NYC known as most charter-friendly district in the world, because of its generous funding and free space, w/ the best opportunity for charter expansion

NYC known as most charter-friendly district in the world, because of its generous funding and free space, w/ the best opportunity for charter expansion.

Our lawsuit also mentioned, highlighted below .

“….the charter operator Achievement First, which opened its first charter schools in Connecticut in 1999, has decided that its second home, New York City, has policies that are more welcoming for charter schools. The organization has decided to abandon further growth in Connecticut unless that state changes its policies, said Dacia Toll, one of the founders and the co-chief executive officer for the network.  New York is a draw because the city’s school system is providing charter operators with school buildings for free or at a low cost, she said.
The per-pupil rate for charter schools in New York City is $13,500, the same rate as for regular public schools. By contrast, Connecticut gives charter schools 75 percent of the per-pupil rate that it gives regular schools, Ms. Toll said, and the money comes from a separate stream of funding for charter schools that has been flat for four years.  Achievement First’s charter schools in New York City are financially sustainable after an investment of between $500,000 and $750,000 for startup costs, but that’s not the case in Connecticut, where the charter operator’s schools need the support of philanthopic funding to stay open, Ms. Toll said.”

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2011/08/12/01charter_ep.h31.html

Published Online: August 12, 2011

Charter Operators Face Challenges in 'Scaling Up'

By Mary Ann Zehr

The pace at which the highest-performing charter-management organizations are “scaling up” is being determined largely by how rapidly they can develop and hire strong leaders and acquire physical space, and by the level of support they receive for growth from city or state policies, say leaders from some charter organizations viewed by advocates as successful.
From the 1999-2000 to 2008-09 school years, the number of students enrolled in charter schools more than tripled, from 340,000 to 1.4 million, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. The proportion of all public schools that are charter schools more than doubled, from 2 percent to 5 percent, during that same period, but that growth has not been uniform across the country.
To explore what might be obstacles to growth for successful charter operators, Education Week interviewed leaders of five of the seven charter-management organizations, or CMOs, in the NewSchools Venture Fund’s portfolio that the fund sees as producing the best student-achievement results.
Those seven charter operators are: Aspire Public Schools, Achievement First, Green Dot Public Schools, Harlem Success Academy Charter School, the Knowledge Is Power Program, Uncommon Schools, and Rocketship Education. That same set of operators has also been identified by the Center on Reinventing Public Education, at the University of Washington, in Seattle, as the nation’s top performers, and the center is expected to release a report in the fall about the characteristics that have made them successful.
As might be expected, some of the charter operators identified by charter supporters to have the strongest records in student achievement are focusing their expansion in cities or states that have policies viewed as friendly to charter schools, such as New York City and Newark, N.J., and are steering away from locations viewed as unfriendly. Legislation passed in the last year that relaxed limitations or lifted caps on opening charter schools in Illinois, Indiana, North Carolina, and Tennessee will benefit charter operators that want to expand, said Chad A. Miller, the senior director of federal advocacy for the Washington-based National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.
Policies that make it easy for charter schools to acquire free or low-cost facilities or that ensure such schools get the same per-pupil funding as regular public schools are a big draw. The presence of Teach For America, an alternative teacher-preparation program, is also attractive to charter operators.
Charter schools are publicly financed but largely independent of the regular school system. Some are single-site schools run by small, local groups; others are part of growing regional or national networks operated by CMOs.

Charter Territory

Charter-management organizations that were operating at least two schools in 2007 were concentrated in 18 states and the District of Columbia. CMO leaders say they are scaling up in several states where they view policies to be charter-friendly.

SOURCE: Center on Reinventing Public Education

Not everyone thinks that policies that make it easier for charter operators are fair.
On July 25, a group of public school parents, backed by advocacy groups, filed a lawsuit in a New York trial court arguing that charter schools should be required to pay for the use of public school buildings.
Leonie Haimson, the executive director of Class Size Matters, a New York City-based nonprofit organization that is backing the lawsuit, contends that the city’s education department is breaking state law by not providing space and services to charter schools at cost.
“Their expansion is undermining the quality and resources of our regular public schools,” she said, “Meanwhile, our public school students are experiencing larger class sizes, are losing access to art, music, and science rooms, are losing their libraries, and increasingly, special-needs students are getting their services in hallways, closets, and stairwells.”
Also, on Aug. 2, North Carolina’s court of appeals stood by a lower court’s decision that charter schools aren’t entitled to the capital funds that traditional public schools receive in response to a lawsuit filed in 2009 by seven charter schools seeking access to such funds. The appeals court ruling said the matter should be determined by legislative action rather than judicial decision.
But a New York state judge had a different perspective in ruling last month on a separate lawsuit that the United Federation of Teachers, the NAACP, and other groups, had filed in June. That suit contested the closing of some 22 public schools and the planned “co-location” of 16 new charter schools into buildings that are now the home for traditional public schools. The judge sided against the plaintiffs by dismissing a preliminary injunction to block the New York City district’s plan.
“It’s a bit ironic that going back two decades ago, the earliest advocates for charters claimed that the education sector had been taken over by special-interest groups, like the unions,” reflected Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies charter schools. “Fast forward 20 years later, and it’s the charter lobby that has captured the hearts and minds of politicians and the charter lobby that’s pushing for favorable treatment.”

Hospitable Environments

Boston and Milwaukee have recently moved from the “unfriendly” list to the “friendly” list in terms of being hospitable to charter operators, while California, because of its persistent budget crisis, is seen by charter operators as offering an increasingly challenging environment for expansion. One CMO that opened its first schools in Connecticut has ruled out opening new schools in the Constitution State in favor of opening new schools in nearby New York City.
“The bottom line for charter-management organizations is, wherever they operate, they want to get the same per-pupil funding as traditional school districts,” said Deborah McGriff, a nonprofit partner for the NewSchools Venture Fund, in San Francisco, which finances the replication of charter schools by CMOs it deems high-performing.
The expansion of high-quality charter schools isn’t only of interest to private funders, such as the NewSchools Venture Fund. The U.S. Department of Education operates a grant program with the same mission; the program gave out $50 million in fiscal 2010, its first year, and is expected to provide $25 million for that purpose in fiscal 2011. The department released final priorities for the program July 12.
The $50 million last year was given to a dozen charter operators that said they would open 127 new schools and expand 31 others.
The federal competition has maintained its requirement from its first year that grants will be given only to charter operators that have experience running more than one high-quality charter school. The Education Department tweaked the priorities for the competition for fiscal 2011, which ends Sept. 30, and later years to spell out for the first time that it will give preference to charter operators that demonstrate a record of enrolling a diverse group of students, including students with disabilities and English-language learners.
The upcoming report from the Center on Reinventing Public Education includes findings that charter-management organizations are opening schools in only a small number of states. Robin Lake, the associate director of the center, said that “a big part of that is whether states have hospitable policies.”
Currently, the average nationwide per-pupil funding rate for charter schools is about 80 percent of the rate for regular public schools, according to Ms. McGriff, who was the general superintendent of Detroit Public Schools from 1991-1993. She cited the identification of high-quality teachers and principals as the biggest factor setting the pace for growth of high-performing charter operators, with the ability of charter operators to pay for school buildings as a close runner-up.
Even though Rocketship Education, based in Palo Alto, Calif., runs only three schools, the strong student outcomes for those schools, which serve only K-5 students, and the program’s promise to yield financially sustainable schools have attracted recruiters from halfway across the country.

