VAM Goes To College

The "accountability movement" goes to college!

AUSTIN — Eight years ago, leaders of the University of Texas set out to measure something few in higher education had thought to question — how much their students learn before graduation.

An unsettling answer emerged: arguably, not very much.

That conclusion is based on results from a 90-minute essay test given to freshmen and seniors that aims to gauge gains in critical thinking and communication skills.

The Texas flagship and a few hundred other public universities have joined a growing accountability movement in higher education, embracing this test and others like it that attempt, for the first time, to quantify collegiate learning on a large scale.

But the results have triggered a wave of rancor. Some college leaders are outraged that four years of learning might now be reduced to a single score. Lackluster results have seeded fresh doubts about the country’s vaunted system of higher education.

Yup - they're now going to try and use value-added at colleges too:

The Collegiate Learning Assessment, launched in 2000, has brought rare scrutiny to higher education. Until now, colleges have been largely exempt from the accountability movement sweeping through public elementary and secondary schools yielding the No Child Left Behind law and other initiatives.

In a landmark study published last year, sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa used the test to measure collegiate learning in the nation. Using data drawn from a sampling of public and private colleges, they shook the academic world with a finding that 36 percent of students made no significant learning gains from freshman to senior year.

“I think it’s extremely troubling,” said Margaret Spellings, the former U.S. education secretary and a longtime advocate of accountability in education. “And God bless Richard Arum for taking this on.”

Some colleges are pushing back on this, however - especially because the test itself is a problem:

Two groups representing more than 500 public colleges have pledged to give the CLA or one of its rival tests — the Collegiate Assessment of Academic Proficiency or Proficiency Profile — and to publish results by the end of this year. So far, 144 schools have posted test results, including Frostburg State University in western Maryland. Many schools have not participated in the testing, including the universities of Virginia and Maryland.

Teresa Sullivan, president of U-Va., said the University of Michigan gave the CLA when she was provost there. Freshmen scored so high, she said, there was no way for seniors to score higher. She believes U-Va. students would hit the same ceiling.

“If there is no way to improve, why would you invest your money in this?” she said.

And of course all bad things either start in Texas or Chicago - this one started in Texas:

The University of Texas, one of the nation’s top research universities, was among the first to give the CLA and is using the results to improve instruction. Testing began in 2004 in Austin, under a state mandate.

Last year, UT freshmen scored an average 1261 on the assessment, which is graded on a scale similar to that of the SAT. Seniors averaged 1303. Both groups scored very well, but seniors fared little better than freshmen, according to score reports The Washington Post obtained through a public records request.

“The seniors have spent four years there, and the scores have not gone up that much,” said Arum, a New York University sociologist and co-author of the 2011 book “Academically Adrift.” He reviewed UT’s results at the request of The Post. The school was not among the 24 unnamed colleges in Arum’s study.

With about 51,000 students and nearly 3,000 faculty, the University of Texas is a veritable learning factory. Critics of the CLA, and there are many in Austin, say it is absurd to judge an organization of this scale on the strength of one score. They note that the CLA is relatively brief and administered to a couple hundred freshmen and seniors who have no stake in the results.

That last part is really important - students tend to not do so well on tests that they have no stake in.

Starting next September in New York, students will be taking city and state tests in every grade in every subject in order to evaluate teachers.

Bloomberg has said the city tests will not count for students - only for teachers.

Since students will be taking so many tests every year, many of which they will have no stake in, you can bet the scores are going to be lackluster.

We're already starting to see that with all the Acuity exams we have to give.

Wait until students are taking 20 high stakes exams a year on top of the Acuity tests!

But unlike college, where individual professors are not going to be graded and fired based on scores, teachers in K-12 will have their evaluations published in the newspapers and will be fired if they come up "ineffective" two years running based on test scores.

The "accountability movement" is making a mess of education these days, and given just how absurd this stuff is on the face of it, I have to believe it is a conscious effort on their part to do so.

Nobody in their right mind should believe you can boil a university degree down to a 90 minute standardized test.

And yet, they say they do.

Again, nobody in their right mind should believe that adding 20 high stakes standardized tests a year to every kid's program and using those scores to evaluate and fire teachers is a fine way to improve education.

And yet, this is exactly what President Obama and Governor Cuomo have promoted through their policies.

It's going to be a dark five to ten years until the country comes to its sense once again - if the country comes to its sense, and decides that education comes down to more than what can be tested in some reductionist way.

If I were a college professor working at a state institution, I would start looking over my shoulder for the VAMsters to call for value-added measurements of individual professors.

I would only hope if that comes to pass that many of the education reformers who work at the universities and shout up VAM to the high heavens have their own value-added voodoo used on them too.

NYSED Announces High Level "Test Security Unit"

When did the New York State Education Department start to paramilitarize?

NYSED announces that creation of a high level "Test Security Unit" staffed with experiences investigators to conduct their own probes.

Will this be anything like Arne Duncan's high security team?

You know, there's nothing more important in this world than test security.

Except for the last fifteen years that Merryl Tisch was sitting on the Regents board as the NYSED was watering down tests and rubrics while inflating scores.

When the onus and responsibility of scores was on institutions and politicians rather than individual teachers, they weren't so worried about test security at the NYSED or the Regents offices.

But now that individual teacher evaluations will be based upon test scores - oh, yeah, we need a special "test security unit" to insure the integrity of the system.

Uh, huh.

If they want to check the integrity of the system, they ought to start with the error-riddled value-added measurements they're using on the teacher evaluations.

But that would be too much trouble.

Instead they're going to hire Halliburton goons to work test security - Arne Duncan-style!

Goldman Screws Muppets

Nothing like one of their own exposing them in public for being the crooks they are:

Until early Wednesday morning, Greg Smith was a largely anonymous 33-year-old midlevel executive at Goldman Sachs in London.

Now everyone at the firm — and on Wall Street — knows his name.

Mr. Smith resigned in an e-mail message to his bosses at 6:40 a.m. London time, laying out concerns that Goldman’s culture had gone haywire, putting its own interests ahead of its clients.

What the e-mail didn’t say was that about 15 minutes later, an Op-Ed article he had written detailing his criticisms was to be published in The New York Times. “It makes me ill how callously people still talk about ripping off clients,” he wrote in the Op-Ed article.

The Op-Ed landed “like a bomb,” inside Goldman, said one executive who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The article reignited a debate on the Internet and on cable television over whether Wall Street was corrupted by greed and excess. By noon, television crews crowded outside Goldman’s headquarters in Lower Manhattan. More than three years after the financial crisis, the perception that little has changed on Wall Street — and that no one has been held accountable for the risk-taking that led to the crisis — looms large in the public consciousness.

