Supporting De Blasio On The Charter School Issue

Michael Fiorillo on the war Eva Moskowitz, Andrew Cuomo and the media launched against Bill de Blasio over the charter school issue:

Public school teachers, parents and students are in a tough position here. While De Blasio has not been as strong as people hoped - no surprise to many readers of this blog, I imagine - he nevertheless is making some efforts to right the grotesque inequities caused by charter schools, and can safely assumed to be under tremendous pressure by the local Overclass to allow privatization to continue.

Unless we get out into the streets to show that there is a large constituency willing to fight for the public schools, De Blasio will either give in completely or be destroyed. In either case, that could lead to the endgame coming upon us very soon.

Whatever his temporizing and shortcomings, we probably have no choice but to (critically) support him, get active and loud, and show that there is widespread opposition to the takeover of the schools.

I agree completely - sure it would have been nice to see de Blasio cancel all eight of Eva's charters and give the space to traditional public schools, but you can see from the uproar over de Blasio's cancellation of three schools why that wasn't going to happen.

As Michael notes, the corporate forces have mustered a heavy assault against the moderately progressive policies de Blasio has taken on charters and if those of us who support traditional public schools don't get vocal about supporting him on this, we're going to see, as Michael puts it, "De Blasio will either give in completely or be destroyed."

Let me go on record saying, I support de Blasio on this issue, the so-called "war on charters" is a phonied up meme that came out of Eva Moskowitz's public relations office (as I wrote last night), and we need to hit the media over and over for acting as stenographers rather than journalists in covering this story.

Start with WNBC 4 - give them a call and let them know how you are permanently shutting the channel off over their stenography on the Eva issue.

Patrick Walsh also blogged about the chop job they do on his interview with them over the charter co-location issue.

Here's the number:

866-639-7244

It is time to start talking boycott of the media outlets that carry water for the pro-privatization movement.

NBC and Comcast have carried water for the corporate education reform movement for years now, most notably with their Education Nation pro-privatization propaganda fest (literally subsidized by the for profit University of Phoenix)  and it is high time they pay an economic and political price for this.

Turn off NBC, cancel any business you do with Comcast and let them know this again and again and again.

I just called NBC to let them know.

You should do it too.

Blog it, tweet it, get the story out there - public school teachers have had ENOUGH of the pro-privatization propaganda spewing from NBC and are taking the action to shut the network OFF.

If Eva Moskowitz can get loud and shrill, so we can - WE SUPPORT BILL DE BLASIO ON THE CHARTER SCHOOL ISSUE.

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.

Michelle Rhee And MSNBC

Cheating allegations scandal?

What cheating allegations scandal?

It's like it never even existed over there at the Lean Forward Network.

Maybe now that the "cheating memo" has been found, they'll start to cover it and stop treating her like she's royalty?

John Merrow On MSNBC Tonight To Talk ErasureGate

The only MSNBC host who seems the least bit interested in ed reform as sham, Chris Hayes, is going to have John Merrow on during the eight o'clock hour

I will be on Chris Hayes' program on MSNBC tonight just after 8PM, talking @ Michelle Rhee, the buried memo & its implications.
— John Merrow (@John_Merrow) April 12, 2013

Good to see Merrow going on MSNBC to talk about Rhee and the cheating memo and scandal.

Between the clown car that is the Morning Joe Show and Hardball, Rhee really gets the softball treatment on that network.

They suck up to her almost as much as Oprah.

Christine Quinn Calls Herself A "Pushy Broad"

Christine Quinn went on both MSNBC and CNN today to respond to the front page NY Times article that depicted her as vindictive person with a bad temper and an abrasive personality:

Amid reports about her hot temper and profanity-laced rants, the City Council speaker and mayoral frontrunner embraced the fiery image in two national TV interviews - while saying she tries, not always successfully, not to let her emotions get the best of her and push her over the line.

“I have always said I’ve had a big personality, and I’ve always said I’m a pushy broad, and I’ve always said I want to get things done. And sometimes to get things done you have to be aggressive,” she said in an interview on MSNBC.

“Now I hope I’m never over the line and the times that I have made mistakes and been over the line I’m the first to pick up the telephone and make an apology,” she said. "But I’m passionate about the work I do, and I’m passionate and in a rush to make things better for New York City, and sometimes you have to push to make that happen. This is a tough town. You need tough people leading it.”

In a separate interview on CNN, Quinn denied dishing out political retaliation for personal slights - but did say she’s used force to get sometimes unwieldy Council members to fall in line.  “I’ve tried very hard to bring discipline to the City Council, which was for many many years known a kind of an undisciplined body without focus. Now that means bringing order,” she said.

“At times I get really emotional about the work I’m doing,” Quinn said. “I’m an aggressive woman who gets things done and that’s the way it is. I’ve never been embarrassed about the fact that I am pushy and aggressive.”

In the NY Times article, Quinn admitted to having retaliated against a City Council member who failed to credit her in a public relations release statement:

Several people said that Ms. Quinn’s anger could extend beyond conversation: as speaker, she has used her control of the Council’s funding accounts to punish members who have defied her. 

When Councilwoman Elizabeth Crowley issued a statement to community newspapers in her Queens district that took credit for saving local firehouses from the annual budget ax, she failed to praise Ms. Quinn. Within an hour, Ms. Crowley was called into a room at City Hall, where a livid Ms. Quinn began to shout at her, demanding to know who had authorized what she considered to be a premature and poorly worded release. 

An aide to Ms. Quinn, Ramon Martinez, criticized Ms. Crowley’s abilities as a lawmaker, at one point telling her, “You don’t know when to shut up,” according to people familiar with the episode. (Mr. Martinez, in an interview, said he did not recall using those words at the time, but added, “I certainly could have said that to her” in a separate conversation.) 

Shaken, Ms. Crowley left, thinking the worst was over. Days later, she learned that Ms. Quinn had cut the Council contributions to senior centers and youth sports programs in her district. The two now rarely speak. 

Asked about the episode last week, Ms. Quinn said that Ms. Crowley had committed “a completely inappropriate, attention-grabbing act” and violated Council protocol. “She was told it was not acceptable, and I did not mince words in telling her that,” she said. 

Did Ms. Crowley have her funding cut as a punishment? “It is what happened that year,” Ms. Quinn replied. 

Pressed on whether the move was an act of retaliation, Ms. Quinn just smiled: “It is what happened that year,” she said again, signaling that the matter was closed. 

No matter how Quinn characterized the Crowley episode on CNN today, the New York Times article makes quite clear that she retaliated against a City Council member for not praising Quinn in her p.r. statement by cutting funding in that member's district for programs for the elderly and the young.

Quinn can try and spin that any way she wants, but the fact is, she cut programs for people who had done nothing to her because of a perceived slight.

That's not the act of a"pushy broad" looking to "get things done" by being "aggressive".

That's the act of a nasty, vindictive ego maniac lacking conscience and a sense of a right and wrong.

Adrian Fenty Supports Scott Walker's Union-Busting

Ah, yes, it's finally good to see one of the union-busting ed deform rats (i.e., Klein, Bloomberg, Rhee, Fenty, Obama, Duncan, Gates, Broad, DFER's, et al.) come out and say how they REALLY feel about Scott Walker's attempt to bust the unions in Wisconsin:

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker this morning got some rare Democratic support for his high-profile push to eliminate most state workers' collective barganing rights -- from former D.C. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty.

Fenty made his comments as a guest on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," making an in-studio appearance in New York with takeover mogul and ex-"car czar" Steven Rattner and former Republican presidential candidate Pat Buchanan.

When discussion turned to Walker's anti-union push, Fenty jumped right in.

"This is kind of what I faced in four years as mayor," Fenty told hosts Mike Barnicle and Mika Brzezinski. "He's right on the substance, I think. I tend to agree with him on the need for collective bargaining reform. But he's also right on the politics. I just don't understand why the legislature has been given this pass to go to another state and not do what they were sworn to do, and that's to take a vote. Unfortunately for Gov. Walker, he hasn't been able to get that out. He needs to point the finger a little bit more at them and say. 'Listen, they should take a vote. All I want is for them to vote up or down, and I will be fine with whatever they decide.'"

Brzezinski asked Fenty if he agreed with what Walker is doing.

"The substance of it, I do," Fenty said. "Most governors and mayors would love to be able to manage their team without the interference of collective bargaining. ... I believe that managers have the ability to set fair wages, and to set fair hours, and to reward people or hold them accountable. I think it's a new day. I think a lot of these collective bargaining agreements are completely outdated."

Fenty was often at odds with city employee unions during his four years as mayor -- not least of which the city's teachers union. Organized labor fought hard to defeat Fenty and elect Vincent C. Gray instead. Today was not the first time Fenty's been critical of unions -- he said in October that teachers unions "are going to have to explain why when every tough decision is made to reform the school system they are at the lead in opposing it" -- but it was by far his most sweeping public indictment of organized labor.

For the record, Fenty's "tough decision" reforms in D.C. weren't the slam dunk Fenty likes to say they were:

Rising standardized test scores, often cited by D.C. officials as evidence of an improving school system, are of limited value in determining whether students are actually learning more, according to the first major independent study of D.C. school reform.

