Time For An Education Summit That Doesn't Emanate From The Governor's Office

Ken Mitchell, former superintendent of the South Orangetown school district and current associate professor of education at Manhattanville College:

Gov. Andrew Cuomo has called for another overhaul of the state's flawed teacher evaluation system. The current model was rushed into place so New York could qualify for federal Race To The Top dollars, and has failed to gather accurate information about teacher quality. If Albany's efforts to wrest control from local districts to advance a politically motivated education agenda are successful, the results will be damaging to students and fiscally wasteful, while offering no credible information about teacher performance. It is time for an education summit, but not one that emanates from the governor's office.

The governor has appointed commissions on mandate relief, school reform, and Common Core, naming members who often lacked expertise or objectivity. This time we need a summit involving stakeholders: teachers, principals, superintendents, parents and school boards. We need a de-politicized venue to ensure an objective analysis of the evidence behind current and proposed reforms related to assessment, teacher evaluation, Common Core and charter schools. If policymakers continue to mandate without evidence and allow profiteers to influence educational decisions, children will be harmed and public education ruined.

Read the whole piece - Mitchell asks the right questions about Cuomo's agenda, including:

What is the evidence for using student test results to rate teachers?

Only 20% of teachers teach subjects with yearly state tests - will the state need to develop more tests for all disciplines and grade levels? If so, what would be the cost?

While the public is told that charters are the "solution" to failing schools, what is the evidence? Have charters helped children with significant learning challenges succeed? Why should the public subsidize privatization?

What is the evidence to support that state or private takeovers succeed? What did New York learn from taking over the the Roosevelt School District on Long Island? What did Louisiana learn from the New Orleans charter school takeover?

What was the empirical basis for the Common Core and associated tests? Do they consider the cognitive development of children?

Mitchell concludes:

It is time for a summit. New York would serve as a model to the nation by developing an objective, comprehensive, research-rich analysis of its school reform agenda to ensure that we are helping, not harming, the children in our schools.

 That sounds right to me.

Regents Refuse To Meet With Parents Over Testing Concerns In NY State

That's the essential takeaway from this exchange:

A group of parents concerned about the Board of Regents standardized testing program called on the board to meet with them.

Dennis Tompkins, a spokesman for the State Education Department, said people are welcome to show up during the 20 SED meetings scheduled statewide to address concerns and take comments. The fourth session is Thursday evening in the Rochester area. At least one regent is attending each meeting, he said.

This response from SED is a joke.

They are controlling access to the commissioner and the attending regent at these meetings (see here for that), so the chances of a member of the public getting a chance to voice his/her concerns to a regent in person are negligible at best.

And in any case, the parents are asking to meet with the Board of Regents as a whole, not one regent in a parking lot as everyone heads for their cars after a Common Core town hall.


A commenter on this story puts the whole thing in perspective:

SED just doesn’t get it. The Board, not one, but all of them should give the public access as a collective body in a Q&A type forum. But nope they won’t do it, they are all smarter than us, they all know better. Its absolute and complete unaccountability representing almost 1/3 of our budget. So what Senator and “DEMOCRATIC” assembly-member is going to put in the constitutional amendment to abolish the board of regents and put SED under the executive branch, where it belongs? Not a single one. This debacle is all on Speaker Silver, he hand selected every single one of these regents. He has been supporting SED for every single one of his 20 years in power. Now we have a hand selected young, inexperienced, arrogant man running one of the largest state agencies in the state, who doesn’t even have the credentials to be a superintendent of a small school district and has zero credibility. This is just a nightmare no matter how you look at it.

That's it - Shelly Silver is responsible for all these regents who are imposing their corporate education reform agenda upon the state even as the revolt over that agenda grows and grows.

If we want to to put an end to that corporate reform agenda imposition, Shelly Silver and the Assembly members are the people to target with protests, letters, emails and calls.

Same goes for Governor Cuomo and politicians in both parties in the State Senate.

While the governor does not pick members of the Board of Regents or the SED commissioner,he certainly has great influence in state education policy.

The functionaries at SED and their bosses at the Board of Regents are not going to listen to students, parents, teachers or administrators complaining about the Common Core curriculum, the implementation of the Core, the "suggested" SED modules aligned to the Core, the Common Core tests, the teacher evaluation system tied to the test scores, or the data project handing over sensitive and personal student information to Rupert Murdoch and Bill Gates.

