Catch up with CURMUDGUCATION: PA Senate Ed Chair Wants To Trash Education

CURMUDGUCATION:

Catch up with CURMUDGUCATION

PA Senate Ed Chair Wants To Trash Education

49by Peter Greene / 14h

John Eichelberger has been a Pennsylvania state senator for over a decade, and during those years, he has been no friend to public schools or the teachers who work in them. Seriously-- this is District 30. Eichelberger is a Republican upstart who was swept into office on the wave of voter anger over the infamous late-night pay raise of 2005 . He was supported by an assortment of conservatives incl

PA: How Much Does Your District Pay in Charter Costs

28by Peter Greene / 20h

An extremely handy spread sheet has been circulating lately, and if nothing else, I want to put a link here so that I can more easily find it. If you're in Pennsylvania, you'll want to look at this, too. Yes, 502 districts is a lot. The document covers every school year from 2009-2010 through 2014-2015 for every single one of our 502 pubic school districts (yes, that is a high number, but that's a

DeVos: No Real Role for Feds

7by Peter Greene / 1d

At Axios (the new "media company" from two former Politico honchos ), Johnathan Swan ( formerly of The Hill ) has a quick moment with Education Secretary Betsy DeVos . She uses the opportunity for a bit of a do-over on her confirmation hearing, but it's her thoughts on the federal role in education that are most striking. Among the things that " Betsy DeVos wishes she had said at her confirmation

IOWA: Gutting Unions

21by Peter Greene / 1d

The Iowa House and Senate have voted to gut the public service unions of their state . Under the new bill, Iowa's public service unions (that, of course, includes teachers) may not negotiate anything but wages. Health care, evaluation procedures, and other language items may not be part of contract negotiations. And should those wage negotiations stall, the arbitrator must consider management's ab

FEB 16

Performance Pay Bombs Across the Pond

10by Peter Greene / 1d

I don't know if this will make you feel better or make you feel worse, but our nation is not the only one caught in the throes of bad education reform. The UK has a performance pay system in which teachers get an increase of pay based on their job performance. Well, if there's money to pay for a raise. Well, if the raise is within the cap of 1% (aka "not enough to keep up with inflation"). The UK

FEB 15

I Am Not Hostile To Change

200+by Peter Greene / 2d

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos spoke today to a gathering of Magnet School folks, and opened up by suggesting that "some people" are "hostile" to change. I just want to be clear. I am not hostile to change. In fact, there are some changes that I would love to see. I would love to see a change in the rhetoric about failing schools. Instead of declaring that we will "rescue" students from failin

The Proper Use of Mockery

31by Peter Greene / 2d

Jimmie Fallon has done it again , and not, I'm afraid, in a good way. Fallon has now twice included a Betsy DeVos sketch. His show's version of DeVos is bumbling and clueless, the kind of hapless twit who says, in response to questions about her fitness for the job, replies "I am totally got this." As regular readers of this blog are well aware, I am not above or beyond mockery of certain subjects

FL: Merit Pay (Still) Doesn't Work

100+by Peter Greene / 3d

Yes, and in other news, the sun is expected to rise in the East tomorrow. So, Florida has a merit pay system. In fact, Florida has tried to implement merit pay for quite a while. Of course, there are issues: The design and implementation of merit pay faces several key challenges. First, student outcomes are difficult to define and measure. Second, the contributions of individual teachers to studen

FEB 14

Guest Post: Open Letter To Pat Toomey

19by Peter Greene / 3d

Barbara Ferman is a professor at the College of Liberal Arts, Temple University. She's also the Director of the University Community Collaborative. She passed along this letter to share. If you want to make sure Senator Toomey sees it, feel free to help direct it to him. February 13, 2017 An Open Letter to Senator Toomey, Pennsylvania Dear Senator Toomey: I grew up in a working class family and n

FEB 13

New Congressional Attack on Education

63by Peter Greene / 4d

You probably already heard about H.R. 899 , a bill elegant in its simplicity. Here's the whole text of the bill: The Department of Education shall terminate on December 31, 2018. Thanks to Rep. Thomas Massie (R) of Kentucky for this little zen koan of legislation. It raises many questions. Will the department evaporate? Will it be terminated with extreme prejudice? When the ball drops on New Years

