17 years climbing the ladder at CPS before resigning three years ago to become an education consultant — first with Edison Learning, then with Innovative Consultants International. In a previous CPS job overseeing charters that she was at the center of a controversy surrounding allegations of grade-changing and strip-searching of students at Aspira Charter.

Perfect!

The city that works

Rauner

Back in the early '70s, Chicago earned the nickname, the city that works. Then, like now, the phrase always required the addendum, works for whom? The same question might also be asked about the city's public schools. Under mayoral control, Chicago has been reconstructing a two-tier system of public schools: selective enrollment schools for top scoring students and those with well-connected parents, and under-resourced neighborhood schools for the majority.

Today that notion was reinforced by the news that billionaire union hater, corporate school reformer and Rahm Emanuel's patron, Bruce Rauner, used his political clout to wrangle a seat for his own kid at Walter Payton College Prep High School. Payton is ostensibly at public school, even though a third of its entering freshman students come from private schools. 98 % of its graduates go on to college and only 200 of 7,000 applicants gain admission by testing highest on standardized tests. But if you're Bruce Rauner's kid, forget about test scores. She couldn't pass them and her grades weren't good enough to get in to Payton.

WHITE AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

Rauner, who actually lives in the wealthy suburb of Winnetka, used a phony Chicago address and a phone call to then schools CEO Arne Duncan to get his daughter accepted through the back door, taking a spot away from a likely needier kid who earned it. As you might expect, Duncan was only to glad to comply to this version of rich, white affirmative action.

According to Greg Hinz at Crain's, Rauner saw no irony in sending his daughter to a high school with union teachers. Writes Hinz:

 "The likely GOP gubernatorial candidate, whose biggest public claim to fame has been a crusade to reform education by sharply limiting the power of teachers' unions, which in his view are just a nasty special interest."

Rauner also bought himself one of the Noble St. Charter Schools and had it named after him. But he never consider sending a child of his own there.

Rahm campaign donors, Chicago Hotel developers also bullish on charter schools

Here's a funny quote from the mayor of Chicago

"Government can no longer be an insider's game, serving primarily the lobbyists and well-connected." -- Rahm Emanuel

Chicago Tribune

Here's another funny one from his spokesperson:

"The mayor has instituted the highest ethical and transparency standards and does not accept contributions from entities that do business with the city," Emanuel communications director Sarah Hamilton wrote in an email response to the Tribune. "Nearly every Chicagoan does business in the city, and the mayor is happy to have their support."

Wilson, Rahm & Tisch

It's worth noting here that some of Rahm's biggest campaign donors, like the above-mentioned Donald Wilson of DRW Trading, also underwrite Chicago charter schools. Wilson has personally donated $30,000 since 2011 to Emanuel's other political fund, the Chicago Committee, including $10,000 in January.

Crain's Shia Kapos reports that hotel developer Wilson's foundation has already invested $2 million and long-term support into a new charter school, DRW Trading College Prep in North Lawndale, part of the Noble Network. The high school, which opened in August, falls under an umbrella network backed by millionaire Bruce Rauner. Wilson's sister also sits on Noble's board.

Writes Kapos:

Will Mr. Wilson be helping teach classes related to financial literacy? He chuckles at the suggestion but doesn't rule it out. After all, contemporaries such as former Exelon Corp. CEO John Rowe are familiar faces in charter schools. Mr. Rowe, a history buff, often lectures at Rowe-Clark Math and Science Academy.

D.C. school rheeform: Another privatizer bellies up to the trough

D.C. Councilman David Catania, who's the head of the Council's new newly constituted Education Committee, wants to take Michelle Rhee's failed corporate-reform plan to the next level. He's handing out a big contract to Hogan Lovells, an international firm with "wide areas of practice in government and industry, including K-12 and higher education," to re-design the city's school reform plan. The firm's lawyers will supposedly "research school policies that have succeeded around the country, help determine what might work in the District and translate that into legislative language."