We have to make Shelly Silver and the Assembly Dems, Dean Skelos and the Senate Republicans, Jeff Klein and the Senate Democrats, and Governor Cuomo know that there will be expensive political prices to be paid if they continue to ignore the will of the people in these matters.

Why The UFT Will Never Go Back On The Teacher Evaluation System Sell-Out

Norm Scott posted the following:

This came in an email as a suggestion for MORE to take up the cause and I think it should. But I wonder if the UFT which supports and vehemently defends the new evaluation system will be calling for a waiver.

It is now possible for states to request a waiver from teacher evaluations for the upcoming school year.  Randi Weingarten and the AFT (parent body of the UFT) has asked for it and, in an astonishing about-face, Arne Duncan, US Secretary of Education and the person responsible for tying federal funding to teacher evaluations, has followed with the offer of a one-year moratorium.

This makes sense!  Many states have already applied for their waivers, but not New York.  Cities and districts throughout the state need time to make their way through the incredibly complex process (over 200 pages in NYC) of implementing a teacher evaluation system.  We need to rally behind Randi and the AFT. Unions upstate--NYSUT and Rochester, in particular--have been outspoken in their support for the moratorium.  In fact, there's been a lot of agreement among many different interests that a moratorium is needed.

Now is the time to call on our union and help make the request for a waiver an issue.  Speak to the mayoral candidates, let them know this matters to you.  Let your colleagues and friends know that an option is there for the taking, and New York has not jumped on the chance to give our school systems the time they need to do this right.

The UFT and NYSUT leaderships have already sold us out on APPR and they're not going back on that sell-out.

Mulgrew and Iannuzzi stood on stage with Cuomo back in February 2012 to announce they were dropping a lawsuit against the state for increasing the state test component of the evaluation system  - a lawsuit they had won in a lower court - and while Iannuzzi talks some about a moratorium, don't listen to what he says, watch what he does.  As for Mulgrew, there's been no talk of a moratorium from the UFT on evaluations at all - instead we've gotten reams of email propaganda from Mulgrew about how wonderful and fair the new system is.

When both of these unions file a lawsuit against the APPR system for being poorly designed and fundamentally flawed, when they argue that good teachers are going to get hacked up and destroyed in this system because it is so badly designed and fundamentally flawed, when they stop talking about how wonderful the Danielson rubric is and instead point out the absurdity of using it in practice four to six times a year for every teacher, that's when you'll know they're serious about protecting their members and putting a stop to the abuse that is going to come with APPR.

So far, the UFT is all on board with this piece of garbage.  They've spent more time attacking critics of the APPR system like Diane Ravitch and Carol Burris than acknowledging the flaws in the system that are going to lead to thousands of teachers getting "i-rated" next year.

Some have speculated that Mulgrew, whose sister helped run a company that made millions from business contracts with the DOE, may have family/financial reasons for selling his members down the river.

Michael Fiorillo has pointed out that the UFT and NYSUT leaderships have become co-partners with the NYSED and NYCDOE in the management system of employer/employee relations, with the unions playing the "good cops" to the NYSED's and NYCDOE's bad ones as they both lead us to a world with fewer work protections and less employment stability.

While the union heads often talk a good game and sometimes even take actions to make it look like they're fighting back against the powers that be, the overall trajectory of the last few years has been a downward spiral of power, prestige, work protections, benefits, and job autonomy for teachers.

Whatever words the union heads use and whatever small steps they take to "fight" the system have done little to mitigate the erosion of teachers' rights and protections.

You can bet the leaderships of both the state and local unions benefit from these circumstances or they wouldn't be happening.

Whether the corruption is as blatant as payoffs from the DOE to Mulgrew through his sister's education company or a little more nebulous - you help us bring your teachers to slaughter, we'll make sure you stay in power and keep sucking up those union salaries, double pensions, and other perks - the reality is that the union leaderships at both the UFT and the NYSUT have long ago sold us out on evaluations and they're not going to go back on that without an enormous amount of pressure coming from the memberships to force that.

With Mulgrew winning re-election handily through the corrupt UFT election process last May that saw more retirees vote than current members, you can bet he's not too worried about having any pressure from the membership this year and besides, whatever pressure does come from below, they can relieve that by making some essentially useless gestures like co-location lawsuits and the like that ultimately do not stop the ravages of the reform movement but do make it look like the UFT is trying to fight them.

Until New York teachers wake up a realize that the union leaders in both the NYSUT and the UFT have sold them out and will continue to sell them out until they throw them out of power, nothing is going to change.

