"Teach For America" Trojan Horse Among Ferguson Activists? | Black Agenda Report

"Teach For America" Trojan Horse Among Ferguson Activists? | Black Agenda Report:

"Teach For America" Trojan Horse Among Ferguson Activists?

by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

Some minor revisions and additional links have been inserted in this article since its Dece. 10 publication.

It's hard to imagine more ruthless, murderous and insanely wealthy corporate criminals than theKoch Bros. What if one of their executive vice presidents was black? What if she came from Florissant MO, only a few minutes from the spot where Michael Brown was murdered? What if the Koch VP had kicked it with some of the demonstrators and activists early on, maybe even taken an arrest or three, run around some corners and huffed some tear gas with them?

Now suppose that black Koch VP from Florissant got picked as one of the “young black leaders” whomet with President Obama at the White House last week. The black Koch VP does not offer to resign her position or denounce her employer, and the Koch Bros empire certainly won't stop doing any of the reprehensible things it does in Richmond CA, in Louisiana, and everywhere else in the world.

1. Is this OK? Should the activists in motion over police murder of black people be good with this? Should they just look away and say well, the other stuff she's involved in, that her employer's involved in IS a concern butthis here is about the police. Should they say that concern ain't THIS concern, that concern ain't OUR concern???? Is this the way a broad new social movement against injustice and oppression is supposed to act?
2. Can they really doubt that the Koch PR team will NOT use the black VP's participation in their movement to confuse and disadvantage oppressed people somewhere else?
3. And would it be right for those with misgivings and questions about whether the Koch VP really belongs at the table, numbered among movement activists, to keep their reservations private, restricted to personal and closely held conference phone calls, private emails and the like? Or is this everybody's movement and therefore everybody's business, not just the affair of the designated "leaders"?

Something much like this is actually occurring around Ferguson. One of the “young black activists” who met with President Obama last week was Brittney Packnett, a Florissant native who happens to be executive director for the St. Louis office of Teach For America.

TFA is a nonprofit organization backed to the tune of hundreds of millions per year by Wal-Mart, the Broad Foundation, Monsanto and a long list of corporate villains and hedge fund predators intent upon dismantling, destroying and privatizing public education in black and brown neighborhoods, turning public education into a private profit center. Privatizing public education is also the bipartisan aim of top Republicans and Democrats across the country, so the Obama Department of Education has also provided tens of millions per year in federal funding for Teach For America.

Teach For America recruits young, mostly white grads from elite colleges to undergo a 5 week training program which supposedly enables them to replace experienced, mostly black teachers in inner city schools. Although TFA used to claim it sends its recruits to “underserved” schools where experienced teachers don't want to go, the facts are that underprepared TFA temps have replaced tens of thousands of experienced teachers in Newark, Chicago, St. Louis, and dozens of other cities around the country. Teach For America contends that inner-city public schools are NOT underfunded, that chronic poverty, joblessness, homelessness and short staffing are merely “excuses” used to protect the "bad teachers" which its mostly white temps are replacing. This is precisely the opposite of what knowledgeable young activists like the Dream Defenders Phillip Agnew will tell you.

For those not up on the criminal role Teach For America plays in black communities around the country, here are a few links....

• The Daily Dot did an extensive report on Teach For America you can find athttp://www.dailydot.com/opinion/inside-real-world-teach-for-america/
• http://atthechalkface.com/…/why-teach-for-america-cannot-c…/
• http://dianeravitch.net/…/mark-naison-how-tfa-is-destructi…/
• https://www.jacobinmag.com/2011/12/teach-for-america/
• http://www.thenation.com/…/what-happens-when-you-criticize-…
• http://www.publicschoolshakedown.org/teach-for-america

In this context, the Teach For America rep sitting among the “young black activists” is a Trojan Horse.

No, it won't do any good to take Ms. Packnett aside and “talk to her” about this. That's naïve. She has a 

 "Teach For America" Trojan Horse Among Ferguson Activists? | Black Agenda Report:

A Tribute to Race To The Top and Secretary Arne Duncan

Race to the Top loses all funding in 2015 omnibus spending bill

Obama’s Race to the Top loses all funding in 2015 omnibus spending bill - The Washington Post

Obama’s Race to the Top loses all funding in 2015 omnibus spending bill - The Washington Post:

Obama’s Race to the Top loses all funding in 2015 omnibus spending bill

President Obama and firstlLady Michelle Obama both would see key initiatives whacked if the $1.01 trillion spending bill unveiled by congressional leaders this week passes without changes in these areas: the president’s chief education initiative, Race to the Top, loses all funding, and the first lady’s effort to nutritionally improve school lunches takes a hit with language that allows schools to take their good old time about meeting a mandate on serving whole grain.