Rocketship’s Expansion

Aylon Samouha, the chief schools officer for Rocketship Education, said a team of politicians and educators from Milwaukee, including the city’s mayor, a charter authorizer, and a representative from Teach For America, visited Rocketship’s schools in San Jose, Calif., to try to recruit Rocketship to Milwaukee.
Mr. Samouha said Rocketship Education is considering opening schools in that city, as well as in Chicago, New Orleans, and Newark. It has applied for charters in California’s Santa Clara County and in the cities of East Palo Alto, Oakland, and San Francisco.
It will cost $2.5 million to $3 million for the charter operator to open a cluster of eight schools in a particular location over five years, and after that the schools will be financially sustainable, according to Mr. Samouha.
The charter operator saves money on teachers’ salaries by having students spend only four hours a day in classrooms, where the teachers are expected to work with them on higher-order skills, and two hours a day in a learning lab, where they work on their basic skills with the help of computer software and small-group learning with teachers.
The Rocketship CMO won’t open schools in any location unless Teach For America has a presence there, Mr. Samouha said. Seventy-five percent of the charter operator’s teachers are members or alumni of TFA, a program that trains recent graduates of top colleges for stints as teachers in high-need schools.
“We’ve got to go where we can get the most quality in one swoop, and that happens to be Teach For America, both for teachers and future school leaders,” Mr. Samouha said. He defined quality, in part, as “people excited about education reform.”
Rocketship Education plans to open two more schools this coming school year and aims to be running some 200 schools across the country by 2020. Developing strong teachers and leaders and acquiring physical space are challenges to Rocketship’s growth, Mr. Samouha said. Equally challenging is getting charter authorizers to agree to a charter to open eight schools over five years in one location, which is how Rocketship plans to proceed with growth, Mr. Samouha said.

Beyond California

The Los Angeles-based Green Dot Public Schools, which has already scaled up considerably since launching its first charter school in 2000, is also being recruited outside California.
“Governors have called me begging me to get Green Dot in their states,” said Marco Petruzzi, the president and chief executive officer of Green Dot. The organization’s first school served 140 9th graders. This coming school year, the CMO is set to operate 21 schools with 10,000 students in Los Angeles.
That level of enrollment marks a significant growth spurt, even over this past school year, when 8,300 students were enrolled in Green Dot schools. (Green Dot considers some of its campuses to have several schools on them.)
While Green Dot initially opened mostly independent charter schools, the organization now has a strong focus on “turnarounds” of low-achieving schools, setting it apart from the other charter leaders interviewed for this story. Most charter operators have deliberately steered away from trying to improve existing schools in favor of starting new ones.
Mr. Petruzzi said that developing and hiring principals and coping with what educators view as California’s low per-pupil student funding—set to be less than $6,000 per pupil for charter schools this coming school year—are the top barriers Green Dot faces in scaling up. Also, he said, persuading the Los Angeles Unified School District to turn over schools and buildings to Green Dot is increasingly a challenge.
But Monica Carazo, a spokeswoman for the 672,000-student Los Angeles Unified School District, said the district complied with all four requests for buildings made by Green Dot schools for the 2011-12 school year.
Green Dot has plans to scale up to serving 15,000 or 16,000 students in Los Angeles by 2015, according to Mr. Petruzzi. Its involvement outside of Los Angeles so far extends only to a school in the Bronx borough of New York that it doesn’t officially operate.

Seeking Friendly Climates

Aspire, in Oakland, has also focused so far only on California. It opened its first charter school in Stockton, Calif., in the 1999-2000 school year and has grown by several schools each year. The CMO operates 30 schools and has nearly doubled its enrollment, to 12,000, over the past three school years.
James Willcox, the chief executive officer of Aspire, said the difficult budget climate in California is causing him and other Aspire leaders to think about opening schools outside the state.
“It’s getting harder and harder to do quality schools in California,” he said, “because the funding is so painfully low, and charter schools get less per student than traditional public schools.”
About 10 percent of the charter network’s $100 million budget is provided by private philanthropy, he said.
Meanwhile, the charter operator Achievement First, which opened its first charter schools in Connecticut in 1999, has decided that its second home, New York City, has policies that are more welcoming for charter schools. The organization has decided to abandon further growth in Connecticut unless that state changes its policies, said Dacia Toll, one of the founders and the co-chief executive officer for the network.
New York is a draw because the city’s school system is providing charter operators with school buildings for free or at a low cost, she said.

Funding Differences

The per-pupil rate for charter schools in New York City is $13,500, the same rate as for regular public schools. By contrast, Connecticut gives charter schools 75 percent of the per-pupil rate that it gives regular schools, Ms. Toll said, and the money comes from a separate stream of funding for charter schools that has been flat for four years.
Achievement First’s charter schools in New York City are financially sustainable after an investment of between $500,000 and $750,000 for startup costs, but that’s not the case in Connecticut, where the charter operator’s schools need the support of philanthopic funding to stay open, Ms. Toll said.
Achievement First opened its first school in Bridgeport 12 years ago and now has 10 charters (some that include several schools), which are expected to enroll 6,200 student in the 2011-12 school year.
But Eva Moskowitz, the head of Harlem Success Academy Charter School, indicated that opening charter schools in New York City is no picnic when she spoke at a session about scaling-up at the annual conference of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, held in Atlanta in June.
Her organization has been sued over facilities issues in the lawsuit filed in June by the United Federation of Teachers and civil rights groups.
“When I open new schools, they say I’m empire-building. I’m a chain,” she said of her critics. “I’m only at nine [schools].”
Ms. Toll said that Harlem Success is likely experiencing more difficulty than Achievement First to get physical space in New York because it seeks to use buildings in Harlem, where space is at more of a premium than it is in the Brooklyn neighborhoods where Achievement First has launched schools.
In comparison, the charter operator on the NewSchools Venture Fund’s top-performing list that has grown in the most locations is the Knowledge Is Power Program, or KIPP. A KIPP school opened both in Houston and New York City in 1995, and since then, the network has grown to 109 schools in 20 states and the District of Columbia. KIPP leaders expect to expand the network from its current enrollment of 27,000 students to 55,000 by 2015, said Richard Barth, the CEO of the KIPP Foundation, in San Francisco.
“This is very hard work. There’s no silver bullet,” he said. “Human capital is the number-one challenge.”
Mr. Barth said KIPP is focusing on growing the number of schools and students served in the charter-friendly locations where it is already present, rather than opening schools in new locations. That means significant scaling up in Atlanta, the District of Columbia, New Orleans, and Newark.
Vol. 31, Issue 01

Bloomberg Brags on Test Scores: Better Than Buffalo

Excerpt:

 

<Despite the gain and the mayor’s frequent claims to the contrary, the so-called achievement gap between blacks and Hispanics as opposed to whites and Asians remains essentially unchanged over the course of his administration.

 

The gaps persist across the state but the differences between races in the state as a whole are not as large as they are in the city. The gap between Hispanics and whites on the math test statewide came out to 23.1 percentage points, compared to 28.7 percentage points in the city. Among blacks, the gap in the city was more than 4 percentage points greater than in the state overall. Similar discrepancies exist in the reading test.>

 

Gotham Gazette’s Wonkster Blog

Test Scores: Better than Buffalo
By Gail Robinson

August 8th, 2011

http://www.gothamgazette.com/blogs/wonkster/2011/08/08/test-scores-better-than-buffalo/

The yearly releasing and parsing of students test scores took place Monday with Mayor Michael Bloomberg finding lots of good news among the reams of data.

To sum up, the scores show a very modest increase – but an increase – in the percentage of New York City third through eight graders that the state deems to be proficient in reading and math. Overall 57.3 percent of students rated a proficient in math, up from 54 percent last year, and 43.9 percent in English language arts, a 1.5 percentage point rise from last year.

In many respects, though, the data present a sobering picture. The increases in the city were modest. While up from last year, the scores represent a steep drop from 2009 when the state decided that the tests – and its scoring – had gotten too easy and so recalibrated the scores and began revamping the test itself. And after 10 years of so-called school reforms and massive infusions of money, less than half the students in city public schools are considered proficient readers.

(For detailed breakdown of the city scores, including results for individual schools, go here. For more information on statewide results go to the New York State Department of Education.)

State officials underscored this in their prepared statement. “Students outcomes have been stubbornly flat over time,” state Education Commissioner John King said. And state Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch found that the results “underscore the urgent need” for the state to move forward with reforms.

Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers struck a similarly subdued tone. While praising the “incremental gains,” in a prepared statement, Mulgrew said, “We still have a long way to go. As a former classroom teacher, I know that real progress in student learning comes gradually, not in leaps and bounds. The [Department of Education] needs to come up soon with an instructional strategy that can keep this progress going, despite the problems we are facing next year like a dramatic rise in class size and the loss of hundreds of valuable programs.

But Mayor Michael Bloomberg largely rejected such sobriety. Although he repeatedly said improvement was needed, he enthusiastically hailed the results.

“No matter where the state sets the bar, New York City kids continue to improve over time” he said at a press briefing. “The news really is very good,” he added.

(The spin – and our analysis of the scores after the jump)

Choose Your Stats
The test scores release contains a trove of data. And not surprisingly the administration likes to pick and chose what statistics it stresses so as to put its performance in the best possible light. In the middle part of the decade as scores seemed to skyrocket, the mayor and his then schools Chancellor Joel Klein stressed the huge gains.

Last year, when the state recalibrated the scores, erasing much of those gains, Klein urged reporters to look at the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

And this year when the gains are modest — and leave the percent of students considered proficient far short of the level supposedly reached in 2009 — Bloomberg has decided the only measure that makes any sense is how the city compares to the state as a whole and to its other major cities (Buffalo, Syracuse, Yonkers and Rochester).

“We want to be sure students progress every years,” Bloomberg said. “How do you measure progress? Against the rest of the state.”

That’s a far different tact than the one Bloomberg and Klein took in 2009, when Buffalo, Syracuse and Rochester recorded larger gains than New York.

While New York City saw its reading score rise by 1.5 percent point and its math by 3.3 points, the state score dropped 1.3 points in English and showed a 1.8 point gain in math. Despite this, the city still lags the state as a whole. Two thirds of state students scored a three or four in math; 57.6 managed that in English.

But all the other cities saw their scores drop from last year, some with strikingly low results. In Syracuse, for example, less than a quarter – 22.5 percent – of students achieved proficiency in English. In all of the cities except Yonkers, less than a third of students could be considered proficient in math.

The Great Gap

The mayor also noted all racial groups, students with disabilities and English language learners recorded some gains on the math test and all but English language learners saw their scores rise on the reading test. Black students achieved the biggest gain – with a 2.2 percentage point gain in the number of students achieving proficiency on the English test this year and 3.8 percent point more doing so on the their math test.

Despite the gain and the mayor’s frequent claims to the contrary, the so-called achievement gap between blacks and Hispanics as opposed to whites and Asians remains essentially unchanged over the course of his administration.

The gaps persist across the state but the differences between races in the state as a whole are not as large as they are in the city. The gap between Hispanics and whites on the math test statewide came out to 23.1 percentage points, compared to 28.7 percentage points in the city. Among blacks, the gap in the city was more than 4 percentage points greater than in the state overall. Similar discrepancies exist in the reading test.

The scores for English language learners and students with disabilities remain very low. Only 12.4 percent of the English language learners and 14.2 percent of student with disabilities met the standards in English. In math, the scores were better: 34.5 percent of English language learners being proficient and 27.3 percent of students with disabilities.

Middle School Gains, Elementary Losses

Picking and choosing numbers presents hazards, but middle school math scores seem to present a clear sign of success. In 2006, when the current test system came into use, only 38.9 percent of eight graders scored proficient. Math achievement showed a steady gain from 2006 until the recalibration of 2010. It improved this year, though, with 52.5 percent of eight graders deemed proficient. This is more than the percentage for third graders – a striking fact in a system where at time it has seemed the more years students stay in school the more their achievement lags. In addition, more students score proficient now than they did for in 2007, in the heart of the dumb test era.

Middle school reading told a different – and grimmer — story. Only 36.6 percent of seventh graders and 35 percent of eight graders were considered proficient this year. In both grades, the number of students getting a level three or four in reading declined from 2010 to 2011.

Fourth grade achievement is also questionable. On math 62.3 percent of the children now rank proficient, lower than the percentage in 2003, before the Bloomberg changes had really taken effect. (Over the years the administration and its critics have differed over what year one should use as a benchmark.) In English, the number of fourth graders meeting standards now sits 1.5 percentage points lower than it did in 2003.

Joel Klein while at DOJ okayed monopolistic acquisition of NewsCorp 14 yrs ago; "govt was bamboozled or worse"

Chris Christie also involved in this tangled tale.

http://nyti.ms/ovL9s6

The Media Equation

News Corp.’s Soft Power in the U.S.