Chicago threw the bums out of power.  Washington threw the bums out of power.  Newark almost threw the bums out of power.  Mulgrew won re-election with over 80% of the vote.

Throwing the bums out of power doesn't guarantee victory over the ravages of reform - witness the firings in Chicago this week - but it does guarantee real opposition to it as opposed to the phonied up opposition we get from the corrupt union heads in this city and this state.

Quinn Hammered Over Engineering Of Bloomberg's Third Term

Candidates took it to Bloomberg successor Christine Quinn last night over term limits:

Democratic mayoral hopefuls piled on front-runner Christine Quinn last night over term limits at a candidate forum, in one of the liveliest exchanges yet in the race.

“What happened before was a disgrace and it is a mark on the city of New York,” said former city Comptroller Bill Thompson, who ran unsuccessfully in 2009 against Mayor Bloomberg after Quinn pushed through an extension to the term-limits law so Hizzoner could run for a third term.

“There is no indispensable person in this city!” Thompson shouted, attacking Quinn’s and Bloomberg’s defense that it was right to extend term limits to three terms because Bloomberg’s strong fiscal stewardship could best lead New York through the economic crisis.

Quinn defended herself amid the attacks last night in a packed auditorium at St. Francis College in Brooklyn.

“I made a decision a number of years ago based on the economic situation we faced. I believe it was the right decision,” she said.

She also said Public Advocate Bill de Blasio — another mayoral hopeful who has attacked her term-limits move — supported a similar idea when he ran against her for council speaker in 2005.

De Blasio, who fought the term-limits extension in 2008, said he had supported only the notion of changing term limits after an open review, which never took place.

“Democracy got suspended in our town in 2008,” he zinged at the debate last night.

Indeed it did.

Quinn engineered the third (illegal) Bloomberg term by overturning the will of the people of this city.

Twice New Yorkers had voted for term limits.

And a backroom deal engineered by Christine Quinn and promoted by Bloomberg and his cronies and toadies undid those votes.

She can defend the move as "the right decision" all she wants.

As Thompson said, no one is indispensable in this city - not Mayor Bloomberg, not Christine Quinn, nobody.

Quinn should be ashamed of what she did back in 2009.

That she is not says much about the quality of person she is.

She is a cynical opportunist willing to do the politically expedient thing, no matter what harm it does.

It is good to see the mayoral candidates taking the fight to her.

There is still time to undo Bloomberg's fourth term (a la Quinn's first term.)

But the time is growing short.

From Detroit To Cyprus To NYU - The Bankers Own It All

Light posting for a few days, but two good pieces before I go:

Glen Ford: From Detroit to Cyprus, Banksters in Search of Prey

Michael Hudson: Solution to Student Debt is to Get the Banks Out of the Education Business

Two Bloomberg Stories That Should Scare You

The first, from Fred Dicker in the Post, says that Bloomberg is now giving campaign contributions to Shelly Silver and the Assembly Democrats after long shutting them out from his financial largesse.

That ought to open a few eyes - what's Bloomberg going to want in return for the money and the promise of more money?

The second story that ought to terrify you is a puff piece on Bloomberg from the Washington Post where Bloomberg gets to tell us how he's going to single-handedly save us all from the NRA:

On Monday, Bloomberg will headline a summit on guns at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, another opportunity for the outspoken mayor to deliver an indictment of Washington’s failure to do anything meaningful on the issue. Although the Democrat-turned-Republican- turned-indepen­dent says he practices a “noble and practical” brand of post-partisan politics, when it comes to gun laws, he is more aligned with one party than the other.

...

 “I’m going to prove a counterweight” to the NRA, said Bloomberg, who spent about $10 million in five congressional and statewide races against NRA-supported candidates last year, winning four of those contests. “It seemed effective, and I’m certainly going to take a good, hard look at next time. . . . You can organize people, I can write checks.”

Both these articles indicate what Bloomberg plans to do post-City Hall - influence as many policies as he can by throwing around as much money as he can.

Now I understand some of you out there might say, well, the NRA is a toxic organization and we need some counterweight to their money and influence, so even if that counterweight is Bloomberg, it's important on this issue that we have that.

I agree the NRA is a toxic organization that has a lot of money and influence, but I worry when one guy with more money than God suddenly decides he is going to single-handedly buy elections with his cash.

Make no mistake, Bloomberg plans to do this not just with gun laws and the NRA, but also with education reform.

That's why he's funding his lobbying group StudentsFirstNY and that's why he put his former City Hall toadie Micah Lasher in charge.