...

Although he isn’t highly paid by Wall Street standards — earning about $500,000 last year, according to people briefed on the matter — Mr. Smith is part of what some Goldman staff members and alumni refer to as a sizable, yet silent contingent within the investment bank. These people are increasingly frustrated with what they see as a shift in recent years to a profit-above-all mentality.

Evidence of this shift, they say, can be seen in the accusations brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2010 that the firm intentionally duped certain clients by selling a mortgage-security product that was designed by another Goldman client betting that the housing market would crash. More recently, a Delaware judge criticized Goldman over the multiple, and potentially conflicting, roles it played in brokering an energy deal. (In both cases, Goldman has denied any wrongdoing.)

Even the greed-loving, Wall Street-worshipping, union-bashing shills at the Daily News felt the need to criticize Goldman:

Goldman Sachs’ clients will be the ultimate judge of whether the venerable Wall Street investment bank is a topflight firm or closer to the tank of scheming sharks portrayed on Wednesday’s New York Times Op-Ed page.

Goodness knows, over the years, while the firm has profited handsomely, Goldman has managed to make its customers plenty of money.

That said, the essay by Greg Smith, “Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs,” will stand as a landmark cri de coeur , one that will have long-term reverberations for the company and the industry it so powerfully represents.

Smith ended a 12-year career at Goldman with a resignation letter for the ages. He wrote of a growing culture of voracious greed and described an ethic that put profit above all else — especially clients’ interests.

Those clients were left, in Smith’s words, like muppets with their eyes torn out.

Not surprisingly, the firm views the column as overamplified griping by one disgruntled employee. Perhaps. There are two or more sides to every story. But Smith’s descriptions are harrowing.

He described his pleasure, from his first day on the job as a recent college grad, at being a company man. He advised major clients around the world, worth more than a trillion dollars in assets. He sought out and mentored potential hires, even appearing in a Goldman recruitment video.

Then, a drastic shift in corporate culture changed everything.

“I knew it was time to leave,” he wrote, “when I realized I could no longer look students in the eye and tell them what a great place this was to work.”

Wrote Smith: “Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as ‘muppets.’ ”

“These days, the most common question I get from junior analysts about derivatives is, ‘How much money did we make off the client?’ . . . You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the junior analyst sitting quietly in the corner hearing about ‘muppets,’ ‘ripping eyeballs out’ and ‘getting paid’ doesn’t exactly turn into a model citizen.”

Indeed they don't.

Better hold some teachers accountable, eh Daily Newsers?

That'll make things all better.

Because so far, nobody - I mean nobody - from Wall Street has been held accountable for the financial collapse and the ethical and moral lapses that lead to it.

Teacher Saves Overdose Victim

One of the few positive stories about teachers in the press these days:

Brooklyn teacher Cassandra Byrd-Scolaro can offer help in reading, writing — and resuscitation.

The heroic Public School 17 instructor used her Wednesday lunch break to revive a suspected overdose victim after finding the lifeless woman inside a restaurant bathroom.

“She looked dead,” said Byrd-Scolaro, 34, who flew into action before emergency medical workers arrived. “She had no pulse. I immediately began giving her compressions.”

Three minutes later, with EMS workers on the scene, the unidentified woman was breathing and her heart was once again beating.

“We heard a gurgling,” the teacher recounted. “She was coming back.”

But the drug-addled victim didn’t use her second chance to say thank you: She instead flipped the bird at Byrd-Scolaro and the medical workers.

Most others gave the 10-year teaching veteran an A-plus for her life-saving effort inside the S&B Restaurant at 194 Bedford Ave. in Williamsburg.

Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott called Byrd-Scolaro to compliment her quickness under pressure and her ability to administer CPR.

And her principal, Dr. Robert Marchi, said he was hardly surprised to learn there was a hero on his staff.

“To me, she represents the very best in what a teacher ought to be,” Marchi said of Byrd-Scolaro. “I can’t think of another person you’d rather have at your side in distress than this lady.”
The fourth-grade teacher, one of 11 PS 17 staffers to volunteer for CPR training, proved that she was an attentive student during her first opportunity to use those skills.

“It was a great feeling,” she said before heading back to afternoon classes

Ah, yes - heroics from the 4th grade teacher at PS 17.

But before we definitely say that she "can offer help in reading, writing and resuscitation" - as the teacher-bashing Daily News said this morning - we need to look up her value-added score on her Teacher Data Report.

Because if that score is below average, the teacher-bashing New York Daily News normally would be calling for this teacher to be fired for being a "bad teacher."

Doesn't matter that the TDR's have a maximum margin of error in math of 75% and a maximum margin of error in ELA of 87%.

The total measure of a teacher these days is the TDR based upon student gains on test scores.

This is about accountability and performance, people - who cares if this woman saved somebody's life?

If she can't raise student test scores as measured by an error-riddled algorithm, she needs to be fired.

And now back to our regularly scheduled media teacher bashing - NY1's top education story is another tale of a DOE arrested for allegedly perpetrating a sex crime...

Accountability For CityTime Company, But Not For Bloomberg

One of the buzzwords in education these days is "accountability."

Mayor Bloomberg loves to hold other people accountable for their performance of their jobs - especially teachers.

One of the reasons he supports publishing teacher evaluations in the newspapers is so that parents can hold their kid's teachers accountable for performance.

Yes, with Bloomberg, it's always about accountability and performance

And yet, how come he isn't being held accountable for the CityTime mess?

In a city where Boss Tweed, Mayor Jimmy Walker, and Stanley Friedman all brazenly pilfered public money during eras gone by, no government scandal compares to the size and scope of CityTime.

It was "the single biggest fraud ever perpetrated on the city of New York," U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said Wednesday.

But thanks to a dogged joint investigation by Bharara and Rose Gill Hearn, the commissioner for the city's Department of Investigation, the crooks are paying back most of what they stole.

Science Applications International Corp., the main contractor on the CityTime project - and one of the country's biggest defense giants - has agreed to return to taxpayers the astonishing sum of half a billion dollars by close of business Thursday.

Of that money, $466 million will go directly to the city treasury and the rest to the federal government. SAIC also agreed to forgo another $40 million in bills it had previously submitted to the city.

No local or state government in the country has ever recouped so much money from a single fraud, Bharara said.

The money represents a huge chunk of the nearly $700 million taxpayers shelled out for an automated timekeeping and payroll system that mushroomed over a decade to 10 times its original pricetag of $63 million.

Sounds good, except that the person who allowed all this thievery in the first place - namely Boss Bloomberg - hasn't once answered for the scandal:

Mayor Bloomberg, who stood next to Bharara at a press conference Wednesday, called this "a major victory for taxpayers...for justice and public integrity."