Hogan Lovells is one of the world’s largest law firms with $1.8 billion in revenue and 2,500 lawyers in 40 offices, including the US, Abu Dhabi, China, Vietnam, and Caracas. They are big in defense contracting, real estate, and aerospace. They used to operate in Chicago but shut down this city's operation in 2010 because of  "conflicts and deteriorating performance." Just this past month, they were hit with a huge malpractice suit by former clients, claiming HL gave bad advice following a failed development venture that led to a $36 million jury verdict against them.

Last year, HL put together a  research report called, "Evolution: Profiting from Uncertainty." That ought to tell you something about where this is headed.

Catania admits that the elected City Council members essentially know nothing about education and therefore need to contract out school reform planning to HL lawyers. Buckle up, D.C.

He might have considered asking educators.  I mean, they know a little about education.

School Reform Mississippi-style

 Arkansas 1958 (Atlantic Monthly)

Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant has signed a charter school expansion bill into law continues the state's long tradition of two-tier schooling and racial segregation.

The new law is one that expands the authority to create charter schools -- public schools run by private groups that are freed up from government regulation. Charters in states like Mississippi and Alabama are the latest version of the "segregation academies" which allowed whites an escape from school deseg agreements after the Brown decision. For more than four decades after they were established, "segregation academies" in Mississippi towns like Indianola continue to define nearly every aspect of community life.

The Clarion-Ledger reports that at least 50 Mississippi school districts have student populations that are more than 75 percent black, according to an analysis of state Department of Education data. The majority of those districts’ student populations are more than 90 percent black. Justice Dept. investigations recently found the state operating schools that retain their "racial identity from the Jim Crow era,” 

Other measures signed by Bryant  include a pilot plan in four districts to partially pay teachers based on teaching evaluations and student test scores.

Also see:
Segregated Charter Schools Evoke Separate But Equal Era in U.S. (Bloomberg News)
Charter Schools and the New Segregation (Diane Ravitch Blog)
In North Carolina, school resegregation by charter? (Inst. for Southern Studies)

Making college accessible only to the rich

Despite all the talk about college readiness and 21st-century jobs, a college education is becoming inaccessible to all but the children of the rich or to those able to take on a burden of life-long debt. Like the indentured servants of old, today's poor or working-class students will graduate with dimming prospects for working in the field for which they are trained and will be working as much for the bankers as for their employer or themselves.

Yesterday's New York Times reports that on July 1st, the interest rate on many student loans is scheduled to double to 6.8 percent from 3.4 percent — just as it was last year, when in the midst of an election campaign, Congress voted to extend the lower rate.  Today, student advocacy groups released an issue brief charging that the federal government should not be profiting from student loans, while more and more students bear a crushing debt burden.

DFER's 'Education Warrior' Sen. Smith, busted trying to rig N.Y. mayor's race

Smith, in a conversation with a federal informant, expressed his feelings on the illegal payoffs. “Business is business.” 

Hedge-fund school reformers at DFER's held up State Sen. Malcolm Smith, as their all-time school privatization hero. They describe Smith here as "a proud supporter of public charter schools long before it became popular to do so within the Democratic Party." Smith was even honored with DFER's 2007 Education Warrior Award .

Oops! This from today's Daily News:

Democratic state Sen. Malcolm Smith was busted Tuesday with City Councilman Dan Halloran in a plot to pay cash for a spot on the GOP mayoral ballot — and a better shot at City Hall. FBI agents arrested four other suspects, including Bronx Republican Chairman Jay Savino and Queens GOP vice chairman Vincent Tabone, after the alleged corruption was exposed by federal officials. The two party leaders allegedly accepted bribes in exchange for helping Smith pursue his never-realized run for City Hall.

 My advice to the feds. Talk to hedge-funder Whitney Tilson.  

Walton paying for CPS propaganda campaign on school closings

Federico Waitoller and Stephanie Farmer from CReATE, present  research on school closings at today's City Hall press conference. But can education research counter the Walton-funded propaganda campaign? (Mike Klonsky photo)

The Walton Fund, philanthropic arm of the mega-billionaire Walton family (Wal-Mart), has given CPS nearly half-a-million dollars to underwrite Rahm's pro-school-closing propaganda campaign. The $478,000 grant went to setting up the  Profits Children First Foundation, an organization created by CPS which a spokesperson confirmed was to help facilitate the “community engagement process” over the school closings.