FEB 12

Charter Schism Explainer

23by Peter Greene / 6d

The charter world (which is mostly all that's to what we mean by "education reform") has been wrestling and fracturing and considering serious marital counseling over the past year or so. This bit of a crisis has been exacerbated since, oh, November. I've been drawn into conversations about this schism several times in the last week, which means it's time to write a simple explainer. Feel free to

ICYMI: This Week's Reading (2/12)

5by Peter Greene / 6d

The list is long this week, but at least it's not all politics. At least, I'm pretty sure it's not all politics. I Never Cared Much About Politics; The Trump Nominated Betsy DeVos A guest at the Washington Post. The title is self-explanatory Holy Warrior Against the Welfare State Jennifer Berkshire's trip to Michigan yielded a lot of good writing. This piece appeared in the Baffler and explains a

Reformsters Contemplate Race (Part 2)

5by Peter Greene / 6d

I've worked my way slowly through two panel discussions held at the American Enterprise Institute a couple of weeks ago. They're interesting and mostly thoughtful discussions among reformsters about how reformsterism (by which, mostly, they mean the charter movement) can navigate this new era and the 

CURMUDGUCATION:

Successful Hunger Strike Is Leading To National Movement For Better Education | PopularResistance.Org

Successful Hunger Strike Is Leading To National Movement For Better Education | PopularResistance.Org:

Successful Hunger Strike Is Leading To National Movement For Better Education

Above Photo: Dimitry B.

Jitu Brown, champion of public schools and racial justice, pushes hard against privatizers and big-city Democrats who neglect impoverished schools.

Jitu Brown helped lead one of the most striking protests in America in 2015, a weeks-long hunger strike to stop Chicago from closing a community high school. He’s part of a coalition of community groups that have exposed and fought the institutional racism in K-12 education, from GOP-led privatization to Democratic neglect in blue cities. He spoke with AlterNet as his group, Journey for Justice Alliance, launches a new national coalition for equitable public schools.

Steven Rosenfeld: Today [Feb. 14], President Donald Trump and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos had a White House event championing school choice. They didn’t use the word “privatization.” Let’s begin with you telling us about Journey for Justice Alliance and what you’ve seen in communities that privatize schools.

Jitu Brown: The Journey for Justice Alliance is a national network of grassroots communities and organizations in 24 cities. We also have a member in Johannesburg, South Africa. These are primarily black- and brown-led organizations with a constituency of low-income families, the people who are actually targeted for school privatization or what they call school choice.

Building unity with the Journey for Justice Alliance was actually pretty easy because we all had the same pain. When the press conference ends, when local politicians finish their spin, what they leave in their wake are parents and communities who are suffering. Not only with schools but who have been failed as taxpayers. Parents and communities who have been ignored, who lost their voting rights and have suffered through a system that is gleefully inequitable.

So when people talk about school choice, if you as a parent [are asked], Would you like a great neighborhood school? I challenge folks to find a parent who would say no. The school choice movement is an illusion. As schools go, it is a shell game. It’s three-card monte. It’s parents who have lived through the sabotage of public education in their communities find[ing] somewhere to send their babies. So when charter school operators come and the school is shiny and every child gets a laptop, of course, a parent who has been denied their basic right will go for that.

I want to make this point. We are not at odds with charter school families. We have all been underserved. What we are saying is we want equity and not the illusion of choice. See, these schools boards and these elected officials who go around saying what black and brown children want, they never address the fact that often in those same cities, white children have a completely different reality at their neighborhood schools. See, that’s acceptable to them. And as our communities have suffered from violent retaliation as we become organized, many of our communities are unorganized. So the people have not been able to mobilize around what they would like to see because we are in survival mode. So, as communities have been made more vulnerable, the privatization movement has swooped in like a hawk and snatched up our most precious resource.

But the sabotage of public education in black and brown communities is very real. That’s not propaganda. That’s not me trying to be dramatic. It’s very real, and if we take the time to follow it, we can see it.

SR: You were invited in to keep a Chicago school from being shut down by that Successful Hunger Strike Is Leading To National Movement For Better Education | PopularResistance.Org:

Impact Investing and Venture Philanthropy’s Role in Sowing the Seeds of Financial Opportunity | Dissident Voice

Impact Investing and Venture Philanthropy’s Role in Sowing the Seeds of Financial Opportunity | Dissident Voice:

Impact Investing and Venture Philanthropy’s Role in Sowing the Seeds of Financial Opportunity

Gates and other venture philanthropist’s have ‘pioneered’ and ‘seeded’ new education markets through direct funding and by shaping ‘education reform’ policies. Charter schools are an essential component of this mission… allowing impact investors to be the drivers of the education reform industry’s final mission: to fully dismantle public education by way of “anywhere, anytime learning” and “personalized” technologies.

