Common Core Test

Test Your Common Core Savvy

The “Common Core” standards are now being imposed on schools around the country. This regimen is the latest phase of the corporate assault on public education, orchestrated by multibillionaires like Bill Gates, imposed by the Obama White House and carried out by a handful of “educational” monopolies (Pearson, McGraw Hill, College Board). On April 6, Class Struggle Education Workers in New York held a workshop in New York City on “Common Core: Privatization and Regimentation of Public Education.” The lead speaker, Charles Brover, gave a “test" illustrating what the Common Core is all about. The test was inspired by and adapted from “Test Your Public Ed Savvy,” by Susan Ohanian and Stephen Krashen, The Progressive (magazine), January 26, 2013.* Take the test below, click on the answers (with explanatory notes) and raise your Common Core Savvy.

TEST YOUR COMMON CORE SAVVY

Multiple-choice test. Choose an answer and click on it.

1. According to the Common Core mission statement, with implementation of the Standards “our communities will be best positioned”
   1. to provide greater educational equity.
   2. to provide greater educational access.
   3. to compete successfully in the global economy.
   4. to expand and activate civic participation.
   5. to enhance students’ intellectual development.
2. Common Core Standards were developed because
   1. parents worry that U.S. children score far below other countries on international tests.
   2. teachers lack the skills to craft adequate curriculum and wanted help.
   3. state departments of education asked for them.
   4. of grass-roots concern that children need special tools to compete in the Global Economy.
   5. the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation paid for them.
3. Who said, “people don’t give a shit about what you feel or what you think.”
   1. Benito Mussolini, fascist dictator of Italy
   2. Donald Trump, real estate mogul, TV star
   3. Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York City
   4. Don Rickles, insult comedian
   5. David Coleman, architect of the Common Core Standards
4. What makes Common Core Standards different from all other educational standards?
   1. All other standards fail to provide guidance for teachers and curriculum developers.
   2. All other standards are a hodge-podge without evidence-based assessment.
   3. All other standards lack sufficient academic rigor.
   4. All other standards are not enforced by a national testing regime.
   5. All other standards overvalue non-informational texts.
5. U.S. international test scores aren't at the top of the world because
   1. we lack common standards and valid tests.
   2. many teachers are not doing their job.
   3. nearly 25% of American children live in poverty.
   4. American children are not interested in hard study.
   5. parents don't take an interest in children's education.
6. The new online feature of Common Core testing
   1. will reduce administration costs.
   2. will streamline student evaluation.
   3. offers new opportunities for creativity.
   4. will lead to more individualized learning.
   5. means students will be tested many more times each year.
7. After taking the most recent New York State tests aligned to the Common Core Standards, an upstate 8th grader, Sophia, created her own test with items based on her letter, titled, “Dear New York State:” In her letter she writes:
   1. Thank you so much for the state test. How else could I know how I am doing in school? This multiple choice test really gives me a chance to exhibit deep learning and critical thinking.
   2. When I take a state test, I feel I am at my best. I am so focused. I welcome the pressure and stress; so do my teachers and family. Some additional neuro-enhancing drugs can also help.
   3. When I take a state test, I am not myself. I feel as if I need to do everything the way the state thinks it should be. There is only one way to do these tests: your way.
   4. When I take a state test, I feel really confident and happy because I know that there is always one right answer to every question. In this crazy, mixed up world, it’s good to know that someone is in charge. I love your state!
   5. We need tougher standards, and a better way to excel on the tests based on them. When I take a state test, I always think that my teacher didn’t prepare me for this or that question. You can’t trust teachers or schools. Let’s have the test-makers educate us directly. BTW I own a computer and a smart phone. This can work!
8. Who said Hurricane Katrina was "the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans. That education system was a disaster."
   1. Rush Limbaugh
   2. Pat Robertson
   3. Editor at The Onion
   4. Bill O'Reilly
   5. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan
9. While extolling the benefits of standardized testing, Obama and the billionaire reformers send their own children to private schools not dominated by testing because
   1. they don’t really like their own children and only want what’s best for others.
   2. they are not interested in knowing about the intellectual development of their children.
   3. they don’t care about the effectiveness of their children’s teachers.
   4. they think the tests will detract from the excellence of their children’s education.
   5. at these prices, they don’t need tests to know the schools are damn good.
10. “Decompose numbers less than or equal to 10 into pairs in more than one way, e.g., by using objects or drawings, and record each decomposition by a drawing or equation” This is a Common Core Mathematics Standard for grade:
    1. K
    2. 1
    3. 2
    4. 3
    5. 4
11. When Kentucky tried to pilot a Common Core aligned curriculum, proficiency rates
    1. went up 5%
    2. went down 30%
    3. went down 10%
    4. went up 10%
    5. stayed about the same
12. What is the most likely effect of the Common Core Standards on student achievement?
    1. U.S. students will outperform students in Finland and Singapore on international math tests.
    2. The racial achievement gap will be narrowed, finally.
    3. No effect other than massive cheating, increased tears, family stress, and perhaps with regard to the math tests, some prayer in public schools.
    4. Students will achieve competitive advantage in the global marketplace.
    5. More students will be college and career ready.
13. Who among the following educators does NOT support the Common Core Standards?
    1. Linda Darling Hammond
    2. Howard Gardner
    3. Jeffrey Wilhelm
    4. E.D. Hirsch
    5. Randi Weingarten
14. Children who live in poverty in the U.S.
    1. are protected by a comprehensive social welfare safety net.
    2. need a very structured curriculum.
    3. are more likely to attend a school with poorly supported libraries than are middle-class children.
    4. have the same chance for school success as other students-if their parents support education.
    5. need vouchers to attend better schools
15. A notable feature of education in Finland, the country scoring highest on international tests, is:
    1. universal pre-school emphasizes an early start in skill development.
    2. children in grade school have a play break every 45 minutes.
    3. a system of annual national standardized tests informs teachers of every child's skill attainment.
    4. there are no teacher unions to cripple reform.
    5. corporate leaders have taken a leadership role in school policy.

STOP! DO NOT GO ON! DO NOT TAKE A PLAY BREAK!

CHECK YOUR ANSWERS ON THE “ANSWER SHEET” BELOW.

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ANSWER SHEET

1. C is correct. The final sentence of the mission statement of the Common Core Standards: “With American students fully prepared for the future, our communities will be best positioned to compete successfully in the global economy.”
   
   Answers A, B, C and D are important purposes of education, but the Common Core initiative represents a chauvinist, competitive distortion of those purposes. For an even scarier, openly militaristic justification of support to the Common Core, see U.S. Education Reform and National Security (2012) by Murdoch exec and former NYC corporate educational reform raider, Joel Klein and “mushroom cloud” imperialist war monger, Condoleezza Rice (not such an odd couple, after all). Along with the Common Core Standards and testing, they also propose a periodic “National Security Audit” because public schools “constitute a very grave national security threat facing this nation.” It is not a giant step from thinking about our children as “human capital” (rather than human beings) and widgets to thinking about them as human drones.
2. E is correct. See “Is the Gates Foundation Involved in bribery,” July 23, 2010.
   
   The Gates Foundation gave more than a hundred million dollars to the Council of Chief School Officers and the National Governors association (“JoLLE Forum — Rotten to the (Common) Core,” Nov. 1, 2012) — the two main organizations charged with drafting and promoting the Common Core. The Common Core Initiative is a key part of the “reformers’” market-based strategy to denigrate and close public schools, bust and marginalize unions and make way for charters, vouchers and privatization. Answer B is a false claim given as another rationale for the Common Core. “Reformers” undermine the professional expertise of teachers, particularly career teachers who have devoted their lives to the profession. The “reformers” instead idolize the Teach for America model where Ivy League hotshots teach for a couple years, enhance their resumés, and then go off to their real jobs, often — as in the case TFA graduate Michelle Rhee — to the lucrative education reform business. Answers A, C, and D are also untrue
3. E is correct. David Coleman in a speech to New York State educators in Albany, April 2011 disparaging personal writing.
   
