Business Leaders Speak To New Yorkers About Common Core

Buried near the bottom of the NY Times article on the Common Core tests is this doozy:

New York’s bleak scores could prompt unease among elected officials who have staked their reputations on rising test scores. 

“For educators and parents who aren’t crazy about testing to begin with, one can understand why they feel like they’re being subjected to bait-and-switch,” said Frederick M. Hess, an education policy scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. 

On Thursday, a group of prominent New York business leaders, hoping to stave off the resistance to the Common Core standards, will release a letter urging New York policy makers to move forward with the new standards.

Will some of the prominent business criminals, er, leaders work for JP Morgan Chase?

Because the same NY Times that reported business leaders are worried that New Yorkers will balk at the Common Core after this test epiphany is reporting JP Morgan Chase is under criminal investigation in two states for fraudulent activity around subprime mortgages.

Maybe some of these business leaders work for Bank of America?

If so, that would be interesting because the New York Times reports that BoA is being targeted by both the SEC and the DOJ for defrauding investors by selling worthless or greatly overvalued investment products.

Perhaps Rupert Murdoch, owner of News Corporation will be one of those business leaders?

If so, he's due to explain before Parliament why he turned a blind eye to corruption and bribery in the newsrooms of his British papers even as his company faces lawsuits in the U.S. over hacking and a DOJ investigation into violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

We fetishize "business leaders" in this country.


But who cares what "business leaders" say about the Common Core?

Many of these people are criminals anyway.

Many of them stand to make money off education reform.

These people don't send their kids to any schools that will be using the Common Core.

It doesn't matter a whit what "business leaders" think.

Check that:

Maybe it does matter.

If "business leaders" think NY State should do something, then it behooves us to do the very opposite.

Just ask all of those Goldman Sachs customers robbed by the Vampire Squid of Wall Street.

NYSED Tries To Get Businesses On Board With Common Core Tests

John King looks for help for his Common Core test regime:

Amid complaints of disruption and angst in the classrooms, the state's major teachers union launched a petition drive asking parents to protest the use of a new set of standardized tests.

Now, state Education Commissioner John King has enlisted business leaders in what might be seen as a counteroffensive.

King urged a roomful of corporate decision-makers to support the tests and, more importantly, the new Common Core approach to learning embraced by New York and 46 other states.

"We need the entire community to support the standards," King said Thursday during a talk hosted by the Center for Economic Growth.

At the end of the hour-long discussion, CEG Executive Director Michael Tucker urged those in attendance to sign a pledge saying they would support the Common Core by writing letters to the media and generally talking up the concept.

Such efforts are the latest front in the battle for public opinion — and possibly legislative intervention — over the Common Core and its exams, which will also play a role in how teachers are evaluated.

They must really be feeling the pressure up their in Albany if King needs to sucker business guys into this p.r. campaign.

What makes him think anybody cares what these businessmen and businesswomen think about the tests?

Feds Threaten To Take Back $700 Million In RttT Money If NYC Teachers Aren't Evaluated With Test Scores

Uh, huh - apparently the whole state loses it's Race to the Top money if NYC teachers do not agree to APPR.

Which seems patently unfair considering 99% of the other districts agreed to this piece of crap system.

But never let it be said that the oligarchs in power will not force their polices NO MATTER WHAT.

Who cares if the policies are unpiloted, untested and potentially harmful to students?

This is education reform, folks, and the oligarchs know best.

That's why some "business leaders" are urging Congress to reauthorize NCLB.

Because "business leaders" know what's best for this country and its people.

And haven't they brought so much good into the world already?

You know, like collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps and the housing bubble and the tech bubble and income inequality comparable to the Third World...

Just what condition would this country be in without it's "business leaders".

Probably healthy and happy.

I say, let NY lose its $700 million in RttT money.

That money can only be used to fire teachers, close schools, develop tests, and track data anyway.