By DAVID CARR

Published: August 7, 2011

Over the last month, many Americans watched from a distance in horror or amusement as it became evident that the News Corporation regarded Britain’s legal and political institutions as its own private club.
That could never happen in the United States, right?
As it turns out, a News Corporation division has twice come under significant civil and criminal investigations in the United States, but neither inquiry went anywhere. Given what has happened in Britain with the growing phone-hacking scandal, it is worth wondering why.
Both cases involve News America Marketing, an obscure but lucrative division of the News Corporation that is a big player in the business of retail marketing, including newspaper coupon inserts and in-store promotions. The company has come under scrutiny for a pattern of conduct that includes below-cost pricing, paying customers not to do business with competitors and accusations of computer hacking.
News America Marketing came to control 90 percent of the in-store advertising business, according to Fortune, aided in part by a particularly quick and favorable antitrust decision made by the Justice Department in 1997. That year, the News Corporation announced it wanted to buy Heritage Media, a big competitor, for about $754 million in stock plus $600 million in assumed debt. The News Corporation said it would sell the broadcast properties and hang onto the marketing division, which serviced 40,000 groceries and other retailers.
The deal would make News America Marketing the dominant player in the business and, for that reason, the San Francisco field office of the Justice Department recommended to Washington that the News Corporation’s takeover bid be challenged on antitrust grounds. Typically, such a request from a field office would carry great weight in Washington and, at a minimum, delay the deal for months.
But the Justice Department brass overrode San Francisco’s objections and gave its blessing in just two weeks. So who ran the antitrust division at the Justice Department at the time? Joel Klein, who this year became an executive vice president at the News Corporation, head of its education division and a close adviser to Rupert Murdoch on the phone-hacking scandal in Britain.
It’s worth noting that less than a year later, the Justice Department division led by Mr. Klein blocked the News Corporation from selling its share of a satellite company to PrimeStar, owned by a group of cable providers, on antitrust grounds, so any suggestion that a department of the United States government was snugly in the hip pocket of Mr. Murdoch would not be correct.
None of this suggests that Mr. Klein cut some sort of a deal that resulted in a job 14 years later. But the speed of the antitrust decision surprised even the people involved in the takeover. One of the participants, who declined to be identified discussing private negotiations, said he thought the sale was effectively blocked before the surprising turnaround.
“After that meeting with the San Francisco office, we all looked at each other and said, ‘This deal is not going to happen,’ ” he said.
My colleague Eric Lipton and I spent a few days trying to tease apart who made the actual decision to give the purchase the go-ahead — “It was as if a magic button had been pushed somewhere. We were all in shock,” said one of the same participants in the deal — but there is no paper trail.
People who worked at the Justice Department back then either could not recollect how the decision was made or declined to share information if they knew.
A spokeswoman for the News Corporation released this statement: “Joel didn’t know Mr. Murdoch at the time of the Heritage Media transaction 14 years ago. A year later, the D.O.J. under his leadership challenged the PrimeStar transaction in which News Corporation had a major interest. Any suggested inference is ludicrous.”
A lawyer who worked in the Justice Department in Washington at the time but did not want to be identified discussing internal matters, said: “This decision was made on the merits. The front office in Washington didn’t think a case could be won in court based on the very narrow definition of the market.”
But in retrospect, the anticompetitive fears of the San Francisco office were well founded.
After the Heritage Media deal, News America Marketing was in a position to throw its weight around and it did just that, drawing a variety of lawsuits in which competitors claimed they had been threatened and harassed. The News Corporation has settled those cases at a cost of over $650 million, and now the F.B.I. is looking into whether there was a pattern of illicit tactics by that division of the News Corporation.
“The way this whole thing got started was a horrible mistake. The government was bamboozled or worse,” said Thomas J. Horton, a law professor at the University of South Dakota who used to work at the Justice Department and represented a competitor, Insignia Systems of Minneapolis, in a lawsuit against News America Marketing. “The company has a long history of behaving unethically with no regard for our system of justice or legal ethics. They are ruthless.”
One of News America Marketing’s other competitors was Floorgraphics, a small New Jersey company that did in-store ads. George Rebh, who founded Floorgraphics along with his brother Richard, met with Paul V. Carlucci, head of News America, in 1999 at a Manhattan restaurant, and the News Corporation executive got right to the point.
“I will destroy you,” Mr. Carlucci said, according to his deposition in the Floorgraphics suit against News America, adding, “I work for a man who wants it all, and doesn’t understand anybody telling him he can’t have it all.” (Mr. Carlucci is now the publisher of the News Corporation-owned New York Post.)
Just in case the Rebh brothers did not get the point, court records indicate that beginning in October 2003, someone working out of the Connecticut headquarters of News America Marketing gained access to the Floorgraphics computer network, which included a collection of advertisements the company had created for its customers.
The News Corporation’s executives, as they have in case of phone hacking in Britain, said they had no idea that people working for them were engaged in such activity.
But in 2004, a Floorgraphics board member sent a letter to David F. DeVoe, chief financial officer of the News Corporation, detailing that Floorgraphics computers had “been breached by News America, as identified by their I.P. addresses.” News America has since admitted in court to breaching its competitor’s computers, but attributed it to lax security and a rogue employee.
According to correspondence that has been forwarded to members of the New Jersey Congressional delegation, Mr. Rebh also got in touch with the F.B.I., which sent two special agents to the Floorgraphics offices in 2004. One of the agents, Susan Secco, followed up with an e-mail in which she commented on the evidence Floorgraphics had compiled.
“I believe I have all I need to conduct interviews, as there is an excellent paper trail,” she wrote.
She then got in touch with the United States attorney in New Jersey and, after an initial burst of interest, the case died a slow death. The United States attorney at the time in New Jersey was Chris Christie, now governor of New Jersey and a rising star in the Republican Party.
Michael Drewniak, the governor’s press secretary, said politics played no role. “The U.S. attorney’s office receives thousands of referrals each year from parties seeking criminal investigations. Any decision to prosecute or not prosecute is based strictly on the strength of the evidence or lack thereof,” he said.
Two senior lawyers who supervised the unit that handled the initial investigation — Kevin O’Dowd and Deborah L. Gramiccioni — are now senior aides to Mr. Christie in the governor’s office. A state official said neither Mr. O’Dowd, then an assistant United States attorney, nor Ms. Gramiccioni, then chief of the office’s commercial crimes unit, recalled the details of the case and suggested that it had been handled at a lower level.
In early 2005, Mr. Rebh urged Representative Rush Holt and New Jersey’s two senators at the time, Jon S. Corzine and Frank R. Lautenberg — both Democrats — to press Mr. Christie and Alberto R. Gonzales, then the United States attorney general, to pursue the matter. The Federal Trade Commission asked for jurisdiction and was denied by the Justice Department. Frustrated, the Rebhs went to the Secret Service, but the case died for lack of cooperation.
Floorgraphics filed a civil lawsuit in federal court in 2009, but the suit was dropped when the News Corporation agreed to buy the assets of Floorgraphics for $29.5 million.
Given the pattern of conduct revealed recently in Britain, there is renewed interest in how News America behaved in the in-store business. Mr. Lautenberg and Mr. Holt sent a letter last month to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., reminding him about the original accusations made by Floorgraphics and suggesting that the Justice Department revisit the case.
Although the statute of limitations on many of the ostensible crimes has expired, Mr. Lautenberg and others have indicated that the Senate Commerce Committee may hold hearings to investigate whether there was a broad pattern of misconduct by the News Corporation.
It’s too early to say what the result of these accusations and inquiries might be. And certainly no one has credibly said that the News Corporation’s employees here have hacked phones as they did in Britain, or replicated in America the kind of cozy, possibly corrupt relationships British employees fostered with officials.
Then again, maybe they didn’t have to. In America, where the News Corporation does most of its business and also has a long reach into film, TV, cable and politics, the company’s size and might give it a soft, less obvious power that it has been able to project to remarkable effect.
E-mail: carr@nytimes.com;
Twitter.com/carr2n
 

Video & commentary: FMPR stopped privatization of teacher retirement

Please watch and share this important video that demonstrates the importance of militant struggle against government privatization policies. Angel

Edwin Morales, FMPR:

Just recently a law was approved in Puerto Rico that stopped the privatization of the public sector retirement systems and increases the percentage that government will contribute for a period of 10 years. This represents a huge victory in the struggle against this system's privatization.

The government's original plans were to sell off our portfolio of loans, to sell off that building and to fuse the system of central retirement and the one of teachers in order to be able to then rip off billions of our dollars. The government would then use our sacked funds to finance their drives to privatize with Project 1370 and Governor Fortuño's Reorganization Plan #4.

The struggle that the FMPR waged included:
a petition drive with signatures from across the island-nation
a work-stoppage during the public hearings for this privatization project
the August 26, 2010 national FMPR teachers' work-stoppage
a day of civil disobedience inside the retirement system's offices (watch video)

We are more than happy because, even though a crisis prevails, our success here represents an increase in the social wage of our teachers. It is important for victories like his be shared widely so other workers everywhere can see that, with determination and struggle, we can win and stop the plans of the wealthy class.

Here is a link to the civil disobedience that our FMPR organized last year in the Retirement Offices.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIvSzRL90Uo

What The ‘F’?

Fascinating post by Gary Rubinstein showing how most of NYC schools rated “F” on their progress reports rated better than average in their progress percentile, and far better in bringing up scores of their lowest third kids.

Another fascinating factoid: at least two of these “F” schools the DOE intends to close,  (ACE and P.S. 332) while one “F” school they tried to expand: Community Roots; why?  Could it be b/c it is a charter school?

 

What The ‘F’?