*****

In the late 19th century many U.S. industrialists – Andrew Carnegie, John Pierpont Morgan, John D. Rockefeller and others – who amassed immense wealth through the exploitation and degradation of workers (including children), began to establish philanthropic trusts and foundations. Oil monopolist John D. Rockefeller (senior) described this social mission as a divinely inspired “business of benevolence.” Accordingly, historian Benjamin J. Soskis reports that Rockefeller declared in 1906:

I believe that the power of making money is a gift from God… I believe it is my duty to go on making money and still more money, and to use the money I make for the good of my fellow man according to the dictates of my conscience.

As such, philanthropists of this time channeled charitable gifts to civil society and aid-based organizations charged with facilitating the cultural reproduction of American values derived from the Protestant ethics that sustain U.S. capitalism: individualism, self-reliance, hard work, meritocracy, discipline and obedience. In terms of the benevolent role of philanthropists during this period, Soskis frames it this way:

This conflation of the obligations of business and businessman was encouraged by the concept of stewardship, the dominant means by which Americans understood the responsibilities of wealth in the nineteenth century. By the dictates of stewardship, men could not claim ultimate ownership over their possessions, but held them only as trustees for some higher authority—in the concept’s Protestant manifestation… By bridging the realms of accumulation and redistribution, stewardship linked provisional property rights with the responsibilities that attended those rights. Stewardship provided a bridge between the imperatives of service and self-interest, a causeway over which proponents of corporate philanthropy would make their unsteady way in the decades to come.

Through this doctrine of divine providence, these charitable “Captains of Industry” advanced everything from universal public education, immigrant assimilation and poverty mitigation to the arts, public health and science and medical research. Naturally, this giving came with a social engineering agenda. For example, as documented in my article “The Despotic Origins of Public Secondary Education,” their financial and political support for universal public education was intended to bolster U.S. hegemony, by furthering U.S. industrial capitalism’s imperialist pursuits as tied to the nation’s foundational structures of heteropatriarchy, white supremacy and settler colonialism. Relatedly, the article goes on to document how:

At the turn of the 20th century, capitalism’s proclivity for crisis was fomenting rebellion within the U.S. through massive labor strikes, struggles for universal suffrage and relief from poverty as a major depression gripped the nation due to overproduction. In response, the nation’s political and economic elite significantly expanded U.S. pursuits of overseas markets for American goods and investment capital… [rationalizing] U.S. military intervention. These events required the intensification of the social control apparatus of U.S. nationalism – well oiled by its highly effective and profitable role in the conquest of North America – as a means [in part] to deflect attention towards an external “threat.”

Thus, this tycoon driven endeavor served the ideological and practical social mission of cultivating greater social cohesion (i.e. social control) when the nation’s undemocratic design was increasingly unambiguous and insurrection was presenting a clear and present danger to its foundational social order.

To achieve these aims on a more structural level, Prussian inspired common schools established in the 19th century served as the model for the establishment of compulsory secondary education in early 20th century America. According to these altruistic “stewards” of the public good, mass public education needed to be standardized, vocational and efficient as a means to serve their larger “social mission” of preparing students for their future roles in the 20th century industrial workforce. This philanthropic agenda was made explicit in 1914 when the National Education Association passed a resolution that read, in part:

We view with alarm the activity of the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations—agencies not in any way responsible to the people—in their efforts to control the policies of our State educational institutions, to fashion after their conception and to standardize our courses of study, and to surround the institutions with conditions which menace true academic freedom and defeat the primary purpose of democracy as heretofore preserved inviolate in our common schools, normal schools, and universities.

Fast forward to the 1990’s when “venture philanthropy” emerged, shifting the social mission of philanthropy to focus on neoliberal structural adjustment programs, which dictate austerity measures in the service of elite financial investors. Since philanthropic foundations are established and controlled by billionaires whose wealth and power is derived from human exploitation and environmental degradation, this modern pursuit should not come as a surprise. The personal interests of this opulent minority are directly tied to today’s financialized economy as investors and as members of politically influential networks that oversee global financial markets. As such, in the 21st century venture philanthropists have focused their efforts on constructing new financial markets through what is referred to as “mission investing,” “social impact investing,” or just “impact investing.” Impact investing is a continuation of the sixty-year colonizing mission of the IMF, World Bank, World Trade Organization, “Troika” and the United States government; yet with a “friendlier,” but more duplicitous methodology.