And to win the $700 million in RttT money, NY State districts have had to pledge to spend over $2 billion on "reforms".

It seems to me losing RttT money would be one of the better things that could happen to this state.

And it also seems to me that ignoring, or better yet, mocking the "business leaders" who promote an education policy for the country is also one of the better things that could happen.

So thanks for sharing your thoughts on education, Bill - now whyn'tcha go back to working on that terrific Windows 8 system that everybody loves so much...

NY Times Performs P.R. Task For Steiner

This piece of puffery about NYSED commissioner David Steiner should not be read on a full stomach.

It's pretty glucose-heavy.

The gist I get is that Steiner - lover of the classics, quoter of of Shakespeare - is agonizing over the Cathie Black waiver matter.

Oh, please.

Steiner may play an educator on TV for the public but behind closed doors he is a Bloomberg/ed deform shill through and through.

He has been bought and sold and had a Bloomberg LP stamp on his forehead.

Anybody working in official education circles in New York these days has to have that stamp of approval.

And you can see it from how Steiner conducts his official duties.

What lover of the classics agrees to reduce good teaching to test scores and ELA curriculum to multiple choice test prep?

The Times piece says Steiner likes to weave the works Plato, Dante, Homer and Shakespeare into his emails.

How fantastic!

But what I see him weave into his efforts as NYSED commissioner is the works of Bloomberg, Gates, Rhee, Klein, Duncan, Broad, et al.

As such, I am certain his hero Dante will have a special circle in hell for Steiner where he can try and engage hungry special education students, fresh from Obama's food stamp cuts, on test prep.

In order to get out that special circle in hell?

He's got to have all of them improve on their tests, year after year, for eternity.

Why I Have Decided To Support Cathie Black For Chancellor

Everywhere I look - from the education blogs to the newspapers (except for the Murdoch Post, of course) to the City Council to the State Senate - I hear calls for Mayor Bloomberg to pull back the appointment of Hearst publisher Cathie Black to replace Joel Klein as New York City schools chancellor.

The rationale is that Ms. Black has no prior education experience, has never taught in schools or studied education issues, knows nothing of education policy matters and indeed, didn't even attend public schools herself (as Klein famously did) or send her own children to them.

That rationale is a good one and makes lots of sense. It assumes that the leader of the New York City public schools ought to be able to discuss education policy, curriculum, teaching matters and student issues as well as deal with the more managerial problems a chancellor faces, like budgeting, personnel, etc.

On the face of it, I agree with that rationale, and ordinarily I would be signing those CAN CATHIE BLACK petitions like everybody else.

Here is why I have decided not to:

No matter who the autocratic Bloomberg picks to be the new schools chancellor, the policies are going to be the same.

Cathie Black, Shirley Temple-Black, the members of Black Sabbath - it doesn't really matter who Bloomberg hires to run the school system so long as it is Bloomberg doing the hiring and calling the shots on policy.

Bloomberg has three more years to completely destroy the school system as it was constituted before he took over in 2002.

So far, he's done a pretty good job of that.

Four reorganizations, several different curriculum shifts (remember RAMP UP? Oh, those were the days!!!), "fair financing" of the school budgets so that it is now in the interest of individual schools to rid themselves of expensive veteran teachers for cheaper newbies, hundreds of schools closed over the past eight years (with 57 more to go this year), the creation of many new charter schools sited in traditional public school buildings, and the emphasis on data and test scores over anything else in education have made the system nearly unrecognizable from what it was before Bloomerg took control.

The old BOE is a distant memory, even for those of us who worked under that system.

These days, even the BOE headquarters building on Livingston Street has become emblematic of Bloomberg's New York - it was sold off to become condos.

None of this is to suggest that we should mourn for the passing of the old BOE. But if Bloomberg has brought anything to the schools system, it is destabilization, chaos and constant change. This is what Klein liked to call "creative destruction" and the rationale behind it was less to create something good than to destroy what they considered bad.