The plan is to demonstrate to many politicians both here in NY and around the country that the Bloomberg corporate education reform policies are the ones they will hold dear to their hearts or they're going to have Bloomberg throwing millions in cash to their opponents.

Now maybe Bloomberg is suddenly giving cash to Shelly Silver and the Assembly Dems because he wants them to push the gun control issue in Albany.

But you know that he's also going to want to push education reform there too and with Silver and the Assembly Dems on the receiving end of his cash, who knows how that plays out?

Scott Stringer: Suspend Parent Elections

The undermining of the democratic process by the Walcott NYCDOE hasn't gone unnoticed in political circles:

The city's local parent elections are so botched that the Department of Education should suspend them, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer said.

Stringer wrote a letter to Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott saying he's heard numerous complaints from parents who tried to run, or vote, for the community education councils.

"How do you drop candidates from the ballot?" he asked. "How do tell people they are not eligible to run when in fact they are? How do you put out a voter guide and the candidates are missing from the guide?"
There are 32 community education councils for the local districts and four that represent citywide parents of children in high school, special needs and English Language Learners.
Jaye Bea Smalley, co-chair of the citywide council on special education, is running for re-election and logged-in to vote online Sunday but saw she wasn't even on the ballot. When she called the Department of Education, she said she was (incorrectly) told she wasn't eligible to vote because she has a daughter in pre-K. Smalley also has two older children with special needs, which is how she was originally elected to the council on special education a year ago.

"If I was running for Congress, a major public office, this would just absolutely be such a scandal and it would be halted," she said. "This is a statutory office governed by law. ... It is really no different."

Ah, but it IS different.

You see, this is Mayor Bloomberg's New York.

It is NOT a democracy.

It is an oligarchy.

If Mayor Bloomberg decides this is the way these elections will run and that certain parents are NOT eligible to either run or vote (you know, the ones who don't support his school policies), well, then that is just how it is.

The nice thing about the botching of these community education councils is that Bloomberg and the DOE never listen to anything anybody ever says on them anyway.

So it doesn't matter if some people weren't able to vote and others got to vote twice.

At the end of the day, the only vote that REALLY matter is the VOTE OF ONE - and that would be owned by the Mayor of Money himself, Michael Bloomberg.

The Future of Education

Scary.

The graduate students at Harvard and Chris Christie get ready to take on the political thugs - teachers.

I would like to point out that this supposed "consensus" on education comes from the ruling classes and their corporate pols, but the people they govern - you know, the parents, students and teachers - well, there the consensus is the exact opposite.

Looks like the People's Republic of Harvard has been taken over by Microsoft, Goldman Sachs and the Koch Brothers.

Where's The Accountability?

The Obama administration Department of Justice has decided to not pursue criminal charges against former Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo.

Apparently, if everybody was in on the mortgage scam - from mortgage brokers who falsified applications; investment bankers who concocted complex and “opaque” mortgage bonds; rating firms that provided high ratings on the bonds but said they were lied to; and institutional investors that relied on dubious ratings because the securities carried above-market interest while promising to be risk-free - then Mozilo cannot be charged for doing the same.

It is an interesting theory of accountability - if everybody is guilty of a crime, then nobody is guilty.

Coming from President Accountability himself, who has made accountability of teachers a centerpiece of his administration, it is rank hypocrisy at best, abject cronyism and corruption at worst.

After the choice of JP Morgan Chase exec William Daley to be chief of staff, Jeff Immelt to be jobs czar, and Angelo Mozilo to get away scott free with fraud, can there be any doubt that Mr. Change We Can Believe In has turned his eye toward 2012 and has decided cozying up to the banksters and the Wall Street criminal class is Job # 1 for his administration?

Bloomberg Sets Up "Front Group" To Lobby Gov't In Comcast-NBC Merger

Read this Nation article on how masterfully Bloomberg manipulates policy decisions using the confluence of media, lobbyists, good government "front groups," and bribes.

We truly live in an oligarchy and Bloomberg is truly one of the owners of the country.

He needs to be sent to the same island Mubarak inhabits post-revolution.

Or the hole in the ground Saddam once called home.

Bloomberg Testified In Secret

Moneybags likes to play holier than thou when it comes to politics and he usually gets the other members of his ruling triumvirate - NY Post/WSJ/FOX owner Rupert Murdoch and NY Daily News/US News owner Mort Zuckerman - to play along in the papers and make believe like Mikey is above political gamesmanship.