by Gary Rubinstein

Anyone following this blog for the past few months know that, to me, the most disturbing thing about the current ed reform movement is the heartless shutting down of neighborhood schools, based mainly on test scores.
Despite Arne Duncan’s claims that he’s seen too many 90/90/90 schools (90% poverty, 90% graduation rate, 90% achievement) to believe that it takes anything more than harder-working teachers to close the achievement gap in high poverty schools, he has yet to produce even ONE non-selective school that has such statistics.
Diane Ravitch​ called him and other politicians out on this in The New York Times a few months ago, and you don’t hear the reformers hailing miracle schools as much as they used to. This makes me happy since less dishonesty means that ‘failing’ schools don’t have to fight for their lives while trying live up to a mythical ideal.
But the reformers saw this coming, so I’ve noticed, recently, a new party line. Rather than focus on the absolutes: the percent of proficient students, regardless of poverty, in the old no-excuses, poverty-is-not-destiny, your-future-is-not-determined-by-your-zip-code, they will now focus on ‘gains.’  How much students progressed in a year, relative to their starting point.
One example of this is the teacher evaluation system that Michelle Rhee​ implemented in D.C. when she was chancellor there. About 28 minutes  into this video she describes how 50% of the teacher evaluations were not based on absolute metrics, like getting 90% proficient, but on the ‘gains’ of the students.  This is what’s now known as value-added.  How much did the students progress.
Though this certainly sounds more fair than asking teachers to get impossible proficiency percents, there are still a lot of problems with these inaccurate tests.  And even if the tests were accurate, how can a teacher be blamed (held accountable) for kids, for instance, who missed much of the school year for poverty-related issues?  When this IMPACT program was implemented, they used it to fire over 200 teachers this year — all from high-poverty schools.  You could argue that this makes sense since only the worst teachers are unable to get jobs at the better schools.  But I’d say, having taught at many different schools, that the teachers at the high-poverty schools are, on average, better than the ones in the low-poverty schools.  They are just working with a more challenging group so it is tougher to get those gains.
As New York City, where I live and teach, works to shut down more and more schools, I just discovered a truly bizarre use of this kind of ‘value-added’ process which factors highly into the annual school report card grade which, in turn, factors highly into the decision to shut down schools.
You won’t believe this.
Starting in 2010, New York City schools made their school report card grade based on the following considerations 15% school environment, 25% student achievement (percent proficient), and a whopping 60% on ‘student progress’.  Up until the 2009-2010 school year, this ‘growth’ was based on student proficiency from one year to the next.  So if all the students had a 2.3 on math in 3rd grade and then they all had a 2.3 on math in 4th grade, they all grew by a year in a year’s time.
But for the 2009-2010 school year, according to their website, they changed it to this:
Student Progress (60% of overall score): measures how student proficiency has changed in the past year. Progress indicators track the yearly gain or loss in ELA and mathematics proficiency of the same students as they move from one grade to the next at the school. A student’s growth percentile indicates the percentage of students, starting at the same test score, whom the student’s growth exceeded. These measures focus on the capacities students develop as a result of attending the school, not the capacities they bring with them on the first day. The metric is calculated for all students and for students in each school’s lowest one-third, as determined by the previous school year’s ELA and Math proficiency ratings. Each of these four metrics counts for 15% of the total score.
So what this means is that they now measure the growth of the entire school like this.  For each student they take their score from the previous year, let’s say that student A got a 2.3 on the 3rd grade math assessment, and they take that student’s score on the 4th grade math assessment, let’s say they got a 2.2, and then they figure out what percent of students in the city who also got a 2.3 on 3rd grade got lower than a 2.2 in 4th grade.  Let’s say that 60% of all the kids that got 2.3 in 3rd grade got less than a 2.2 in 4th grade.  So for that kid, the score would be 60%.  They then do this with every kid in the school and take the median of all those scores.  So the entire school is based on the one kid at the median and how he/she did in comparison to all the other kids in the district who got the same starting score.  They do this for math and ELA and then they do it for just the bottom third of the students in the school to get 4 scores that make up the majority of the school report card grade.
Now, the first thing to consider is what is a good score for this?  50% must be good since it means that the kids (or at least the kid) did better than half the kids who had the same starting point.  It seems like 40% wouldn’t be too bad either.
Well, I downloaded the complete 2009-2010 school report card spreadsheet to see how the five middle and elementary schools that received ‘F’s fared in this huge category.  (Good reading strategy:  make some predictions about what I might say next …)

School	Math %	ELA %	Bottom 1/3 Math %	Bottom 1/3 ELA %
Academy of Collaborative Education	50	46	63.5	72
Cornerstone Academy for Social Action	56	50.5	48	56
Fredrick Douglass Academy IV	43	51.5	64	67
P.S. 332	45.5	64	51	65
Community Roots Charter School	62	44.5	77	46.5

Now, I’m just a school teacher so I don’t know nuthin’ about no statistics, but these scores seem pretty good.  Anything even near 50% seems commendable, and many of these are way above 50%.  And this comprises of 60% of their school report card, and these are the only five schools to get ‘F’s.
Seems strange to me.

Do away with "test-and-punish" for real opportunity to learn

Date: Friday, August 5, 2011, 1:00 PM


My blog posted today on the Opportunity to Learn Campaign’s website,
_http://otlcampaignblog.blogspot.com/2011/08/do-away-with-test-and-punish-for-real
.html_
(http://otlcampaignblog.blogspot.com/2011/08/do-away-with-test-and-punish-for-real.html) .
Friday, August 5, 2011
Do away with "test-and-punish" for real opportunity to learn

By Monty Neill, Ed.D.
Executive Director, FairTest _www.fairtest.org_ (http://www.fairtest.org/)


With the teaching profession and public schools under attack as never
before, teachers, parents and others rallied in Washington, D.C., at the end
of July to “Save Our Schools.” The two most prominent themes at the SOS
event were:

1. The nation’s failure to address poverty or to provide every child with
a strong opportunity to thrive and learn, and
2. The overuse and misuse of standardized tests imposed by No Child Left
Behind and made worse by the actions of many states and districts.


Teachers, students, parents and many others recognize that testing mania
has gone way too far. It undermines the limited educational opportunity
low-income youth do have.

Under NCLB, the rate of improvement on National Assessment of Educational
Progress reading and math scores has slowed or stagnated compared with the
prior decade. This is true in both reading and math. It affects low-income
and minority group students, English language learners and students with
disabilities. (See here for a detailed report on this:
_http://www.fairtest.org/detailed-fairtest-study-naep-results-shows-nclb-ha_
(http://www.fairtest.org/detailed-fairtest-study-naep-results-shows-nclb-ha) .)

Meanwhile, the graduation rate barely reaches 50 percent in many cities.
Harsh disciplinary policies combine with the boring drudgery of
schooling-reduced-to-test-prep to drive many youth out of school. Far too many end up
in the criminal justice systems. (For the links between testing, discipline
and the school-to-prison pipeline, see
_http://www.fairtest.org/position-paper-nclb-and-school-prison-pipeline_
(http://www.fairtest.org/position-paper-nclb-and-school-prison-pipeline) ).

Lack of funding and unwise testing policies combine to narrow the
curriculum. Children lose access to subjects that engage them, missing out on
knowledge and skills they will need as adults. Reducing instruction to test prep
in reading and math, as is happening in many schools, compounds the
problem. Children of color and low-income youth lose the most, in part because
their families can’t afford to make up for what they don’t get in school
(see
_http://www.fairtest.org/racial-justice-and-standardized-educational-testin_
(http://www.fairtest.org/racial-justice-and-standardized-educational-testin) ).

The U.S. must shift the “education reform” paradigm from test-and-punish
to helping schools improve. The Forum on Educational Accountability, which
I chair, has proposed ways to do that (see _http://www.edaccountability.org_
(http://www.edaccountability.org/) ). The recommendations include:

* reduce the amounts and consequences of testing, while supporting
high-quality assessment;
* ensure strong professional growth for teachers;
* fully fund the federal Title I and IDEA Part B programs (respectively,
funds for low income youth and students with disabilities); and
* provide high-quality early childhood education.


Other alliances and groups recommend similar changes. FairTest, for
example, explains how to overhaul assessment and evaluation (see
_http://www.fairtest.org/fact-sheet-better-way-evaluate-schools-pdf_
(http://www.fairtest.org/fact-sheet-better-way-evaluate-schools-pdf) ).

Unfortunately, the test-and-punish ideology of leading elements in both
political parties, backed by some large foundations and major corporations,
will be tough to dislodge – but dislodge it we must. That was the purpose of
the SOS rally. One event in D.C. is only a step on our way, not the end.
Winning the change requires educating, organizing and mobilizing the vast
numbers of people who know we cannot defund or test our way to educational
improvement. That work is our main task.
--
Monty Neill, Ed.D.; Executive Director, FairTest; P.O. Box 300204, Jamaica
Plain, MA 02130; 617-477-9792; _http://www.fairtest.org_
(http://www.fairtest.org/) ; Donate to FairTest:
_https://secure.entango.com/donate/MnrXjT8MQqk_ (https://secure.entango.com/donate/MnrXjT8MQqk)

Obama Disappointment

What Happened to Obama?

By DREW WESTEN, NY TIMES

August 8, 2011

Drew Westen is a professor of psychology at Emory University and the author of “The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation.”