Bloomberg and Klein considered the old system bad. It wasn't market-friendly, it wasn't run with business sense and principles, it wasn't efficient and accountability-based.

At least that's how they saw it (and continue to see it.) So they spent eight years blowing everything up more than once in attempt to instill fear, "accountability" and efficiency into the system. Never mind that business principles and efficiency brought us the Tech Bubble of 2000, the Housing Bubble of 2007, and the financial crisis of 2008 - Klein and Bloomberg value ONLY a business and corporate mindset in running a school system, human beings be damned.

So in replacing Klein, Bloomberg has ALWAYS intended to continue with this agenda. And the agenda has been to remake the school system to look like a corporation - top-down management, "accountability" principles, punitive measures for those who aren't making the grade according to those prevailing accountability principles, employees who constantly fear downsizings and layoffs, and the breaking of the teachers union.

Indeed, with the help of President Obama's Race to the Top program that brought teacher evaluations tied to test scores and the ability to fire teachers after two consecutive years of "inefficiency" ratings based upon those test scores, Bloomberg's dream of breaking the union is almost complete.

One of his main goals as head of the schools has been to destabilize the teaching corps. and push expensive veteran teachers out and replace them with cheaper newbies. Fair financing of schools has made that the goal of principals as well, and now he is using the economic crisis that the state and city are facing as another opportunity to argue that "bad teachers" (i.e., expensive vets) have to go.

Doesn't matter if these vets are good teachers or not. In Bloomberg's eyes, ANY IDIOT can teach. Or at least he has plenty of people to choose from now that the economy is bad and people are dying for jobs. So he has plenty of cheaper alternatives to the expensive teaching corps. he has now. It is true that the current UFT contract protects teachers from layoffs, but the zeitgeist these days makes me think that job protections like tenure and seniority will either be soon gone completely or rendered meaningless by the new teacher evaluation law.

Layoffs are coming. Firings are coming. More school closings are coming. More charter schools are coming. More turf battles between charters and traditional public schools are coming. More chaos and destabilization of the system is coming. Thanks to Obama and RttT, more standardized tests in every subject at every level are coming. More top-down management and standardized curricula are coming.

It doesn't matter who Bloomberg chooses to replace Klein. This will be the policy. Sure, it would be nice to have someone with education experience to replace Klein, but does anyone really think that whomever Bloomberg chooses to replace Klein, even a so-called educator, wouldn't be on the same privatization policy page as Bloomberg and wouldn't carry out those same policies that Klein has carried out?

Yes, it would have been nice to have a more public process to fill the chancellor's position. But as Adam Lisberg points out in today's Daily News, the third term Bloomberg thinks he knows better than everybody else about governance. And after state lawmakers in Albany reauthorized mayoral control of the system without putting any real checks on the mayor's power, there is little that can be done to mitigate the damage Bloomberg wants to do to the system.

He has total control. The problem, then, is not Cathie Black or whoever inhabits the chancellor's chair. The problem is mayoral control.

So I say, let him have Cathie Black. She is the devil we know. Layoffs and downsizings are her specialty, so we know why Bloomberg brought her in. Klein was sour, but Black can do the downsizing with a smile. But every move she makes as chancellor, those opposed to Bloomberg's agenda can use her lack of education experience and knowledge to our advantage. Both the public and the usually compliant corporate media have been skeptical of her. We can use that skepticism against her when she makes her first moves to close schools and fire teachers, as will undoubtedly be done later in the school year. That may be the best way to push back against the union-busting Bloombergian agenda as well as put a check on some of the more chaotic destabilizing efforts of Bloomberg and the school privatizers.

It's not much, I know. And that's because the problem is not Cathie Black or indeed, Joel Klein. The problem is Michael Bloomberg.