But of course, that's just not so. As a billionaire with deep pockets, Bloomberg uses his money to reward friends and allies and punish enemies and those who just don't want to go along with his agenda.

Political Wire notes that the curtain was drawn back upon that drama a bit today:

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg "secretly testified last year before the grand jury that indicted a political operative on charges of stealing $1.1 million from the billionaire mayor's personal fortune," the Wall Street Journal reports.

"The high-profile case has lifted a veil on the most expensive political campaign in city history and serves as something of an embarrassment for Mr. Bloomberg, whom prosecutors contend was duped by Mr. Haggerty into spending money on a sham ballot-security and poll-watching operation. Mr. Haggerty spent much of the money to buy a home, prosecutors alleged."

The New York Times notes the case "is already providing an unusual and, for Mr. Bloomberg, unwelcome glimpse into the casual intermingling of money, politics and government staff that prevailed in his $110 million re-election bid two years ago.."

The NY Times takes a closer look at the case:

It appeared to be a run-of-the-mill campaign e-mail: in October 2009, a Republican political consultant wrote to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s two top aides, Kevin Sheekey and Patricia E. Harris, about Election Day operations.

But one phrase in the letter, disclosed on Tuesday, stands out.

“Kevin,” wrote the consultant, John F. Haggerty Jr., “you said that you also wanted to ‘wash in’ a $100K contribution on top of the cost of the operation.”

As directed, aides to Mr. Bloomberg soon wired over $1.2 million — $1.1 million to cover the cost of services overseen by Mr. Haggerty, plus the extra $100,000 that he suggested be “washed in.”

Mr. Haggerty now stands accused of stealing most of that money from the mayor.

...

The case, which could drag on for much of the next year, has riveted New York City’s political world: scandal, or even the faintest whiff of it, is rare in the Bloomberg universe.

Now it has wafted into his final campaign for City Hall — and forced Mr. Bloomberg to become personally involved. On Tuesday, during a hearing in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, prosecutors revealed that the mayor had provided secret grand jury testimony in the case, though they refused to say precisely when, or what he said.

The case stems from Mr. Haggerty’s work in the fall of 2009, when he was enlisted to develop a “ballot security” system for Mr. Bloomberg on Election Day, a loose term that refers to stationing volunteers, lawyers and inspectors at polling sites to discourage voter fraud.

Mr. Haggerty created a company, called Special Election Operations; drew up a budget; and, according to his lawyers, did exactly what he had promised to do. Rather than put Mr. Haggerty on his campaign payroll, the mayor paid him through a large donation to the New York State Independence Party, which then paid Mr. Haggerty.

The district attorney, however, alleges that Mr. Haggerty actually set up a sham operation, carried out little of the work and used the money to buy a house in Forest Hills Gardens, Queens.

During the hearing, an assistant district attorney, Eric Seidel, repeatedly called Mr. Haggerty a “liar” who “took a circuitous, devious route to obtain the money” from Mr. Bloomberg.

“This is a story of greed, a story of lies, a story of arrogance,” Mr. Seidel said.

...

Much remains mysterious about Mr. Haggerty’s conduct. But the e-mails that were revealed on Tuesday raised a host of questions:

Why would the mayor choose to hire Mr. Haggerty through a state political party, rather than directly?

Why was Mr. Sheekey, a deputy mayor who never formally joined the campaign as an employee, so intimately involved in the campaign’s finances?

And why did the Bloomberg campaign need to spend more than $1 million on ballot security in the first place?

Howard Wolfson, the director of communications for Mr. Bloomberg’s re-election campaign, and now a deputy mayor, said that political parties had a long tradition of providing ballot security — and did so for the mayor in his 2001 and 2005 campaigns.

He said Mr. Sheekey, who previously oversaw Mr. Bloomberg’s mayoral runs, chose to volunteer in 2009. As for the steep price of Mr. Haggerty’s work, Mr. Wolfson said: “Election Day operations are vital in every campaign.”

Pressed about the “washed in” language in the e-mail, Mr. Wolfson said those were Mr. Haggerty’s words, not Mr. Sheekey’s. However, a lawyer for Mr. Haggerty, Dennis C. Vacco, said it was clear from the e-mail that the idea for “washing in” the $100,000 donation came from Mr. Sheekey. “It was Kevin’s suggestion,” he said. Mr. Sheekey did not respond to a message.

The mayor’s political contribution to the Independence Party has become a flash point in the case, with lawyers for Mr. Haggerty arguing that once he donated the money, he ceded control over its use. Aides to the mayor insist that the donation was handled correctly.