Walton dollars were also used to set up this website with a video showing a concerned CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett bemoaning the fact that her school district is not providing "all children" with a "high quality, 21st Century education." Thousands more were spent on website ads and ads on public transportation.

CPS spokesman Dave Miranda said the spots are "educational" and "not an ad campaign," and the primary goal is to spread awareness about community meetings scheduled to discuss each closure. Rahm has basically said that none of those community meetings will have any bearing on his decision to go ahead with the largest public school closing plan in this nation's history.

The CTU calls the campaign pure "propaganda." Jackson Potter, a CTU spokesperson told DNAInfo, “It's clearly a method they're using to try and sell a highly unpopular program that will have tremendous, disruptive consequences for the most vulnerable communities in our city.”

Rhee's millions

Michelle Rhee's anti-union group Students First is bankrolled mainly by a collection of corporate billionaires and power philanthropists. The group is not required by law to disclose its donors or what they give. She refused last week, to give L.A. Times reporters, Michael Mishak and Howard Blume, a list. But she names several in her new memoir, "Radical."

She uses their money to send out lobbyists to dozens of states to push anti-union and anti-teacher legislation with a staff of more than 120 based in her Sacramento offices.

"There is a really talented field of advocates, but it is … underpowered," said Ed Kirby, deputy director of the Walton Family Foundation, which has reported giving StudentsFirst at least $3 million. "The fact that StudentsFirst has joined the fight — that's a big deal." -- L.A. Times

Her wealthy patrons include the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, funded by John Arnold, an Enron oil exec who didn't go to jail, and hedge fund billionaire, who has pushed to rein in public pensions across the country. One of his former colleagues dubbed him "the king of natural gas." Mega-billionaire, Eli Broad, the Los Angeles arts and education philanthropist and a Democrat, is another supporter.

StudentsFirst spent nearly $2 million in last year's general election to support 105 candidates across the country. The vast majority, mostly Republicans, won their races.

Is Rhee really a 'public school parent'?

On March 29th, reporter Mishak had to make a correction to his and Blume's March 26th Times story. In the earlier piece they wrote:

The 43-year-old Rhee, whose children attend public school in Tennessee, where her ex-husband [Tennessee Education Commissioner Kevin Huffman] lives, is guided by the free-market principles that characterized her tumultuous three-year tenure in Washington.

Harpeth Hall has a student/teacher ration of 9:1

Rhee continues to describe herself as a "public school parent."

But when AFTers dug  a little (like Mishak and Blume should have done) they found that Rhee was  lying, not telling the whole truth. Rhee’s older daughter goes to Harpeth Hall, Nashville’s fanciest girls school. But when Times reporters then asked her directly, she suddenly became shy about discussing where her children attend school "out of respect for their privacy,”

Writes Mishak:

Instead, after multiple emails and phone calls from Times reporters, she issued a statement apologizing for “misleading” the newspaper with her initial response. “It was not our intention to be misleading. It is our policy not to discuss where Michelle's children attend school out of respect for their privacy,” the statement says. “While it is true Michelle is a public school parent, we understand how that statement was misleading, and we apologize to the Los Angeles Times.”

Atlanta's testing scandal

I highly recommend these two excellent articles on Atlanta's testing scandal: Atlanta test cheating: Tip of the iceberg? by Valerie Strauss in the Washington Post and Ex-Schools Chief in Atlanta Is Indicted in Testing Scandal by Michael Winerip in the New York Times. Both emphasize the connection between the widespread testing scandals and current policies and practices associated with corporate-style school reform,  No Child Left Behind and Race To The Top.

Writes Strauss:

In New York City, for example, Joel Klein became chancellor of the largest public school system in the country in 2002 and proceeded to institute a no-excuses mentality, attacking teachers unions, closing public schools and pushing the expansion of charter school. He touted a rise in standardized test scores, until, that is, it became clear that the test score improvements were phony. In 2010, state officials revealed that scores had been inflated, and thousands of parents who thought their children were performing on grade level learned that they weren’t. Klein quickly left his job and went to work for Rupert Murdoch.