So long as he has autocratic control of the system, he can pretty much do whatever he wants. Sure, he has had to delay some moves - the UFT won a temporary battle on the school closures. But he mostly gets his way on everything eventually. And whether he gets Cathie Black or is forced to pick some "educator" because the state denies Black a waiver, you can be sure he will STILL try and get his way on pushing his destabilization and privatization agenda.

With Cathie Black as head of the system, Bloomberg has very nakedly signaled his intentions to teachers, city residents, and state lawmakers. The final corporatization of the system is coming. That was going to happen anyway, no matter who he chose. But now that it is out in the open, we can call his CHILDREN FIRST reforms exactly what they are - PRIVATIZATION FIRST.

And we can work to undermine mayoral control by pointing out how absurd it is that one man, one little autocratic egomaniac, gets to make all these decisions that affect a million children, their parents and the educators in the system, in secret, without any outside input

That ought to be the battle we fight next - to wrest total control of the school system from the mayor, any mayor, and return some semblance of democratic control and public accountability to the people who run the school system.

It's a long ways away to the next mayoral control reauthorization, but it is important to start that fight now.

The battle against Cathie Black, while well-meant and one that I am sympathetic to, even if it is victorious, will be a hollow one, just as the UFT court victory on schools closures was.

Bloomberg is STILL closing those schools.

And he can do that because he has complete control.

It is time to end that control.

NY Times: Chicago Charter Schools Run Deficits

President Accountability likes to point to both charter schools and the city of Chicago as the future for public education.

If that is so, it's going to be a future plagued with financial problems, financial improprieties, debt and scandal:

Even as the Obama administration promotes charter schools as a way to help raise the academic performance of the nation’s students, half of Chicago’s charter schools have been running deficits in recent years, an analysis of financial and budget documents shows, calling into question their financial viability.

On Monday, Chicago Public Schools released a bare-bones budget that included a cut of about 6 percent in per-pupil financing for charter schools — to $5,771 from $6,117 per pupil for elementary school students and to $7,213 from $7,647 per pupil for high school students. The cuts are a result of shrinking tax revenue and lagging support from the strapped state government. The city’s 71 charter schools, which enrolled 33,000 students last year and expect to enroll another 10,000 in the 2010-11 school year, stand to lose $15 million under the cuts.

It is difficult to compare the cuts with those that are being made at traditional schools because those schools do not receive money on a per-pupil basis, but district officials said they tried to make the amount of cuts comparable to those being made at traditional schools.

As a result, charters will become more dependent on private donors to provide the extras — more counselors, smaller classes, longer school days and up-to-date technology — that charter operators say set their schools apart from traditional public schools.

But even though Chicago’s charter schools brought in $21 million in private money from foundations, corporations and wealthy individuals in 2007 — the last year for which complete information is available — half have run an average of $700,000 in deficits in recent years, with some of the shortfalls reaching $4 million, according to an analysis of Chicago Public Schools data by Catalyst Chicago, an independent magazine on urban education.

The data showed that two-thirds of the schools could not cover core expenses, like salaries, facilities and overhead, without private money. A third needed private money to fill more than 20 percent of their budgets. A recent study by Ball State University found that Chicago’s charter schools depend far more on private financing than those in other big cities, including Boston, Miami and New York.

Robert Runcie, chief administrative officer for Chicago Public Schools, said the district needed to take a “serious look” at the fiscal health of charters and was developing a system for stricter oversight. Four Chicago charters have been shut down since the 1990s largely because of financial problems.

Charters DO need stricter oversight.

But President Accountability and Secretary Arne say if states try and "restrict innovation" at charters or regulate them unduly, they will risk losing federal education funds:

President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan, a former Chicago schools chief, view charter schools as a way to spur innovation in public school systems that they say are too resistant to change. States that do not allow charters or restrict their replication jeopardize their chance to receive federal financing, Mr. Duncan said last year. “We want real autonomy for charters,” he said.

And "real autonomy" of course means little to no oversight,

Which for many charters means financial problems and/or financial improprieties by management.