   He went on to say, “It is rare in a working environment that someone says, ‘Johnson, I need a market analysis by Friday, but before that I need a compelling account of your childhood’.” If we subject this statement to the “close reading” Coleman favors, we may notice his use of the word, “people.” The “people” who “don’t give a shit” turn out to be our bosses, and education is understood as making “Johnson” a useful, compliant worker. If we extend the critique beyond a close reading, we may want to ask about David Coleman’s problem with his childhood. Answers A, B, C and D are wrong although any of these figures could have said it on another occasion.
4. D is correct. – (This is our Passover question.) It is all about the testing. The tests will be used for everything—to determine outcomes for students, funding for schools and districts, and to be a big part of teacher evaluation determining pay. Educators who try to divorce the Common Core Standards’ lofty language of pedagogical “practices” from the brute facts of the standardized testing are fooling themselves and/or others. CCS promoters say the standards direct “the what” but not “the how” of teaching. But the detailed descriptions of the CCS and the testing requirement for “coverage” imply a shallow curriculum and teacher-centered, direct instruction.
   
   Answers A, B, and C are wrong because there have been many standards documents that have engaged educators as aspirational guides to what students should be able to know and do. Principles and Standards for School Mathematics (1989, 2000) of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) is a good example. It offers lots of guidance for instruction and formative assessments, but no associated standardized tests. (Sadly the NCTM along with most mainstream educational organizations is now drinking the Common Core Kool-Aid.) Answer E is wrong because teachers always try to balance and blend genres; the CCS impulse to teacher-proofing results in a pointless ratio of fictional to informational text.
5. C is correct – See “Measuring Child Poverty,” UNICEF, May 2012.
   
   With increasing child poverty, soaring inequality and more visible downward mobility, educational “reformers” blame public schools, teachers and their unions, parents, anything and everything but the social and economic conditions that devastate the learning opportunities of so many of our school children. Even to mention such reality-based factors exposes the critic to charges of engaging in “the soft-core bigotry of low expectations.” When you disaggregate the data on international tests such as PISA, U.S. middle class students who attend well-funded schools achieve high scores on international tests, among the highest in the world. “PISA 2009 Reading Test Results: The US does quite well, controlling for SES. And maybe American scores are ‘just right.’”
   
   Answers B, D, and E are wrong because they are untrue, and A is a non-sequitur.
6. E is correct. See “Common Core Assessments.” See also “How Much Testing” by Stephen Krashen, 25 July 2012.
   
   Online testing will also contribute to the spiraling costs that school districts cannot afford. See “Federal Mandates on Local Education: Costs and Consequences – Yes, it’s a Race, but is it in the Right Direction?” It is, however, a profitable dream come true for test makers and publishers who can now address a single national market mandated to test and test again.
7. C is correct. See Sophia’s excellent letter and test. In the same reading passage Sophia quotes Einstein’s reprove that if you “judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing it is stupid.” Sophia’s letter expresses how these tests represent a powerful authoritarian reading lesson, a frontal attack on children’s creativity and identities as learners. Answers A and B are untrue, D is insane, and E may be the right answer for Pearson Vue publishers, but 8th graders know better.
8. E is correct. “Duncan: ‘Katrina was the best thing for New Orleans school system,’” Jan. 29, 2010. Answers A, B and D are wrong, but any of these figures could have said it, and doubtless “reformers” of every stripe cheered on the racist dismantling of the New Orleans school system. C might have said it as a parody of A, B, and D, but it was actually said by the U.S. Secretary of Education. Despite heralding the New Orleans catastrophe as an “opportunity” to usher in wholesale market-based approaches, New Orleans remains among the lowest performing districts in the low-performing state of Louisiana. Its charter schools have such a high rate of exclusion, the system has been sued by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
9. D is correct. Of course, we don’t really know what’s in their heads, but Obama sends his children to Sidwell Friends; Rahm Emanuel sends his to the Dewey-inspired Lab School that is explicitly opposed to these tests. While “reformer” politicians balk at “throwing money” at the public schools, they have no trouble throwing money in the direction of their own kids. They also claim (in face of robust evidence to the contrary) that class size doesn’t matter. Sidwell Friends costs about $32,000 per year. And the NYC private schools cost even more. Corporate school reformers and for-profit entrepreneurs Benno Schmidt and Chris Whittle, for instance, run the Avenues school in Chelsea. Teacher student ratio: 9 : 1. Cost $43,000 a year (New York Times, 10 July 2011). As part of education austerity and teacher speed-up, the Gates Foundation suggests stuffing even more students into public school classrooms. Answers A, B and C are probably not true, and answer E, well…
10. A is correct. While it is possible to develop an appropriate lesson from this K standard, it is precisely its inappropriate formal character that is most likely to find its way into the kindergarten classroom—administratively imposed because of the Standards testing regime. Answers B, C, D, and E are wrong, but lessons based on this standard—particularly the formal representation of equalities—could also be suitable as lessons for students in grades beyond kindergarten. Good teachers will find ways to work around the CCS.
11. B is correct. See http://dianeravitch.net/2013/02/26/why-i-cannot-support-the-common-core-standards/. For those who believe in the “vast right wing conspiracy,” it makes one wonder if the high failure rate presumed by Common Core promoters isn’t designed to further malign the public schools and marginalize teachers unions. The reformers have been disappointed by the reluctance of middle-class, suburban parents to chuck in their public schools in favor of the reformers’ voucher and charter privatization schemes. Maybe reformers believe that if a bunch of their kids start failing, the parents will come around.
12. C is correct. Recent research by the Brookings Institute studied the effects of the state standards on student achievement and found no effect except for a slight increase in 4th grade. See The 2012 Brown Center Report: How Well Are American Students Learning? The research report concluded: “The empirical evidence suggests that the Common Core will have little effect on American students’ achievement. The nation will have to look elsewhere for ways to improve its schools.” Answers A, B, and D are untrue. E is the continuation of the false promise made for NCLB under which the achievement gap widened. The CCS is likely to do the same.
13. B is correct. Howard Gardner is a signer of the “Joint Statement of Early Childhood Health and Education Professionals on the Common Core Standards Initiative” expressing “grave concern” about the effects of the Standards on young children, pleading for a suspension of the Standards for K – 3. Statement issued by the Alliance for Childhood, March 2, 2010. Answers A and C are untrue and indicate the extent to which liberal educators have bought the propaganda of the CCS when it comes to advancing careers and selling materials. D is wrong and to be expected of the godfather of such projects. E is wrong and dangerous because it opens up teachers’ unions to union-bashing when the CCS goes the way of NCLB but worse. Wedded as they are to the Democratic Party, neither the AFT or NEA bureaucracies are in a position to stand up to the educational “reform” policies of Obama and Duncan. Race to the Top and the CCS are a continuation and intensification of Bush-era NCLB.
14. C is correct. See Di Loreto, C., and Tse, L. 1999. “Seeing is believing: Disparity in books in two Los Angeles area public libraries”. School Library Quarterly 17(3): 31-36; Duke, N. 2000. For the rich it’s richer: “Print experiences and environments offered to children in very low and very high-socioeconomic status first-grade classrooms”. American Educational Research Journal 37(2): 441-478; Neuman, S.B. and Celano, D. 2001. “Access to print in low-income and middle-income communities: An ecological study of four neighborhoods”. Reading Research Quarterly, 36, 1, 8-26. Answers A, B, D, and E are untrue.
15. B is correct. See “Finland Schools Flourish in Freedom and Flexibility,” The Guardian [London], 5 December 2010. Answers A, C, D and E are incorrect. “Reformers” point to high performing school systems in other countries to bash U.S. public schools, unions and teachers but fail to mention that Finnish schools, for instance, are fully public and unionized; they pay teachers better and provide more professional autonomy and development; they do not torture children with continuous standardized tests, and they do not turn over their educational system to corporate market-based “reformers.”