Writes Winerip:

What made Dr. Hall just about untouchable was her strong ties to local business leaders. Atlanta prides itself in being a progressive Southern city when it comes to education, entrepreneurship and race — and Dr. Hall’s rising test scores were good news on all those fronts. She is an African-American woman who had turned around a mainly poor African-American school district, which would make Atlanta an even more desirable destination for businesses.

Editorial: 'Stop the giveaway to charter schools'

I'm re-posting this editorial from today's Tampa Bay Times in full because it's spot on.

Once again legislators are looking for ways to undermine Florida's public school system by giving more taxpayer dollars and freebies to charter schools, including those run by for-profit management companies. At a time when school district budgets remain squeezed for cash, two House bills would give charter schools more opportunities while undercutting traditional public schools where most Florida students attend. Public schools are bought with public money, and they should not be given away to schools operated by private interests.

The bills would turn on its head the notion of charters as alternative schools with considerable autonomy in exchange for less district support. Instead of being outside the system, charter schools would gain favored status yet still lack taxpayer accountability. One bill, HB 7009, would require districts to give unused school space to charters for free, or only for maintenance costs. And HB 1267 would guarantee that charters receive about $1,200 per elementary student — and more for high school students — for construction and maintenance from general revenue dollars when the Legislature has now failed for two years to invest construction and renovation dollars for public schools.

The Legislature should end its fixation with charter schools as the answer to all that ails Florida's school performance. Some charter schools are successful, but many aren't. Stanley D. Smith, a professor of finance at the University of Central Florida, has done an analysis, controlling for poverty and minority characteristics of elementary schools, that shows "we should question the state's increasing emphasis on charter schools because as a group they underperform traditional public schools." He also studied high school test scores and, using the same methodology, found that charters and traditional schools performed the same.

If a charter wants to use an old public school property, it should do what is happening in Pinellas County. University Preparatory Academy, a charter school, is negotiating with the Pinellas School Board to buy the former home of Southside Fundamental Middle School in St. Petersburg's Midtown neighborhood. If the two parties work out a deal based on fair market values, both sides win.

The Senate still has time to get this right. Education Committee Chairman John Legg, R-Lutz, should understand the conflict better than most lawmakers when it comes to the difference between public schools heavily regulated by the Legislature and charters. He is the co-founder and business administrator of Dayspring Academy, a 12-year-old nonprofit charter in Port Richey. As a legislator, he has a responsibility to ensure that public schools are adequately financed. An open spigot to less-regulated charters — when public schools have been shortchanged — is not in his constituents' interests.

Gov. Rick Scott, with his newfound interest for public education and teachers, should tell legislative leaders that traditional public schools must come first and that charter schools, while they are here to stay, should not be getting guaranteed tax dollars every year to build and maintain schools that are run by people who don't answer directly to the voters.

Murdoch wants FCC to change rules so he can grab L.A. Times

Rupert Murdoch's criminal media empire could expand even more wildly in the U.S. if he's able to get the F.C.C. to get rid of some of its basic regulations. Murdoch's NewsCorp company is stepping up lobbying efforts revise a media ownership rule that would prevent the company from acquiring The L.A.Times and other newspapers in markets in which it already owns television stations.

British billionaire Murdoch is also moving to get billions in U.S. public school district contracts for his Amplify Corp., contracts which would give him access to records and data pertaining to every student and their family in the district. This while he and his media companies are still being investigated for criminal use of wire taps and use of public records.

Craig Aaron, president and chief executive of Free Press, an advocacy group that supports diverse media ownership is quoted in Sunday's New York Times:

“We’re talking about Murdoch owning more newspapers in a year when people are still being arrested at the News of the World." 

Wall St. is bullish on school closings

Moody's in no mood for public schools. 

Philly.com reports that Wall St. likes the mass closing of public schools.

The Philadelphia School District's plan to shut almost 1/10 of the district's 250 schools, as competing, taxpayer-funded charter schools draw off one-third of the district's student body and Gov. Corbett cuts state aid, is "positive from a credit perspective" because it shows school officials "are intent on reducing expenditures" even if it makes them "unpopular," writes Moody's analyst.