The Charter School Scandals blog does a great job of collecting stories about all the charters plagued with financial problems, financial improprieties and other concerns.

Here are some I have chronicled here in the last few months:

Politically Connected, Scandal-Plagued NYC Charter Fires Teachers For Union Activity

Charter School Operates As Nightclub on Weekends

13 Philadelphia Charter Schools Cited For Excessive Board Salaries, Rampant Rents and Conflicts of Interest

Charter Schools Connected To Malcolm Smith, Michael Bloomberg Get Perks For Their Schools

And let's not forget the NY Times article from back in April that took a look at how for-profit operator Imagine Schools runs things:

Regulators in some states have found that Imagine has elbowed the charter holders out of virtually all school decision making — hiring and firing principals and staff members, controlling and profiting from school real estate, and retaining fees under contracts that often guarantee Imagine’s management in perpetuity.

The arrangements, they say, allow Imagine to use public money with little oversight. “Under either charter law or traditional nonprofit law, there really is no way an entity should end up on both sides of business transactions,” said Marc Dean Millot, publisher of the report K-12 Leads and a former president of the National Charter Schools Alliance, a trade association, now defunct, for the charter school movement.

“Imagine works to dominate the board of the charter holder, and then it does a deal with the board it dominates — and that cannot be an arm’s length transaction,” he said.

And just does Imagine Schools profit from these arrangements?

Imagine is a private for-profit company that calls itself non-profit and runs schools with public money - making millions in the process.

Imagine charges exorbitant rates to its schools for "rent" - according to the Times article, a charter school in Nevada called 100 Academy pays 40% of the $3.6 million it receives from the state to Imagine Schools for rent.

That's an awful lot of rent money, isn't it?

In addition, they charge a fee to "manage" the school, leaving very little left over to actual run the school and educate the children.

How's that for leaving no for-profit charter school management company behind?

Gee - I wish I could declare myself a "non-profit," then run my business for-profit with little to no outside oversight.

Then I could charge rent and a management fee and take over 60% of the money I am given by the state to run my school just for rent and fees!

Gotta love education reform!

And as the NY Times reported earlier this week, financial scandal and impropriety is not just relegated to the charter school world. Almost all of the reforms being pushed by President Accountability and Secretary Arne are encouraging lots of and lots of problems.

Take the "school turnaround" program:

With the Obama administration pouring billions into its nationwide campaign to overhaul failing schools, dozens of companies with little or no experience are portraying themselves as school-turnaround experts as they compete for the money.

A husband-and-wife team that has specialized in teaching communication skills but never led a single school overhaul is seeking contracts in Ohio and Virginia. A corporation that has run into trouble with parents or the authorities in several states in its charter school management business has now opened a school-turnaround subsidiary. Other companies seeking federal money include offshoots of textbook conglomerates and classroom technology vendors.

Many of the new companies seem unprepared for the challenge of making over a public school, yet neither the federal government nor many state governments are organized to offer effective oversight, said Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy, a nonprofit group in Washington.

“Many of these companies clearly just smell the money,” Mr. Jennings said.

Rudy Crew, a former New York City schools chancellor who has formed his own consulting company, said he was astonished to see so many untested groups peddling strategies to improve schools.

“This is like the aftermath of the Civil War, with all the carpetbaggers and charlatans,” Dr. Crew said.

Indeed, the education reform movement is littered with carpetbaggers and charlatans smelling profit and little to no oversight or accountability from the people running things in Washington or the states.

Given all the problems we have ALREADY seen with charter schools and education reform groups, shouldn't the federal government encourage STRICTER oversight and accountability of them then we currently have?

The answer is of course yes - if the government officials running things actually cared about the problems.

But they do not.

Their agenda is to close traditional public schools, bust the unions, open the public school system to for-profit companies, and deprofessionalize the teacher corps into a bunch of McTeachers who work for five years before moving on to their "real jobs" (i.e., just like at Teach for America.)

They are succeeding.