Score analysis:

• 14 – 15 correct: You already know too much about this subject and are probably some kind of troublemaker. (Call us.)
• 9 - 13 correct: You have not spent too much time reading about the Common Core Standards that won’t affect student achievement in any case.
• 0 - 8 correct: Needs improvement. Perhaps some “value added” evaluation is in order.

*Questions 2, 5, 6, 8, 14, and 15 were taken from Ohanian and Krashen. The rest is of this test was created by the Class Struggle Education Workers (CSEW).

The CSEW is a New York City-based group of teachers, educators and unionists committed to a Marxist understanding and active, working-class defense of public education internationally. Because capitalism generates poverty, inequality, and racism, we believe that educational issues must be faced as part of a wider struggle for the emancipation of the working class and the oppressed by building a class-struggle workers party to fight for a workers government. You can contact us at cs_edworkers@hotmail.com, or edworkersunite.blogspot.com to comment on our test, write some new test items (please norm these with a cohort of radical teachers), or argue with us about our answers. (We have been known to change grades.) 

 

http://edworkersunite.blogspot.com/2013/05/test-your-common-core-savvy.html

 

The Counter Reform Movement Gains Speed

http://blog.ourfuture.org/20130515/americas-education-spring-a-growing-revolt-against-reform-mandates

America’s Education Spring: A Growing Revolt Against ‘Reform’ Mandates

By Jeff Bryant | May 15, 2013

“It’s always hard to tell for sure exactly when a revolution starts,” wrote John Tierny in The Atlantic recently. “I’m not an expert on revolutions,” he continued, “but even I can see that a new one is taking shape in American K-12 public education.”
Tierney pointed to a number of signs of the coming “revolution:”

• Teachers refusing to give standardized tests, parents opting their kids out of tests, and students boycotting tests.
• Legislators reconsidering testing and expressing concerns about corruption in the testing industry.
• Voucher and other “choice” proposals being strongly contested and voted down in states that had been friendly to them.

Tierney linked to a blog post by yours truly, “The Inconvenient Truth of Education Reform,” explaining how the movement known as “education reform” has committed severe harm to the populations it professes to serve while spreading corruption and enriching businesses and political figures.
Echoing Tierney, on the pages of Slate, The Nation, and elsewhere, David Kirp, education professor and author of a popular new book casting doubt on competitive driven, market-based school reform, declared that cheating scandals and parent rebellions over high stakes standardized testing were proof that much ballyhooed reform policies championed by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Education Secretary Arne Duncan are not “a proven – or even a promising – way to make schools better.”

Kirp declared that mounting evidence from school reform efforts in major U.S. metropolitan areas reveals “it’s a terrible time for advocates of market-driven reform in public education. For more than a decade, their strategy – which makes teachers’ careers turn on student gains in reading and math tests, and promotes competition through charter schools and vouchers – has been the dominant policy mantra. But now the cracks are showing.”
In a legislative view, the Progressive State Network, which supports left-leaning state legislators and monitors legislative policy in state houses, noticed “a backlash is brewing in many states as more and more parents and legislators alike start asking questions about corporate education reform.” The post on PSN’s website referenced Tierney’s article and highlighted a Minnesota bill that eliminates testing requirements for graduation and several states that are embroiled in battles to defeat measures known as the “parent trigger,” which enables private takeovers of public schools.

These observations are not alarmist chatter but well-reasoned, valid conclusions that anti-government collectivist actions related to public school policy are scaling up from isolated protests to a nationwide movement of unified resistance.

The movement is widespread among teachers, students, and parents. It is grassroots driven and way out in front of most journalists and political leaders. And it’s scaling up in intensity.

A Teacher-Student-Parent Movement
For quite some time now, education historian and reform opponent Diane Ravitch has written about the ever expanding discontent among teachers over the emphasis on standardized testing and test-based teacher evaluation and school rating systems.

As proof of this discontent, Ravitch has closely followed and commented on a boycott against standardized testing among teachers in Seattle, an ongoing protest among principals in New York state against new teacher evaluations, and objections to the “testing beast” among educators and parents in Texas.
In ever-greater numbers, however, students are also leading the resistance. A recent article in The Nation reported on the growing student resistance movement driven by grievances over austerity budgets and systemic racism.
From all corners of the country – North Carolina to Philadelphia to Louisiana to Chicago – students as young as eight years old are organizing and taking part in a variety of actions including zombie protests, school walkouts and sit-ins, and acts of defiance like the recent rant by a high school student in Texas that went viral over the Internet when he castigated a seemingly indifferent teacher for dispensing education in “packets” rather than engaging the class in meaningful, relevant learning.

In Chicago, youth voice is forming in grassroots groups like CSOSOS (Chicago Students Organizing To Save Our Schools) and VOYCE (Voices of Youth in Chicago Education) that have led prominent, headline-earning protests to school closures, teacher firings, and over emphasis on high-stakes testing.

In Philadelphia, a handful of students used their social media and organizing skills to whip up student resentment and send hundreds of students into the streets to protest budget cuts to their favorite education programs.
In Denver, high schoolers have formed Students4OurSchools and staged walkouts protesting the over-emphasis on standardized testing.

Students in Philadelphia, Providence, Rhode Island, Portland, Oregon, and elsewhere have formed student unions that have developed attention-getting tactics, which have spread to a national scale. These student organizations’ Facebook pages speak in unison against school closures and cutbacks, widespread teacher firings, and top-down implementations of mandated standards and high-stakes testing.

In many places, teachers and parents are supporting rebellious students and even joining in the protests. Grassroots parent groups, in fact, have been the driving force behind efforts to beat back school voucher proposals in Tennessee and parent trigger legislation in Florida.

Resistance is particularly vehement in low-income communities of color in large urban school districts where reform measures have lead to widespread teacher firings and school closings. In Chicago, Philadelphia, New York City, Cleveland, and Detroit, vocal protestors have been organizing in their own communities but also uniting in national campaigns, such as this year’s Journey for Justice effort that brought hundreds of activists in allied grassroots organizations to the White House to protest school closings.
Unlike school reform proponents who benefit from massive donations from rich foundations and politically connected funders, grassroots groups leading the resistance – like the Alliance for Educational Justice and Alliance for Quality Education – have far humbler means and few connections to the political class and deep pocketed philanthropists like Bill Gates.

Nevertheless, these groups have generated strong outpourings of popular dissent and produced important analyses of the duplicity of the reform agenda.

A Movement Getting More Recognition
Mostly, grassroots-led protests against education mandates have gotten little attention from even the few media outlets and reporters focused on education.

That changed, however, when the head of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, called for a moratorium on the consequences of high-stakes testing related to the Common Core.

All of a sudden, when there was a crack in the conventional wisdom that education policy was a centrist agreement between teachers’ unions and conservative belief tanks, many education bloggers and journalists decided the school accountability movement had reached a surprising new level of intensity.

Long-time education journalist Dana Goldstein speculated on her blog that Weingarten’s moratorium call is proof that education matters that were once considered products of a “coalition” of centrist-minded – although mostly conservative – wonks and Beltway operatives are now points of strong contention.

Her conclusion was that these differences represent a “deep divide” among the political class about whether it’s a good idea to “scare us into meaningful school reform.”

Another experienced education journalist, Sam Chaltain also reflected on his blog on calls for a testing moratorium. He recalled that after Barak Obama was elected, Obama proceeded with “a series of education policies that further entrenched America’s reliance on reading and math scores as a proxy for whole-school evaluation.”

Critics of those policies “vented,” Chaltain explained, but “policymakers nodded. And absent any real noise, the tests continued.” But with this more recent backlash to education mandates, Chaltain observed, “policymakers have been unable to ignore a groundswell of noise and resistance.”
Chaltain concluded that conflicts over school policy had “reached a tipping point.”