But for a guy about to receive a $500,000 settlement, the mayor did not seem all that elated.

Bloomberg has not yet explained how such a massive theft - the biggest stain on his administration - could occur for so long without any of his aides noticing.

Only one city official, former Payroll Administration director Joel Bondy, has lost his job because of CityTime.

Maybe when the criminal trial of the CityTime crooks finally begins, we'll learn what our own officials knew and didn't know.

Yes, maybe then Bloomberg will have to answer publicly for his own conduct in the oversight - or lack thereof - of the CityTime project and his own administration officials who were working on it.

State Moves Up Evaluation Deadline To July 1, 2012 From January 16, 2013 - UPDATED

UPDATE - 7:39 PM: The below quote has been pulled from the Daily News link. It had been there as of 4:14 PM when I blogged this. It would be fabulous if the Daily News got the story wrong - the last thing we need is some ramped-up deadline that is just a few months off that pushes through the most radical changes to the school system and to teacher evaluations in a long, long time.

Better to, you know, actually think about stuff before you, you know, change it.

Especially when people's jobs and reputations (now that the evals will be published in the press) are on the line.

Given how Cuomo, Tisch and King pushed through changes to the original RttT law last May AFTER the legislation had been passed, raising the state part of the eval based upon test scores to 40%, it would not be beyond the pale for Cuomo to push through a unilateral change to the deadline after the unions agreed to the framework.

************************************************************************************

From the Daily News:

There's also a change to a recent deal to implement a statewide teacher evaluation system. School districts now must implement their plans by July 1 of this year, rather than Jan. 16 of next year, or face losing their school aid increase. For the city, the evaluation appeals process must be in place by Jan 16 of next year.

Expect the pressure to mount on the UFT to come to an agreement on the new evaluation system - including new local tests for all subjects in all grades - before September 4, 2012.

Expect the UFT to cave to that pressure.

Expect Bloomberg and his Tweedies to institute a nightmarish barrage of tests, 3-12, in all subjects and use a VAM similar to the TDR VAM to evaluate teachers on those tests.

Expect thousands of teachers to come up "ineffective" every year on that measurement - and expect EVERY teacher to eventually come up "ineffective" on it since the VAM will be so error-riddled and random.

Expect thousands of teachers to be slated for firing and thousands more to be stuck going to hours of PD to "improve."

Expect Leo Casey to say the deal scrapes the skies and anybody who doesn't like it just doesn't understand it.

Cuomo And Dems Use Campaign Cash To Run Teacher Evaluation Ads

Just in case you're a teacher and still think Democrats in this state are, you know, supportive of you:

ALBANY — Gov. Cuomo took to the air in a new ad Tuesday urging New Yorkers to pressure their local school districts and unions to reach deals on new teacher evaluation systems.

The ad, paid for by the state’s Democratic Party, comes as a host of teachers unions and administrators push for changes to a grading deal brokered by Cuomo between the state Education Department and the state teachers union.

The governor has threatened to withhold state aid if the local districts do not implement the teacher evaluations by January.

The ad is scheduled to run on radio stations statewide. In it, Cuomo reiterates his message that New York’s spending on education ranks first in the nation while the state’s graduation rate is 38th.

“It’s not just how much government spends, it’s how we spend it that counts — and we must do better,” Cuomo said. “Now we need the individual school districts across the state to implement these new standards,” he added.

Never mind that 1/3 of the principals in this state are calling for changes to the system - including rolling out a pilot program before forcing every school in every district in the state to use it.

Never mind that the evaluation system isn't actually finished - the VAM that will be used on student test scores hasn't been developed, the tests that will be rolled out in every subject in every grade haven't been created yet EVEN THOUGH PEOPLE WILL BE FIRED USING THIS SYSTEM - Cuomo and the State Democratic Party want to make sure that the public is fooled into thinking this sound is sound, scientific, objective and ready to go.

It is none of those things.

I will reiterate something I said last week - I spoke to someone in a state senators's office who said to me that no changes are going to get done to the system because the the NYSUT already made the agreement, so what you saw last month in the governor's press release is going be the new teacher evaluation system in New York.

This person also said lots of people in Albany know it's going to be a nightmare, that it is essentially unworkable because it is so complex, will force school districts to add so many new tests to the curriculum JUST TO GRADE TEACHERS, and will be the subject of so many lawsuits (especially because nobody knows how unreliable the VAM is going to be.)

And yet, Cuomo and the State Democratic Party are running a propaganda campaign to get this through in every district by September 2012.

You can bet the UFT will agree to this piece of garbage as soon as Andy comes a callin' to Mulgrew and puts some pressure on him.

All I can say is, it's going to be a dark, dark time for the next five years until somebody comes to their senses in Albany.

Teachers need to start bombarding their assembly members and state senators NOW about this impending catastrophe.

In addition, researching legal help wouldn't be a bad idea either.

You can bet if you're declared "ineffective" with this new system, the UFT will be useless as a defense.

NYSED Commissioner Shows His True Bias

Here.

He should be fired as NYSED Commissioner.

He won't be, of course, because he is just the kind of corporate reform-friendly shill the real owners of this state (i.e., the hedge fund managers, the Wall Street criminals, the corporate cronies and the testing companies) want at NYSED.

But it is clear he doesn't give a shit who gets hurt under this new system - students, teachers, administrators.

All he cares about is getting a system in place that lets allows him to corporatize schools all across this state - from the curriculum to the tests to the evaluation system for teachers.

Obama, Bloomberg Talk Education And Other Matters

Monday morning scary story:

They traded thoughts about education, ruminated on the state of immigration and discussed the federal deficit.

But most intriguingly, they talked about the future. Over a long private lunch at the White House, President Obama posed a question to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg: what are you interested in doing next?

Mr. Bloomberg’s precise response is unknown. But their meeting a few weeks ago, confirmed by aides to both leaders and previously undisclosed, was potentially significant for both men, as Mr. Obama seeks support for his presidential campaign and Mr. Bloomberg ponders his post-mayoral career.

Mr. Obama, facing a bruising re-election fight, is eager to attract the kind of centrist, independent voters drawn to Mr. Bloomberg’s brand of politics.

Mr. Bloomberg, confronting the end of his career in elected office, is grappling with how to exert the kind of influence over public discourse that he has had as mayor of the nation’s largest city.

The lunch invitation is striking because Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Obama are thought not to be particularly close — nor to have an especially warm relationship. But the White House seems intent on courting Mr. Bloomberg.

Jay Carney, the White House spokesman, said the lunch was part of a continuing dialogue that the president very much valued. Over the last two years, Mr. Obama has invited Mr. Bloomberg to play golf on Martha’s Vineyard and has dispatched Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to Gracie Mansion to seek the mayor’s views on the economy.