The Education Department would take a slight hit in funding; at $70.5 billion, down $133 million below the fiscal year 2014, but special education grants to states would get $25 million more than last year, up to $11.5 billion. Funding for the somewhat controversial School Improvement Grant program is maintained at $506 million. (It’s somewhat controversial because there are big questions about its overall effectiveness.)

The $4.3 billion-dollar Race to the Top was Obama’s main education initiative, first announced in 2009 as an effort to ensure that every student was “college and career ready” and to achieve “educational equity” by aggressively  “turning around” the lowest-performing schools (or by closing them if they didn’t turn around fast enough.) The program was a competition among states for federal funding, with certain stipulations; states (and later districts) had to promise to implement specific school reforms favored by Education Secretary Arne Duncan in order to win the cash. The Gates Foundation awarded millions of dollars to states that sought its help in designing their Race to the Top contest entries. The program became controversial as some critics said it represented federal intrusion into local education (though states were not required to participate) and critics wondered how a competition among states  – which would create winners and losers — could create educational equity.

There is also no funding for the controversial Common Core State Standards in this legislation. The development of the standards and their implementation was not federally funded, though the Obama administration did provide $360 million to two multi-state consortia that developed new Core-aligned standardized tests, which are being given to students for the first time this school year. That money had been appropriated in previous years. The administration also linked Race to the Top funding to the adoption of common standards; an early version of the first Race competition used the Common Core standards by name but, as my colleague Lyndsey Layton reported here, that was changed out of fear that “some states would consider that unwanted — and possibly illegal — interference from Washington.”

In fiscal year 2014, Race to the Top was given $250 million, according to this legislation summary, for competitive awards to states to develop or grow early childhood programs for children from low- and moderate-income families.  Obama’s fiscal year 2015 budget proposal included $300 million for a proposed “Race to the Top-Equity and Opportunity.” While Race to the Top gets no funding in the 2015 omnibus bill, the administration’s Preschool Development Grants program gets $250 million for 2015.

The House and Senate congressional summaries of education-related funding in the 2015 omnibus bill highlight different things. The Republican-led House notes that Race to the Top is being eliminated, while the Senate version doesn’t mention it. And while the Senate version notes Obama’s Race to the Top loses all funding in 2015 omnibus spending bill - The Washington Post:

Garfield High Teacher: Standardized Tests 'Disproportionately Impact Students Of Color' | KPLU News for Seattle and the Northwest

Garfield High Teacher: Standardized Tests 'Disproportionately Impact Students Of Color' | KPLU News for Seattle and the Northwest:



Garfield High Teacher: Standardized Tests 'Disproportionately Impact Students Of Color'

By KYLE STOKES • DEC 9, 2014

 

The issues of race and class currently fueling protests around the U.S. manifest in a different way in the classroom, says Garfield High School teacher Jesse Hagopian.

"Many of our students feel they're being set up," said the educator-activist and advisor of Garfield's Black Student Union who led the school's testing boycott in 2013.

Hagopian says the setup exists in the standardized tests policymakers across the nation have increasingly used to measure the gap in academic performance. The gap, he says, too often separates students of color from their white peers, and hold teachers and school leaders accountable for closing it.

Catching Students Who Are Falling Behind

President Obama has said, "There's nothing wrong with testing. We just need better tests ... that track how well our students are growing academically so we can catch when they're falling behind, and help them before they just get passed along."

Though the mechanisms that made the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act so powerful have become largely unpopular, many, including Obama administration officials, still support the law's central aim: to shine a bright spotlight on inequities in the nation's education system.

But Hagopian sees it differently, especially when it comes to racial inequities in schools. He recently edited a book titled "More Than A Score" that criticizes education policymakers for becoming too obsessed with standardized testing.

'Disproportionate Impact' On Students Of Color

"When you discuss the problem of black success in terms of their failure to succeed or their failure to achieve," said Hagopian, "and you don't discuss the fact that the opportunities are being systematically denied to them, then you blame our black youth for the problems that our society has created."

"These tests," he added, "disproportionately impact students of color because they Garfield High Teacher: Standardized Tests 'Disproportionately Impact Students Of Color' | KPLU News for Seattle and the Northwest:

When Charter Schools Are Nonprofit in Name Only - ProPublica

When Charter Schools Are Nonprofit in Name Only - ProPublica:

When Charter Schools Are Nonprofit in Name Only

This post has been updated to include a response from National Heritage Academies.