Similarly, veteran education reporter at Education Week Michelle McNeil observed, “Not since the battles over school desegregation has the debate about public education been so intense and polarized.”

McNeil sourced the polarity to the conventional wisdom that public education is “an institution that historically is slow to change,” and now it’s being “forced to deal with so much change at once.” And she asserts that the controversy over change is mostly “about centralization or decentralization” of specific “reform” efforts.

But what Goldstein, McNeil, and others on the sidelines fail to grasp is that the pushback against the nation’s education policy is not new. The “polarization” is not “obscuring” the issues – as McNeil contends – it’s clarifying them. And the “debate” over education has broken free from being an issue confined to “fringes” and “policy elites” to take its rightful place at the center of “a growing, broader backlash.”

Indeed, just like the fight to integrate public schools was connected to the larger struggle for civil rights, fights to preserve and strengthen public schools – whether they take the form of students walking out of class to protest education cuts, parents fighting against deceptively named “empowerment” policies, or teachers boycotting standardized tests – are connected to much larger struggles over what kind of nation America is becoming.

A Leadership Out Of Touch
The growing rebellion to education mandates has been driven mostly by grassroots groups formed first among low-income communities of color, but now the movement is extending to people of greater means and social-political capacity like parent groups that worked an inside game with state legislators to thwart implementation of the Common Core standards in Indiana, block parent trigger bills in Florida, and curb the emphasis on high stakes testing in Texas.

This unification of the grassroots with the “grass tops” in education is not well understood in the media or among policy elites.

In fact, people in charge of education governance appear to be more clueless than ever about what they are intent on accomplishing and legislating.
Witness the recent confession from one of the movement’s most influential leaders, Bridgeport, Conn., school chief Paul Vallas. As Valerie Struass reported at her blog on The Washington Post, Vallas has led reform efforts in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New Orleans that have become blueprints for education policy ideas across the country. Yet he admitted that the policies he has championed are resulting in a “nightmare” of complexity.
Reportedly, he characterized his efforts to enact test-based teacher evaluations as a feature of a “testing industrial complex” and “a system where you literally have binders on individual teachers with rubrics that are so complicated … that they’ll just make you suicidal.”

Vallas’ newfound doubts over what he has created reflected other confusing comments from education policy leaders. Most notable was the commentary by Bill Gates, widely acknowledged as a leader in the movement to base teacher evaluations and school ratings on student test scores, warning against the “rush to implement new teacher development and evaluation systems” based on test scores.

Even more perplexing was Secretary Duncan’s recent inability to deliver a straight answer about parent trigger bills. As Beltway gadfly Alexander Russo recently reported, “Duncan described the trigger as ‘an important tool’ for parent involvement -– but not the only or even the most important one” – whatever that means.

Compared to authentic grassroots outpourings for resources, equity, and real democracy, these equivocations from education policy leaders are puny and venal to say the least.

Intensity Is Building

“Scared” or not, recalling Goldstein’s comment, activists driving protests against the nation’s prevailing education policies are ratcheting the fight to unprecedented intensity that will likely become even more forceful in future efforts.

Later this month, for instance, teachers in Chicago are planning a citywide three-day march to protest impending school closures. Education related bills in state legislatures in California, Texas, New York, North Carolina, and elsewhere will be highly visible points of contention. And actions to protest the imminent doubling of college loan debt interest rates – certainly an issue related to public education – are generating a unified response from hundreds of thousands of Americans.

Clearly, the resistance to top-down education mandates is building. The movement is propelled by forces far greater than what education journalists and policy leaders understand – widespread grievances about inequity, unfairness, and public disempowerment.

The revolt is happening. The revolt is now.

Selling Student Data

Student Privacy For Sale to Highest Bidder?

http://www.bqbrew.com/2013/05/14/student-privacy-for-sale-to-highest-bidder/

May 14, 2013 - News Brew - Tagged: Achievement Reporting and Innovation Systems (ARIS), Amplify, Brooklyn, Department of Education, education, inBloom, May 15-June 15 issue, politics, poverty, privacy, privatization, Queens, Rupert Murdoch, schools

How safe is the personal information of public school students? This is a question that parents are starting to ask themselves. We teach them to keep their personal information as private as possible. We teach them how to protect themselves from predators who may be lurking on social media sites. Yet some of their sensitive information is already available to the highest bidder and it isn’t because of Facebook. It’s available through their school records.
Most parents know about the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act(FERPA). It was enacted in 1974 and is supposed to protect the privacy of students educational records. Originally, it required parental consent for any access to a student’s educational records.

(Photo: Okko Pyykkö/CC)

In 2009, however, several important amendments(pdf) were made to parts of FERPA. One of them was an amendment to 34 CFR § 99.31(a)(1), which now allows the disclosure of education records, without the consent of a parent or guardian, to third party consultants, contractors, volunteers, or any other group to whom an educational institution has outsourced services or functions.
So, a school or educational institution can share whatever information they want with whoever they want without you knowing about it. In fact, in New York City, it’s already happening.
inBloom is an open source, cloud-based education data portal. It will be used to store student information. According to inBloom’s website, they’re “dedicated to bringing together the data, content and tools educators need to make personalized learning a reality for every student.”
It is partly funded by both the Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation and was partially built by Wireless Generation, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.
Wireless Generation, part of Amplify, has already had its hands on some NYC student data for some time now. They created the Achievement Reporting and Innovation System (ARIS). They recently got a $12.5 million contract to develop assessments and teaching tools for Common Core tests  inBloom also claims to be a tool for transitioning to Common Core standards.
All of these groups have something else in common – they’re at the forefront of education “reform”.
There is also a question of security. Parents who are not tech savvy are uncomfortable with cloud-based storage because they are not aware of just how secure it is. While they know that moving data to the cloud will cut costs in the long run, how do they know their children’s information will be properly protected? Fears are exacerbated by news that in March of this year it was discovered that Amazon’s cloud storage system was improperly configured, resulting in 126 billion files being accidentally exposed to the public.
Opponents of inBloom are worried about just what kind of student information is going to be made available and to whom. As of now, all information can and is being shared with third party groups, including identifiable information such as a student’s name, addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, pictures, test scores, grades, attendance records, race/ethnicity, health records that are available to schools,  economic and disability status. In states where Social Security numbers are used as student ID numbers, that information will also be made available.
Leonie Haimson, founder and Executive Director of Class Size Matters, organized a student privacy town hall meeting in Brooklyn on April 29. During her presentation, she pointed out that confidential disciplinary records could potentially be leaked. “This could damage our children’s prospects for life if it leaks out.”
It is important to note that both The Gates Foundation and inBloom were invited to participate in the meeting. Neither group sent representatives.
What if you don’t want you child’s information to be stored with inBloom? Too bad.
Since your child’s educational record is considered property of their school district you have very little say in what they can do with it.

Part of inBloom was built by Wireless Generation, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp (Photo: David Shankbone/CC).

What do groups like the Gates and Carnegie Foundations, Amplify, News Corp.–people who clearly do not send their own children to public schools–want from their involvement in the corporate “reform” of public education ?
In the most generous interpretation of what’s happening, it can appear as an effort by the 1% to improve education by making it a business, a model they’ve had experience and success in.
And yet, as more and more parents are coming to find out, they have good reason to question both the supposed successes, and the underlying motivations, of the corporate expansion into public education under the guise of “reform.”
Their for-profit charters can target the cream of the crop in public schools and lure them away with the promise of a chance at a better education (even though it has been proven (pdf) that charters often do not out perform public schools), leaving the rest of the student body with a one-size-fits-most educational program.
More probably, this is about money. Public education is funded by about $500 billion a year in taxpayer money and that has for-profit companies and venture capitalists drooling. With access to student data, marketers have their research done for them.
At worst, this is a way for the 1% to pick and choose which students have the potential to rise to the top of corporate success and segregate them from the 99%, further widening the socio-economic gap.
In March of this year, Assembly member Daniel O’Donnell introduced the Student Privacy bill to the New York State Assembly. The bill, A06059 and S04284, would prohibit the release of personally identifiable student information where parental consent is not provided.
Imagine walking into a third grade class and choosing which students will be economically successful. Can you predict which will be wall street moguls or small business owners? Doctors or lawyers? Civil servants or artists? Or which ones will struggle to get by and live paycheck to paycheck? And is this how we want our kids to grow up? Measuring their self-worth by what their take home pay is at the end of the year?