“They speak from time to time,” Mr. Carney said. “The president always enjoys an exchange of ideas and insights with Mayor Bloomberg and is appreciative of the mayor’s leadership on immigration, the economy and education, as well as his commitment to New York City.”

This is why the president's education policies and the mayor's education policies are inseparable - fire teachers, close schools, add standardized tests to every subject in every grade, tie teacher evaluations to those scores using an error-riddled VAM formula, tie teacher pay to those test scores.

When Mayor Bloomberg closes 33 SIG schools this year and fires half of the teachers, he will be using a policy developed and promoted by Barack Obama.

I just want to remind people of that fact as the 2012 campaign gears up.

People love to demonize Bloomberg as the villain in the Ed Deform World, and there is no doubt that Bloomberg relishes playing that role (see here for his star turn.)

But after eight years of the Obama administration, the same policies that Bloomberg pushes - school closing, teacher firings, charter school openings, testing, teacher evals and pay tied to scores - will be enshrined in every state in the nation as education policy by Barack Obama and his USDOE.

Student Loan Debt Bomb

Three fair jobs reports have the Obama people doing high fives over the economy.

No high fives here, however:

Bankruptcy lawyers have a frightening message for America: They’re seeing the telltale signs of a student loan debt bubble that is placing increased financial pressure on families struggling with their children’s mounting debt. According to a recent survey by the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys, more than 80 percent of bankruptcy lawyers have seen a substantial increase in the number of clients seeking relief from student loans in recent years.

In most cases, those clients could not meet the federal hardship standards that are necessary to discharge a student loan through bankruptcy proceedings. Instead, many of these parents or guardians who co-signed the student loans face the prospect of losing their life savings, cars or homes to collection agencies for aggressive private lenders.

...

The amount of student borrowing skyrocketed from $100 billion in 2010 to $867 billion last year — or more than the $704 billion in outstanding U.S. credit card debt, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Of the 37 million borrowers who have outstanding student loan balances as of third-quarter 2011, 14.4 percent have at least one past-due student loan account. Together, these balances come to $85 billion, or roughly 10 percent of the total outstanding student loan balance.

College seniors who graduated with student loans individually owed an average of $25,250, up 5 percent from the previous year, according to a study by Brewer’s group. Parents are responsible, on average, for $34,000 in student loans, a figure that rises to about $50,000 over a standard 10-year repayment period. An estimated 17 percent of parents whose children graduated in 2010 took out loans, a 5.6 percent increase from 1992 and 1993.

A report last year by the Pew Research Center and the Chronicle of Higher Education warned that public anxiety over college costs is at an all-time high. Moreover, “low income college graduates or those burdened by student loan debt are questioning the value of their degrees,” saying the cost of college has delayed other life decisions, the report said.

But of course the people at the USDOE and the NYCDOE are going to begin tracking both schools and individual teachers on college attendance and readiness, so the point of whether college is good or not for individual students right out of high school is moot.

College For All is good for the bankers - and that's what matters these days

Until people start going belly-up on their students loans.

Not to worry, though - there's a government bailout waiting at the end of the line for the banksters.

As for the Millenium Generation, there's a shackle and chain waiting to be tied around their legs for the rest of their lives as they consistently have to go back to college to be "re-trained" for the latest technology advances and compete for employment in an economy that is increasingly rigged against them:

Stef Gray, a Hunter College graduate from New York who has paid $300 in forbearance fees to the company since May, organized the petition drive in hopes of persuading Sallie Mae to drop the fee, just as Bank of America and other financial institutions dropped unpopular fees in the face of Internet protests.

Gray, 23, who lives in Brooklyn, has become a symbol of the plight of young Americans saddled with debt. With both her parents deceased, Gray has put herself through school with part-time jobs and three private loans with Sallie Mae.

Since graduating in May with a master’s degree in geographic information systems, Gray has been unable to find full-time employment. Instead, she says, she has gotten by with temporary jobs and waitressing. Without a steady income, she says, it has been impossible to make the $700 monthly payments on her $40,000 in loans. Nor has she been able to consolidate the loans or negotiate more favorable terms with Sallie Mae.

Every time she deferred a payment on the three loans, Sallie Mae slapped her with a $50 forbearance fee for each loan — a total of $150.

“That may not sound like a lot of money to some,” she said. “But for me, with no parents, struggling to get by without a job and not receiving any unemployment, that’s a lot of money.” Because of the compounding effect of the interest rate on the unpaid portion of her loan and related penalties, Gray says, her original $40,000 loan has grown to $65,000. “The interest is snowballing,” she said.

Morning in Obama's America.

Going to be one bad day for a long time to come...

Bloomberg Sows The Seeds Of Corruption

See if you see any connection between this Seedco corruption story and how Bloomberg runs the school system:

City investigators have discovered evidence of large-scale fraud in one of the agencies leading Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s signature initiative to find jobs for unemployed New Yorkers.

The Department of Investigation found that Seedco, a nonprofit organization that frequently works with the Bloomberg administration, falsely claimed to have helped at least 1,400 people — out of about 6,500 — find jobs; those people are in fact jobless or found employment on their own.

Seedco “developed systematic practices to report false placements” to the city’s Department of Small Business Services, according to a report on the investigation that was released on Friday.

...

The reports of fraud come as a blow to Mr. Bloomberg, who sought a third term based on his ability to lead the city in a tough economy and has heralded his administration’s success in finding jobs for unemployed New Yorkers. The mayor has praised the role nonprofit groups, paid by the city, have had in the jobs effort.

...

The employees at Seedco also described a culture of unrelenting pressure from the Bloomberg administration to produce data showing that the job placement effort was working. Each year, city officials increased the targets for placements, even in the midst of a deep recession. The city required contract agencies to give weekly, monthly and quarterly reports of progress. City officials graded their progress, giving good marks to those with high numbers of placements, and poor grades to those that fell behind.

Agencies producing high numbers of job placements are given “performance-based” bonuses. And Seedco, at the time of the fraudulent job placements, was competing for a new multimillion-dollar contract to run a work force center in the Bronx.

Seedco employees told city investigators that they believed they would lose their jobs if they failed to reach their goals.

Internal memorandums and e-mails, uncovered by the Department of Investigation and Seedco, reveal directors and staff members discussing unethical and, in some cases, outright fraudulent behavior.

Gee, I'm sure now that we're going to put unrelenting pressure upon schoolteachers to raise student test scores every year or be fired, they'll be no unethical or outright fraudulent behavior by employees of the school system trying to save their jobs.

