|
|
9486 in the collection
The Selling of School Reform
Ohanian Comment:There's a lot of interest/outrage here, not the least of which is what passes for "Democrat" and "progressive." Along with "reform," these terms are so debased and corrupted that no one of conscience can identify with them any more.
My advice: Read The Nation article below and then come back and look at these hot links. Then read the article again.
Know them by their links. Education Reform Now, the outfit laundering money to Sharpton, links to the following outfits, describing them as a rich source of information, opinions and research findings on the wide range of issues and concerns involved in education reform:
The Center for Education Reform
Core Knowledge Foundation
School Choices (Andrew Coulson)
Education Reform Index: Arthur Hu Online
The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation
Heartland Institute
Pacific Research Institute
But all this is too obvious and pathetic. What is not so obvious is the way this author, who is an associate editor at American Prospect, home of the third way Democrats, posits the issues. There are plenty of us grassroot resisters who shun both camps of so-called democratic reformers. Certainly, teachers and children don't seem to be represented in the factions described below.
Clink on the links on Education Trust and Education Sector below and note who's funding what the writer refers to as "progressive free- market reform."
And take a look at the Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) board and list of advisors. NOTE: The identifications are from DFER. Hot links to articles on this site, which give a fuller view of what these justlers are up to, are provided.
The DFER Board
Alan Bersin - Member of California Board of Education, former California Secretary of Education, former San Diego Schools Superintendent, former U.S. Attorney for Southern California, member of Harvard University's Board of Overseers.
Kevin Chavous (chair) – Former Washington, DC, City Council member and chair of the Education Committee.
Tony Davis - Anchorage Capital, board chair for Achievement First East New York, in Brooklyn.
Charlie Ledley - Cornwall Capital, NYC, board member and treasurer of Harlem Village Academy and Leadership Village Academy Charter Schools.
Rafael Mayer - Co-founder and managing partner, Khronos LLC, board member for Planned Parenthood of NYC, KIPP AMP, and The Dalton School.
Sara Mead - New America Foundation, former analyst for Education Sector and the Progressive Policy Institute, Washington, D.C.
John Petry - Gotham Capital, co-founder of Harlem Success Academy Charter School, NYC.
Dianne Piche - Citizens Commission on Civil Rights, former national field coordinator for NARAL, part-time instructor of education law, policy and ethics at the University of Maryland - College Park graduate school of education.
Andrew Rotherham - Co-Founder and Publisher, Education Sector, former White House education advisor to President Clinton, author of the blog, Eduwonk.com. And served on the Broad Prize for Urban Education review board.
Whitney Tilson - T2 Partners and Tilson Funds, vice chairman of KIPP Academy Charter Schools in NYC, co-founder of the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City.
Caprice Young - President of the California Charter Schools Association, former president of the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education, and former assistant deputy mayor in Los Angeles.
The DFER Board of Advisors
William Ackman - Founder, Pershing Square Capital.
Steve Barr - Founder and CEO, Green Dot Public Schools.
Cory Booker - Mayor of Newark, N.J. Called a 'political hustler' by Black Commentator.
David Einhorn - Founder of Greenlight Capital, LLC.
Joel Greenblatt - Founder and Managing Partner of Gotham Capital.
Vincent Mai - Chairman of AEA Investors, LP.
Michael Novogratz - President of Fortress Investment Group.
Tom Vander Ark - President of the X-Prize Foundation. And former top education executive for Gates.
These names DO keep appearing on this site as education deformists. There are many more links for some of them. You can enter their names on a search on the home page of this site for more information.
Do you need any more evidence that the so-called two party political system is dead? We have one political party--the corporate party. They are out to destroy public education because such education is at the core of democracy, and they need a workforce that is scared, compliant, and obedient.
There are no good guys here. None.
What the hell is free-marked education reform?
by Dana Goldstein
It sounds like the beginning of a bad joke: Al Sharpton, Newt Gingrich
and Mike Bloomberg--all failed presidential hopefuls--arrive at the
White House for a joint meeting with President Barack Obama. Upon
leaving the Oval Office, they convene a press conference on the White
House lawn.
But far from tearing one another to bits or sniping at the man whose job
they coveted, these unlikely comrades--a self-appointed civil rights
spokesman, a former Republican Speaker of the House and a billionaire
New York City mayor--were in total agreement. The topic of the meeting?
Schools.
"You have to hold people accountable, and those that perform should be
the ones that teach our kids, and those that don't, unfortunately our
children are just too important," Bloomberg said, referring to his
support for teacher merit pay.