There's no mention of the Dept of Justice's pending actions against Moody's for defrauding investors.

Pritzker leaving Chicago. Who's complaining?

What we miss or lose out on on a local level we more than gain because of her involvement on a national level,” says Marty Nesbitt, who co-founded the Parking Spot airport parking management company with Ms. Pritzker. -- Crain's

Pritzker (Bloomberg pic)

It seems Obama is about to appoint Hyatt's union-bashing billionaire, Penny Pritzker, as his next Commerce Secretary. It's clearly a patronage appointment, the usual payback to Chicago corporate and political leadership for their support in last year's election. Pritzker was Obama's chief fund raiser. That's also the obvious reason why Pritzker was appointed by the mayor to sit on the school board. It's not like she had any other qualifications. Last week she left her position on the  board in preparation for her departure to D.C.

While some are jumping for joy and shouting "good riddance" -- Chicago teachers and Hyatt Regency Hotel workers to name but a few -- others who have benefited more directly from Pritzker patronage are crying the blues.

John Canning Jr., founder and chairman of Madison Dearborn Partners, agrees. If she was unable to give because of a conflict of interest, “we'd certainly miss that,” he says. “She's been extremely generous to a lot of causes. That's important.”

But more realistic Chicago corporate types know that they will ultimately profit on the Pritzker appointment.

Pritzker, now ranked 255th on the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans, was reportedly in the hunt for that job in 2008. But she withdrew her name apparently because of toxic subprime loans involving a failed bank partially owned by her family. There were also concerns that her $1.8 billion net worth included offshore accounts.Aside from Hyatt,

Pritzker is also the co-founder of PSP Capital Partners LLC and Pritzker Realty Group in Chicago and Artemis Real Estate Partners LLC in Chevy Chase, Md., just outside the capital.

It's unclear if the export of school privatization companies and charter operators to other countries, will be included in her Commerce Dept. portfolio.

Charters grease corporate contracts

Rupert Murdoch (AP photo)

Writing in Salon.com, David Sirota warns us to stop pretending wealthy CEOs pushing for charter schools are altruistic "reformers." They're raking in billions.

 Citing a fact sheet from the for-profit education industry itself, the Washington Post recently reported that “the education sector now represents nearly 9 percent of the country’s gross domestic product” while the “for-profit education is valued at $1.3 trillion, and is one of the largest U.S. investment markets.” Likewise, NPR reports that as he’s launched an education technology division, Rupert Murdoch “has described education as a market worth hundreds of billions of dollars.” This is why the tech site Geekwire predicts another full-scale tech industry bubble, thanks to “K-12 and other education segments now being chased by a mob of investment capitalists.”

According to Sirota, contracts are much easier to land in privately run charter schools because such schools are often uninhibited by public schools’ procurement rules and standards requiring a demonstrable educational need for technology. That reality, no doubt, is part of why charter schools often spend so much more on “administration” and “business services” than do their public school counterparts.

Remember when Crown and Edelman told us how they did it?

It was back in 2011 when Jonah Edelman and Stand For Children, backed by billionaires like Crown, Pritzker, Griffin, and Rauner, took IL politicians and union leaders for a ride.

My colleague asks some good questions

My colleague at DePaul, Ken Saltman, is quoted in this AP Wire story by Kathy Matheson, "Complaint Targets Philanthropy in Public Education." 

"Is it fair for a small number of really rich people to take over educational policy-making?" said Kenneth Saltman, an education professor at DePaul University in Chicago. "Who are the lobbyists really working for? Who's funding them?"

Good questions all.

Behind the Chicago's school closings: Rahm's gentrification

Greg Hinz at Crain's unintentionally gives us some clues about the real reasons for Rahm's mass closures of neighborhood schools and their replacement with privately-run charters and selective-enrollment schools. It has much more to do with reshaping the city's demography, pushing out the poor and people of color from the inner city and replacing them with a new class of young, tech and finance professionals.

Writes Hinz:

 Take, for instance, the paradox that the city has grown wealthier even as it has lost hundreds of thousands of working-class residents, most of them minorities. 

As Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago economist Bill Testa put it, it's good that minorities finally can make it anywhere, including the 'burbs. Everyone should have choices. At the same time, it's undeniable that one reason working-class people are fleeing the city is that the influx of wealthier newcomers is driving up prices.

To some extent, that's classic gentrification because, when those with money fight for space against those without, the money folks almost always win. Forcing lower-income folks out to inner-ring suburbs via pricing pressures can be a real disservice, if only because the suburbs are much less equipped than the city with public transit to get people to work.

Of course, Chicago's gentrification didn't begin with Rahm. It goes as far back as the 1950s and old man Daley's regime. The demolition of Chicago's public housing in the 80's and 90's and the forced migration of thousands of black families out of the west and south sides, out to inner-ring suburbs, began under Richie Daley. The city now has only five census tracts of majority high-income earners, but vast swaths of majority low-income households.

Chicago now has only 5 census tracts of majority high-income earners, but vast swaths of mostly low-income households.  (Chicago Magazine)

Daley together with the Civic Committee and then schools CEO Arne Duncan, also cooked up the Renaissance 2010 school debacle and the unbridled expansion of privately-run charters and new selective enrollment high schools at the expense of neighborhood schools.

Renaissance 2010 was a dismal failure in terms of improving Chicago's public schools if that was ever its real intent. It was quietly junked and replaced with the current strategy of mass school closings in mainly black and Latino communities under the banner of under-utilization.

The Sun-Times confirmed today that 90% of the students impacted by CPS school closings are African-American.

Of those 129 schools located mostly on the South and West sides, 117 are majority black. And 119 of them have a percentage of black students higher than thedistrict average. At the 129 schools on CPS CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett’s list of schools that could be closed this year, 88 percent of the students are black. Schools with at least 90 percent black students account for 103 of the 129. Just nine are majority Hispanic.

Byrd-Bennett insists that "race is not a factor" in the process to close schools in an effort to “right size” the district. Rather, she says, the population decline has led to “under utilization.” But it's not hard to see how the destabilizing of neighborhoods through gentrification and the accompanying concentration of wealth and resources in the downtown and South Loop area of the city, has pushed low-income families out of their former communities leading to this population decline.

Many other targeted schools aren't under-utilized at all but are in cusp neighborhoods targeted for gentrification. CPS has also artificially intensified the crisis by redefining under-utilization to mean classrooms with fewer than 30 students and overstating the numbers of lost school enrollment.

All part of the plan.

The Language of the Ownership Society

I'm always taken by the language of the Ownership Society. I'm dazzled by how it's used and misused to obfuscate and mystify. For example, I love the word sequestration. For one thing, as a blogger, I've gone about as far as I can go with the fiscal cliff, as in: "We're not afraid of the fiscal cliff. Many of us are already over it."  I even had the term banned as own of my New Year's resolutions. You've never heard it since then. Have you?

Of course, sequestration is nothing new. The working poor and the rapidly disintegrating middle class have been the targets of sequestration for the past three decades or more. 

You could say it began with the dismantling of the labor unions during the Reagan years. Or maybe in the '90s with Clinton's so-called "welfare reform." Sequestration  currently takes the form of  foreclosures, the cutting of real earnings relative to productivity, pensions, and medical care for the sick and elderly, reduced access to education, and other so-called "entitlements." In general we've nearly all been sequestered to one degree or another, through the greatest redistribution ever of public wealth from the bottom to the top in response to the de-industrialization of America.

But now I'm all into sequestering those who deserve to be sequestered. Here in Chicago for example, I'd like Katten Muchin Rosenman, the law firm that swung the parking meter deal, to be sequestered. I was cursing at them just the other night after walking half-way up a long Lincoln Avenue  block in below-freezing weather. Late for a meeting. My numb fingers fumbling for 8 quarters. Dropping one in the snow. Damn, now trying to work a credit card into the slot and then finding out the buttons weren't working. Then having to walk on the icy sidewalk half a block back to the car and then a block back again to my destination. What is this but another form of sequestration?