And if there is any of that, we'll just blame the "bad teachers" instead of the unrealistic goals and benchmarks pushed by Bloomberg and his corporate managers.

Because it's never the fault of the most brilliant mind to ever run New York City - the Mayor of Money himself, Michael Bloomberg.

None of the cronyism, corruption, or criminal activity of city employees and/or the consultants hired by the city seen on his watch is ever his fault.

CityTime and the theft of $600 million in city money - not his fault.

Money laundering through the Independence Party - not his fault.

NYPD ticket fixing scandal - not his fault.

NYPD gun-running - not his fault.

NYPD planting drugs on victims to increase arrest stats - not his fault.

Judith Hederman/FTA/NYCDOE scandal - not his fault.

Willard Lanham/NYCDOE scandal - not his fault.

Faulty GPS systems - not his fault.

Faulty NYCHA computer system - not his fault.

And of course the systematic fraud perpetrated at Seedco, encouraged by the Bloomberg administration's own obsession with data, stats and "performance" - not Bloomberg's fault either.

Bloomberg is very big on the performance of city employees - so much so that he's willing to spend $700 million over budget just to make sure they punch in and punch out at the right time - but when it comes to tracking his own performance as steward of the city and its finances - it's never his responsibility and it's never his fault when things go wrong or money gets stolen.

Must be those damned teachers...

Cuomo Education Policy - Pearson First!!!

Governor 1% has a new website up called NYStudentsFirst that tracks the districts in NY State that have come to an agreement with their local unions over a teacher evaluation system.

As Assailed Teacher points out, the site is ridiculously simplistic, offers few details about the evaluation systems agreed upon by the local districts and unions and is simply another hammer Cuomo is trying to use to force the unions to agree to an evaluation system based upon test scores.

I noted in a comment on Assailed Teachers post that

Cuomo’s site steals its name from both Tweed (“Children First”) and Rhee (“StudentsFirst.”) Which it should, since the ideology behind Cuomo’s policies is the same ideology behind the policies promoted by Rhee and pushed by Bloomberg and Tweed.

I would like to add that the name of the site ought to be Pearson First!!! since that company will be the main beneficiary of all of these new evaluation systems that are going to force new standardized tests (both state and local tests) into every grade in every subject, K-12.

And we shouldn't be surprised about that.

As Michael Winerip has reported in the NY Times, Pearson has been bribing state officials, including former NYSED Commissioner David Steiner, with overseas education junkets and other goodies to sign testing contracts with the company.

And as Alan Singer pointed point at Huffington Post last week, Pearson literally is trying to control what gets taught in every school in the nation, how it gets taught, who does the teaching of that material and how both the teacher and the subject matter is assessed:

If it has its way, Pearson will soon be determining what gets taught in schools across the United States with little or no parental or educational oversight. Pearson standardized exams will assess how well teachers implement Pearson instruction modules and Pearson's common core standards, but not what students really learn or whether students are actually learning things that are important to know. Pearson is already creating teacher certification exams for eighteen states including New York, organizing staff development workshops to promote Pearson products, and providing school district Pearson assessment tools. In New York, Pearson Education currently has a five-year, $32 million contract to administer state test and provides other "testing services" to the State Education Department. It also recently received a share of a federal Race to the Top grant to create what the company calls the "next-generation" of online assessments.

...

From February 9-11, Pearson organized a National Summit in Orlando, Florida to promote its concept of "Best Practices in School Improvement" and to sell its programs for integrating Common Core State Standards into curriculum, instruction and assessment. These include providing "struggling and successful schools alike with professional development and consultative services that have helped their leaders transform instruction in the classroom and raise students' achievement levels." The company brags that senior America's Choice fellows Sally Hampton and Phil Daro, employees of a Pearson sub-division, "not only led the development of the Common Core Standards, but also helped design Pearson's CCSS services, helping us tailor our professional development, district level consultative services, job-embedded coaching, learning teams for building capacity, and even whole school CCSS implementation services in order to meet your specific needs and interests as you align curriculum content and practices to the standards."

Singer goes on to note that Cuomo has appointed David Wakelyn, a former employee of the Pearson sub-division America's Choice, to be Deputy Secretary of Education in New York State.

Hey, who cares that the state attorney general is looking into allegations that Pearson "has acted improperly to influence state education officials by paying for overseas trips and other perks" - let's put a guy with ties to Pearson in charge of overseeing state education policy.

It seems Pearson makes all the calls on education policy in this state - from teacher evaluation deals to testing contracts - and Governor Cuomo is happy to sign off on that.

In fact, education officials in many states and at the USDOE are signing off on Pearson running education policy.

No wonder they're the leading "education company" in the world:



And with 45 states signed off on the Obama-approved Common Core Curriculum and Pearson ready to roll out curriculum materials, tests and teacher evaluation programs for the Common Core, it's only going to get better for Pearson from here on out.

Pearson First!!! indeed.

Another Bloomberg Corruption Scandal

The Bloomberg scandals just keep mounting:

One of New York’s largest nonprofit job placement agencies falsely claimed to have helped find jobs for at least 1,400 people in less than two years, according to the city’s Department of Investigation.

The agency, Seedco, the investigative agency found, “developed systematic practices to report false placements” to the city’s Department of Small Business Services. In many hundreds of cases, Seedco, which is an important part of the Bloomberg administration’s ambitious efforts to find jobs for the unemployed, took a jobless client’s work history, altered dates and claimed past employment as a new job.

The investigative agency noted that the number of fraudulent claims could be much higher. For three years, from 2008 through February 2011, city officials “deemed it acceptable” for its nonprofit contractors to shred all job placement documents.

The New York Times, in two articles last summer, revealed these and other abuses after a former deputy director at a Seedco center, Bill Harper, provided 400 examples of false placements. Later, six former Seedco employees said managers had pressured them to produce thousands of fake job placements.

The Department of Investigation noted that Seedco responded by dismissing allegations of fraud as untrue and attacking the credibility of Mr. Harper. Even as agency officials took this public posture, investigators noted, senior staff members privately had unearthed an e-mail pointing to fraud.

Perhaps most confounding, city investigators discovered Seedco employees’ entering false job placements into its database as recently as last month.

...

The Bloomberg administration gives “performance-based” payments to nonprofit job contractors that produce high numbers of job placements. And at the time of the alleged fraudulent job placements, Seedco was competing to win a new multimillion-dollar contract to run a work force center in the Bronx.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has lauded Seedco and its work in meeting his administration’s aggressive job-seeking goals. Seedco, with a board that is a who’s who of nonprofit royalty in the city, now holds $22.2 million in contracts from the Department of Small Business Services. Seedco also holds welfare-to-work contracts with the city.

Will Bloomberg be held accountable for this scandal?