Sharpton intoned, "The nation's future is at stake, our children [are]
at stake."
Education Secretary Arne Duncan was there to lend the administration's
support. "There's a real sense of economic imperative," he said. "We
have to educate our way [to] a better economy."
Though the media portrayed the meeting as one among "strange
bedfellows," in fact Sharpton, Gingrich and Bloomberg are all on the
same side of the education policy debate roiling the Democratic Party.
The three are spokesmen for the Education Equality Project (EEP), an
advocacy group that has attracted widespread media attention since its
June 2008 launch, in large part because of its bipartisan call for
policies like merit pay and the expansion of the charter school sector.
With the support of rising star Democrats like Newark, New Jersey, Mayor
Cory Booker and Washington, DC, Mayor Adrian Fenty, the EEP and such
allied groups as the political action committee Democrats for Education
Reform--have openly pushed back against the influence of teachers
unions, community groups and teachers colleges over national education
policy. Proclaiming themselves "reformers," they often borrow their
strategies from the private sector, and they believe urban public
schools must be subjected to more free-market competition.
On the other side of the divide is a group of progressive policy experts
and educators who published a manifesto during campaign season called
A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education. They believe teachers
and schools will not be able to eradicate the achievement gap between
middle-class white children and everyone else until a wide array of
social services are available to poor families. They envision schools as
community centers, offering families healthcare, meals and counseling.
Theoretically, there is no reason all these people can't work together.
Some charter schools, after all, have had extraordinary success in
raising the achievement of low-income students--even, in some cases,
with the cooperation of teachers unions. Many younger teachers appear
enthusiastic about performance-based pay, although there is no evidence
from the cities that have tried it, like Denver, that it improves
student achievement. Yet the single-mindedness--some would say
obsessiveness--of the reformers' focus on these specific policy levers
puts off more traditional Democratic education experts and unionists. As
they see it, with the vast majority of poor children educated in
traditional public schools, education reform must focus on improving the
management of the public system and the quality of its services--not
just on supporting charter schools. What's more, social science has long
been clear on the fact that poverty and segregation influence students'
academic outcomes at least as much as do teachers and schools.
Obama's decision to invite representatives of only one side of this
divide to the Oval Office confirmed what many suspected: the new
administration--despite internal sympathy for the "broader, bolder
approach"--is eager to affiliate itself with the bipartisan flash and
pizazz around the new education reformers. The risk is that in doing so
the administration will alienate supporters with a more nuanced view of
education policy. What's more, critics contend that free-market
education reform is a top-down movement that is struggling to build
relationships with parents and community activists, the folks who
typically support local schools and mobilize neighbors on their behalf.
So keenly aware of this deficit are education reformers that a number of
influential players were involved in the payment of $500,000 to
Sharpton's nearly broke nonprofit, the National Action Network, in order
to procure Sharpton as a national spokesman for the EEP. And Sharpton's
presence has unquestionably benefited the EEP coalition, ensuring media
attention and grassroots African-American crowds at events like the one
held during Obama's inauguration festivities, at Cardozo High School in
Washington.
"Sharpton was a pretty big draw," says Washington schools chancellor
Michelle Rhee, recalling the boisterous crowd at Cardozo. Rhee is known
for shutting down schools and aggressively pursuing a private
sector-financed merit pay program. Some of the locals who came out to
hear Sharpton booed Rhee's speech at the same event, despite the fact
that her policies embody the movement for which Sharpton speaks.
The $500,000 donation to Sharpton's organization was revealed by New
York Daily News columnist Juan Gonzalez on April 1, as the
EEP and National Action Network were co-hosting a two-day summit in
Harlem, attended by luminaries including Chicago schools CEO Arne
Duncan. The money originated in the coffers of Plainfield Asset
Management, a Connecticut-based hedge fund whose managing director is
former New York City schools chancellor Harold Levy, an ally of the
current chancellor, Joel Klein. Plainfield has invested in
Playboy, horse racetracks and biofuels. But the company did not
donate the money directly to Sharpton. Rather, in what appears to have
been an attempt to cover tracks, the $500,000 was given to a nonprofit
entity called Education Reform Now, which has no employees. (According
to IRS filings, Education Reform Now had never before accepted a
donation of more than $92,500.) That group, in turn, funneled the
$500,000 to Sharpton's nonprofit.