That conclusion, part of a report issued Friday by the National Research Council, is likely to drive new debate about the testing-centered culture of D.C. schools and other systems across the country. While the testing data contain encouraging signs, the widely quoted averages of citywide performance say little about the quality of teaching and learning.

"Looking at test scores should be only a first step - not an endpoint - in considering questions about student achievement, or even more broadly, about student learning," the study said.

The council is the research arm of the National Academies, and its report is the first in a series of evaluations required by the 2007 law that placed the city's long-troubled public schools under mayoral control. Researchers said that while the city has made "a good faith effort" to implement the Public Education Reform Amendment Act, it is premature to draw sweeping conclusions about its effect on student achievement.

The District became a national staging area for urban school reform under then-Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D), who appointed Michelle A. Rhee as the city schools' first chancellor hours after taking control of the system. She resigned in October, after more than three years on the job, and was succeeded on an interim basis by her deputy, Kaya Henderson.

Fenty and Henderson could not be reached for comment. Rhee declined to comment.

Reading and math scores on the District's two main tests, the annual D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System (D.C. CAS) and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), have shown what the report describes as "modest improvement" under Rhee and her predecessor, former superintendent Clifford Janey, although elementary-grade scores fell in 2010.

But researchers said the city must develop a more sophisticated capacity to track individual students who shift from traditional public schools to public charter schools, or in some cases drop out of the system entirely. The city also needs a firmer grasp on rapidly changing neighborhood demographics and their impact on academics. "In the meantime, naive aggregate comparison of test scores among race-ethnic groups in the District should be interpreted critically and cautiously," the study said.

The study received an enthusiastic greeting from critics, who say heavy emphasis on testing has narrowed curricula and warped classroom creativity.

"This report is a shot over the bow of politicians seeking to reform education in this incredibly narrow way," said Mary Lord, a member of the D.C. State Board of Education and mother of a junior at Wilson High School.

But of course the Morning Joe crew never pointed this stuff out to Fenty.

They also never point out to Joel Klein when he's on the program that the achievement gap between white and Asian students and black and Hispanic students in NYC schools was larger when Klein left as chancellor than it was before Klein took over.

Although now that Klein works at Rupert Murdoch's FOX News, I suspect the Morning Joe crew won't have to worry about carrying Klein's water anymore since Rupert won't let him on rival MSNBC.

Maybe that's why Fenty was on to shill for education reform instead.

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.

NBC Hates Teachers

Here's the list of participants for their "Education Summit":

Participants in the Education Nation Summit will include:

•Michael Bloomberg: Mayor, City of New York
•Geoffrey Canada: CEO & President of Harlem Children's Zone Project
•Arne Duncan: US Secretary of Education
•Byron Garrett: CEO of the National Parent Teacher Association (PTA)
•Allan Golston, President, US Program, The Gates Foundation
•Reed Hastings: Founder & CEO of Netflix
•Walter Isaacson: President & CEO of the Aspen Institute
•Joel Klein: Chancellor of New York City Schools
•Wendy Kopp: CEO and Founder of Teach for America
•John Legend: Musician; Founder of the Show Me Campaign
•Gregory McGinity: Managing Director of Policy, The Broad Education Foundation
•Bill Pepicello, Ph.D.: President of University of Phoenix
•Sally Ride: First Female Astronaut; Vice-chair of Change the Equation
•Michelle Rhee: Chancellor, District of Columbia Public School System of Washington, D.C.
•Margaret Spellings: Former US Secretary of Education
•Antonio Villaraigosa: Mayor, City of Los Angeles, California
•Randi Weingarten: President of American Federation of Teachers (AFT-CLO)

Not ONE teacher there.

Not one.

Weingarten doesn't count.

Nor does Wendy Kopp.

And Christ, what is the University of Phoenix guy doing there?

He belongs in jail for fraud, not pontificating about education.

Have you taken a look at the number of consumer fraud complaints AGAINST the University of Phoenix?

There are 14 pages of complaints about this "university" at Consumeraffairs.com alone.

Seriously, this guy belongs in a Turkish prison.

That HE has been invited to the "summit" while a working teacher has not says all you need to know about NBC News, G.E. and the other corporate sponsors of this "summit."

But there are plenty of other problems with the summit as well.

Why is John Legend there?

Will he be singing?

Or just parroting Gates Foundation propaganda like he usually does?

Because the summit doesn't need John Legend to parrot Gates Foundation propaganda when they have the president of the Gates Foundation on the panel.

Like most education "reform" discussions, the NBC Education Summit is a sham.

They already KNOW the answers to the questions they're going to ask.

They just want to continue to sell the country on them.

Give NBC a call and let them hear some of your thoughts.

Phone: (212) 664-4444

Ask for the NBC News comment line. Then ask for the MSNBC comment line.

And be brief. You only get about 45 seconds.