Throughout the proceeding, lawyers on both sides seemed to telegraph their strategy for the case. Lawyers for Mr. Haggerty argued that the work Mr. Bloomberg sought was completed, even if he might have overpaid for those services.

“There is no crime in coming in under budget,” said Raymond R. Castello, a lawyer for Mr. Haggerty.

As it turned out, there is no evidence that Mr. Bloomberg ever asked Mr. Haggerty for any of his money back.

Mr. Seidel, from the district attorney’s office, disclosed e-mails that he said showed false attempts by Mr. Haggerty to cover his tracks, especially once people inside and outside the campaign started to inquire about his spending.

At one point, shortly before he was charged, Mr. Haggerty even produced several fraudulent check stubs to suggest he had paid poll workers, Mr. Seidel said.

“He got caught,” Mr. Seidel said. “And it’s as if he was squirming around.”

Wow - you know who's squirming too?

Bloomberg.

Note that he made sure he testified IN SECRET.

Then he has his minions lay down a bunch of bull for the Times story even as the question remains - what EXACTLY was Bloomberg doing "washing in" money through the Independence Party.

The aide who used that phrase - Kevin Sheekey - is probably the closest Bloomberg advisor there is.

Though he now works for Bloomberg LP, he is the guy who is spearheading the mayor's presidential run in 2012.

You can be pretty sure that if Sheekey was the guy looking to "wash in" money (aka "launder"), then Bloomberg would know about it too.

Which again brings us back to the question - what was the mayor doing throwing that $1.1 million around through a round about way?

Why didn't he want that money back if it wasn't used the way it was supposed to be used?

And, more importantly, who else did the mayor use to "wash in" campaign cash in 2009?

Cuomo Vs. "Special Interests"

That's how the Daily News frames the story that Cuomo is raising money from Wall Street, from hedge fund managers, and from corporations to take on "special interests" like public employees unions.

Apparently, at least in this framing of the issue, Wall Street, hedge fund managers and corporations are NOT "special interests."

Never mind that Cuomo is raising millions from these people in order to do their bidding.

Never mind that Wall Street had its most profitable quarter ever or that the banksters are handing out billions in bonuses this year.

The problem according to Wall Street, to the hedge fund types and to corporations is that "special interests" like public employees unions are demanding too much of the public dime and need to be stopped so that taxes on corporations and rich people can be cut.

So they're handing Little Andy millions in order to make sure that corporations pay as little in tax as possible, that hedge fundies pay 15% capital gains instead of actual, you know, income tax on their income, and that public employee pay and pensions are slashed to the bone so that the government can spend less money and tax corporations and rich people even less than the current low levels.

Ah, yes - those evil public employee special interests.

But there's no "special interest" that Cuomo is serving by taking millions from Wall Street and corporations and serving those interests.

Oh, no - that's his patriotic duty.

What a grand guy he is.

Indeed, a hero.

Socio-Emotional Skills And Education

I don't know if a lot of people caught this article about a different kind of eduction reform in the Times from before Christmas. To my mind, it is a very important article, so I wanted to post it here in full:

J. B. Pritzker, a prominent Chicago businessman, says he wakes up each day mulling the best way to get a return on his investments. The most valuable resource he can find is “smart people with character.”

It explains why, last week, Mr. Pritzker, a liberal Democrat, introduced a person he described as a University of Chicago supply-side economist at a gathering that might have benefited mayoral candidates concerned about Chicago’s public schools performance.

At the gathering, James J. Heckman, who has won the Nobel in economic science, offered a provocative idea for reducing spiraling budget deficits and strengthening the economy: investing in early childhood development.

Mr. Heckman marshals ample data to suggest that better teaching, higher standards, smaller classrooms and more Internet access “have less impact than we think,” as he put it at the Spertus Institute. To focus as intently as we do on the kindergarten to high school years misses how “the accident of birth is the greatest source of inequality,” he said.

He urges more effectively educating children before they step into a classroom where, as Chicago teachers tell me, they often are clueless about letters, numbers and colors — and lack the attentiveness and persistence to ever catch up. Matters are as bleak with many students entering the City Colleges system.

Mr. Heckman is not really a supply-sider, but he is big on return on investment, just like Mr. Pritzker, who sponsored the Spertus event with the McCormick Foundation and is also a contributor to my wife’s nonprofit group.