A couple of years ago, auditors looked at the books of a charter school in Buffalo, New York, and were taken aback by what they found. Like all charter schools, Buffalo United Charter School is funded with taxpayer dollars. The school is also a nonprofit. But as the New York State auditors wrote, Buffalo United was sending " virtually all of the School's revenues" directly to a for-profit company hired to handle its day-to-day operations.

Charter schools often hire companies to handle their accounting and management functions. Sometimes the companies even take the lead in hiring teachers, finding a school building, and handling school finances.

In the case of Buffalo United, the auditors found that the school board had little idea about exactly how the company – a large management firm called National Heritage Academies – was spending the school's money. The school's board still had to approve overall budgets, but it appeared to accept the company's numbers with few questions. The signoff was "essentially meaningless," the auditors wrote.

In the charter-school sector, this arrangement is known as a "sweeps" contract because nearly all of a school's public dollars – anywhere from 95 to 100 percent – is "swept" into a charter-management company.

The contracts are an example of how the charter schools sometimes cede control of public dollars to private companies that have no legal obligation to act in the best interests of the schools or taxpayers. When the agreement is with a for-profit firm like National Heritage Academies, it's also a chance for such firms to turn taxpayer money into tidy profits.

"It's really just a pass-through for for-profit entities," said Eric Hall, an attorney in Colorado Springs who specializes in work with charter schools and has come across many sweeps contracts. "In what sense is that a nonprofit endeavor? It's not."

Neither National Heritage Academies nor the Buffalo United board responded to requests for comment. (Update: NHA spokeswoman Jennifer Hoff said in an emailed statement, “Our approach relieves our partner boards of all financial, operational, and academic risks – a significant burden that ultimately defeats many charter schools. Freed from burdens like fundraising, our partner boards can focus on governance and oversight … NHA and its partner schools comply fully with state and federal laws, authorizer oversight requirements, and education department regulations – including everything related to transparency.”)

While relationships between charter schools and management companies have started tocome under scrutiny, sweeps contracts have received little attention. Schools have agreed to such setups with both nonprofit and for-profit management companies, but it's not clear how often. Nobody appears to be keeping track.

What is clear is that it can be hard for regulators and even schools themselves to follow the money when nearly all of it goes into the accounts of a private company.

"We're not confident that sweeps contracts allow [charters schools and regulators] to fully fulfill their public functions," said Alex Medler, who leads policy and advocacy work at the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, a trade group for charter regulators. The organization discourages the arrangements. "We think this is an issue that needs attention."

Officials have gotten glimpses of questionable spending by some firms using "sweeps" contracts. 

Take the case of Brooklyn Excelsior Charter School, another National Heritage Academies school. In 2012, state auditors tried to track the $10 million in public funding given to the school, only to conclude they were " unable to determine ... the extent to which the $10 million of annual public funding provided to the school was actually used to benefit its students." From what auditors could tell, the school was paying above-market rent for its building, which in turn is owned by a subsidiary of National Heritage When Charter Schools Are Nonprofit in Name Only - ProPublica:

State’s first charter school in disarray | Local News | The Seattle Times

State’s first charter school in disarray | Local News | The Seattle Times:

State’s first charter school in disarray

Since it opened in September, the state’s first charter school has lost its special-education coordinator, principal, board president and half the rest of its board. By Wednesday, it must prove to a state board that it can solve problems in four major areas.

Just months after it opened, First Place Scholars, the first charter school in Washington state, is in turmoil.

Its first principal resigned in November, more than half of its original board of directors have left, too, and the state’s charter-school commission has identified more than a dozen potential problems that need to be fixed soon if the school wants to keep its doors open.

Among them: hiring a qualified special-education teacher for the roughly two dozen students who need those services, and completing background checks on some of its nonteaching staff.

Members of the Washington State Charter School Commission, charged with vetting and overseeing charter schools, say they are hopeful that First Place will turn itself around and that the school is on track to complete its corrective action plan on time.

But if it doesn’t, the school will face stricter negotiations that could ultimately lead to its closure.

The school’s rocky start is bad news for charter supporters, who barely got a charter law passed here two years ago after trying for nearly two decades.

Joshua Halsey, the commission’s executive director, said his group takes the school’s problems seriously.

“We’re monitoring this very closely,” he said.

First Place opened in September as the first charter under the 2012 measure, which has been hailed as one of the strongest in the country and allows for up to eight charters to be opened each year for five years.