Will any city official be held accountable?

They should be:

The city’s investigation report raises a question of why city officials did not push harder for answers. It does not suggest any complicity by city officials.

But last August, when the deputy commissioner of small-business services, Angie Kamath, was asked about allegations of fraud at Seedco, she insisted at first that no investigation was needed. “We have internal closure,” she said.

She said that if Mr. Harper was “seriously concerned about the integrity of the data,” he should have come to the city rather than The Times.

Yeah, city officials really seemed like they were going to get right on that investigation.

And once again, it is Bloomberg's unrelenting push for ever-higher performance goals that brought about the fraud:

Seedco no longer allows managers to judge employees based on their ability to meet aggressive job placement targets. Seedco notes, too, that it does not profit from its job placement work.

That excuse understates the pressure on nonprofit groups when it comes to job placement. As the city’s investigation department notes, nonprofit groups, not the least Seedco, are engaged in a highly competitive race for new city contracts. In Seedco’s case, agency officials pressured workers to produce more and more fraudulent job placements even as the agency sought a large new contract to open a job center in the Bronx.

Relentless competition always brings out the best in all of us, doesn't it?

I'm sure when Governor Cuomo and Mayor Bloomberg get their way next year and start pitting teachers against each other on a big state-wide bell curve built from relentless test score-based performance goals, nothing like what happened at Seedco will happen in the school system.

Endless Test Prep

Already happening in North Carolina:

More ammunition for foes of high-stakes testing has come in the form of a survey of North Carolina teachers showing that more than half those polled say they devote over half their classroom time to preparing for high-stakes tests.

The results have been publicized at virtually the same time as the annual MetLife Survey of the American Teacher, which showed this year that teacher job satisfaction is at its lowest in more than two decades, as my colleague Liana Heitin reported yesterday.

The North Carolina survey of more than 600 teachers statewide and an accompanying report from the North Carolina NAACP, Advocates for Children's Services, and the Advancement Project (a civil rights group that tackles community inequities), also showed that nearly 90 percent of teachers thought the state's end-of-grade and end-of-course tests damaged teacher morale.

Those tests fulfill state accountability requirements, and some of them also fulfill the federal No Child Left Behind Act accountability requirements, said Alexi Freeman, a staff attorney with the Advancement Project.

"It can ruin cooperation among teachers, lead to handpicking of students and punishment of teachers who want to work with 'struggling' students, and weaken curriculum by increasing the prevalence of narrowly 'teaching to the test,'" said the report called "Taking Back Our Classrooms!"

The survey's results also revealed more than three-quarters of teachers surveyed think such high-stakes tests are driving "good teachers" out of the profession.

This is happening in many grades in New York State already too - and soon it will be happening in ALL grades in ALL subjects, K-12.

Don't you love the Orwellian language the corporate politicians use to describe their corporate reform - NYStudentsFirst.

A reform that promotes new standardized tests in every grade in every subject - both state and local - and ties teachers' jobs to those scores - is termed "NYStudentsFirst."

Gee - where did Cuomo get that name from?

Isn't there another corporate education reform group with that name?

Oh, right.

And then of course the corporate reformers at Tweed call their reforms "Children First."

What none of these corporate pols and corporate reformers acknowledge in public is that all of these reforms are actually termed in private "Testing Companies First."

If you don't believe this is so, just ask the students and teachers in North Carolina.

The World Is Ending

Fire up a colortini and watch the pictures as they fly through the air:

WASHINGTON — Earth’s magnetic field is about to be shaken like a snow globe by the largest solar storm in five years.

After hurtling through space for a day and a half, a massive cloud of charged particles is due to arrive early Thursday and could disrupt utility grids, airline flights, satellite networks and GPS services, especially in northern areas. But the same blast could also paint colorful auroras farther from the poles than normal.

Scientists say the storm, which started with a massive solar flare earlier in the week, is growing as it races outward from the sun, expanding like a giant soap bubble. When it strikes early Thursday, the particles will be moving at 4 million mph.

“It’s hitting us right in the nose,” said Joe Kunches, a scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colo.

...

The storm is part of the sun’s normal 11-year cycle, which is supposed to reach peak storminess next year. Solar storms don’t harm people, but they do disrupt technology. And during the last peak around 2002, experts learned that GPS was vulnerable to solar outbursts.

Because new technology has flourished since then, scientists could discover that some new systems are also at risk, said Jeffrey Hughes, director of the Center for Integrated Space Weather Modeling at Boston University.

Reminds me a little of this story

Asteroid To Destroy Earth

The Onion

Onion News Network To Broadcast Planet’s Final Moments NEW YORK, NY (September 29, 2011) – With a giant asteroid expected to hit Earth on October 4th, the Onion News Network has announced it will continue broadcasting until the moment the planet is…

Very exciting.

I'm rooting for the asteroid.

Bloomberg's Restaurant Ratings Derided As Unfair And Arbitrary

The Mayor of Reductionism evaluates schools, teachers, and restaurants using letter grades - but the restaurants are starting to fight back:

A cheer went up the other night at James, a popular Brooklyn bistro, as a triumphant waiter marched into the retro-tinged dining room bearing the new gold star of the New York City restaurant trade: a framed, blue letter “A.”

As diners applauded, the waiter placed the letter grade in the restaurant’s front window — and removed the orange “B” that had been there for three worrying months.

Nineteen months after the Bloomberg administration began issuing letter grades to the city’s 24,000 restaurants, the bright “A,” “B” and “C” signs have become commonplace and polarizing presences, embraced by discerning customers but despised by restaurateurs who say the grades are handed out in unfair and inconsistent ways.

On Wednesday, the restaurant inspection program is to face its first full-fledged vetting by the City Council, whose members have expressed concern about the effects the grades have on small businesses and the increasing number of fines for sanitary violations issued by the health department.

Not to be upstaged, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg scheduled a news conference of his own on Tuesday to defend the inspection program, one of the more high-profile initiatives he has initiated in a rocky third term.

At Zero Otto Nove, a stalwart trattoria in the Bronx, Mr. Bloomberg sought to pre-empt criticism by citing statistics showing an uptick in restaurant revenue and a reduction in salmonella infections since the grading system began in 2010. He denounced critics as “people that complain because they don’t want to keep their restaurants clean.”

“They think it’s O.K. to have mice and roaches and dirt and not have people wash their hands before they come back from the bathroom,” the mayor said, his voice rising. “That’s just simply unacceptable, and their complaints are going to fall on deaf ears, I can tell you that. We’re not going to change."

Notice the mayor calls critics of this reductionist system filthy f%^&*ing pigs.

That's kinda how he treats critics of the school grading system and the new evaluation system too.