—Ava M. Capote–

TruthDIg: Pulling the Parent Trigger: The Push to Privatize Public Schools

Pulling the Parent Trigger: The Push to Privatize Public Schools

Friday, 10 May 2013 10:31 By Yasha Levine, NSFWCORP | Report

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When NSFWCORP sent me to Victorville this January, I little expected that the neighboring town of Adelanto would become ground zero for a fight between billionaires on one side, and poor, vulnerable minority parents and children on the other.
I first heard about the fight through the local right-wing paper, the Victorville Daily Press, which gleefully announced on its front page that a local school, Desert Trails Elementary, had just made history as the first school in the nation to be privatized under California's new "parent trigger" law. The paper described the takeover as “promising a fresh start to the failing elementary school,” and claimed it had received widespread support from parents.
The national press gushed in similarly glowing terms. The LA Weekly described the Adelanto privatization as an “historic moment for the education-reform movement picking up steam across the nation.” The New York Times dutifully compared the takeover of Desert Trails to “Won’t Back Down.” An “issues” movie starring Face of Indie Maggie Gyllenhaal, “Won’t Back Down” promotes the parent-trigger law as a panacea for America’s public-education problems, one that “empowers” parents to fight back against self-interested public school teachers and their union.
All in all, everyone agreed that this takeover of Desert Trails Elementary represented a triumphant moment for parents and their children, a victory for the people over rapacious elementary school teachers and their unions.
But something didn’t seem right about this story — it was too pat, too much like a triumph-of-the-spirit Disney tale, too much like Maggie’s movie. So I made some calls and started spending some time in Adelanto, to find out what really went on there.
* * Motorists entering the City of Adelanto are greeted with a big blue sign that reads: "The City With Unlimited Possibilities." It's not clear who came up with this slogan, or when. But, these days, the sign is a cruel joke.
Founded in 1915 by the guy who invented the modern electric iron, Adelanto never amounted to much. Mostly it served as pit stop and junkyard to a nearby George Air Force Base. The base closed more than a decade ago, and home values have collapsed since the last real-estate bubble popped. Entire neighborhoods emptied out, and building companies went belly up, leaving behind half-finished “master planned communities” that still stand there, desiccating in the dry heat. Signs advertise brand-new three-bedroom McTractHomes for zero down and $800 a month.
Today, Adelanto is the end of the line. A poor, desert town, the city serves as a dumping ground for low-income minority families who have been squeezed out of the Greater Los Angeles-Orange County region and pushed out over the San Bernardino Mountains into the bleak expanse of the Mojave Desert, where housing is dirt cheap and jobs almost non-existent.
The numbers tell the story: Of the 32,000 people who call Adelanto home, one out of three are below the poverty line. Per-capita income is just under $12,000 — nearly three times lower than the California average, and about as much as the average person earns in Mexico. There are almost no jobs here, and Starbucks ranks among the city’s top-ten employers.
Nearly two-thirds of the population are Latinos, many of them undocumented. Another one in five are African-American. Then there are the 5 percent of the population that the census bureau classifies as “institutionalized,” which is nothing but a wishy-washy bureaucratic way of saying that 1 out of 20 Adelanto residents is currently rotting in jail — a rate five times higher than the national average. Adelanto does not have its own high school, but dropout rates in the neighboring suburb of Victorville, also hard-hit by the subprime bubble, are among the worst in the state — hovering somewhere around 50%.
If you stand at the city’s welcome sign, you can just make out its three major prison facilities: a giant federal prison complex to the north, a brand-new state prison to the west, and just north of that, California’s largest private immigrant deportation facility. The last was built recently by Geo Group, the nation’s second-largest private prison contractor.
* * I would spend several weeks talking to the parents of children enrolled in Desert Trails Elementary, meeting with them in local taco joints and strip mall diners and talking about what happened. As I had suspected, their version of events turned out not to match the Disney version in national papers.
The parents told me that a Los Angeles-based group calling itself Parent Revolution organized a local campaign to harass and trick them into signing petitions that they thought were meant for simple school improvements. In fact those petitions turned out to be part of a sophisticated campaign to convert their children’s public school into a privately-run charter — something a majority of parents opposed. At times, locals say, the Parent Revolution volunteers’ tactics were so heavy-handed in gathering signatures that they crossed the line into harassment and intimidation. Many parents were misled about what the petition they signed actually meant. Some told me that the intimidation with some of the undocumented Latino residents included bribery and extortion.
They first noticed something was up in the summer of 2011, when small groups of parents decked out in Parent Revolution T-shirts started appearing around town, going door to door to speak to parents of Desert Trails Elementary kids, spreading the word that they were organizing a "parent union" to try to improve the quality of their children's education.
At that, local parents who’d been involved in school affairs started to grow suspicious. According to several I spoke to, two of the leading members of this new “parent union” had previously served in the school’s Parent Teacher Association, and had resigned amid accusations of improprieties.
Why would they suddenly start a new parent organization? Spite? Revenge? And what exactly was Parent Revolution?
Parents didn’t get much of a chance to ponder these questions. As soon as summer vacation ended, the parent union began to reveal its true function. Adelanto was to become the first victim of a giant corporate push to privatize public schools.
* * Put simply, a parent trigger law allows a group of parents to hand over their kids’ public schools to private contractors, and then allows these new private contractors to tear up teacher union contracts and fire or hire as they see fit — all while receiving taxpayer money to fund their private-charter school business.
The law works like this: If enough parents sign a trigger petition (representing more than 50% of the number of students in the school), they can fire its principal, lay off unionized teachers or hand it over to a private charter school company.
According to a recent investigation by FryingPanNews, Parent Revolution has received $14.8 million since its founding in 2009. Almost half of that — $6.3 million — came from the Walton Family Foundation, which has long bankrolled the war on unions and public education. The rest of Parent Revolution’s cash came from more liberal sources, including The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Broad Foundation, each of which has given about $1.5 million to the group.
As reported in Dissent, these three foundations -- Gates, Walton and Broad -- spend roughly $4 billion a year to hand public K-12 education to the private sector, giving them increasing leverage over a sector that's worth $500 billion per year.
Parent Revolution is a direct outgrowth of the charter school industry. Ben Austin, the outfit's leader, previously headed a large charter-school firm called Green Dot Schools, whose backers overlap nicely with Parent Revolution's backers -- Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Walton Family Foundation, Eli Broad, Phillip Anschutz, and others. Austin's replacement at Green Dot Schools is a former partner at Bain, Mitt Romney's old firm.
Parent Revolution's Ben Austin has described the law as "a groundbreaking and historic new policy" that will "transform public education," and has dressed it up in the language of parents' rights. ALEC, which adopted a version of the Parent Empowerment Act as a model for "parent trigger" legislation, described it in similar terms, saying that it "places democratic control into the hands of parents at school level."
And yet, for all this empowerment, parents have never tried to pull the trigger on their own, not without Parent Revolution coming into town and applying pressure, intimidation and bait-and-switch techniques on unsuspecting parents.
In recent years, Diane Ravitch, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education under George H. W. Bush, has turned into the most eloquent and forceful critic of charter schools and voucher programs. She tells me that California's parent trigger law was not designed for the parents' sake. Instead, Ravitch describes it as "a stealth tactic by charter advocates to gain a larger market share by duping parents."
Charter school advocates like Parent Revolution and so-called "school reformers" like Michelle Rhee (recently discredited in a series of test-score cheating scandals and for trying to conceal the wealthy Wall Street funders of her "StudentsFirst" pro-privatization group) front for some of the world's biggest, most powerful corporate figures. Potentates from the extraction industry, Wall Street hedge fund tycoons and others have invested huge sums into privatizing America's public education system. For them, it is a public trough filled with up to $1 trillion just waiting to be converted into private profit, whatever the consequences for children.
Former "Junk Bond King" and convicted felon Michael Milken, Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison, Netflix founder Reed Hastings and billionaire venture capitalist John Doerr are just some of the names betting heavily on privatized education. Black Rock, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and just about every other big name in Wall Street and private equity are in on the action, as well.
An investigation by the Huffington Post revealed that Michelle Rhee's secretive, well-funded pro-privatization group StudentsFirst is backed by hedge fund tycoon David Tepper, who pocketed $2.2 billion in 2012 alone. Another backer is billionaire John Arnold, a former Enron trader who reportedly gave Rhee's group "tens of millions" of dollars. Arnold, a self-described "libertarian" who profited heavily from Enron's manipulation of the California energy markets, is funding the drive to slash California teachers' pensions through his front-group, The California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility.
Just last month, Rhee joined the "Parent Revolution" group for ajoint march in support of parent trigger and charter schools in Los Angeles. It's a small world, school privatization, and its inhabitants have very deep pockets.
So these are some of the people behind the parent trigger law, which should indicate what it’s really about. The law will give these corporate interests a new weapon with which to privatize public education and access to a virgin vein of taxpayer dollars. Best of all, the trigger law makes it look as if parents are choosing to privatize public education out of their own free will. They were given a choice, and they put their trust in the private sector.
California is just the beginning. In the past few years, parent trigger laws have popped in seven states so far, and another dozen others are currently deliberating similar legislation.
But this kind of reform did not come easy. The parent trigger law was conceived as a con, but that didn’t mean that parents would fall for it automatically. That’s what Parent Revolution learned when it used the trigger law for the first time shortly after it passed in 2010.
Parent Revolution first tried using the law to take over a school in Compton in 2010, organizing a small clique of local Compton parents and waging a blitz fake-grassroots campaign to dupe parents into pulling the trigger on their kids’ school. But the campaign crashed and burned after parents and teachers pushed back hard. Compton parents accused Parent Revolution organizers of deception and harassment, and many of those who signed the petition eventually rescinded their signatures. “They told me the petition was to beautify the school," one parent told the Los Angeles Times. “They are misinforming the parents, so I revoked my signature."
To fight back, Parent Revolution called in a favor from Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a former Chicano community organizer turned charter school advocate. Villaraigosa, who has stacked the LA County Board of Education with former employees of the Eli Broad empire, counter-accused Compton parents of harassment, and equated them with union-busters:

“It's particularly alarming to see these parents resort to the kind of intimidation, the kind of smear campaigning, the kind of rumor-mongering that is all too reminiscent of the way bad employers try to intimidate working people.”

But it was no use. Even Compton — a city synonymous with gangs, poverty and violence — was neither poor enough, nor isolated enough to take Parent Revolution’s “power empowerment” program without a fight.
An isolated desert suburb about halfway between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, home to some of the poorest families in Southern California, would prove to be much more vulnerable to the tactics used by Parent Revolution.
* * So they went to Adelanto. By enlisting local parents to canvass the neighborhood speaking out against the teacher’s union, Parent Revolution had already laid the groundwork. The “parent union” was a classic PR strategy, designed to create a rift between parents and the local teachers’ union. Parent Revolution’s aims were initially vague, except on one issue, which was demonizing the teachers union. Parent Revolution volunteers all told the same story: The school’s problems were the fault of bad, self-interested teachers, who cared more about their own pay benefits and job security than about educating the children. As the group's website explained, "Our schools are failing our children because they are not designed to succeed. They have been designed to serve adults, not children."
In September 2011, the local “parent union” was joined by the big guns: a troop of trained, experienced organizers sent in from Parent Revolution’s main office in Los Angeles.
Parent Revolution's "lead organizer," a former Green Beret by the name of Alfonso Flores, headed the campaign. Flores is not just any old organizer. He has worked as a public school teacher, run a Los Angeles charter school called Global Education Academy and is considered an expert in the field of applying free-market solutions to public education. In 2008, Flores led a panel at a seminar hosted by the Pacific Research Institute, a GOP think-tank linked to ALEC and the Cato Institute, and backed by major oil, tobacco, pharmaceutical and health insurance firms. (Pacific Research Institute flaks served on President George W. Bush’s environmental advisory panel in 2001.) The same year that it hired Flores to offer advice on how charter-school administrators could improve student behavior, Pacific Research Institute was lobbying hard against the healthcare reform and a government-run medical system, saying that it would inevitably result in Soviet-style shortages and the rationing of medical care.
Alfonso Flores set up a command bunker in a rented home just a block away from the school, on Delicious Street. Parent Revolution advisors and organizers sent in from LA continuously came to the house to hold strategy sessions, instruct trigger parents on everything from collecting signatures to handling the media. They used it as a forward operating base to launch tactical operations into the community. Hanging in the living room and overlooking all this activity was a black-and-white poster depicting Parent Revolution’s mission and raison d'etre. The top part of the poster showed a big black fish eating a group of disorganized little fish. This was the “system” eating the “parents.” Below it was another big black fish, but this time it was being chased by an even bigger fish made of organized smaller fish. This was the local “parent union” eating “Desert Trails Elementary School.”
Devouring a public school—nothing better describes what Parent Revolution was doing in Adelanto. Over the next three months, packs of trigger activists and organizers would spill out of the house and swarm the neighborhood, aggressively pushing parents to sign some sort of petition that they barely bothered to explain.
First, they started with the school. Parent Revolution’s lead organizer Alfonso Flores led the pack.
One mother described the group’s aggressive petition drive in a signed statement filed with the Adelanto School District. I was able to obtain this statement from anti-trigger parents:

“The man came to my car over several days and constantly begged me to sign the petition when I asked to get it & turn it in later he stated that he couldn’t do that so after several minutes of harassment I gave in and signed the petition unaware of the consequences. He was very pushy & persistent. I wish I that I wan’t intimated [sic] by him & that I didn’t sign the petition.”

It got so bad that parents had to ask the school to deploy more security to protect them from Parent Revolution’s pushy canvassers.
“They were there every day, every morning and every afternoon,” says Maggie Flamenco, a mother of two special-needs children enrolled in Desert Trails, and a member of the Adelanto’s Special Education Parent Advisory Committee. We met at a Denny’s just around the corner from Desert Trails Elementary. The way Flamenco describes it, the trigger campaign was much more like a low-intensity war designed to break the parents’ will using intimidation, harassment and deception, than anything like the “empowerment” that the Parent Trigger advocates claimed it was.
She described to me how Parent Revolution volunteers would block cars with their bodies to get the parent driver to sign their parent –trigger petition; how they’d knock on windows, hound and follow parents when they dropped their kids off and when they picked them up after school. They were so persistent about it that it got to the point where parents like Maggie dreaded going to collect their own children.
Maggie told me she had to file a police report against a Parent Revolution activist because the man kept harassing her every time she came to pick up and drop off her kids at school. “Because I was one of the parents who did not want to sign... he blocked the car with his body and prevented me from leaving, writing my writing my plates down, taking pictures of my plates, taking pictures of the kids...it was just harassment."
The harassment worked. Maggie didn’t sign the petition, but she did withdraw her kids from the school because of the stress and fear they were suffering from the repeated harassment.
"Their anxiety was high. Their teachers and aids were saying, 'The school is gonna be done.' They were scared," she explained. “The doctor put them on a home hospital due to their anxiety. All this stuff with their school they were just freaking out that it was going to get taken over, that they are not going to have their aides, their teachers anymore. They are autistic so they don't understand anything. They told me the other day, ‘I hope they don’t close the school when we’re in there.’”
This was clearly no longer a grassroots campaign run by local parents, nor was its mission to empower the community. Its primary goal now was to force as many parents as possible to sign "parent trigger" petitions.
Parent Revolution operatives followed people into local businesses, harassed them with constant phone calls and staked out people's homes. One father got a panicked call from his child, who was scared because a man was lurking outside their home for a long time. Panicking, the dad rushed home, only to find a Parent Revolution organizer camped outside waiting for a signature.
Some Desert Trails parents noticed that Parent Revolution organizers had somehow obtained contact information that was not publicly listed, including cell phone numbers and addresses, and worried that the group had somehow illegally accessed their children’s confidential school records.
One mother outlined her suspicions in a signed statement later filed with the Adelanto School District:

“I received a call on my cell phone, and the parents came to my house twice. My cellphone is not public record and when I questioned the gentleman on the phone how he received my cell # the call disconnected. I then called back and did not receive and [sic] answer. I am also wondering how they knew my address. I feel there has been a breech in confidentiality of my 2 childrens [sic] record at the school … I am now afraid they have my childrens [sic] Social Security numbers.”

Parent Revolution used every debt-collector trick in the book, purposefully making life so miserable for parents that they would agree to sign just to get the canvassers off their backs. “Most of the reason the parents signed was because they were tired of not answering their door, of hiding from them,” said Maggie Flamenco.
Lori Yuan, a mother of two kids Desert Trails and a member of Adelanto’s planning commission, who would later lead the parent effort to resist Parent Revolution, agreed: “Most folks were duped and had no idea the consequences of this petition succeeding.”
Statements filed by parents with Adelanto’s school district all say pretty much the same thing: “We were duped and pushed.” Here are just a few examples:

“I was misled and told that we weren’t going to fight to be a charter school. They kept coming to my home and insisted I sign. I am upset thats not what I wanted for my students.”  “The petitioner kept coming to my doorstep, for many days, my wife told me not to sign it but I did because I felt harassed, and I wanted them to leave me alone. I don’t blame them I blame myself but I don’t agree with the petition now that I understand it.”

Just a few months before Parent Revolution showed up in town, there had been a huge scandal involving the Adelanto Charter Academy, a new publicly-funded charter school that embraced “conservative and Christian values” run by a couple of businessmen with deep connections to San Bernardino County’s GOP political machine. At the time, it was Adelanto’s only charter school. District officials started to notice something was up when they discovered administrators didn’t bother with even the most basic bookkeeping, and a deeper audit revealed that the school failed to meet basic education requirements, served tainted food and functioned as little more than a shell company that diverted public education funds into private bank accounts and political campaigns.
On top of all that, it turned out that the charter school was set up with the help of San Bernardino County Supervisor Bill Postmus, who crashed and burned in that special way only evangelical closet-cases manage to pull off: he was arrested for possession of meth while under investigation for a long list of corrupt dealings and kickbacks. Right before the Adelanto Charter School scandal broke, Postmus pleaded guilty to fourteen felonies, including bribery, conspiracy, extortion and the misappropriation of public funds.
It was big, ugly mess, and it did not make charter schools look very good. So Parent Revolution canvassers did what any honest community organizer would do: they pretended that their petition had nothing to do with charter schools.
"When Parent Revolution came to my door, they explained they wanted to make the school better, get water fountains, the playground set and making sound like they were gonna do a makeover, instead of a takeover,” said Eleanor Medina, who moved to Adelanto 10 years ago from Buena Park in small city in Orange County to retire, and has been helping raise her grandchildren. “They also said that everyone was going to get a computer.”
Other parents report they were told pretty much the same thing: Parent Revolution promised that they were not trying to convert Desert Trails into a charter school, and reassured parents current teachers would not be fired. Organizers also made the dubious claim that if the petition went through, each child was going to receive a laptop to own.
For parents who insisted on giving the petition a closer read, Parent Revolution used a crude bait-and-switch technique: canvassers asked the parents to sign two completely separate petitions, and invoked two different clauses of the parent trigger law. The first petition sought only to introduce reforms and give parents greater power over administering the school. The second petition invoked the full privatization package: firing all the teachers and handing the school over to a private charter- school company (the specific company would be chosen at a later time).
Two petitions? Well, Parent Revolution’s reps explained that the second petition would never be used officially, but only employed as a negotiating tool — a prop that could be used to threaten the school district if it attempted to stall implementing the demands of its first petition.
Chrissy Alvarado, a mother of two students at Desert Trails, says she always thought the two petitions were just a ruse, a way to sow confusion. “They never explained themselves enough for us to understand anything,” she said. “In reality, it was all about the charter.”
She was right.
In early January, Parent Revolution activists announced that they had collected signatures representing 70 percent of the students, and proceeded to submit the petition calling for full charter conversion.
The news outraged Desert Trails parents, but it finally spurred them into action, and the small group emerged to try and stop the petition.
Eleanor Medina couldn’t believe they had the gall to dupe parents like that: "You're talking about my kids' education. They need to go to college. Pretty soon they're gonna need to go to college just to get a Jack in the Box job."
“We didn't know what we could do, because no one had done this before,” Lori explained as she met me for coffee, before heading to an Adelanto planning commission meeting. “We were in overdrive, 24 hours a day, doing nothing but research, pounding the pavement, driving around, having meetings, going crazy. Literally nothing else in life existed how do we beat this, what do we do.”
Very quickly it became apparent a whole lot of parents had been duped, and would happily rescind their signatures if they got a chance.
“We called hundreds of lawyers, but no one would help us. They didn’t even refer us to the right lawyer who could help us,” Lori explained, shaking her head. “Meanwhile, Parent Revolution had a slick legal team working for them pro bono.”
Anti-trigger parents were grasping at straws, and felt totally alone. Local teachers couldn’t help them; they were afraid to even talk. The union told them to stay quiet because it was afraid of legal action from Parent Revolution. Anti-trigger parents say that, in the end, the only real help came from California’s teachers union, but even that was mostly restricted to legal advice on how to properly collect statements from parents so that Parent Revolution would not be able to challenge them in court.
“We got no real help from anyone,” said Lori. And that included the press, which tended to smear anti-trigger parents as union stooges and thugs out to intimidate low-income minorities into submission. LA Weekly ran a series of particularly nasty articles, specifically attacking Lori for doing the bidding of corrupt teachers who care more about “cushy union contracts” than their students’ education. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial features editor (and son of raging neocon Douglas Feith) David Feith published a string of pieces attacking the efforts of anti-trigger parents to push back against Parent Revolution’s astroturf campaign. Feith smeared their genuine grassroots organizing as a “systematic and legally questionable pressure campaign waged against parents” on behalf of the “hostile unions” and the “education establishment.”
Lori started to feel surrounded by intrigue. She says, “I would do these interviews with these people and reporters and journalists and bloggers. Anyone that would call I would talk to because I need to get this information out because people need to know this. And then I'd get the article and I'd be like this has nothing to fucking do with what I said. I got to the point when I started thinking, do they — and by they, I mean Parent Revolution — do they own everything? Do they own the fucking editors, do they own the newspapers?"
Lori’s paranoia-sense was not that far off the mark.
Parent Revolution might not own the press, but the people and companies who fund groups like Parent Revolution and stand to profit from school privatization, well . . . they quite literally do own the press. Sometimes they are the press.
Among the major investors in privatizing education is Rupert Murdoch.
It was Murdoch’s 20th Century Fox that put out “Won’t Back Down,” Maggie Gyllenhaal’s parent trigger film bankrolled by Phillip Anschutz, the right-wing oil billionaire who funds everything from anti-gay ballot initiatives and Christian Identity, to teaching creationism in schools. Anschutz is also a major backer of ALEC, the right-wing lobby group that pushed through the “Stand Your Ground” vigilante laws that resulted in Trayvon Martin’s murder. ALEC is also spearheading parent-trigger laws in states across the country.
Murdoch recently announced his plans for aggressive expansion into the private primary education sector, saying, "When it comes to K through 12 education, we see a $500 billion sector in the U.S. alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed.”
Murdoch’s News Corp media empire is vast. The Washington Post Company — which owns The Washington Post, Slate.com, Foreign Policy magazine, among other news media holdings — relies heavily on its for-profit education subsidiary, Kaplan Inc, which generated 62% of the company’s revenue in 2012. Then there’s The Financial Times and The Economist, both of which are owned by Pearson, a multinational mega-media company that’s also heavily involved in private education.