But sooner or later, they will be exposed for being the carpetbaggers, charlatans and criminals they are.

That includes many (though not all) of the charter operators and education reform groups.

But it also means Bloomberg, Klein, Obama, Duncan, Rhee, Gates, et al.

You can lie and cheat and deceive for a long time and get away with it.

But eventually people catch on.

It happened to Bush after Katrina.

It will happen to them too.

Unfortunately there won't be much left of the public school system by then.

And that, of course, is ultimately the point.

Applying Financial "Innovations" To Public Education

Via Barry Ritholtz at The Big Picture, here are six lessons from the collapse of the economy in 2008-2009 that Economics Nobel Laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz says we haven't learned yet:

1. Markets are not self-correcting, and without adequate regulation, they are prone to excess.

2. There are many reasons for market failures. Too-big-to-fail financial institutions had perverse incentives: Privatized gains, socialized losses.

3. When information is imperfect, markets often do not work well – and information imperfections are central in finance.

4. Keynesian policies do work. Countries, like Australia, that implemented large, well-designed stimulus programs early emerged from the crisis faster

5. There is more to monetary policy than just fighting inflation. Excessive focus on inflation meant that some central banks ignored what was happening to their financial markets. The costs of mild inflation are miniscule compared to the costs imposed on economies when central banks allow asset bubbles to grow unchecked.

6. Not all innovation leads to a more efficient and productive economy – let alone a better society. Private incentives matter, and if they are not properly aligned, the result can be excessive risk taking, excessively shortsighted behavior, and distorted innovation.

Notice number six on the list. Stiglitz elaborates:

While the benefits of many of the financial-engineering innovations of recent years are hard to prove, let alone quantify, the costs associated with them - both economic and social - are apparent and enormous.

Indeed, financial engineering did not create products that would help ordinary citizens manage the simple risk of home ownership - with the consequence that millions have lost their homes, and millions more are likely to do so. Instead, innovation was directed at perfecting the exploitation of those who are less educated, and at circumventing the regulations and accounting standards that were designed to make markets more efficient and stable. As a result, financial markets, which are supposed to manage risk and allocate capital efficiently, created risk and misallocated wildly.

President Obama and Mayor Bloomberg are helping to bring the kinds of financial "innovations" Stiglitz is talking about above to public education.

Neo-liberals like Obama and Bloomberg privilege the "free-market" and want to bring "free-market principles" like merit pay, standardized test tracking and the Race to the Top zero sum competition for funds (12 states win, 48 states lose) to public education in order to shake things up and force what they see as entrenched schools and educators to innovate.

But as Stiglitz notes about the financial markets, if unregulated, they bring short-sighted action and greedy behavior that is harmful to individuals and society as a whole. That's the kind of action we're seeing in public education these days as cities and states try all kinds of unproven innovations, like closing whole swaths of schools in cities like Chicago and New York and reopening them as charter schools.

Mayor Bloomberg has closed over 50 public schools in the last three years. He says more closures are to come in the next four years of his third term. He closes these schools for low test scores and low graduation rates as measured by the Department of Education (some schools with lower scores and rates remain open, however, so the process is not very transparent.) President Obama likes that school closure policy and has institutionalized it as part of his Race to the Top zero sum/winner take all education funds competition.

Leaving aside how some of the most recently closed schools in New York City used to have higher test scores and higher graduation rates before hundreds of at-risk students from other schools were dumped on them, let's note that fear of closure will have all kinds of harmful effects on how schools and educators operate.

You can be sure this year's Regents exams will get extra special attention from the graders when grading time comes. You can also be sure that teachers will feel the pressure from assistant principals and principals. For the ELA Regents exam, essays that should be graded a "2" will get a "3" and perhaps even a "4" if a student is right under a 65 score for the test. With the stakes so high, grade inflation will be rife throughout the system. And merit pay creates the same kind of grade inflation/cheating environment that the school closure policy does, only on the individual level for teachers.