IT was a blustery day in Washington on Jan. 20, 2009, as it often seems to be on the day of a presidential inauguration. As I stood with my 8-year-old daughter, watching the president deliver his inaugural address, I had a feeling of unease. It wasn’t just that the man who could be so eloquent had seemingly chosen not to be on this auspicious occasion, although that turned out to be a troubling harbinger of things to come. It was that there was a story the American people were waiting to hear — and needed to hear — but he didn’t tell it. And in the ensuing months he continued not to tell it, no matter how outrageous the slings and arrows his opponents threw at him.
The stories our leaders tell us matter, probably almost as much as the stories our parents tell us as children, because they orient us to what is, what could be, and what should be; to the worldviews they hold and to the values they hold sacred. Our brains evolved to “expect” stories with a particular structure, with protagonists and villains, a hill to be climbed or a battle to be fought. Our species existed for more than 100,000 years before the earliest signs of literacy, and another 5,000 years would pass before the majority of humans would know how to read and write.
Stories were the primary way our ancestors transmitted knowledge and values. Today we seek movies, novels and “news stories” that put the events of the day in a form that our brains evolved to find compelling and memorable. Children crave bedtime stories; the holy books of the three great monotheistic religions are written in parables; and as research in cognitive science has shown, lawyers whose closing arguments tell a story win jury trials against their legal adversaries who just lay out “the facts of the case.”
When Barack Obama rose to the lectern on Inauguration Day, the nation was in tatters. Americans were scared and angry. The economy was spinning in reverse. Three-quarters of a million people lost their jobs that month. Many had lost their homes, and with them the only nest eggs they had. Even the usually impervious upper middle class had seen a decade of stagnant or declining investment, with the stock market dropping in value with no end in sight. Hope was as scarce as credit.
In that context, Americans needed their president to tell them a story that made sense of what they had just been through, what caused it, and how it was going to end. They needed to hear that he understood what they were feeling, that he would track down those responsible for their pain and suffering, and that he would restore order and safety. What they were waiting for, in broad strokes, was a story something like this:
“I know you’re scared and angry. Many of you have lost your jobs, your homes, your hope. This was a disaster, but it was not a natural disaster. It was made by Wall Street gamblers who speculated with your lives and futures. It was made by conservative extremists who told us that if we just eliminated regulations and rewarded greed and recklessness, it would all work out. But it didn’t work out. And it didn’t work out 80 years ago, when the same people sold our grandparents the same bill of goods, with the same results. But we learned something from our grandparents about how to fix it, and we will draw on their wisdom. We will restore business confidence the old-fashioned way: by putting money back in the pockets of working Americans by putting them back to work, and by restoring integrity to our financial markets and demanding it of those who want to run them. I can’t promise that we won’t make mistakes along the way. But I can promise you that they will be honest mistakes, and that your government has your back again.” A story isn’t a policy. But that simple narrative — and the policies that would naturally have flowed from it — would have inoculated against much of what was to come in the intervening two and a half years of failed government, idled factories and idled hands. That story would have made clear that the president understood that the American people had given Democrats the presidency and majorities in both houses of Congress to fix the mess the Republicans and Wall Street had made of the country, and that this would not be a power-sharing arrangement. It would have made clear that the problem wasn’t tax-and-spend liberalism or the deficit — a deficit that didn’t exist until George W. Bush gave nearly $2 trillion in tax breaks largely to the wealthiest Americans and squandered $1 trillion in two wars.
And perhaps most important, it would have offered a clear, compelling alternative to the dominant narrative of the right, that our problem is not due to spending on things like the pensions of firefighters, but to the fact that those who can afford to buy influence are rewriting the rules so they can cut themselves progressively larger slices of the American pie while paying less of their fair share for it.
But there was no story — and there has been none since.
In similar circumstances, Franklin D. Roosevelt offered Americans a promise to use the power of his office to make their lives better and to keep trying until he got it right. Beginning in his first inaugural address, and in the fireside chats that followed, he explained how the crash had happened, and he minced no words about those who had caused it. He promised to do something no president had done before: to use the resources of the United States to put Americans directly to work, building the infrastructure we still rely on today. He swore to keep the people who had caused the crisis out of the halls of power, and he made good on that promise. In a 1936 speech at Madison Square Garden, he thundered, “Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred.”
When Barack Obama stepped into the Oval Office, he stepped into a cycle of American history, best exemplified by F.D.R. and his distant cousin, Teddy. After a great technological revolution or a major economic transition, as when America changed from a nation of farmers to an urban industrial one, there is often a period of great concentration of wealth, and with it, a concentration of power in the wealthy. That’s what we saw in 1928, and that’s what we see today. At some point that power is exercised so injudiciously, and the lives of so many become so unbearable, that a period of reform ensues — and a charismatic reformer emerges to lead that renewal. In that sense, Teddy Roosevelt started the cycle of reform his cousin picked up 30 years later, as he began efforts to bust the trusts and regulate the railroads, exercise federal power over the banks and the nation’s food supply, and protect America’s land and wildlife, creating the modern environmental movement.
Those were the shoes — that was the historic role — that Americans elected Barack Obama to fill. The president is fond of referring to “the arc of history,” paraphrasing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous statement that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But with his deep-seated aversion to conflict and his profound failure to understand bully dynamics — in which conciliation is always the wrong course of action, because bullies perceive it as weakness and just punch harder the next time — he has broken that arc and has likely bent it backward for at least a generation.
When Dr. King spoke of the great arc bending toward justice, he did not mean that we should wait for it to bend. He exhorted others to put their full weight behind it, and he gave his life speaking with a voice that cut through the blistering force of water cannons and the gnashing teeth of police dogs. He preached the gospel of nonviolence, but he knew that whether a bully hid behind a club or a poll tax, the only effective response was to face the bully down, and to make the bully show his true and repugnant face in public.
In contrast, when faced with the greatest economic crisis, the greatest levels of economic inequality, and the greatest levels of corporate influence on politics since the Depression, Barack Obama stared into the eyes of history and chose to avert his gaze. Instead of indicting the people whose recklessness wrecked the economy, he put them in charge of it. He never explained that decision to the public — a failure in storytelling as extraordinary as the failure in judgment behind it. Had the president chosen to bend the arc of history, he would have told the public the story of the destruction wrought by the dismantling of the New Deal regulations that had protected them for more than half a century. He would have offered them a counternarrative of how to fix the problem other than the politics of appeasement, one that emphasized creating economic demand and consumer confidence by putting consumers back to work. He would have had to stare down those who had wrecked the economy, and he would have had to tolerate their hatred if not welcome it. But the arc of his temperament just didn’t bend that far.
The truly decisive move that broke the arc of history was his handling of the stimulus. The public was desperate for a leader who would speak with confidence, and they were ready to follow wherever the president led. Yet instead of indicting the economic policies and principles that had just eliminated eight million jobs, in the most damaging of the tic-like gestures of compromise that have become the hallmark of his presidency — and against the advice of multiple Nobel-Prize-winning economists — he backed away from his advisers who proposed a big stimulus, and then diluted it with tax cuts that had already been shown to be inert. The result, as predicted in advance, was a half-stimulus that half-stimulated the economy. That, in turn, led the White House to feel rightly unappreciated for having saved the country from another Great Depression but in the unenviable position of having to argue a counterfactual — that something terrible might have happened had it not half-acted.
To the average American, who was still staring into the abyss, the half-stimulus did nothing but prove that Ronald Reagan was right, that government is the problem. In fact, the average American had no idea what Democrats were trying to accomplish by deficit spending because no one bothered to explain it to them with the repetition and evocative imagery that our brains require to make an idea, particularly a paradoxical one, “stick.” Nor did anyone explain what health care reform was supposed to accomplish (other than the unbelievable and even more uninspiring claim that it would “bend the cost curve”), or why “credit card reform” had led to an increase in the interest rates they were already struggling to pay. Nor did anyone explain why saving the banks was such a priority, when saving the homes the banks were foreclosing didn’t seem to be. All Americans knew, and all they know today, is that they’re still unemployed, they’re still worried about how they’re going to pay their bills at the end of the month and their kids still can’t get a job. And now the Republicans are chipping away at unemployment insurance, and the president is making his usual impotent verbal exhortations after bargaining it away.
What makes the “deficit debate” we just experienced seem so surreal is how divorced the conversation in Washington has been from conversations around the kitchen table everywhere else in America. Although I am a scientist by training, over the last several years, as a messaging consultant to nonprofit groups and Democratic leaders, I have studied the way voters think and feel, talking to them in plain language. At this point, I have interacted in person or virtually with more than 50,000 Americans on a range of issues, from taxes and deficits to abortion and immigration.
The average voter is far more worried about jobs than about the deficit, which few were talking about while Bush and the Republican Congress were running it up. The conventional wisdom is that Americans hate government, and if you ask the question in the abstract, people will certainly give you an earful about what government does wrong. But if you give them the choice between cutting the deficit and putting Americans back to work, it isn’t even close. But it’s not just jobs. Americans don’t share the priorities of either party on taxes, budgets or any of the things Congress and the president have just agreed to slash — or failed to slash, like subsidies to oil companies. When it comes to tax cuts for the wealthy, Americans are united across the political spectrum, supporting a message that says, “In times like these, millionaires ought to be giving to charity, not getting it.”
When pitted against a tough budget-cutting message straight from the mouth of its strongest advocates, swing voters vastly preferred a message that began, “The best way to reduce the deficit is to put Americans back to work.” This statement is far more consistent with what many economists are saying publicly — and what investors apparently believe, as evident in the nosedive the stock market took after the president and Congress “saved” the economy.
So where does that leave us?
Like most Americans, at this point, I have no idea what Barack Obama — and by extension the party he leads — believes on virtually any issue. The president tells us he prefers a “balanced” approach to deficit reduction, one that weds “revenue enhancements” (a weak way of describing popular taxes on the rich and big corporations that are evading them) with “entitlement cuts” (an equally poor choice of words that implies that people who’ve worked their whole lives are looking for handouts). But the law he just signed includes only the cuts. This pattern of presenting inconsistent positions with no apparent recognition of their incoherence is another hallmark of this president’s storytelling. He announces in a speech on energy and climate change that we need to expand offshore oil drilling and coal production — two methods of obtaining fuels that contribute to the extreme weather Americans are now seeing. He supports a health care law that will use Medicaid to insure about 15 million more Americans and then endorses a budget plan that, through cuts to state budgets, will most likely decimate Medicaid and other essential programs for children, senior citizens and people who are vulnerable by virtue of disabilities or an economy that is getting weaker by the day. He gives a major speech on immigration reform after deporting a million immigrants in two years, breaking up families at a pace George W. Bush could never rival in all his years as president.
THE real conundrum is why the president seems so compelled to take both sides of every issue, encouraging voters to project whatever they want on him, and hoping they won’t realize which hand is holding the rabbit. That a large section of the country views him as a socialist while many in his own party are concluding that he does not share their values speaks volumes — but not the volumes his advisers are selling: that if you make both the right and left mad, you must be doing something right.
As a practicing psychologist with more than 25 years of experience, I will resist the temptation to diagnose at a distance, but as a scientist and strategic consultant I will venture some hypotheses.
The most charitable explanation is that he and his advisers have succumbed to a view of electoral success to which many Democrats succumb — that “centrist” voters like “centrist” politicians. Unfortunately, reality is more complicated. Centrist voters prefer honest politicians who help them solve their problems. A second possibility is that he is simply not up to the task by virtue of his lack of experience and a character defect that might not have been so debilitating at some other time in history. Those of us who were bewitched by his eloquence on the campaign trail chose to ignore some disquieting aspects of his biography: that he had accomplished very little before he ran for president, having never run a business or a state; that he had a singularly unremarkable career as a law professor, publishing nothing in 12 years at the University of Chicago other than an autobiography; and that, before joining the United States Senate, he had voted "present" (instead of "yea" or "nay") 130 times, sometimes dodging difficult issues.
A somewhat less charitable explanation is that we are a nation that is being held hostage not just by an extremist Republican Party but also by a president who either does not know what he believes or is willing to take whatever position he thinks will lead to his re-election. Perhaps those of us who were so enthralled with the magnificent story he told in “Dreams From My Father” appended a chapter at the end that wasn’t there — the chapter in which he resolves his identity and comes to know who he is and what he believes in.
Or perhaps, like so many politicians who come to Washington, he has already been consciously or unconsciously corrupted by a system that tests the souls even of people of tremendous integrity, by forcing them to dial for dollars — in the case of the modern presidency, for hundreds of millions of dollars. When he wants to be, the president is a brilliant and moving speaker, but his stories virtually always lack one element: the villain who caused the problem, who is always left out, described in impersonal terms, or described in passive voice, as if the cause of others’ misery has no agency and hence no culpability. Whether that reflects his aversion to conflict, an aversion to conflict with potential campaign donors that today cripples both parties’ ability to govern and threatens our democracy, or both, is unclear.
A final explanation is that he ran for president on two contradictory platforms: as a reformer who would clean up the system, and as a unity candidate who would transcend the lines of red and blue. He has pursued the one with which he is most comfortable given the constraints of his character, consistently choosing the message of bipartisanship over the message of confrontation.
But the arc of history does not bend toward justice through capitulation cast as compromise. It does not bend when 400 people control more of the wealth than 150 million of their fellow Americans. It does not bend when the average middle-class family has seen its income stagnate over the last 30 years while the richest 1 percent has seen its income rise astronomically. It does not bend when we cut the fixed incomes of our parents and grandparents so hedge fund managers can keep their 15 percent tax rates. It does not bend when only one side in negotiations between workers and their bosses is allowed representation. And it does not bend when, as political scientists have shown, it is not public opinion but the opinions of the wealthy that predict the votes of the Senate. The arc of history can bend only so far before it breaks.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on August 7, 2011, on page SR1 of the New York edition with the headline: What Happened To Obama?.

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Day of Infamy rewrite: 2nd Dip of Recession begins

[UPDATE]  Day of Infamy rewrite: Economy goes into toilet

Preface note: I've been working all day researching, rewriting, weaving in more data and links, watching as the next Global Meltdown begins.   This is Thurs night, 2 days later, and the Stock Market has begun it's downward slide.  It may rebound Friday, like the Titanic rearing up before is slips away, or it may plunge.  Either way, Monday could be one of the blackest days you may ever live through.  It did not have to be this way.  And if I'm wrong, feel free to laugh.  I'll be glad if you can.

The only job the Government had was to pump money into our Economy to create jobs.  When Consumers cannot spend, and Banks will not spend, then our Government must.  Sadly, and avoidably, what was done on Aug 2nd by the Fascists in Washington will hurt you.  ~ Gene

===================================

[NOBAMA]   Aug 2, 2011:  A date that will live in infamy . . .

Remembering History:  FDR: NEW DEAL   -   Obama? RAW DEAL

MUCH MORE

     •> earthhome.us / Mission

===================================

Aug 2, 2011:  A date that will live in infamy . . .

Remembering History:  FDR: NEW DEAL  -  Obama? RAW DEAL

        

letter + response from Joanne Barkan re teacher value-added at Dissent

From Leonie Haimson:

See the critical comment on "Firing Line" from Claire Robertson-Kraft who is the Associate Director of Operation Public Education, a University of Pennsylvania project which has been instrumental in promoting value-added modeling.

And Joanne Barkan's response at this link:.

http://dissentmagazine.org/atw.php?id=521

Barkan has a  great rebuttal you should read; here are some other points of my own:

"Most of the reformers’ systems are not simply focused on measuring performance and dismissing teachers, but also on providing them with more robust mentorship and meaningful ongoing professional development."

Umm, not really! They focus on simplistic and reductionist methods of evaluation to push as many teachers out schools asap.  Hanushek has said that 5-10% of teachers should be fired each year.  There is nothing if the corp reform agenda that really deals with giving teachers more support or a better chance of success.

As I see it, the issue isn’t with the elements of the reforms themselves. Rather, it’s a matter of the process used to design and implement the new systems. Largely driven from the top-down, these initiatives are being rolled out much too quickly without garnering the input of teachers and other stakeholders that would be necessary to sustain the efforts over time.

No, the elements of reforms themselves are essentially destructive and anti-thetical to good teaching.  This is like Joel Klein saying his biggest error is not communicating his policies better to parents.

Rather than engaging in polarizing discussion, we should be focusing our efforts on supporting promising legislation like a recent Illinois education law—which brought multiple stakeholders to the table to work together as partners in reform.

Yes, Jonah Edelman of Stand for Children told the truth about that; how he outfoxed and outgamed the teachers unions – in part by offering millions of dollars to state legislators to push his essentially anti- teacher legislation.

a stupid and Incoherent critique of SOS march by Ed Deformer Kevin Carey

From Leonie Haimson

An incoherent critique of SOS march by Kevin Carey.

Duncan had nothing to do with the decades of demographic change, economic dislocation, and failed urban policy that helped to produce de facto segregation in many public schools.

What about the numerous studies showing charters are leading to more segregation, not less?

Duncan’s approach to being secretary of education has been to focus on education—specifically, turning around chronically low-performing schools, improving the quality of academic standards and tests, judging teachers by their success in the classroom, and supporting innovative school models, including charter schools.

And that’s the problem!  Obviously Carey wasn’t listening to how these policies, including school closings, high stakes testing, charter expansion, and teacher evaluation linked to test scores is making things worse, not better!

Most people think teachers should be evaluated according to student learning results…

Most people, in other words, have a more complex understanding of education policy than your average Hollywood celebrity. That’s a lesson our nation’s leaders should take to heart.

No, most experts on testing or educators do not believe this at all.   

http://www.tnr.com/article/93156/education-reform-matt-damon-arne-duncan

Published on The New Republic

An Incoherent Protest Against Education Reform, Brought to You by Matt Damon

 Kevin Carey August 4, 2011

By the time Matt Damon got to the microphone at the Save Our Schools rally last weekend, the few thousand public school teachers in attendance had been standing not far from the White House in the July heat for nearly three hours. Yet their enthusiasm had not flagged, and they cheered loudly as Damon said … not much, really. That teachers like his mother are “awesome,” that standardized tests are bad, and that people who have literally never taught anyone anything have no business being involved in education policy. Himself excluded, presumably.

Specifics, in other words, weren’t the order of the day. Rather, the event was a catalogue of broad grievances voiced by activists, academics, and rank-and-file teachers. Unfortunately, the more the rally turned to education, the less sense it made.

To be sure, teachers have good reason to be angry. K-12 education stands on the shrinking middle ground of the American labor market. Teachers haven’t fallen into destitution like many blue-collar workers, but they certainly haven’t reaped the windfall benefits enjoyed at the high end of our increasingly unequal society. Both Damon and Jon Stewart (in a taped address) correctly mocked the notion that teachers are overpaid. From 1969 to 2008, the average inflation-adjusted public schoolteacher salary increased by only 11 percent. Real GDP per capita increased by 123 percent during the same time.

2008, of course, was the year when the people who had been getting rich, while teachers just got by, blew the economy apart. Tax receipts plummeted, school budgets were hit, and teachers started losing their jobs. Conservatives in Congress fought rational counter-cyclical attempts to shore up the state and the local governments that provide 90 percent of school revenues. Then Republicans rode a wave of voter anger over the rising unemployment and insecurity to gubernatorial victories in states including Wisconsin, Ohio, New Jersey, and Florida.

The newly elected governors promptly blamed the budget crisis on public employee salaries and benefits, slashed said benefits, and enacted historic limitations on collective bargaining. Meanwhile, corporate profits soon returned to record highs. It was no surprise that the largest contingent at the Save Our Schools rally came from Wisconsin, where teachers’ unions played a major role in the waves of public protest over Governor Scott Walker’s anti-labor agenda.

But Barack Obama isn’t Scott Walker, and few of the rally participants seemed willing to openly denounce the president. Instead, they focused their anger on Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, the affable ex-basketball player and former CEO of Chicago Public Schools. “Arne Sucks,” read one sign; “Duncan’d,” said another. Indeed, much of the rally consisted of people blaming Duncan for problems he has no ability to solve.

For example, firebrand activist Jonathan Kozol, author of Savage Inequalities and other accounts of terrible injustice visited upon low-income students, noted that American public schools are more segregated by race today than they were when the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1968. Therefore, Kozol thundered, Duncan was not merely guilty of rejecting Brown v. Board; he was working to restore the separate-but-equal doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson.

It’s an incendiary charge that makes no sense whatsoever. Duncan had nothing to do with the decades of demographic change, economic dislocation, and failed urban policy that helped to produce de facto segregation in many public schools. Duncan is not Chief Justice of the United States John Roberts, who wrote the majority opinion in a 2007 Supreme Court case that forbade school districts from combating segregation by racially balancing their schools. Duncan’s crime, according to Kozol, is trying to ensure that the resulting segregated schools give their minority students a good education.

The speaker after Kozol picked up the torch: “Hey, Arne Duncan! It’s poverty, stupid!” But Arne Duncan is not Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, whose job is to reduce and mitigate child poverty. Nor is he Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, who should be doing more to reduce unemployment so children aren’t poor in the first place.

And it is surreal to hear people like Stanford professor Linda Darling-Hammond—once considered a candidate for Duncan’s job—stand in front of the White House and scold this administration for insufficient attention to children’s health care. Health care! Obama signed an expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program for poor children 15 days after taking office. He gambled his presidency on the Affordable Care Act. It was like listening to someone criticize George W. Bush for not launching enough expensive foreign wars.

Duncan’s approach to being secretary of education has been to focus on education—specifically, turning around chronically low-performing schools, improving the quality of academic standards and tests, judging teachers by their success in the classroom, and supporting innovative school models, including charter schools. Was there a rally somewhere else on the Mall denouncing Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack for focusing too much on the national free- and reduced-price school lunch program and not enough on better curricula in 6th grade math?

The charter school part of Duncan’s agenda, however, was all the connection the rally participants needed. Most charter schools are run by non-profit organizations. The best and most successful, like KIPP and Achievement First, are staffed by progressives with an almost monastic commitment to helping poor children learn. But some charters are run by for-profit companies, i.e. private corporations, and the use of the word “corporate” as a catch-all insult at the Save Our Schools rally was not limited to the people selling the latest Chomsky on folding tables near the back.

Again, it’s perfectly understandable for people whose jobs have been destroyed by reckless corporations and whose profession has been denigrated by corporate-backed politicians to feel ill will toward big business. But the Koch brothers aren’t getting rich by running charter schools. By the same token, Bill Gates didn’t cause the economic crisis or put Chris Christie in the New Jersey governor’s mansion. The fact that some hedge fund managers support charter schools and that the Gates Foundation (like every other foundation) is endowed with money earned in the private sector does not lead, ipso facto, to the conclusion that corporations have taken over American schools. Or, in the words of a self-described ’60s SDS member whose white-guy rapping shouldn’t have been allowed anywhere near the stage:

They’re working hard to take over our schools

And run them for profit like they do our jails

So they make up lies to say that we fail

While the failure is theirs because they’ve stolen our wealth

Whatever is good they preserve for themself

Now they’re saying that we hold the whole nation back

If we don’t pass the test their companies track

When the reality is they’re the ones who need testing

To see in whose pockets school profits are resting

From Murdoch to Klein to Gates to Rhee

The achievement gap hustle is one big crime spree!

Will Obama listen to any of this? Probably not. Obama was preoccupied with the debt ceiling circus over the weekend, and the rally leaders turned down an invitation to meet with White House officials earlier in the week.

It was hard to ignore the fact that in a nation of 3.3 million public school teachers and millions more parents, professors, and administrators, barely 3,000 people (according to Education Week) attended the rally. As much as the organizers profess to represent a broad grassroots movement, polls suggest that over two-thirds of Americans support charter schools, a number that has been steadily growing over time. Most people think teachers should be evaluated according to student learning results, and that—contra Save Our Schools—the federal government should either maintain or increase its role in K-12 education.

Most people, in other words, have a more complex understanding of education policy than your average Hollywood celebrity. That’s a lesson our nation’s leaders should take to heart.

Kevin Carey is the policy director of Education Sector, a think tank in Washington, D.C. 

Source URL: http://www.tnr.com/article/93156/education-reform-matt-damon-arne-duncan