Lightbulb moment. " Education Reform is the Best Stock on the Market"

http://dailycensored.com/2010/03/25/education-reform-is-the-best-stock-on-the-market/

Daily Censored
EDUCATION REFORM IS THE BEST STOCK ON THE MARKET
Written by Adam Armstrong Education Mar 25, 2010

By Guest Blogger George Thompson

Numerous corporations such as Microsoft and ETS (Education Testing Service) use philanthropy to influence education policies in such a way as to create demands for their products. To take but one example of how this works, consider how Pearson PLC, is expanding its current markets through the push for national standards. (http://www.corestandards.org/) After increasing profits by 46% at the height of the recession, based largely on its stake in the burgeoning school improvement industry, Pearson is now in a position to profit even more from “Obama’s push for common state standards in math and reading”, according to CEO, Marjorie Scardino. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704754604575094751085387736

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As mentioned in earlier, Pearson is only one of many high-stakes players in this game of “raising the bar” and “closing the gap” for an ever greater accountability which is to be extracted from public funding in the name of “school improvement”. What is more disconcerting is the extent to which we have allowed public education to be effectively controlled by the education improvement industry and the accountability measurement organizations. Readers of previous articles in Daily Censored have been made well aware of the complex web of partnerships between for-profit organizations and non-profits, non-governmental organizations, research agencies, think-tanks, front groups, foundations, mass media controllers and politicians. This network holds a mafia-like grip over the government production of education policy which can only be broken by popular demand for an education system that is entirely government owned and operated and one that is driven by the principle of equality rather than “targeted” funding. Until the general population is made aware of how school improvement and accountability that serves it are being used to subvert their power over education, it seems likely that policy will continue to be dominated by reform’s fundamentally anti-democratic agenda.

http://www.truth-out.org/121708R

Obama's Betrayal of Public Education?
Arne Duncan and the Corporate Model Of Schooling
Wednesday 17 December 2008
by: Henry A. Giroux and Kenneth Saltman, t r u t h o u t | Perspective

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Duncan, CEO of the Chicago Public Schools, presided over the implementation and expansion of an agenda that militarized and corporatized the third largest school system in the nation, one that is about 90 percent poor and nonwhite. Under Duncan, Chicago took the lead in creating public schools run as military academies, vastly expanded draconian student expulsions, instituted sweeping surveillance practices, advocated a growing police presence in the schools, arbitrarily shut down entire schools and fired entire school staffs. A recent report, "Education on Lockdown," claimed that partly under Duncan's leadership "Chicago Public Schools (CPS) has become infamous for its harsh zero tolerance policies. Although there is no verified positive impact on safety, these policies have resulted in tens of thousands of student suspensions and an exorbitant number of expulsions."<4> Duncan's neoliberal ideology is on full display in the various connections he has established with the ruling political and business elite in Chicago.<5> He led the Renaissance 2010 plan, which was created for Mayor Daley by the Commercial Club of Chicago - an organization representing the largest businesses in the city. The purpose of Renaissance 2010 was to increase the number of high quality schools that would be subject to new standards of accountability - a code word for legitimating more charter schools and high stakes testing in the guise of hard-nosed empiricism. Chicago's 2010 plan targets 15 percent of the city district's alleged underachieving schools in order to dismantle them and open 100 new experimental schools in areas slated for gentrification. Most of the new experimental schools have eliminated the teacher union. The Commercial Club hired corporate consulting firm A.T. Kearney to write Ren2010, which called for the closing of 100 public schools and the reopening of privatized charter schools, contract schools (more charters to circumvent state limits) and "performance" schools. Kearney's web site is unapologetic about its business-oriented notion of leadership, one that John Dewey thought should be avoided at all costs. It states, "Drawing on our program-management skills and our knowledge of best practices used across industries, we provided a private-sector perspective on how to address many of the complex issues that challenge other large urban education transformations."<6>

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/3/26/a_look_at_arne_duncans_vip

A Look at Arne Duncan’s VIP List of Requests at Chicago Schools and the Effects of his Expansion of Charter Schools in Chicago
When President Obama’s Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, was the head of Chicago’s Public Schools, his office kept a list of powerful, well-connected people who asked for help getting certain children into the city’s best public schools. The list—long kept confidential—was disclosed this week by the Chicago Tribune. We speak with the Chicago Tribune reporter who broke the story and with two Chicago organizers about Duncan and his aggressive plan to expand charter schools.

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PAULINE LIPMAN: Yes, good morning. I’m really glad that Azam has done this story, because it provides some evidence for what we’ve pretty much known on the ground all along. And as you said, I think that what it reveals is a bigger scandal.