Public education needs to be a collaborative enterprise where teachers help each other and schools work together to educate children. But with the Obama/Bloomberg school closure policies, schools will compete to enroll students who are either at or above grade level while finagling to get at-risk students, ELL students, or support services students off their enrollment lists. Why should a school take a chance having test scores and graduation rates drop and have Mayor Bloomberg order them closed when they can simply exclude "problem" students (as so many of the charter schools do)? On the individual level, why should teachers take on "at-risk" students in their classrooms and risk low test scores when their pay is contingent upon the scores? Even worse, why should teachers take on at-risk students if the safety of their jobs is contingent upon scores, as both Obama and Bloomberg want to do by tying standardized test tracking to teacher evaluations?

As for the data being used to evaluate students and teachers, that too is suspect. Stiglitz notes that "When information is imperfect, markets often do not work well – and information imperfections are central in finance." Well, the same can be said for education. Test scores can be a part of the picture of how a student or a teacher is performing, but they are certainly not the whole part. And considering how easily manipulated the current battery of state tests are, I'm not sure they are even a part of the picture at all. Even Secretary of Education Arne Duncan admits that the tests as currently constructed are imperfect and not a terribly good measure of student or teacher performance. But he also says they're the best we have, so we have to use them. The data fetish itself is a troubling thing these days, but the fact that the data fetishists insist upon using the data even though they admit it is suspect is even more troubling.

Finally, paying students merit pay for test scores seems designed to perpetuate the Wall Street mentality that nothing counts as progress unless it goes up every quarter and pays you a bonus. And I think that's the idea behind all these hedge fund managers and financial wizards getting into the public education sphere. It's simply another revenue grab by the robber barons who already own this country, have already been bailed out by middle and working class taxpayers and make ridiculous amounts of money for the task of moving paper around at the nation's most expensive casino on Wall Street.

You would think that after the hedge fund managers and financial wizards created the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, they would be shunned from public policy discussions instead of being given a seat at the education reform discussion table and given another taxpayer-provided punch bowl to devour.

Bringing Financial Industry Innovation To Public Education

So many education "reformers" these days come straight from the financial world - billionaire media tycoons like Mayor Moneybags, billionaire monopolists like Bill Gates, billionaire philanthropists like Eli Broad, and all those hedge fund managers/education reformers we met in last week's Style section of the Times.

They like to talk about how important it is we bring MBA management techniques, business innovation, deregulation and of course competition to public education.

You see, collaboration is Communist and the old way of managing schools is so 19th century and what we need to do is bring some of that brash thinking and knack for innovation the boys in finance have brought to the financial markets and the banks.

It sounds great, of course, until you realize that the brash thinking and knack for innovation the boys in finance have brought to the financial markets and the banks also brought us the Tech Bubble, the Enron scandal, the Housing Bubble, the 2008 financial collapse, the bailouts, and crooks like Bernie Madoff.

I'm a public school educator, so I know I'm suspect when I make snide and probably Marxist remarks about the disasters the financial geniuses have caused in the past twenty years.

But what about when Paul Volker, former head of the Federal Reserve and the man widely credited with bringing the U.S. out of the 70's/80's stagflation mess, says it:

Speaking at the Wall Street Journal's Future of Finance Initiative yesterday, former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker looked to finance's recent past and saw little to like, noting that he has yet to see any evidence that financial market innovations have provided any benefit to the economy.

Apparently, Volcker thinks the industry reached a peak when it invented the ATM and, given what's happened over the last year or two, it's hard to disagree with that view.

Yeah, the list of innovations emanating from the financial industry that Volker likes has one item on it - the ATM machine.

All the other innovations he says not only did not provide any benefit to the economy, they "took us right to the brink of disaster."

If the best thinking of the MBA class and the financial industry types brought us the Tech Bubble, the Enron scandal, the Housing Bubble, the 2008 financial collapse, the bailouts, Bernie Madoff, and "right to the brink of disaster," maybe, just maybe, we want to take the innovations they offer for public education with a healthy shaker of salt too.