Campaign supporters promised that the bar for instructional quality and sound financial management would be set high for nonprofits seeking to open charters — free, independently run but publicly funded schools that aren’t bound by many of the same restrictions governing typical public schools. In exchange for agreeing to a set of goals, called a charter, charter schools receive roughly as much public money as traditional public school districts do.

So far, the state’s charter commission has approved seven other charter schools. Six will open in 2015 and one in 2016. Spokane Public Schools, which also may authorize charter schools, has approved two, both opening in 2015.

First Place was the first charter to open in part because it wasn’t starting from scratch. It had long been a private elementary school, founded to serve homeless students, in partnership with Seattle Public Schools.

Located in the former Odessa Brown medical clinic in Seattle’s Central District, the K-5 school focuses on students who have been homeless or have experienced a variety of other traumas. Classes have 14 or 15 students each. Becoming a charter is helping First Place expand from about 45 students to up to 100.

Halsey, the state charter commission’s executive director, chalked some of First Place’s problems up to being the state’s first charter school.

“It’s one thing for a district to open a new school — it’s a whole different story when you talk about a whole district being established,” Halsey said. “And that’s pretty much what these charter schools are.”

When First Place opened this fall, some said a lot was riding on its success.

But Steve Sundquist, the charter commission chairman, said Tuesday that he didn’t think First Place’s troubles represent a setback for the state’s broader charter-school movement.

“This will not be the only case of struggle,” he said. “But I believe ultimately we’re going to see a successful story here.”

Troubles pop up

First Place hit its first bump when Halsey sat in on a board meeting in September and noticed the board went into executive session, saying they wanted to discuss personnel matters, which is appropriate, but also “other” issues, which is not a legal reason for public boards to meet in private. Several parents then complained to the state Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction about the school’s special-education practices, prompting Halsey to visit the school Oct. 30.

During that visit, Halsey noted more than a dozen ways that First Place appeared to be out of State’s first charter school in disarray | Local News | The Seattle Times:

Charter's Don't Do It Better or Cheaper

Charter's Don't Do It Better or Cheaper:



CHARTER’S DON’T DO IT BETTER OR CHEAPER

The hard spin that investors put on their own charter corporations is that they do education better, and for cheaper than those bad public schools. But, with some years of experience behind us now, it is clear that charters do neither.



The last eleven years of  my public high school teaching years were spent in a big high school that covered a part of the outer suburban ring of the Oklahoma City metro area.



Occasionally they needed me to teach a few sections of Advanced Placement U.S. History to the Juniors who wanted to tool up for college, but mostly I taught the regular U.S. History course for everyone else.



That “everyone else” category was a very mixed group of people who were special ed, those with medical disabilities, and those who were on their way to rehab. My students included the brilliant but angry, the drug/alcohol addicted, the diagnosed and undiagnosed emotionally disturbed, and the occasional athlete who just didn’t have enough time or energy to study enough for AP courses.



The Yearly Arrival of Private School Students



There was a private church-connected school in that city that proclaimed loudly each year what accomplishments their student body had shown. The general public of that city were impressed, but I wasn’t.



It’s because each year sometime around February the private school to public school sojourn would begin for those students who didn’t “fit in” at that private school and would get kicked out due to their earning enough demerits. The Juniors among them would land mostly in my classroom.



I never minded getting those students. For the most part they were pretty cool because they were glad to get out of that private school’s suffocating environment.



What I did mind was the continual bragging by the private school’s officials. I was in a unique position to see what they were doing. They collected tuition long enough to lock in the contracts that parents signed, then started kicking out those students who “didn’t work out.”



After the gleaning time, yes, they had a hand-picked group that would finish the year while my public school classroom picked up the pieces. It was ridiculously easy for them to compare and criticize the public schools for their environment while their policies actually contributed to that unstable environment.



Cherry-picking charters still don’t make the grade



My first-hand experiences with the cherry-picking of private schools has been a large contributing factor to my skepticism of investor-owned charters from the beginning. The game that investor charters are playing is an old one, finely honed by the private schools for decades.



The big difference is that investor-owned corporate charters are far more aggressive and have had huge foundations like those of Gates, and the Waltons, that buy good publicity by their largess that is actually not a gift, but a purchase of attention and viewpoint.



We now have 5-10 years of experience of those big charter Charter's Don't Do It Better or Cheaper:

HEMLOCK ON THE ROCKS: What Are My “Skelly Rights”?

HEMLOCK ON THE ROCKS: What Are My “Skelly Rights”?:

What Are My “Skelly Rights”?

RB

What Are My "Skelly Rights"?

In the late '70's, the California Supreme Court established your "Skelly Rights." This means that public employees must be provided a "pre-disciplinary hearing" with management before they may be suspended (for five days or more,) demoted or terminated. The Court decided that this right is rooted in the federal constitution which says that a citizen cannot be deprived of property without due process.  In other words, when a governmental agency threatens to take income from one of its employees, this threat to his "property" requires due process.

The "Skelly Decision" comes from Dr. Skelly, an employee who worked for the state, who also had a three-martini-lunch habit.  After some significant performance problems, he was fired. He sued, and the resulting lawsuit, Skelly vs. the State of California, established the due process rights we know today. Basically, these say that an employee has the right to two levels of hearing: first, a "pre-disciplinary meeting" with the level of management proposing the discipline (The hearing officer must have the authority to modify or withdraw the discipline, but need not be an impartial third party).

The second step, if the matter isn't settled at the Skelly, is a "full evidentiary hearing before a reasonably impartial" third party.  This hearing involves witnesses, presentation of evidence, cross examination, etc -- very much like a court case. Most of the time, the impartial third party is an arbitrator or a panel, such as a Personnel or Civil Service Board.  However, it's legal for the City Manager to function as the hearing officer, so long as he or she has not already been involved in the case.

Many people think of the first hearing, "the Skelly" as a bit of a Kangaroo Court. After all, you are appealing to the level of management that has already decided to discipline you.  It is basically an opportunity to explain why the accusations are wrong, or why the "punishment" is too severe for the "crime."  But it IS a "pre-disciplinary safeguard:" the City cannot take action against you until it has heard your appeal and provided a written answer.

The City also must provide you with all information about the charges against you, prior to the hearing, so that you may intelligently defend yourself. A "notice of proposed disciplinary action" must include:

§         A statement of the nature of the proposed discipline

§         The effective date of the proposed discipline

§         The reasons for the discipline

§         The specific policy or rule violated

§         A statement advising the employee of the right to respond orally or in writing.

Skelly Rights Apply to all Permanent Public Employees. Even managers and confidential employees are covered by Skelly. If you belong to an employees association, your association is obligated to represent you. The only exception to this is that the group is NOT required to represent you through arbitration or a board hearing if a legal analysis recommends that your case "lacks merit;" in other words, if it is "unwinnable."  (An arbitration or Civil Service hearing can be expensive; your Association isn't obligated to drain its members' treasury to defend people who commit serious offenses, for which there's little defense…)

Skelly applies ONLY to Public Employees. The idea that government cannot take the "property" of your job applies only IF you work for government. California is an "at-will state." Unless they have a good union contract, employees at private companies can be fired without cause. Skelly Due Process is the primary legal distinction between public and private employees in California.

Although appealing to your own Management doesn't sound like much of a right, the Courts have bolstered your Skelly rights considerably over the last twenty years, and Management has become more respectful of the Skelly process. This is partly due to other employment laws which have sprung up since the 70's: discrimination, harassment, disability, wrongful termination, etc. Today there is a substantial industry of attorneys prepared to take your case if the City doesn't fire you for truly good reasons – or if it HEMLOCK ON THE ROCKS: What Are My “Skelly Rights”?:

YAY! Carl Petersen Qualifies for the March Ballot

                                      

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Monday December 8, 2014

Contact: Carl Petersen (818) 869-0309

Carl Petersen Qualifies for the March Ballot in LAUSD School Board Election

The Los Angeles City Clerk has completed its verification of the signatures that Carl Petersen submitted last week and qualified him for the ballot in the March election. He seeks to represent District Number 3 on the LAUSD's Board of Education, which includes most of the San Fernando Valley west of the 405 freeway and portions of Sherman Oaks, Studio City and North Hollywood. He will run with the Ballot Designation of "Businessman/Activist Parent."

"With the Miramonte sex scandal, MiSiS crisis and iPad scandal draining hundreds of millions of dollars from our children's educations, new blood is desperately need on the School Board," the candidate said. "As a father of four children enrolled in the district, I look forward to bringing a parent's perspective to the Board's proceedings and using my business experience to bring accountability back to the district."

The election will take place on March 3, 2015.

Carl Petersen is running for LAUSD School Board District 3 to give voice to the students, parents and teachers of the district. He is a father of five, including two daughters on the autism spectrum. With four children still enrolled in the district he understands the challenges facing the district and has a direct stake in seeing them addressed. He is currently the Director of Logistics for a manufacturer of security cameras in Glendale where he has been employed for the past nine years. For additional information please visit www.ChangeTheLAUSD.com or call Carl Petersen at 818-869-0309.

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Carl Petersen 

Candidate for Board of Education, District 3

www.ChangeTheLAUSD.com