The larger scandal is that Chicago has basically a two-tiered education system, with a handful of these selective enrollment magnet schools, or boutique schools, that have been set up under Renaissance 2010 in gentrifying and affluent neighborhoods, and then many disinvested neighborhood schools. So parents across the city are scrambling to try to get their kids into a few of these schools. So instead of creating quality schools in every neighborhood, what CPS has done is created this two-tier system and actually is closing down, as you said, neighborhood schools under Renaissance 2010 and replacing them with charter schools and a privatized education system, firing or laying off, I should say, certified teachers, dismantling locally elected school councils, and creating a market of public education in Chicago, turning schools over to private turnaround operators. And this is, in the bigger, bigger scandal, this is now the national agenda under the Obama administration for education.


JUAN GONZALEZ: And amazingly, Arne Duncan doesn’t have that much of a—he’s not an educator by trade, to speak of. Could you talk a little bit about his background?


PAULINE LIPMAN: Yeah, not only is he not an educator by trade, I mean, he was a functionary in the Daley administration. But because Chicago is under mayoral control of schools, which is another part of Obama’s and Duncan’s national agenda under the federal stimulus Race to the Top funds, because of that, what we have is exactly a school system that is led at the top by virtually no educators. There is only one educator in a high position. The board are all appointed by Daley. They are all bankers or corporate heads. The CEO of schools before Duncan, Paul Vallas, was in Daley’s budget office. The new CEO, Ron Huberman, ran the Chicago Transit Authority. So we have a school system that, as a whole, is led by corporate managers, not by educators.

Bill Gates, an avid supporter of charter schools, which are mostly not unionized, was invited to speak to the conference on Saturday.

Asked about the invitation, Weingarten said the federation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation don't need to agree on every issue in order to engage in dialogue about what needs to be done to fix America's schools.

"The real issue is we have to engage with people," she said.

The federation - one of the nation's two big teachers unions - has been praised by Gates Foundation staff and others for its willingness to try new approaches to old problems.

Union locals have partnered with several school districts to get major Gates grants from the foundation's teacher effectiveness project.

The Gates Foundation and several other major education-focused foundations have also invested in the federation's new fund for innovation that is giving grants for education reform efforts designed by teachers.

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http://www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=686§ion=Article
Editorial: 'Alan Greenspan II' Heads Education Department... Arne Duncan's Newspeak -- and Ayn Rand/'Free Market' Ideology -- Means Bullying States Into Forced School Closings, Massive Privatization

George N. Schmidt - April 15, 2009

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Not a bit. Arne Duncan believes what he says, and will do what he promises. He got away with it in Chicago largely because the corporate media was uncritical of Mayor Richard M. Daley's performance as chief of the schools and the fact that his "Board of Education" would rubber stamp every free market approach to the public schools, especially those designed to privatize as much of the school system as possible. During the more than seven years Arne Duncan served -- not as "Schools Superintendent" but as "Chief Executive Officer" -- at the top of Chicago's public schools system, the Chicago Board of Education would vote every month -- unanimously and without debate -- in favor of betwen 100 and 200 proposals from Arne Duncan every month. More than 2,000 per year. More than 10,000 in the seven years between July 2001 (when Duncan was appointed) and December 2008 (when Obama tapped Duncan to head the U.S. Department of Education). What most of the USA is about to learn is that Barack Obama's Secretary of Education is not simply not an educator, as George W. Bush's final education secretary (Margaret Spellings) was. Duncan doesn't even think about education. He views a school system as he viewed an investment portfolio during his days with Ariel Capital Management, the investment house at which he worked prior to his appointment as U.S. Secretary of Education by President Obama in December and his taking office in January 2009.

For more than a year, Duncan, the seven members of the Chicago Board of Education (all of whom are in business, not education) and his inner circle (especially the all-powerful Office of New Schools which leads the replacement of public schools under "Renaissance 2010") have been discussing Chicago schools as a "portfolio" -- the same as your "financial planner" would discuss your investments if you have enough money to have a financial planner and maintain investments in stock, bonds, and other so-called "instruments" or "products".

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Using this Orwellian jargon, straight out of his own business experience, Arne Duncan was systematically destroying public schools in Chicago and replacing them, for the most part, with unregulated quasi-private schools (charters and others).