Incidentally, all three companies have been members of ALEC’s pro-charter Education Task Force, which has been at the forefront of the effort to enact legislation to privatize public education in states all across America.
But for Adelanto residents, the centralization and corruption of news media was a bigger issue. The main concern for Lori and other anti-trigger parents was to collect as many rescissions as possible.
As they made their rounds, they found that the vast majority of parents they spoke to had had no idea that the petition would convert the school to a charter. The magnitude of Parent Revolution’s deception came as a shock. “In our canvassing to gain rescissions, there were maybe three people or households that I can recall that actually said, ‘Yep, we know exactly what this petition will do, we want the teachers fired’,” explained Lori.
Over the course of two months, anti-trigger parents managed to collect somewhere around 116 rescission statements.
As the group collected rescissions, talked to parents and educated as many as possible about what Parent Revolution’s intended to do with Desert Trails, tension in the community continued to mount. There was real anger and bitterness. Friends and neighbors suddenly became mortal enemies, and even kids started getting drawn into the conflict.
Desert Trails’ principal David Mobley told the Los Angeles Times that kids whose parents were on opposite sides of the trigger issue had started fighting at school. "It's sad because these kids used to be really good friends. Now these kids have become pawns in a political mess, and it just breaks my heart,” Mobley said.
Chrissy Alvarez’s best friend -- I’ll call her Mary (not her real name) -- was one of the leading members of the trigger group. Chrissy explained that their friendship turned into hostile after she realized that Mary had been an accomplice to Parent Revolution’s swindle and knowingly helped sell out her community — something Chrissy could not forgive.
Why would Mary do the bidding of a corporate front group, pouring her energy and time into privatizing her kid’s school?
Turns out that Mary, who had a second-grade daughter in Desert Trails, had good reason to join the campaign. Chrissy says she had serious problems with her immigration status and was facing deportation. Parent Revolution promised to make those problems disappear. It was an offer than must have been hard to resist: help a group pull off its trigger campaign or face deportation and the possibility that she’d never see your family again.
"No shit?!" I blurted out. We were sitting in a taco shop in a strip mall on the edge of town with a couple of other parents. We were in a family setting, and there were kids around. But I couldn’t restrain the profanity. I was too shocked. I just couldn’t believe it.
“Yes! She told me! She was my best friend,” Chrissy explained. "We were still best friends until the time she submitted the petition. And I told her to her face: 'You guys have been bs'ing. These were bought with citizenship.' She had already signed two documents that she was supposed to leave the country years ago. She was in a heap of trouble. She had gone to a lawyer, who told her that there was no way around this other than you going back to Mexico.”
I recognized the woman’s name. She had been interviewed by cable news networks, and appeared in dozens of news stories talking about parent empowerment and the need for parents to take an active role in their children’s education. She even squirted a couple of tears for reporters once.
Dangling citizenship in front of a desperate mother facing deportation—this is what parent empowerment looks like to the billionaires trying to privatize public education. And it appears she was not the only one...
Multiple sources told me that Parent Revolution had propositioned other undocumented Latino immigrants, promising to help resolve their immigration status in return for their support of the parent trigger petition. Help with immigration in exchange for a single signature? It’s an offer that many families must have found difficult to turn down.
I made multiple to attempts to verify these allegations. But no one would talk or even communicate with me — on or off the record. Through a third-party, I was told that they feared retribution from Parent Revolution and did not want to put their families in danger. “One, they are tired. Two, they are scared. Three, they are thinking: ‘What’s the point? The school is already gone’,” explained a parent who had tried to arrange a meeting.
They were scared. And who could blame them?
As undocumented immigrants, they had nothing to gain by talking to me. On the contrary, they had everything to lose. The sprawling private deportation facility located just a few miles north of the school, dedicated to corralling and booting out people just like them, served as a constant reminder of just how much they had to lose, and how easily deportation could happen to them. A speeding ticket is enough to initiate deportation these days, and it doesn’t matter if they have children or family: recent stats show that a quarter of people deported are parents with children who are U.S. citizens.
I could appreciate this kind of fear. My family fled the Soviet Union in 1989, and we spent seven nerve-racking months living in European refugee camps. We had no money, no citizenship and no idea about the future. I was just a kid, but I was deeply affected by the fear, anxiety and insecurity that dominated our lives. We certainly didn’t think we had any rights, or that we were entitled to anything. The most important thing was to keep your head down and not rock the boat.
No wonder Parent Revolution chose Adelanto. Out here it could act with near-impunity.
Even so, there was some pushback. Even the poor don’t like being ripped off.
Armed with the stack of rescissions collected by Lori and Chrissy, Adelanto’s school board invalidated 100 of the 466 original petition signatures submitted by trigger activists, bringing the number below the simple majority required by law. And so on March 2012, Adelanto’s school board unanimously voted to reject Parent Revolution’s petition on grounds it had failed to meet minimum signature requirements.
But it was a short-lived victory.
Parent Revolution lawyered up, and after a year of court battles, forced the Adelanto’s school district to accept the trigger petition. In the summer of 2012, San Bernardino County Superior Court Judge Steve Malone ruled that the school district had no right to reject the petition because California's parent trigger law did not give it authority to rescind signatures. It was a bizarre decision, and didn’t seem to accord with the spirit and letter of California’s Parent Empowerment Law.
But was it valid?
That’s not clear. Adelanto’s cash-strapped school district didn’t appeal the decision. It simply didn’t have the resources to continue a lengthy court fight. Not that it would have continued to fight for very long, even if tired. Shortly after the decision, two parents who had been involved in Parent Revolution won spots on Adelanto’s school board, finally and totally tipping the board’s ideological balance in favor of charter school.
"I thought the ruling was crazy,” said Diane Ravitch. “If anything, it seems totally not to have empowered the parents, but to say: you mistakenly signed a petition and you can't take your name off. That's not parent empowerment, that's parent deception.”
“It’s basically the taking of public property,” said Ravitch, unable to hide her annoyance with the claims made by trigger advocates. “In the nature of public education, people come and go. In the course of a few years, there is a lot of turnover in terms of who the parents are in a school. But they don’t own the school. The public owns the school. So you’re taking a public facility that was paid for by tax dollars and saying that they people who are using it right now this year have the right to turn it over a private operator.”
Imagine if we did the same thing with other public services like buses or libraries... "Take a vote of everyone who happens to be in a public library at any given moment and say we want to hand it over to the Library Corporation of America to run for a profit.”
But the reality was even worse than that.
On October 18, Desert Trails parents met in a park adjacent to the school to vote and pick the specific charter company that would take control of the school. California’s Parent Empowerment Act allows only the parents who signed a trigger petition to cast a ballot in this vote, which meant that hundreds of parents should have shown up to make the decision, and to exercise their newfound empowerment. But in the end, only 53 ballots were cast — with 50 of them voting to give the contract to LaVerne Elementary Preparatory Academy, a small charter operator that runs one other school in a nearby town.
A decision made by 53 people in a town of 32,000? That’s less than 0.2% of the population. Parent empowerment indeed.
As this article goes to press, LaVerne Academy has posted a job ad looking to hire teachers for the newly rebranded Desert Trails Preparatory Academy. According to the ad, job seekers only need a substitute teachers permit to apply. Apparently that’s all that’s required to help improve education at a chronically struggling school.

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