If one person is at the center of this close-knit nexus of Wall Street
and education reform interests, it is Joe Williams, who serves as
president and treasurer of the EEP's board and is also the executive
director of Education Reform Now. But it is through his day job that
Williams, a former education reporter for the Daily News, exerts
the most influence. He is executive director of Democrats for Education
Reform (DFER), a four-year-old PAC that has gained considerable
influence, raising $2 million in 2008 and demonstrating remarkable
public relations savvy.
The group's six-person team works out of an East Forty-fifth Street
office donated--rent-free--by the hedge fund Khronos LLC. In recent
months, DFER has had a number of high-profile successes, chief among
them a highly coordinated media campaign to call into question the work
of Obama education adviser Linda Darling-Hammond, once considered a top
contender for the job of education secretary. During the same week in
early December, the New York Times, Washington Post,
Wall Street Journal and Boston Globe published editorials
or op-eds based on DFER's anti-Darling-Hammond talking points, which
focused on the Stanford professor's criticisms of Teach for America and
other alternative-certification programs for teachers. Less than two
weeks later, Obama appointed DFER's choice to the Education Department
post, Chicago schools CEO Duncan.
During campaign season, DFER donated to House majority whip James
Clyburn, Senator Mark Warner and Virginia swing district winner
Representative Tom Periello, among others. The organization regularly
hosts events introducing education reformers like Rhee and Fenty to New
York City "edupreneurs," finance industry players for whom education
reform is a sideline. DFER is focused on opening a second office, in
Colorado, a state viewed as being in the forefront of standards- and
testing-based education reform. The group successfully promoted Denver
schools superintendent Michael Bennett to fill the Senate seat vacated
when Obama named Ken Salazar as interior secretary. Bennett led the
school system with the highest-profile merit pay system in the nation.
During the Democratic Party's national convention in Denver this past
August, DFER hosted a well-attended event at the Denver Museum of Art,
during which Fenty, Booker, Klein, Sharpton and other well-known
Democrats openly denigrated teachers unions, whose members accounted for
10 percent of DNCC delegates. With Clyburn and other veteran members of
Congress in attendance, many longtime observers of Democratic politics
believed the event represented a sea change in the party's education
platform, the arrival of a new generation. While progressive groups such
as Education Sector, Education Trust and the Citizens' Commission on
Civil Rights have long attempted to push free-market education reforms
to the Democratic Party, it is only with the arrival of DFER that the
movement has had a lobbying arm with an explicit focus on influencing
the political process through fundraising and media outreach.
"For a lot of groups that are dependent upon both private money and
government money, there's a tendency not to want to get involved in the
nitty-gritty of politics," Williams said in a March 31 phone interview
from Denver, where he was meeting with Colorado politicians, setting the
stage for DFER's expansion there. "Our group--what we do is politics. We
make it clear: we're not an education reform group. We're a political
reform group that focuses on education reform. That distinction matters
because all of our partners are the actual education reform groups.
We're trying to give them a climate where it's easier for them to do
their work."
The education reformers who came to prominence in the 1990s, including
the founders of Teach for America and the Knowledge Is Power Program,
the national charter school network that fought unionization in one of
its Brooklyn schools, often went to great lengths to portray themselves
as explicitly apolitical. Nevertheless, "a lot of those people are,
politically, Democrats," says Sara Mead, a DFER board member and
director of early childhood programs at the Washington-based New America
Foundation. "One of those things that DFER does that's really important
is to help give those people a way to assert their identity as
Democrats. It's important for those groups' long-term success, but also
for Democrats, to the extent that some of these organizations are doing
really good things for the kids whose parents are Democratic
constituents. It's important that those organizations are identified
with us rather than being co-opted by Republicans, as they were in the
past."
The question remains, though, whether DFER and its allies actually do
speak for poor and minority parents and their kids. Who on the left
would disagree that the staggering achievement gap between middle-class
white kids and poor children of color is a civil rights issue of
national importance? Who wouldn't view the high dropout rates among
black and Latino boys as a disgrace? And yet there is no clear national
representation for the interests of the urban, mostly black and Hispanic
parents whose children's schools confront these statistics day in and
day out.
"On the local level is a certain distrust and despair about schools that
makes poor families accessible" to free-market education reformers, says
Deborah Meier, an education professor at New York University and the
founder of several successful experimental public schools for poor
children. "But I think the intersection between poverty and racism can't
just be tackled in this one area, in schools."
Teachers unions, with their focus on wraparound social services for poor
kids and better working conditions for teachers, believe they are the
natural spokespeople for poor families. But so do union critics such as
Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee and Joe Williams, who are sympathetic to No
Child Left Behind and standardized testing, and whose allies support
private school voucher programs.
"The DFERs, when they look at vouchers and charters, they don't look at
the underlying conditions," says Randi Weingarten, president of the
American Federation of Teachers. "Parents want to send their kids to
charters and parochial schools because they like the smaller class
sizes, they like the attention to safety, they like the attention to
conditions that public school teachers talk about all the time. They
make us the villains instead of the people who have the most
power--the superintendents and mayors."
Weingarten says she likes Williams, who is in fact a reasonable and calm
interlocutor; he even walks the walk by sending his children to New York
City public schools. Some of DFER's board members, though, such as
investment manager and a Teach for America founder Whitney Tilson, have
been known to grow overheated in their attacks on unions, calling them
corrupt and claiming that their leaders don't care about children.
Traditional education liberals can be just as harsh on the subject of
DFER. Criticizing the group's lack of commitment to the racial
integration of schools, veteran education writer Jonathan Kozol said,
"DFER is working in historical oblivion. If they're going to betray
everything that Dr. King and Thurgood Marshall fought for, at least they
ought to have the honesty to say so."
DFER is focused on reaching out to state legislators across the country,
pressing them to support policies such as lifting the cap on the number
of charter schools allowed to open in a year. DFER is also carefully
watching how Congress and the Obama administration dole out the $100
billion for schools included in the February economic stimulus package.
Much of that money will fill local budget gaps, simply allowing school
districts to continue their work without resorting to massive layoffs.
But a $5 billion "race to the top" fund is intended specifically to
foster innovation and reform in a small number of states--perhaps
between eight and twelve--that win a competitive grant process. As White
House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said in March, "The resources come
with a bow tied around them that says 'reform.' Our basic premise is
that the status quo and political constituencies can no longer determine
how we proceed on public education reform in this country."
That sounds a lot like a DFER talking point. Indeed, it has become clear
that DFER's idea of education reform is the one driving the Obama
administration as it distributes these funds. In a major March 10
address on education delivered to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce,
Obama spoke glowingly of charter schools and merit pay plans. "Too many
supporters of my party have resisted the idea of rewarding excellence in
teaching with extra pay, even though we know it can make a difference in
the classroom," he said--though education research has yet to offer
proof that merit pay is a panacea. Later in the speech, the president
called charter schools the national leaders on education "innovation"
and called on states to allow their proliferation.
Two weeks later, during a conference call with reporters, Duncan said
thirty-six school districts across the country are doing "interesting
things around [teacher] compensation" and added he hoped federal
stimulus dollars will increase that number to 150. The education
secretary called "rewarding teacher excellence" a major priority but
would not be more specific about how such "excellence" should be
determined.
Darling-Hammond--back at Stanford but still advising the Obama
administration--is focusing her latest research on international teacher
quality. Nations like South Korea and Singapore have managed to reduce
education inequality by building stable, high-quality teacher forces,
she says. The key is paying teachers more, across the board, and
providing them with better professional training and support.
Test-score-based merit pay, according to Darling-Hammond, is a "marginal
issue."
On the ground, however, merit pay has become a major point of
contention: in districts like Washington, some teachers have resisted
calls for student test scores to heavily influence their salaries, and
parents have protested the firings of popular teachers, professionals
they believe were making a difference in their children's lives.
Unexplained teacher firings "are not a way to run a school," says Ruth
Castel-Branco, an organizer with DC Jobs With Justice. "That shakes up
the very foundation of stability that schools have to have. There has to
be due process and a meaningful way for parents to engage."
So far, at least, free-market education reformers have struggled with
this piece of the puzzle. Lacking a membership base, their movement's
lobbying arm is essentially top-down, financed by New York
hedge-funders, supported by research conducted at Beltway think tanks
and represented on the ground by a handful of state and local
politicians scattered across the country. And while it's true that
charter schools and Teach for America instructors interact with children
and parents every day, the excitement around individual schools and
classrooms does not easily translate into a national agenda. After all,
the vast majority of urban students remain in traditional public
schools, taught by teachers who came through traditional teachers
college certification routes.
Even the involvement of Al Sharpton can't change those facts. Joe
Williams, who describes himself as chastened by his involvement in the
$500,000 payment to Sharpton's group, will admit that. "I wouldn't even
consider Sharpton grassroots, actually," Williams says. "But he holds a
lot of power. He brings attention to an issue like this."
Dana Goldstein is an associate editor at American Prospect.
— Dana Goldstein
The Nation
2009-06-15
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090615/goldstein
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
Pages: 380
[1] 2 3 4 5 6 Next >> Last >>
|