To get a sense of the benevolent framing of this imperious global project, one only has to read its beneficiaries’ promotional materials, such as the Monitor Institute’s 2009 publication, “Investing for Social & Environmental Impact: A Design for Catalyzing an Emerging Industry:”

The New Yorker moving into her first home, the student in Tanzania studying under electric light, the small-business owner in Cambodia expanding her payroll—none of these people would recognize one another as co-participants in the same emerging industry. Neither, perhaps, would the commercial banker placing debt in the Acquisition Fund, the high-net-worth individuals investing in E+Co, or the German worker whose pension fund invested in microfinance through Blue Orchard. Yet these are all examples of the proliferation of activity occurring as a new industry of impact investing emerges. This industry, which involves making investments that generate social and environmental value as well as financial return, has the potential to complement philanthropy and government intervention as a potent force for addressing global challenges at scale.

The Monitor Institute claims to be “a social enterprise that surfaces and spreads best practices in public problem solving and pioneers next practices – breakthrough approaches to addressing social and environmental challenges.” Monitor is a subsidiary of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited, a leading multinational financial institution that provides audit, assurance, tax, consulting, advisory, actuarial, corporate finance, and legal services to “select Impact Investing and Venture Philanthropy’s Role in Sowing the Seeds of Financial Opportunity | Dissident Voice:

DeVos criticized teachers at D.C. school she visited — and they are not having it - The Washington Post

DeVos criticized teachers at D.C. school she visited — and they are not having it - The Washington Post:

DeVos criticized teachers at D.C. school she visited — and they are not having it

Newly minted Education Secretary Betsy DeVos had a hard time getting inside the District’s Jefferson Middle School Academy last week when protesters briefly blocked her from entering. But at the end of her visit — her first to a public school since taking office — she stood on Jefferson’s front steps and pronounced it “awesome.”

A few days later, she seemed less enamored. The teachers at Jefferson were sincere, genuine and dedicated, she said, they seemed to be in “receive mode.”

“They’re waiting to be told what they have to do, and that’s not going to bring success to an individual child,” DeVos told a columnist for the conservative online publication Townhall. “You have to have teachers who are empowered to facilitate great teaching.”

[Betsy DeVos being guarded by U.S. Marshals Service]

DeVos, who has no professional experience in public education, is an avowed proponent of voucher schools, charter schools, online schools and other alternatives to traditional public schools. Teachers across the country have been galled by what they see as her lack of faith in — and understanding of — the public schools that educate nearly nine in 10 of the nation’s children.

Jefferson educators found her comments about their work hard to take: On Friday evening, the school responded to DeVos via its Twitter account, taking exception to the education secretary’s characterization of Jefferson teachers.

“We’re about to take her to school,” the first of 11 rapid-fire tweets said.

The tweetstorm singled out teachers like Jessica Harris, who built Jefferson’s band program “from the ground up,” and Ashley Shepherd and Britany Locher, who not only teach students ranging from a first- to eighth-grade reading level, but also “maintain a positive classroom environment focused on rigorous content, humor, and love. They aren’t waiting to be told what to do.”

“JA teachers are not in a ‘receive mode,'” the tweets concluded. “Unless you mean we ‘receive’ students at a 2nd grade level and move them to an 8th grade level.”

[Influential conservatives: Trump, DeVos should dismantle Education Dept. and bring God into classrooms]

An Education Department spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Antwan Wilson, who accompanied DeVos on her visit to DeVos criticized teachers at D.C. school she visited — and they are not having it - The Washington Post:

Hitting Left Episode #3 with the Klonsky brothers and in-studio guest Bill Ayers. | Fred Klonsky

Hitting Left Episode #3 with the Klonsky brothers and in-studio guest Bill Ayers. | Fred Klonsky:

Hitting Left Episode #3 with the Klonsky brothers and in-studio guest Bill Ayers.

Audio Player

00:00

00:00

Use Up/Down Arrow keys to increase or decrease volume.

Share this:

Hitting Left Episode #3 with the Klonsky brothers and in-studio guest Bill Ayers. | Fred Klonsky: