Turns Out Brian Williams Misremembers A Lot Of Things

I'm sure you've heard by now how Brian Williams "misremembered" being in a helicopter that was forced down by enemy fire in Iraq in 2003.

It turns out, there's a lot more he misremembers:

The NBC news anchor, who apologized Wednesday for telling a false story about taking fire in a helicopter while covering Iraq, is being called out for possibly lying about his experience covering Hurricane Katrina, according to a report.

Williams claimed to have gotten dysentery from drinking flood water and seeing dead bodies float past his hotel in the New Orleans French Quarter while covering Hurricane Katrina.

However the The New Orleans Advocate noted that the French Quarter was not flooded and quoted a local health expert who did not recall anyone getting such a stomach ailment.

Williams recalled his bout with the bug in interview with Tom Brokaw last year, when he said: “I accidentally ingested some of the floodwater. I became very sick with dysentery."

The Advocate said a public health official never heard of people getting things like dysentery after the storm.

“I don’t recall a single, solitary case of gastroenteritis during Katrina or in the whole month afterward,” Dr. Brobson Lutz told The Advocate.

“I don’t know anybody that’s tried that [drinking flood water] to see, but my dogs drank it, and they didn’t have any problems.”

Williams said also during an interview in 2006 that he saw dead bodies float past his window in the French Quarter.

“When you look out of your hotel window in the French Quarter and watch a man float by face down, when you see bodies that you last saw in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, and swore to yourself that you would never see in your country,” Williams said in 2006.

But the French Quarter, the original high ground of New Orleans, was not impacted by the floodwaters that overwhelmed the vast majority of the city, The Advocate said.

He also said in his Brokaw interview: “Our hotel was overrun with gangs, I was rescued in the stairwell of a five-star hotel in New Orleans by a young police officer. We are friends to this day.”

NBC News brass don't want to hold Williams accountable, but former Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw does:

“Brokaw wants Williams’ head on a platter,” an NBC source said. “He is making a lot of noise at NBC that a lesser journalist or producer would have been immediately fired or suspended for a false report.”

Brokaw's own credibility is in question here, since he apparently knew the Iraq helicopter tale was a fable:

Brokaw, 74, was still the “Nightly News” anchor when Williams came back from his Iraq expedition — and an insider said he knew the story Williams later spouted was bunk.

“Tom Brokaw and [former NBC News President] Steve Capus knew this was a false story for a long time and have been extremely uncomfortable with it,” the source said.

NBC News execs had counseled him to stop telling the tale.

NBC put a guy who made shit up about his Iraq war reporting experience into the Nightly News anchor chair - heckuva job NBC!

While the elites at NBC are trying to save Williams' lying ass, some of the plebes feel differently:

NBC brass hasn’t been talking to lower-level employees about the situation, leaving people in a panic, the insider said.

“NBC bosses don’t understand how serious this is. Nobody in a leadership position is talking to the troops. Nobody has addressed it,” the source said.

One longtime NBC employee who has worked with Williams on several occasions had a few dirty words to describe the celebrated anchor, calling him a “real pompous piece of s–t.”

“He’s an a–hole,” he fumed. “He’s not a journalist. He’s a reader.

“Oh, the fireworks that are going off inside,” he said. “It’s embarrassing. He’s the face on NBC. He’s a liar.

“Everyone knew it.”

Can't wait for the next NBC Education Nation where the pompous Williams asks directs questions to Michelle Rhee about the importance of holding teachers accountable for their performance and behavior.

Same goes for Brokaw, who has been known to pontificate about teachers unions allowing poor performing teachers to remain in their profession.

Brokaw knew Williams was full of shit, NBC News brass knew he was full of shit, Williams himself knew he was full of shit - and yet, there was Brian Williams, hosting the NBC Nightly News last night.

Ah, yes - accountability is only for the little people.

Stupid Shit Education Reformers Say: Education Nation Edition

There are two ways to improve our schools. Hire better people and improve the ones we have. Everything else is just noise. #EducationNation
— Todd (@ToddWhitaker) October 6, 2013

Gotta love the motivational speaker/education professor/car salesman Todd Whitaker weighing in on complex issues like public education, poverty and teaching with so pithy and ignorant a tweet.

But what else can you expect from a guy who makes his living selling snake oil?

This is the kind of bullshit you get from Education Nation and NBC, indeed, from the corporate-owned media as a whole, when they cover education.

It gives a forum for this kind of stuff.

My response:

No, Todd, dealing with issues affecting students, schools, teachers and learning is not just "noise."

It's called trying to find solutions to complex issues in an increasingly complex, rapidly changing (some would say "devolving") world.

That you think this sort of thing is nothing but "noise"shows nothing but your own ignorance and inability to see beyond your corporate reform ideology.

Poverty matters.

What is happening outside schools in the culture at large, the nation at large, the world at large matters.

These things affect what happens in schools.

One more thing to say about this, Todd:

Education Nation Should Invite Carrianne Howard To Talk About How Wonderful Lloyd Blankfein's Art Institutes Are

Raging Horse does an excellent job of pointing out who NBC should have invited for their corporate education reform-slanted Education Nation propaganda-fest this year.

Alas, NBC isn't much interested in having anybody on that stage who won't carry water for the corporate education reform agenda, so they only invited deformers like Michael Bloomberg, Jeb Bush, Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee, et al. to this year's Education Nation.

Even Diane Ravitch was only invited to sit in the audience, an outrageous insult to not only Ravitch but to every teacher in this country who has been slammed and smeared by corporate reforms like Klein, Rhee, et al.

But of all the corporate education reform-friendly guests NBC did invite, I find Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein the most outrageous.

You see, Goldman Sachs, in addition to being the most evil corporate entity on the planet, owns 41% of the parent company of the notorious for-profit swindle college, the Art Institutes.

Bloomberg News published a devastating expose of the Art Institutes and Goldman Sachs back in 2010 that found degrees from the Art Institutes essentially worthless, debt levels incurred by students at the schools extremely high.

They use the story of Carrianne Howard, a young woman who graduated from the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale and now makes her living as a stripper, to show just what a scam the school is (that's Howard pictured above, with her Art Institute diploma):

Carrianne Howard dreamed of designing video games, so she enrolled in a program at the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale, a for-profit college part-owned by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Her bachelor’s degree in game art and design cost $70,000 in tuition and fees. After she graduated in December 2007, she found a job that paid $12 an hour recruiting employees for video game companies. She lost that job a year later when her department was shuttered.

These days, Howard, 26, makes her living in a way that doesn’t require a college diploma: by stripping at the Lido Cabaret, a topless club in Cocoa Beach, Florida. “I didn’t know what else to do,” she says. “I’ve got a worthless degree. It’s like I didn’t attend school at all.”

...

Carrianne Howard, the Florida student, didn’t borrow for her education. Instead her parents paid roughly $70,000 in tuition bills. Her mother, an airline data analyst, and her father, a computer engineer, sold their California home and moved to Virginia after her father lost his job and her mother retired. They used money from the sale to pay for tuition, and her parents are now struggling financially, Howard and her mother say.

Howard grew up in Valencia, California, a suburb of Los Angeles, and became drawn to video gaming during high school. One afternoon in 2004, an Art Institute ad popped up on her PC.

“I was as excited as can be,” she says. “I thought it was a dream come true.”

She and her mother toured the Fort Lauderdale campus, a bright, modern three-story building flanked by reflecting pools and palm trees. Her tour guide “just made it sound really exciting and a lot of fun, like I was going to make hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Howard says.

EDMC schools train representatives to make “no promise, implication, or guarantee” about employment, Muller says.

A couple of years into her studies, Howard says she grew disenchanted. Some classes consisted largely of playing video games, she says. She wanted to drop out but her mother insisted she finish because the family had spent so much already. She graduated in December 2007; in March 2009 she lost her first job, at GameRecruiter, a Fort Lauderdale-based gaming industry employment agency where she was making $12 an hour. Marc Mencher, GameRecruiter’s president and CEO, says she was let go only because he closed down her entire department, and calls her “an exceptional performer.”

She may be struggling to find work in part because of inadequate preparation from the Art Institute’s gaming department, Mencher says.

“It’s a weak program because it’s understaffed,” says Mencher, who serves on the Art Institute’s national advisory board for gaming programs. “I personally feel the students aren’t getting their money’s worth.”

After Bloomberg Businessweek asked EDMC for comment, Mencher sent a follow-up e-mail, saying that although the Art Institute is “not perfect and they have issues like any organization,” it is “an excellent program built on input from respected industry professionals along with local employers.” It has an “outstanding placement” record for graduates, he said.
Lido Cabaret

Howard applied for dozens of jobs, not only in gaming but also in grocery stores and nursing homes, mostly for minimum wage, she says. In October 2009, Howard turned to adult entertainment by doing paid Web chats. In March she started dancing at Lido Cabaret, earning $400 to $1,000 a week, she says.

She now hopes to save enough to go back to college and get a business degree. As she considers returning to school, Howard also helps run an anti-Art Institute website, where she has collected more than 70 names in a petition to send to the U.S. Education Dept.

The private, nonprofit Florida Institute of Technology, where Howard would like to enroll, won’t accept any of her credits from EDMC, according to spokeswoman Karen Rhine, because the Art Institute doesn’t have the kind of accreditation the traditional college requires. In its school catalog and other documents, the Art Institute “does not imply or guarantee” that credits will transfer to other universities, says EDMC’s Muller.

At 1 a.m. on a recent weeknight, Howard finished a shift at Lido. “This is what I do,” she says. “When I’m in here, I try not to think about the Art Institute.”

NBC ought to add Carrianne Howard or any of the other students who graduated from Art Institutes with a worthless degree and tens of thousands in debt to talk up the school.

But instead they invite banker criminal Blankfein instead.

In the past, they have had the CEO and head criminal of the University of Phoenix at Education Nation.

This year, the executive VP from Apollo Group, the owner of the University of Phoenix, will be there.

So every year, NBC doesn't miss a trick to not only invite every corporate deformer they can think of to sell the corporate deform agenda, but there's always a for-profit college criminal shill on the panel as well.

But no Diane Ravitch, no Anthony Cody, no Karen Lewis, no Susan Ohanian, no Lois Weiner, no actual working teachers who don't carry the ed deform message

And no students from one of these for-profit scam schools like Art Institutes or University of Phoenix to tell the audience how much debt they carry as they work at Starbucks or Applebees or, like Carrianne Howard, a strip club.

NBC's Education Nation ought to come with a scammer alert on the bottom of the screen.

The entire "symposium" is nothing but propaganda for the corporate education deform movement and for the criminal for-profit school industry.

Education Nation Sponsors - A Rogue's Gallery Of Criminality And Corruption

NBC is a media conglomerate that used to be owned by the evil General Electric (a company that manages to straddle evil in quite a few ways, from making and profiting off armaments that kill people to making badly designed nuclear power plants to polluting the environment with impunity to exploiting its own labor all across the world to preying on low income minorities with $700 million in subprime loans, $218 million of which ended up in foreclosure.)

Now NBC is owned by Comcast, a company that is universally hated by consumers across the country and regularly ranks in the top five of the the list of "Most Despised" companies in America.  If you want to see just how bad a company Comcast is, check out the customer forums on Comcast's own site!  I have been a customer of all three major cable companies and I can say without a doubt that Comcast was by far, the worst of the three.  The bill consistently shifted around, they were always trying to stick me with charges for products or services that I never asked for, and the customer service was abysmal.  Then, when I ended my service and returned my cable box and paid my last bill, they claimed they never got the money and sent the last month's charges into collection.  Yeah, I have fonder memories of that time when my apartment building burned than I have as a Comcast customer.

So, let's cut to today.  NBC is running the third edition of its education reform show called Education Nation.  As has been usual with the other two editions of this nonsense, NBC has invited a corporate education reform friendly line-up of guests - people like Joel Klein, Geoffrey Canada and Michelle Rhee.  When they have invited parents or teachers to be part of the line-up, these have been parents and teachers who espouse corporate education reform values like firing hundreds of thousands of teachers, tying teacher evaluations to test scores, charter school expansion, online schools and the like.  This year, NBC is promoting the education reform movement movie "Won't Back Down," just as a couple of years ago they promoted another education reform movement movie, "Waiting for Superman."  And just as in the past, NBC's Education Nation tolerates no dissent from the corporate education reform narrative - Diane Ravitch and other noted opponents to the education reform agenda have not been invited to the show, though darling of the corporate reform movement Randi Weingarten is there to give her perspective on things.

Which perhaps makes sense, since the AFT is inexplicably one of the sponsors of this crap, as is the NEA.  Yes, you heard right, teachers - you're hard-earned dues money is going to help sponsor an NBC show that promotes the myth of the "bad teacher" and the sanctity of the standardized test score.  I suppose this is the unions' way of "staying relevant" in a time of anti-teacher, anti-union bashing, but frankly, both the AFT and the NEA would do better to put on their own "Debunking NBC's Education Nation Nonsense" show and invite real students, real parents, real teachers and real education leaders to tell their stories.  But that would take some actual ingenuity or desire at the unions to take on the education reform movement, and as we have seen over and over, that does not exist at either the AFT or the NEA.  They would rather have " a seat at the table" or some such nonsense rather than promote the values and principles their members hold dear - like smaller class size, a rich, diverse curriculum, and other progressive education values.

So I get why they wouldn't want to put on their own Education Nation to debunk NBC's corporate version.  But why the hell are they also sponsoring it?  Have you seen the list of corporate sponsors?  The line-up reads like a rogue's gallery of corporate criminality, nepotism and cronyism:

University of Phoenix
Gates Foundation (i.e. Microsoft/Monsanto)
Bezos Foundation (i.e., Amazon)
ExxonMobile
Citibank
Statefarm
Kelloggs Foundation

We could take a brief look at each of these criminal organizations and the harm they do to America and the world and then ask what would anybody who cares about kids, education or schools be doing watching an education show on a network once owned by one of the most evil companies in the world, now owned by one of the most despised, that is sponsored by these corporate criminals.  But you can do your own Google search and come up with the pollution caused by ExxonMobile, the horrible working conditions at Amazon warehouses, the horror Bill Gates is doing to Africa and Asia via GMO, and the predatory business practices of TARP-recipient Citibank.  Instead I am going to focus on the University of Phoenix, since this company purports to be an institution of higher learning, has been a corporate sponsor of Education Nation for all three years and has managed to get its president onto the Education Nation stage to pontificate about education issues.

Here is how NBC bills the University of Phoenix:

University of Phoenix is constantly innovating to help students balance education and life in a rapidly changing world. Through flexible schedules, challenging courses and interactive learning, students achieve personal and career aspirations without putting their lives on hold. As of May 31, 2011, 398,000 students were enrolled at University of Phoenix, the largest private university in North America.

All of that is just advertising jive.  The University of Phoenix is actually a for-profit "college" with the highest number of student loan defaults of any school in the country.  One out of every four students who attends this "college" defaults on his or her loan.  The graduation rate is also one of the lowest in the country (currently 9%, 5% for online students), and even when you do graduate with a University of Phoenix degree, you find out very quickly it's not worth the paper its printed on.

So why is University of Phoenix on the list of Education Nation sponsors?  Why was the president of this for-profit diploma mill on stage at Education Nation talking about education standards last year when his own company has none other than, "Can you hold a pen and sign for the loan, please?"

NBC News president Steve Capus has defended the presence of University of Phoenix as a sponsor, saying that the company is not shaping editorial content for Education Nation and has been the subject of some "tough news stories" on NBC News.

But as FAIR has pointed out, NBC has actually done more to promote University of Phoenix than scrutinize them. Ann Curry actually patted a University of Phoenix VP on the head on The Today Show at "Learning Plaza" last year and praised him for helping kids.  So much for the "tough NBC news stories" on University of Phoenix.  And in fact, NBC has partnered with the University of Phoenix to "donate" technology to classrooms that will show NBC "educational programs" while promoting the University of Phoenix and made the University of Phoenix it's lead sponsor in the "On-The-Road" segment of last year's Education Nation. Far from being a simple sponsor with no say over editorial content, it is clear from the prominent place the University of Phoenix has on the sponsor's list, the donor's list, and in the content of Eduction Nation that NBC and its parent company Comcast are quite comfortable selling a diploma mill with abysmal graduation rates and the highest defaults of any college in the land to its viewers.

What are we to make of a so-called education reform forum that promotes and partners with a "college" that has stolen hundreds of millions of dollars from taxpayers over the last decade in the form of defaulted loans, has saddled hundreds of thousands of students with tens of thousands of dollars in debt and continued to expand its business even as its graduation rates and loan default rates show that it should be shut down?

If NBC News was an actual "news" organization as opposed to some public relations wing of its parent corporation, the people at the network wouldn't be partnering with some shyster college like University of Phoenix and putting the president of said college on stage to talk about higher education standards.

No, if NBC News were an actual "news" organization, they would be exposing the University of Phoenix for the crap college it is, warning every American to stay as far away from it as possible, and asking law officials why the University of Phoenix president wasn't behind bars with Bernie Madoff.

But of course NBC News is not an actual "news" organization any more than Brian Williams or Matt Lauer are real newsmen (as opposed to corporate shills) and so we get the Education Nation crapola, hosted by the unctuous Williams, complete with corporate criminal sponsors and studio audience.

The good news out of all of this is, fewer people are watching TV these days, and of those, fewer still are watching NBC News shows, so who knows how many people are actually going to see this garbage.  Many Americans have woken up to the fact that what they see spewed on TV news programs these days is propaganda and lies.  They actually hold teachers and schools in much higher esteem than, say, news media personalities from NBC.

Still, it's really a big pain as an educators to have to push back against the lies and propaganda on something like NBC's Education Nation and it's certainly true that many of those lies and some of that propaganda has become conventional wisdom for Americans.

How could it be otherwise when all they ever hear about schools from hacks like Brian Williams is "Our schools are in crisis!"

NBC Uses Laugh-Added Measurements To Lay Off "Tonight Show" Employees

NBC has announced layoffs for two dozen "Tonight Show" employees and has reportedly slashed the salary of host Jay Leno by millions of dollars to avoid steeper staff cuts at the show.

The network, which is set to begin airing Education Nation in late September, a "seminar" of education reform that promotes, among other things, value-added measurements of teacher effectiveness based upon test scores for conducting education cutbacks and layoffs, has decided to use laugh-added measurements of the "Tonight Show" staff to see which members will be laid off first.

"Tonight Show" staff members deemed to be adding fewer laughs to the show this year as compared to last year will be let go first.

Previously employee seniority was used to conduct layoffs and cuts at the network, but a spokesman for Comcast Corp, the parent of NBC/Universal, said the cable company had added this "sophisticated tool" built by a cadre of geniuses at Microsoft, the Gates Foundation, and Monsanto to measure how many laughs each employee is adding to the broadcast and can now say with almost exact certitude which employees are the most valuable laugh-wise and which are the least valuable.

The laugh-added measurements have a median margin of error of 52%, a maximum margin of error so high even Carnac couldn't get them right, but Comcast Corp. believes this is the way to conduct employee cuts for the future and says other NBC shows should expect to see layoffs conducted this way too.

Despite high ratings for the just-aired Olympics, the network is hemorrhaging advertising dollars and expects to make cuts at every program on NBC.

The only NBC show Comcast is sparing from layoffs is the NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams.

One anonymous source at Comcast told the Associated Press, "We've used the laugh-added measurement tool on all our shows, including the Nightly News, and frankly, that show is the funniest thing on the network."

Tonight Show employees will be informed of their layoffs tomorrow when they return to work. NBC has decided to bring in former Washington D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee to conduct the layoffs and will tape each for airing during Education Nation next month.

Said the anonymous Comcast source, "Comcast thinks this is a teachable moment that can be used to show how laugh-added and value-added are excellent tools for seeing which employees are valuable and which aren't. And bringing in Michelle Rhee to do the layoffs - well, that was a no-brainer. She really gets off on this kind of thing...especially if somebody cries!"

NY Post Goes After Celebrity Charter School Teacher

The NY Post took a break from beating up on unionized New York City public school teachers at traditional public schools over the error-laden Teacher Data Reports to take aim at a famous charter school teacher working at a famous charter school run by an even more famous (or infamous) charter school operator/huckster:

She has appeared on “60 Minutes,” starred in the documentary “American Teacher” — and makes $125,000 at an unusual Washington Heights charter school.

But celebrity teacher Rhena Jasey, 32, scored a low 18 — on a scale of 0 to 100 — in the recently released Department of Education teacher ratings.

Jasey, a 32-year-old Harvard grad, works at The Equity Project, a publicly funded but privately run charter school that has garnered nationwide attention for its huge teacher salaries — $125,000 a year, plus performance bonuses up to $25,000.

That’s well above the DOE’s top salary to its most educated and veteran teachers — $100,049. But at The Equity Project, teachers don’t get tenure, and can be fired on the spot if they don’t measure up.

It’s a closely watched educational experiment.

“If you want to attract and retain talent, you have to pay for it,” founder and principal Zeke Vanderhoek, a Yale grad who was featured in The New York Times before his school opened and soon after, told “60 Minutes."

So how is Vanderhoek's charter school experiment going?

Not so well:

So far, results at the 480-student middle school have fallen short compared to other district schools, with 31 percent of TEP’s fifth-graders passing state tests.

And how is Vanderhoek, who dealt quite well with the positive press about his Equity Project in the past, dealing with the negative press now?

Not so well with that either:

Vanderhoek refused to speak to The Post, and screamed at a reporter who visited the Audubon Avenue school Friday.

He also would not discuss Jasey, saying in an e-mail, “I do not publicly comment on the specific data reports of any individual teacher.”

Ah, how the tables have turned for this charter school entrepreneur who never misses an opportunity to point out how "bad" the traditional public school system is and uses test score data to back up his point but doesn't want to defend his own performance or the performance of his teachers using that same data set.

In fact, Vanderhoek told the Post reporter through email that he rejects the Teacher Data Reports as reductionist:

Vanderhoek said his teachers are judged on student data and their work, classroom observations and other factors.

“We believe this comprehensive evaluation portfolio is a much more accurate picture of a teacher’s impact on student growth” than the DOE ratings, he said.

Hey, it's good to hear that Vanderhoek believes teachers ought to be judged by a criteria other than test scores.

Too bad he didn't tell that to "60 Minutes."

Too bad, too, that the fawning "60 Minutes" crew wasn't there the other day to capture Vanderhoek screaming at the Post reporter who had the audacity to ask Vanderhoek about his famed teacher's less-than-stellar Teacher Data Report.

As for Jasey, the famous teacher and Harvard grad, just the kind of person the education reformers want to bring into the public school system, a certified member of the "Best and Brightest," how did she handle the scrutiny over her TDR's?

Sigh - not so well:

Jasey’s score of 18 for fifth-grade math in 2009-10 had a range of error placing her between 4 and 32. She did not return messages seeking comment

Ah, yes - here is a certified member of the Best and Brightest, a woman who relished the spotlight in American Teacher, who now won't return comment to the press when questioned about her TDR.

Too bad the fawning "60 Minutes" crew wasn't there to capture that too.

What Jasey should have done is taken the reporter's call and told her what jive the Teacher Data Reports are, what jive basing a teacher's evaluation on student test scores is.

She has had a national platform in a movie narrated by Matt Damon, she works at a school with notoriety even outside the education world

And it's not like she's been shy about the spotlight before.

In fact, she seems to seek it out.

This was a teachable moment for us all, when a member of the certified Best and Brightest with a penchant for the spotlight could have put to rest the notion that value-added measurements of high stakes standardized tests correlate to teacher quality.

She could have used her own TDR as evidence.

Instead she chose to hide out in her apartment.

But that is often the way with these reformy folks, who love the spotlight and the glory when the press is fawning over them but just don't have the courage to answer the really tough questions when their own records are scrutinized.

The War On Teachers

Decided not to write a piece this morning because Accountable Talk said all that needed to be said in this post here.

Read it again and send it to your family and friends who are NOT teachers and might be susceptible to Oprah or Education Nation or any of the ed deform jive.

Particularly this part:

The war on teachers rages on. Frankly, I can't even believe it. Every day brings some new horror to teachers somewhere. If politicians had gone after Osama bin Laden with the same relentless vigor with which they pursue teachers, he'd have long ago been squatting in Guantanamo Bay.

When was it decided that teachers were the enemy? When did we become the bogey man and the scapegoats for every situation in the country? Obama wants to recruit 100,000 new teachers? Is he serious? Who in their right mind would want to become a teacher in this hostile environment?

Indeed.

Law School Scams - Enslaving An Entire Generation

Oh, no! What will all those Teach for America missionaries do after their three year stint in a South Bronx middle school ends!

IF there is ever a class in how to remain calm while trapped beneath $250,000 in loans, Michael Wallerstein ought to teach it.

Here he is, sitting one afternoon at a restaurant on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, a tall, sandy-haired, 27-year-old radiating a kind of surfer-dude serenity. His secret, if that’s the right word, is to pretty much ignore all the calls and letters that he receives every day from the dozen or so creditors now hounding him for cash.

“And I don’t open the e-mail alerts with my credit score,” he adds. “I can’t look at my credit score any more.”

Mr. Wallerstein, who can’t afford to pay down interest and thus watches the outstanding loan balance grow, is in roughly the same financial hell as people who bought more home than they could afford during the real estate boom. But creditors can’t foreclose on him because he didn’t spend the money on a house.

He spent it on a law degree. And from every angle, this now looks like a catastrophic investment.

Well, every angle except one: the view from law schools. To judge from data that law schools collect, and which is published in the closely parsed U.S. News and World Report annual rankings, the prospects of young doctors of jurisprudence are downright rosy.

In reality, and based on every other source of information, Mr. Wallerstein and a generation of J.D.’s face the grimmest job market in decades. Since 2008, some 15,000 attorney and legal-staff jobs at large firms have vanished, according to a Northwestern Law study. Associates have been laid off, partners nudged out the door and recruitment programs have been scaled back or eliminated.

And with corporations scrutinizing their legal expenses as never before, more entry-level legal work is now outsourced to contract temporary employees, both in the United States and in countries like India. It’s common to hear lawyers fret about the sort of tectonic shift that crushed the domestic steel industry decades ago.

Yeah, I dunno if Mr. Wallerstein is remaining calm among all that expanding debt or just living in some kind of denial. Nonetheless, this is a scary story. But it is one you wouldn't know about if you were just listening to the law schools around the country talk about their statistics:

Improbably enough, law schools have concluded that life for newly minted grads is getting sweeter, at least by one crucial measure. In 1997, when U.S. News first published a statistic called “graduates known to be employed nine months after graduation,” law schools reported an average employment rate of 84 percent. In the most recent U.S. News rankings, 93 percent of grads were working — nearly a 10-point jump.

In the Wonderland of these statistics, a remarkable number of law school grads are not just busy — they are raking it in. Many schools, even those that have failed to break into the U.S. News top 40, state that the median starting salary of graduates in the private sector is $160,000. That seems highly unlikely, given that Harvard and Yale, at the top of the pile, list the exact same figure.

How do law schools depict a feast amid so much famine?

“Enron-type accounting standards have become the norm,” says William Henderson of Indiana University, one of many exasperated law professors who are asking the American Bar Association to overhaul the way law schools assess themselves. “Every time I look at this data, I feel dirty.”

IT is an open secret, Professor Henderson and others say, that schools finesse survey information in dozens of ways. And the survey’s guidelines, which are established not by U.S. News but by the American Bar Association, in conjunction with an organization called the National Association for Law Placement, all but invite trimming.

A law grad, for instance, counts as “employed after nine months” even if he or she has a job that doesn’t require a law degree. Waiting tables at Applebee’s? You’re employed. Stocking aisles at Home Depot? You’re working, too.

Number-fudging games are endemic, professors and deans say, because the fortunes of law schools rise and fall on rankings, with reputations and huge sums of money hanging in the balance. You may think of law schools as training grounds for new lawyers, but that is just part of it.

They are also cash cows.

Tuition at even mediocre law schools can cost up to $43,000 a year. Those huge lecture-hall classes — remember “The Paper Chase”? — keep teaching costs down. There are no labs or expensive equipment to maintain. So much money flows into law schools that law professors are among the highest paid in academia, and law schools that are part of universities often subsidize the money-losing fields of higher education.

“If you’re a law school and you add 25 kids to your class, that’s a million dollars, and you don’t even have to hire another teacher,” says Allen Tanenbaum, a lawyer in Atlanta who led the American Bar Association’s commission on the impact of the economic crisis on the profession and legal needs. “That additional income goes straight to the bottom line.”

There were fewer complaints about fudging and subsidizing when legal jobs were plentiful. But student loans have always been the financial equivalent of chronic illnesses because there is no legal way to shake them. So the glut of diplomas, the dearth of jobs and those candy-coated employment statistics have now yielded a crop of furious young lawyers who say they mortgaged their future under false pretenses. You can sample their rage, and their admonitions, on what are known as law school scam blogs, with names like Shilling Me Softly, Subprime JD and Rose Colored Glasses.

“Avoid this overpriced sewer pit as if your life depended on it,” writes the anonymous author of the blog Third Tier Reality — a reference to the second-to-bottom tier of the U.S. News rankings — in a typically scatological review. “Unless, of course, you think that you will be better off with $110k-$190k in NON-DISCHARGEABLE debt for a degree that qualifies you to wait tables at the Battery Park Bar and Lounge.”

Ah, yes, our finest universities and halls of academia lying about statistics and data in order to keep raking in the big bucks - why that tradition is as hallowed and American as Apple Pie, Baseball and Wall Street.

Unfortunately many students do not seem to know that the law schools are lying about the job prospects:

But so far, the warnings have been unheeded. Job openings for lawyers have plunged, but law schools are not dialing back enrollment. About 43,000 J.D.’s were handed out in 2009, 11 percent more than a decade earlier, and the number of law schools keeps rising — nine new ones in the last 10 years, and five more seeking approval to open in the future.

Apparently, there is no shortage of 22-year-olds who think that law school is the perfect place to wait out a lousy economy and the gasoline that fuels this system — federally backed student loans — is still widely available. But the legal market has always been obsessed with academic credentials, and today, few students except those with strong grade-point averages at top national and regional schools can expect a come-hither from a deep-pocketed firm. Nearly everyone else is in for a struggle. Which is why many law school professors privately are appalled by what they describe as a huge and continuing transfer of wealth, from students short on cash to richly salaried academics. Or perhaps this is more like a game of three-card monte, with law schools flipping the aces and a long line of eager players, most wagering borrowed cash, in a contest that few of them can win.

And all those losers can remain cash-poor for a long time. “I think the student loans that kids leave law school with are more scandalous than payday loans,” says Andrew Morriss, a law professor at the University of Alabama. “And because it’s so easy to get a student loan, law school tuition has grossly outpaced the rate of inflation for the last 20 years. It’s now astonishingly high.”

Like everything else about the law, however, the full picture here is complicated. Independent surveys find that most law students would enroll even if they knew that only a tiny number of them would wind up with six-figure salaries. Nearly all of them, it seems, are convinced that they’re going to win the ring toss at this carnival and bring home the stuffed bear.

Law schools teach ethics, but do not practice them themselves. If they did, they would be open and honest about job prospects. Right now, they are engaging in the same kinds of practices the GAO was nailing for-profit colleges for over the summer in a Congressional investigation.

Here is how duplicitous these universities can be:

Even students with open eyes, though, will have a hard time sleuthing through the U.S. News rankings. They are based entirely on unaudited surveys conducted by each law school, using questions devised by the American Bar Association and the National Association for Law Placement. Given the stakes and given that the figures are not double-checked by an impartial body, each school faces exactly the sort of potential conflict of interest lawyers are trained to howl about.

The surveys themselves have a built-in bias. As many deans acknowledge, the results are skewed because graduates with high-paying jobs are more likely to respond than people earning $9 an hour at Radio Shack. (Those who don’t respond are basically invisible, aside from reducing the overall response rate of the survey.)

Certain definitions in the surveys seem open to abuse. A person is employed after nine months, for instance, if he or she is working on Feb. 15. This is the most competitive category — it counts for about one-seventh of the U.S. News ranking — and in the upper echelons, it’s not unusual to see claims of 99 percent and, in a handful of cases, 100 percent employment rates at nine months.

A number of law schools hire their own graduates, some in hourly temp jobs that, as it turns out, coincide with the magical date. Last year, for instance, Georgetown Law sent an e-mail to alums who were “still seeking employment.” It announced three newly created jobs in admissions, paying $20 an hour. The jobs just happened to start on Feb. 1 and lasted six weeks.

A spokeswoman for the school said that none of these grads were counted as “employed” as a result of these hourly jobs. In a lengthy exchange of e-mails and calls, several different explanations were offered, the oddest of which came from Gihan Fernando, the assistant dean of career services. He said in an interview that Georgetown Law had “lost track” of two of the three alums, even though they were working at the very institution that was looking for them.

Georgetown Law School - not just a law school, but a Catholic law school. So not just supposed to teach ethics, also supposed to teach morals.

And here they are, caught in dishonest, duplicitous, immoral, and unethical behavior right in the pages of the New York Times.

Isn't that usually the kind of stuff you expect to read about for-profit schools like Kaplan University?

Indeed it is.

But the higher education system, like the K-12 system, is fast becoming nothing more than one big corporate scam.

In the case of higher education, they're fleecing gullible young people out of their money and enslaving them with unmanageable debt for life.

In the case of the K-12 corporatization of education, they're educating a generation of students unable to critical think and see through the corporate scams.

The sense of denial many students have - Sure, they're aren't many high paying jobs out there, but I'll get one - aids the higher education crooks in scamming people out of their money.

But the schools themselves - and the crooks running them - are most at fault for this mess.

Until people rise up in mass and say "Enough bullshit!", none of this will change.

In fact, it will get worse.

My Question For Obama At NBC's Education Nation

Matt Lauer will be interviewing Barack Obama as part of the Education Nation Summit sponsored by Microsoft, the Broad Foundation, the Gates Foundation, Walmart, General Electric, McGraw-Hill and a few other giant corporations that stand to make billions off education reform.

You can send in questions to ask Hopey/Changey via NBC.

I sent in the following:

You recently signed a $23 billion dollar teacher jobs/Medicaid aid bill. You insisted that $11.9 billion dollars be cut from food stamps in order to pay for the bill. When Rep. David Obey suggested some cuts to the data system provisions in Race to the Top, you threatened to veto the bill.

So the food stamp cuts went through. Beginning in 2014, a family of three will lose $521 in food stamps a year.

My question, Mr. President, is why do you think creating new standardized tests for every subject at every grade level and building data systems to track the scores from those tests and use them to close schools and fire teachers is more important than feeding hungry children?

There is not one untruth in that question I wrote above.

Not one.

And yet, Obama will pontificate on NBC, along with many of the other "experts," about how teachers are hurting children by refusing to give on tenure, seniority, merit pay, charter schools, etc.

Meanwhile Hopey/Changey took $521 out of the mouths of a family of three so he could keep his precious data systems.

And somehow, the press has never called him on this.

Not once.

What hypocrites.

What jive.

All of it.

Superman.

Education Nation.

Zuckerberg.

Oprah.

The ed reformers are not interested in real solutions to address the real problems we teachers deal with every day in the school systems across this nation.

Instead they pontificate about bad teachers and spend millions on p.r. to bust the unions.

Make no mistake - that is ALL this jive is about.

Break the last powerful union in the country.

Rahm Emanuel said about the autoworkers "Fuck the UAW!!!"

You can be sure they feel the same way about the AFT and the NEA as well.

Worst vote I ever cast was for Hopey/Changey.

Frankly, I list that as one of the biggest mistakes in my entire life.

I had a bad feeling about him from the beginning.

I even blogged about that over at NYC Educator's site.

But in the end, the specter of President Palin had me pull the lever for Hopey/Changey, even though I suspected his education programs would be bad.

But never in my wildest nightmares did I think they would be this bad.

After the election, when Repubs retake the House and Senate, very little business will get done in Washington.

There will be lots of gridlock and the GOP is vowing to stop any new spending bill.

There will be little-to-no working together between the parties.

But one piece of common ground they will work will be teacher bashing.

Obama is vowing to end teacher tenure.

John Kline the soon to be House Education Committee chair says that IS some change he can believe in.

You can be sure they will attempt some carrot/stick jive to end tenure.

Want Title 1 money?

Get the unions to agree to abolish tenure.

And if the unions do not agree, the p.r. machine will move into motion and get the word out that teachers hate poor children and want to take their school money from them.

Never mind that Obama has already taken their food stamp money to save his precious data tracking machinery.