Pretty Please With TARP Funds On Top

Larry Summers, the director of the White House’s National Economic Council and President Obama's top economic adviser, appeared on ABC's This Week to explain how the administration plans to get banks lending money again.

They're going to beg them by saying "Please lend money, please, please, please!!!!"

Mr. Summers, Secretary of the Treasury at the end of the Clinton administration, said that “it doesn’t cost anything to encourage banks, as the president will be doing, to meet their responsibilities and expand the flow of credit to small business.” He said the president will remind the bankers of what the federal government did to bail out banks when they were in trouble, “that no major bank would be intact, would be in a position to pay bonuses, if that extraordinary support had not been provided.”

The president, he said, “will be talking with them about what they can do to support enhanced lending to customers across the country.”

”We were there for them and the banks need to do everything they can to be sure they’re there for customers across this country,” he said.

Seriously - that's the plan. We were there for you banksters, now you better be there for us by opening up the coffers and lending to consumers and small businesses again.

Gee, that should work.

Never mind that this administration has done everything in it's power to make sure that the banksters (those politically connected ones, at any rate) got 100 cents to the dollar "owed" to them by AIG, that they have bent over backwards to keep Ben Bernanke printing the money presses at the Federal Reserve night and day to provide liquidity for the big banks, that they have kept "Too Big To Fail" institutions like Citigroup and Bank of America and AIG on life support after they speculated on high risk investments, the best they can do to get banks lending again is to beg them.

No wonder the financial institution people treat Obama with contempt and scorn. If that's the best he can do to them after near financial collapse and trillion dollar bailouts last year, then he deserves to be treated with contempt and scorn.

Now compare how Obama and his merry men treat incompetent banksters and failed financial institutions with how they treat schools they declare "failing" and teachers they say are "bad."

What we hear from President Accountability and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is that failing schools need to be closed, never mind that the causes behind these supposed "failures" may have nothing to do with how good the teachers and administrators in those schools are but stem from larger socio-economic problems like entrenched generational poverty and family dysfunctions like alcoholism and addiction or more mundane problems like large class sizes and few resources.

We also hear from Obama and Duncan how bad teachers need to be fired, never mind that these teachers may have been doing just fine a few years ago before their schools were handed hundreds of "at risk" students with low test scores and troubling graduation rates from other schools that have been closed.

I guess Obama and company suffer from the same fetish so many in America suffer from - that is, the businessman fetish. No matter what happens, the businessman must always be listened to, the businessman always knows best, because he's a, you know, businessman.

Years ago, I used to listen to WFAN, the all-talk radio station, and at least a dozen times a day some know-nothing loud mouth from Jersey or Queens would call to say this is what the Yankees or Mets need to do with the line-up or the pitching staff or whatever. And when the host would say, "What you're saying is stupid and idiotic and makes no practical sense," the callers would say "Hey, I know what I'm talking about. I'm a businessman who runs a __________ business and what works in my place will work for the Yankees. What do you know, you're just a radio DJ!!! I'm a businessman!!!!"

So now some of these same idiots who call sports radio to offer their "business expertise" to their favorite teams are now telling professional educators with actual experience with actual students (usually about 340 a year) in an actual classroom how to educate children. And the rest of us, rather than pointing out the dismal record of business and businessmen in general the past 15 years (think Tech Bubble, think Enron, think Housing Bubble, think 2008 financial collapse, think Bernie Madoff) and noting how they ought to clean up their own messes before creating more of them in other areas of the public sphere, allow these know-nothing loud mouths and their allies in government and the press to call public education "failed."

And of course so much of it starts at the top, where President Accountability lectures teachers about what a bad job they're doing while he rewards the failed financial institutions and the incompetent and/or corrupt banksters who run them by handing them trillions and then begging them to lend some of it out.