There are no legitimate complaints about Bloomberg - you either agree with him or your a filty f%^&*ing pig.

As for the rating system, there are plenty of problems with it.

First, not all "bad restaurants" are treated equally in Bloombergville:

For health officials, the Council’s hearing came at an inopportune moment. The New York Post reported over the weekend that Per Se, consistently rated among the city’s best restaurants, had avoided a “B” grade with a telephone call to a city official, in which the restaurant successfully argued that the inspection report had contained errors.

City Hall officials quickly pointed out that several dozen restaurants, of varying degrees of prestige, had taken the same route to contest alleged violations and avoid a protracted adjudication process. Mr. Bloomberg, at his news conference on Tuesday, referred to any suggestion of undue influence as “an outrage.”

“It’s just so unfair,” the mayor said. “No wonder sometimes it’s just so hard for everybody to keep working in this city and trying to do what’s right.”

Sure, it's unfair when people criticize the mayor for allowing this kind of fine-fixing to go on.

Except that's what he has done - both for restaurants and for tickets.

And it's unfair, too, that a restaurant can get a bad rating for a whole bunch of things that maybe they shouldn't get a bad rating for:

Mr. Bloomberg and Ms. Quinn agreed on Tuesday that the grading system provided diners with more access to information, but some restaurant owners argued that the grading system was far too blunt and was frequently based on relatively minor issues.

“It could be a cracked toilet cover; it could be a gap around a pipe,” said Peter Hansen, the director of operations at Benchmarc Restaurants, which owns several expensive dining establishments in the city.

“But,” Mr. Hansen added, “what your customer is thinking is: old tuna.”

Elizabeth Meltz, who oversees food safety at Mario Batali’s Italian restaurants, said that she supported a grading system and that it could improve public health.

But, echoing other restaurant workers, she said some city health inspectors seemed inconsistent in their standards, asking about certain elements of the kitchen on some visits and not on others. Sometimes, the inspectors appeared unfamiliar with complex dishes like terrine and kimchi, Ms. Meltz said, and on one occasion, she believed that an inspector was disrespectful to her because of her gender.

Nothing like getting a bad rating because the inspector isn't familiar with the dishes - or he had to sit on a cracked toilet seat.

It seems everybody in this city gets letter grades these days that have huge financial implications for them - except for Bloomberg, of course.

He is above letter grades.

And criticism.

And term limits.

Bloomberg Intends To Fire 50% of Teachers At SIG Schools

Went up this afternoon at the Daily News:

City officials are determined to replace roughly half the staff at 33 schools that will be shuttered this summer, documents show.

The city will push forward with axing 1,750 staffers even though doing so won’t necessarily qualify for $58 million in a federal turnaround grant, legal documents state.

United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew struck back Monday, charging the mayor with closing schools rather then improving them. “That’s why his education legacy is in shambles,” said Mulgrew.

The city plans to shut the 33 schools this summer, requiring each of the teachers to reapply for the job at a new school that will reopen next fall with the same students.

The city may not get the federal funds, as it won’t in every case be able to meet the federal requirement that half the staff at the schools be axed.

Bloomberg went on record saying he wanted to fire 50% of all NYC teachers.

He's starting with the SIG schools.

You can bet that after he leaves office, there will be a lot of pressure from the hedge fundies and Wall Street crooks like Kathryn Wilde for Bloomberg's successor to continue his education policies, including the school closure policy and the teacher bashing.

And given the money Bloomberg plans to throw around as a "philanthropist" once he is out of City Hall, he may still have de facto control of the schools even after he no longer holds political office.

Scary but true.

So the UFT's strategy of waiting for Bloomberg to go is short-sighted and ultimately doomed to failure.

The corporate attack on public education, teachers, and unions is bigger than the Little Autocrat.

They ought to be developing a coherent, community-based strategy to fight back against this.

But they're not.

We have some dark days ahead before Bloomberg goes.

And we may have still darker ones afterward.

Duncan Claims Education Is Civil Rights Issue, But Promotes De Facto Segregation, Other Harms, Through Education Policy

The NY Times runs a story today that says black students, particularly boys, receive harsher discipline in public schools, than students of other backgrounds:

Black students, especially boys, face much harsher discipline in public schools than other students, according to new data from the Department of Education.

Although black students made up only 18 percent of those enrolled in the schools sampled, they accounted for 35 percent of those suspended once, 46 percent of those suspended more than once and 39 percent of all expulsions, according to the Civil Rights Data Collection’s 2009-10 statistics from 72,000 schools in 7,000 districts, serving about 85 percent of the nation’s students. The data covered students from kindergarten age through high school.

One in five black boys and more than one in 10 black girls received an out-of-school suspension. Over all, black students were three and a half times as likely to be suspended or expelled than their white peers.

Then the Times offers the obligatory boilerplate quote from the cliche-meister at the USDOE:

“Education is the civil rights of our generation,” said Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, in a telephone briefing with reporters on Monday. “The undeniable truth is that the everyday education experience for too many students of color violates the principle of equity at the heart of the American promise.”

Do you mean like segregated schools, Secretary Duncan? You know, like all those charter schools you promote?

Or schools where white teachers drill students of color on how to behave or toss them out of school?

Or schools where white teachers do nothing but teach to the test so that students do not learn critical thinking skills?

Or promoting policies that target black educators for firing?

Because if those are the things you mean by your boilerplate quote that “The undeniable truth is that the everyday education experience for too many students of color violates the principle of equity at the heart of the American promise," then look no further than at yourself and your boss, President Obama, as the prime culprit for this at the federal level.

Ironic that the first black president promotes policies that are re-segregating schools and diminishing the kinds of educational experiences and critical thinking skills so desperately needed by young people in a time of social and economic change like we have today.

But that's exactly what President Obama is doing, through his education policies.

And the damage from these policies is horrific.

As Glenn Ford of Black Agenda Radio put it:

Educational policy in the Obama era isn’t about education at all. It’s about replacing skilled, experienced teachers with rootless temps better suited to serve in the privatized holding tanks they wish to turn public schools in poor neighborhoods into, for a population on its way to low wage jobs and prisons.

So Secretary of Education Privatization Arne Duncan can bemoan how public education is harming students of color and offer platitudes about civil rights all he wants.

The fact of the matter is, he and his boss are at the vanguard of the destruction.

Obama Moves G-8 From Chicago To Camp David

Looks like the Obama Campaign, er, Obama White House wants to avoid ugly video of people protesting the G-8 in Chicago:

In a surprise turnaround, the White House announced Monday afternoon that Chicago won’t be hosting the controversial G-8 summit after all.

It will be held at Camp David instead of Chicago.

The NATO summit will proceed here May 20-21.

City Hall insisted that it was President Obama’s decision — that Mayor Rahm Emanuel did not ask the White House to take the more controversial of the two summits off Chicago’s hands.

One leading demonstrator pledged the protests “will go forward” despite the switch.

The White House issued a terse statement dropping the bombshell shortly before 3 p.m.

“In May, the United States looks forward to hosting the G-8 and NATO summits. To facilitate a free-flowing discussion with our close G-8 partners, the president is inviting his fellow G-8 leaders to Camp David on May 18-19 for the G-8 summit, which will address a broad range of economic, political and security issues,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said.

“The president will then welcome NATO allies and partners to his hometown of Chicago for the NATO summit on May 20-21, which will be the premier opportunity this year for the President to continue his efforts to strengthen NATO in order to ensure that the Atlantic Alliance remains the most successful alliance in history, while charting the way forward in Afghanistan.”

The Coalition Against the G-8 said the change won't make much difference - the protests will still go forward, albeit with minor changes:

Andy Thayer, a spokesman for the Coalition Against NATO-G-8, didn’t buy the City Hall spin. He believes that pressure from local business leaders concerned about an international onslaught of protesters convinced the mayor to cut the risk in half.

“There’s been a lot of grumbling from business leaders in the city about what a total pain in the neck this thing would be. [The White House] probably looked at what a mess they were gonna make of the city and decided to move part of it to Camp David,” Thayer said.

“I really think the business community began to lean on Emanuel and Emanuel probably realized he was in over his head.”

Although the economic summit will be held in the secluded environment around Camp David, Thayer stressed that the demonstrations in Chicago “will go forward, but maybe not on the 19th” of May.

“Our protest will go forward because NATO is the military arm of the G-8. NATO has bombed whole countries to smithereens and is currently engaged in the U.S.’s longest war in history,” Thayer said.

“I’d say plenty of people have got tons to be upset with NATO about. If anything, people understood much more readily what NATO was about than G-8, which is more of a shadowy institution in people’s minds.”

As for why the Obama Campaign, er, White House decided to change the venue:

Asked why the G-8 was moved from Chicago to Camp David, National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said, “The President felt that Camp David would provide an informal and intimate setting to have a free-flowing discussion with his fellow leaders. He very much looks forward to coming to his hometown for a critically important NATO Summit, as planned.”

The Obama administration and the Emanuel administration apparently under-estimated the hometown opposition to the summit and the fears of rioting that accompanied it.

Yeah, video of riots and stuff burning in the streets doesn't look so good in a Presidential Election Year.

It's a shame both Mayor Emanuel and President Obama aren't more curious about WHY so many people want to come and protest the political face of oligarchy as it makes decisions that sell most of us down the river for the benefit of the few, the powerful and the privileged.

Philanthropy Is The Enemy Of Justice

From The Guardian:

It's strange that at this week's World Economic Forum the designated voice of the world's poor has been Bill Gates, who has pledged £478m to the Global Fund to fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, telling Davos that the world economic crisis was no excuse for cutting aid.

It reminds me of that dark hour when Al Gore, despite being a shareholder in Occidental Petroleum, was the voice of climate change action – because Gates does not speak with the voice of the world's poor, of course, but with the voice of its rich. It's a loud voice, but the model of development it proclaims is the wrong one because philanthropy is the enemy of justice.

Am I saying that philanthropy has never done good? No, it has achieved many wonderful things. Would I rather people didn't have polio vaccines than get them from a plutocrat? No, give them the vaccines. But beware the havoc that power without oversight and democratic control can wreak.

The biotech agriculture that Lord Sainsbury was unable to push through democratically he can now implement unilaterally, through his Gatsby Foundation. We are told that Gatsby's biotech project aims to provide food security for the global south. But if you listen to southern groups such as the Karnataka State Farmers of India, food security is precisely the reason they campaign against GM, because biotech crops are monocrops which are more vulnerable to disease and so need lashings of petrochemical pesticides, insecticides and fungicides – none of them cheap – and whose ruinous costs will rise with the price of oil, bankrupting small family farms first. Crop diseases mutate, meanwhile, and all the chemical inputs in the world can't stop disease wiping out whole harvests of genetically engineered single strands.

Both the Gatsby and the Bill and Melinda Gates foundations are keen to get deeper into agriculture, especially in Africa. But top-down nostrums for the rural poor don't end well. The list of autocratic hubris in pseudo-scientific farming is long and spectacularly calamitous. It runs from Tsar Alexander I's model village colonies in 1820s Novgorod to 1920s Hollywood film producer Hickman Price, who, as Simon Schama brilliantly describes in The American Future, "bought 54 square miles of land to show the little people how it was really done, [and] used 25 combines all painted glittery silver". His fleet of tractors were kept working day and night, and the upshot of such sod-busting was the great plains dustbowl. But there's no stopping a plutocratic philanthropist in a hurry.

And then there is the vexed question of whether these billions are really the billionaires' to give away in the first place. When Microsoft was on its board, the American Electronics Association, the AeA, challenged European Union proposals for a ban on toxic components and for the use of a minimum 5% recycled plastic in the manufacture of electronic goods.

AeA took the EU to the World Trade Organisation on a charge of erecting artificial trade barriers. (And according to the American NGO Public Citizen, "made the astounding claim that there is no evidence that heavy metals, like lead, pose a threat to human health or the environment".)

Now, the EU is big enough and ugly enough to have fought and won the case. But many an African country lacks the war chest for such a fight, and so will end up paying for the healthcare of those exposed to leaky old PCs' cadmium, chromium or mercury, instead of embarking on, let's say, a nationwide anti-malaria strategy. Bill Gates himself may not indeed have known about what the AeA was doing on Microsoft's behalf, but the fact remains that if a philanthropist's money comes from externalising corporate costs to taxpayers, and that if Microsoft is listed for its own tax purposes as a partly Puerto Rican and Singaporean company, then the real philanthropists behind these glittering foundations might be a sight more ragged-trousered than Bill and Melinda.

Free marketeers will spring to the defence of billionaire philanthropists with a remark like: "Oh, so you'd rather they spent all their money selfishly on golf courses and mansions, would you?" To which I reply: "Oh, you mean that trickle-down doesn't work, after all?" But the point is that the poor are not begging us for charity, they are demanding justice. And when, on the occasion of his birthday, a sultan or emperor reprieved one thousand prisoners sentenced to death, no one ever called those pardons justice. Nor is it justice when a plutocrat decides to reprieve untold thousands from malaria. Human beings should not have to depend upon a rich man's whim for the right to life.

Or the right to breathe.

Or go to school.

But these days, it;s Bill Gates world and the rest of us just live in it.