And if that's what Barack Obama wants done now across the USA, it's why Arne Duncan is in power. One of Obama's earliest and most powerful supporters in politics has been John Rogers, Arne Duncan's high school buddy and head of Ariel Capital Management and several other investment institutions. If that approach is not what the USA wants for its public schools, people had better stop thinking that Arne Duncan is thinking like all the other teachers and school administrators in the USA and realize that Duncanspeak is not an aberration, but the dawn of a radical new era where the writings of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman will be much more important than the writings of John Dewey and traditional American public school advocates.

http://www.zcommunications.org/arne-duncan-and-neoliberal-racism-by-paul-street
Arne Duncan and Neoliberal Racism:
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By Paul Street
Wednesday, December 24, 2008

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The testing regime is also intimately related to an ongoing black and Latino graduation rate crisis <5> in Chicago's public schools. High-stakes testing creates a powerful school incentive to raise scores in the easiest possible way - by pushing low-scoring students out. Early in the Duncan era at CPS, an assistant principal of one inner-city Chicago high school told reporters that his school was "penalized for these kids. We want quality more than quantity. If that means removing dead weight, we will remove dead weight'" (Moore 2003). One frequent practice in Chicago high schools under Duncan has been to drop students from the school's roster for poor attendance and then refuse their request to be reenrolled. Another common method for eliminating "underachieving" students is simple expulsion (Orfield et al., 2004). Another major test-score booster is educational gentrification - the closing of neighborhood schools serving primarily poor and minority students and their re-opening as "new schools" with more privileged students recruited from upscale blocks and across the city (a topic to which I turn in greater detail below).

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The CPS under Vallas and Duncan has maintained "a variety of differentiated programs, schools, and instructional approaches" that reflect and deepen sharp divisions of race and class. As post-industrial "global Chicago" has increasingly seen its labor market bifurcated between privileged, higher-end knowledge workers tied to the world economy and an expanding mass of low-wage service workers (Sassen 2004), the city's public schools have provided one type of educational experience for children from the disproportionately white first group and another for children from the disproportionately black and Latino second group.

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The second and inferior category of "military and prison prep" schools and programs are disproportionately located in low-income black and Latino neighborhoods. They are characterized by constricted, monotonous, and deskilled teaching and learning methods, repressive "Zero Tolerance" discipline approaches that produce extreme levels of suspension and expulsion, a ubiquitous police-state presence (replete with metal detectors and drug-sniffing dogs), high teacher burnout and turnover, and the steering of students along a narrow "basic skills" track designed to place them in entry-level positions at the bottom of the city's occupational pyramid. There is little place in the city's black schools and its expanding number of remedial and vocational programs for "learning self-determination, collectivity, and critical analysis of the world and one's place in it, or self-control for ethical ends."

It all amounts to a "new form of tracking" in which "the academic track is more differentiated from the other tracks and more spatially separate than in the old comprehensive high school" (Lippman 2004, 42-57).

http://www.counterpunch.org/libby12292008.html
December 29, 2008

No Cheers for New Education Secretary
Arne Duncan's Dark Years in Chicago
By KENNETH LIBBY

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The reform proposed by the Democratic Party, echoed by Obama, and practiced for the last 8 years by Arne Duncan as CEO (yes, CEO) of Chicago Public Schools include: a neoliberal, market-based approach to improving the education system, including the outsourcing and privatizing of public schools; militarization; and a severely narrowed curriculum.

Duncan leaves his position in Chicago with quite a legacy. He used the punitive aspects of No Child Left Behind to close underperforming schools, mandate curricula, and fire entire school staffs based on standardized test scores. Working with the Commercial Club of Chicago, a group representing the city's wealthy businesses, Duncan headed a program called "Renaissance 2010," designed to close the most "underperforming" schools based strictly on test scores and open new charter schools in the same neighborhoods - neighborhoods also primed for gentrification. Some of Duncan's plans have been foiled by community advocacy groups, the only force willing to stand up against the collusion of government officials and corporate interests.

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The policies touted as educational "reform" by the New Democrats apply the same neoliberal theories responsible for NAFTA, the WTO, and GATT with the same results: the inequalities become greater while those in positions of power receive even greater rewards. A two-tired education system lurks in the distance, the result of neoliberal efforts to create equality. The gradual privatization and outsourcing of public schools represents a shift towards the voucher system, the ideal school system envisioned by Milton Friedman and present-day neoconservatives.

The dull, "research based" education models explicitly required by sanctions in NCLB, inflicted on America's poorest children, and peddled by private, for-profit companies are designed explicitly to raise test scores. The marginal gains accomplished in the so-called "turnaround" schools are the result of data manipulation and drilling students with the question-answer format used in high-stakes testing. This is far from genuine education and contributes to a curriculum void of civics, history, social studies, physical education, health education, and active community building. Most importantly, this kind of education treats our children as either young factory workers or future executives based almost exclusively on their access to quality education. The educational inequality helps ensure poor children learn to read simple instructions and compute basic math, skills suited for minimum-wage employment, while middle- and upper-class students learn the "21st Century Skills" desired by corporate America in private schools, the affluent suburbs, and exclusive charters operating within impoverished districts.