He contends that high-quality programs focused on birth to age 5 produce a higher per-dollar return than K-12 schooling and later job training. They reduce deficits by reducing the need for special education and remediation, and by cutting juvenile delinquency, teenage pregnancy and dropout rates.

With charts and references to long-term studies, Mr. Heckman underscored why families matter and attributed the widening gap between the advantaged and disadvantaged to deficits in skills and abilities that begin with inadequate early childhood development.

One slide juxtaposed achievement test scores with a mother’s education. If you come from a single-parent home with a mother who dropped out of school, your scores lag far behind throughout your academic life.

Test scores may measure smarts, not the character that turns knowledge into know-how. “Socio-emotional skills” or “character,” which we don’t often measure, are critical, and include motivation, the ability to work with others, attention, self-regulation, self-esteem and the ability to defer gratification.

There are few more influential thinkers than Mr. Heckman on the impact of social programs and methods used to assess them.

“He’s one of the great labor economists of all time, a pioneer of empirical analysis of labor markets, human capital and education,” said Austan Goolsbee, chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers and a University of Chicago colleague.

In the mayoral race, only the freshly certified (to run) Rahm Emanuel and Gery Chico offer extensive plans for education reform. Mr. Emanuel’s ideas strike some nonpartisan folks as more innovative, but Mr. Chico puts early learning front and center.

To their credit, both encourage parental participation, though that’s a complex topic. It’s especially knotty for poor parents who don’t have computers, easy transportation or time to be involved in their child’s school.

Finally, each seems more tactical than strategic, with neither arguably offering a compelling answer to a simple question: What exactly is the purpose of a Chicago public school education?

Many politicians jabber about “preparing our children for a global high-tech economy.” That’s a projection of the present onto a future we stumble to imagine, let alone predict.

But if Mr. Heckman is correct, the purpose of education is what it has always been: to develop a well-rounded, knowledgeable and adaptable person; to create upward mobility through smarts and character.

Imagine more young adults going off into the world to make it better — and fewer coming home to sleep on the couch. If a candidate forced a real debate on such a vision, and a plan to pay for it, parents might pony up even in tough times.

I disagree with writer Warren that Rahm's education plans put parents front and center - just like his boss Obama has done in Washington, Rahm's "innovative ideas" about education mean blowing up the current system, blaming teachers for all the ills in the system, and creating a punitive education system that lets parents skate and puts all the onus on teachers and schools.

But I do agree that developing socio-emotional skills is a most important piece to developing well-rounded, knowledgeable and adaptable people.

Right now in NYC, we teach "skills" - in my high school, this mostly means how to score well on multiple choice tests, how to write an MLA-style research paper and how to write formulaic essays for the U.S. History, Global or ELA Regents exams.

In my opinion, this is not education. This does not help develop well-rounded, knowledgeable and adaptable people.

This develops test takers who can take one or two specific tests, but need direction to do anything else.

The politicians, the corporate types and their shills in the corporate media blame teachers for the problems many public school systems have in developing well-rounded, knowledgeable and adaptable people as opposed to test taking automatons who can't do much else.

It burns me up that so many of these people cannot see that the very policies they promote are creating the very problems they claim they want to alleviate.

Or perhaps these people DO know EXACTLY what it is their policies are doing and are just using teachers and the public school system as scapegoats for their planned dumbing down of the majority of America.

After all, a dumbed down America just smart enough to do the shitty jobs corporate America gives them but too dumb to see how badly they're getting screwed in the global economy is in the long term interests of the politicians, the corporate types and their shills in the corporate media.

The Disappearing Middle Class and Cathie Black

First, the story of the disappearing middle class:

WASHINGTON — The good paying, predominantly white-collar jobs that once sustained many American communities are disappearing at an alarming rate, keeping the unemployment rate stubbornly high despite the end of the Great Recession.

More troubling, these jobs in accounting, financial analysis, commercial printing and a broad array of other mostly white-collar occupations are unlikely to come back, experts predict.

There isn't a single cause to the trend. Some of it is explained by changing technology, some of it is the result of automation. Sending well-paying jobs to low-cost centers abroad is another big part of the story. So is global competition from emerging economies such as China and India.

The result is the same in all cases, however. Jobs that paid well, required skills and produced vital communities are going away and aren't being replaced by anything comparable.

"Unfortunately, the evidence is that you see a form of downward mobility of workers who are displaced from middle-skilled, stable career occupations," said David Autor, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in an interview.

So what does this have to do with Cathie Black?

Simple - she's been brought in to downsize the system.

Chancellor Klein long bragged about the future of education as he saw it - sleaker, more efficient, fewer teachers, more online education.

Now Cathie Black will bring that vision to fruition from inside the system - and of course she'll do that with a smile as she lays off thousands of teachers over the course of her tenure, closes hundreds more schools (57 are going to be axed this year alone) and says "It's just something we have to do..."

Meanwhile Klein will be completing his own education vision by running Rupert Murdoch's new online, for-profit education K-12 initiative and doubtless NYC will be its first customer, outsourcing programs currently run by the NYCDOE to the for-profit sector, just as Chicago has already done with some of its summer school programs.

Ultimately, Bloomberg, Klein and Black have a vision for the future of America where there are only a few good paying jobs left for the middle class and the rest of us will have to continually fight it out for the leftovers.

The top 1% - the folks who attend parties given by Moneybags or Cathie with an "i" Black - will be gobbling even more of the wealth and leaving crumbs for the rest of us.

And they'll blame the school system and unions for all this inequity and continue to decimate public education by closing schools, firing teachers, demonizing educators, and ultimately outsourcing public education to for-profit online learning centers and charter schools run by for-profit EMO's

Scary stuff - but just look at the last eight years in this country and this city, look at what job Klein took with News Corp., look at who Bloomberg hired to replace him, and tell me I'm wrong.

NY Daily News: Bloomberg Broke Campaign Finance Laws

Adam Lisberg has the story:

Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. last week laid out in his clearest language yet how Mayor Bloomberg may have broken campaign finance law in funding his reelection bid last year.

Somehow, though, Vance doesn't see it as a case worth pursuing.

He filed legal papers Friday bolstering his indictment of John Haggerty, the election aide accused of pocketing $1.1 million Bloomberg spent for Election Day poll-watching.

Bloomberg funneled that money through a special "housekeeping account" of the state Independence Party, one that can accept unlimited donations and doesn't report them until two months after Election Day.

State law says housekeeping money can only be used for day-to-day party activities, not to benefit any specific candidate. Haggerty, though, claims he spoke directly with Bloomberg about how it would help the mayor's campaign.

Here's where it gets sticky for Bloomberg.

Haggerty's lawyers say that if Bloomberg's $1.1 million was truly a donation to the Independence Party, then prosecutors can't claim it was stolen just because they don't like how the party spent it.

In last week's filing, though, Vance scoffs at the idea Bloomberg's money was a donation to the party.

"This argument seeks to mischaracterize the nature of the transferred funds," prosecutors wrote. "Haggerty deceived Bloomberg and his staff into sending the money to pay for a fictitious ballot security operation."

If Bloomberg's $1.1 million wasn't really a party donation, it should presumably have been reported as part of his campaign spending.

"That's the conundrum here," said Dennis Vacco, one of Haggerty's lawyers. "It's either a contribution or it's an expenditure."

Bloomberg even filed a state Board of Elections form called a CF-16 promising that "all financial activity related to my campaign, including my own," would go through his official Bloomberg for Mayor 2009 campaign.

That's not what happened, though.

Vance and his office will not comment on why - or whether - they haven't tried to pursue a case against Bloomberg.

Lisberg goes on to say the first term Vance doesn't want to risk a battle with Bloomberg and so he;s letting the case go.

So Bloomberg gets to subvert democracy by throwing as much illegal cash into campaigns as he wants without any risk of penalty.

No wonder the country is as screwed up as it is.

Cuomo Is A Crook Too

Before he met with the hedge funders to talk about charter schools, Andrew Cuomo was mum about his feelings about charters (so much so that former governor Eliot Spitzer felt the need to chastise Cuomo publicly to take a stand.)

Then he met with a bunch of hedge funders and other education deformers and they promised him campaign checks and other financial support if he would agree to lift the charter school cap and oppose any accountability standards for charters.

Lo and behold, now that Cuomo has announced for governor, his platform supports increasing the charter cap to 460 and opposes outside accountability measures on issues like where to locate the new charters.

Wow - that's democracy in action.

Meet with hedge funders.

Take checks.

Give hedge funders what they want on education deform.

Parrot Gates Foundation pamphlets in campaign literature.

Andrew Cuomo was bought by the hedge fund/education deform industry.

It would be nice to know what they promised him in return for his positions on education "reform".

You can be sure after Cuomo finishes what Obama and Bloomberg started, there will be nothing left of the public school system as we know.

There will only be charter schools and hedge funds.