Meanwhile, Richie Daley lands a cushy job with the law firm. I say, sequester their asses.

Actually, sequester his whole damn family. And while we're at it, how about a sequester for Rahm, too? Remember, he was the "new sheriff in town" who was going to play hardball with Chicago Parking Meters, LLC. He dropped that ball like a hot potato. Sequester him too.

Sun-Times wanted for aiding and abetting

Sequester Madigan

And then there's the Chicago Sun-Times editorial board. I had hopes for them recently after their reporters did such a great job exposing the whole UNO charter school scandal (and while you're at it, sequester UNO's Juan Rangel, and Boss Madigan, please). 

But today, the Sun-Times ran an editorial supporting the Nekritz pension-robbing bill (which has about as much chance of success as a man walking through hell with his underpants soaked in gasoline). The Nekritz bill not only takes away cost-of-living increases for the elderly; it raises the retirement age (work 'til you drop) and shifts the  cost of paying for teacher pensions from the state to already cash-starved local school districts.

The S-T editors even admit that the bill is unconstitutional. In their words, "We worry it may violate a clause in the state Constitution that protects pension benefits."  Damn right it does. 

Isn't it a crime to aid and abet a criminal who is knowingly engaged in an illegal act?Sequester them, please. 

Good Reads

In considering these dramatic shifts in wealth seizure and redistribution, two important articles caught my attention and are worth a read. The first was this review by the Reader's Sam Worley of Christine Walley's new book, Exit Zero: Family and Class in Postindustrial Chicago. The second was a story in Sunday's New York Times -- "Recovery in U.S. Lifting Profits, Not Adding Jobs" by Nelson Schwartz.

They both shed light on what this latest version sequestration is all about.

Cross posted with Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk blog. 

[Update: He's at it again] Gov. Snyder's privatization mess in Muskegon Hts.

Update: Snyder has declared a financial "State of Emergency" in Detroit. Whenever he does this, it give him the power to overthrow the elected government and appoint  a czar from the corporate world to run the city. 

What's left of Muskegon Heights Public Schools. 

Remember last year when Michigan's wing-nut Gov. Rick Snyder used his fascist powers to privatize the town and schools of Muskegon Heights?  First he replaced the elected city government with a hand-picked business czar, Don Weatherspoon. Then, Czar Weatherspoon decided to turn the entire public school system over to a for-profit charter management company.

Seven month later --- What a mess!

First Weatherspoon ordered the district to stop providing educational services at the end of the last school year and laid off most of its staff. Then he sold off all the surplus assets of the public school system from lockers to the flag polls and even text books.

When that didn't raise enough money Gov. Snyder stepped in with a $3.5 million “emergency” loan to help the pay off private companies like MESSA health insurance, Priority Health health insurance and Chartwells Food Service. The loan under the state’s Emergency Municipal Loan Act is the second one the district received. In August 2012, the state loaned the district $7.6 million. The school district also will use the $335,000 annual fee it receives for authorizing the Mosaica-run charter school system to pay off its debts.

Then they reopened as Mosaica and tried to staff the privately-operated schools with non-certified teachers and any principal they could dig up and get to stay for more than a few weeks. Then they spent millions on security cameras in each and every classroom to watch the teachers.

Last but not least came Mosaica's test-crazed approach to teaching, relying mainly on Scantron testing.

MLive reporter Lynn Moore writes:

Muskegon Heights High School has a new principal -- the third and some could argue fourth -- since the school was turned into a charter school at the beginning of this school year...The Muskegon Heights High School, as well as the middle school and two elementary schools, is now operated by Mosaica, a charter school management company. 

That's 4 principals (or should I say, "heads of school") since September.

Mosaica operates more than 90 schools across the country and in India. They have left a trail of mismanagement and corruption scandals in their wake since they ran into trouble for mismanaging a school near New Orleans. The Louisiana dispute led to arbitration. In the end, Mosaica was forced to pay $350,000 in damages. Then there was this cheating scandal in D.C. and that mess with the management of King High School in Philly.

The company already operates six Michigan charter schools, five of which fall below the 20th percentile on the state's ranking of schools. One school is at the 26th percentile.