From Socialism to Neoliberalism: A Story of Capture (Part 2 of 2)

http://deterritorialinvestigations.wordpress.com/2013/07/24/from-socialism-to-neoliberalism-a-story-of-capture-part-2-of-2/

From Socialism to Neoliberalism: A Story of Capture (Part 2 of 2)

Posted on July 24, 2013 by edmundberger

Kahn Goes to Washington, Rustin Goes to War
Overall, 1972 proved to be a year of change on all fronts. Shachtman passed away and was eulogized by Kahn in the pages of Dissent. Henry Jackson lost the nomination to George McGovern and organized labor, and following the opinion of Bayard Rustin, reverted to supporting the man who had split the left several years earlier, Hubert Humphrey.ⁱ On the other hand, Harrington declared his support for the dovish McGovern, the only viable anti-war candidate anywhere on the political spectrum. By all means McGovern should have won the support of labor: he had written his doctoral dissertation on the Ludlow Massacre, and according to the AFL-CIO itself he had voted pro-union 93% of the time.ⁱⁱ But Meany, ever the anti-communist, held far more clout than the average opinion of the worker represented by the federation. In was in context that after Jackson lost out Kahn, at the request of Lane Kirkland, went to work at the AFL-CIO as Meany’s speechwriter.ⁱⁱⁱ
As these rivalries drove irreversible wedges into the various factions of the left, the Socialist Party of America underwent a transformation. At their 1972 convention, the party’s co-chairs, Rustin and Charles Zimmerman (the head of the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union and the AFL-CIO’s Civil Rights Committee)^iv restructured and renamed the organization as the Social Democrats USA (SD/USA). The SD/USA drew its ranks from the AFL-CIO – LID alignment: members included Tom Kahn and Rachelle Horowitz, A. Philip Randolph, Norman Hill, Robert J. Alexander, Albert Shanker, and lesser-known activists such as Carl Gershman, Sandra Felman, Penn and Eugenia Kemble, Joshua Muravchik, Jay Mazur, John T. Joyce, and Adrian Karatnycky. To announce the creation of the new organization, the SD/USA published a pamphlet titled “The American challenge: A social-democratic program for the Seventies.” Dismissing the radicalism of the 1960s, the pamphlet describes the softening views of the organization, beginning with a dismissal of the intellectuals and activists that were critical of Big Labor, and containing allusions to the belief that the U.S. could be an instrument of peace with the ability to promote democracy around the world.^v
One of the first acts of the new SD/USA was to launch a counterattack against the peaceniks that they perceived as taking over the Democrat Party, chiefly personified in George McGovern. McGovern’s historic loss to Nixon had created an open space to ‘reclaim’ the Democrats, something that was seen as essential at the dawn of détente. After a LID luncheon Midge Decter, a secretary at the offices of Commentary, and Ben Wattenberg, then serving as Jackson’s chief strategist, conceived of a vehicle for just such an agenda – the Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM), an anti-communist, anti-‘New Politics,’ pro-labor consortium.^vi For Jackson, it was a platform that he could draw on for another presidential bid in 1976. The SD/USA featured prominently: Penn Kemble was named the executive director, and Bayard Rustin, Carl Gershman, Rachelle Horowitz, Josh Muravchik, Albert Shanker, Norman Hill, and others would follow suit.^vii Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary and husband of Decter was also a member,^viii as was the intellectual Allen Weinstein,^ix Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, future Trilateralist Samuel Huntington, and most of the upper management of the AFL-CIO.^x
As this strong bloc formed and solidified the ties between the Jacksonites, the Shachtmanites and labor, Kahn continued to climb the ranks of the AFL-CIO. He became increasingly involved in the federation’s International Affairs division, the longtime homes of Jay Lovestone and Irving Brown, a former organizer for the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union who had become AFL-CIO’s point man in Europe. Not surprisingly, Brown, like Lovestone, was supplementing his union duties with work for the CIA.^xi Kahn situated himself quite nicely in this world in-between organizing and espionage. As Horowitz later recalled, “During this time Tom Kahn helped craft much of the AFL-CIO’s foreign policy and domestic strategy for maintaining a credible anti-communist stance….As editor of the Free Trade Union News, Kahn kept readers abreast of the struggle for democracy and free trade unionism in the communist world.”^xii

Rustin’s rise was equally impressive. He joined the boards of both the “who’s who of neoconservatives,” Freedom House, and along with Gershman and Shanker, the International Rescue Committee (IRC). In an evolution similar to that of the Shachtmanites, the organization had originally been formed by socialists and prominent liberal intellectuals (including the militant Reinhold Neibuhr, LID member John Dewey, Jay Lovestone, and Bryn Hovde, a State Department official and president of the New School for Social Research)^xiii and had drawn support from the AFL’s David Dubinsky and Freedom House’s founder, Eleanor Roosevelt.^xiv The Committee was soon working in tandem with the New School, with ample funding provided by the Rockefeller Foundation, to bring refuged intellectuals from abroad to the United States.^xv Before long, however, it would be also be drawing funding from the Ford Foundation, and indirectly, the CIA.^xvi Noting that the IRC had also taken an active in the early build-up to the Vietnam War, journalist Robert Scheer had written in 1965 that the humanitarian organization “helped to shape the Cold War as we live it today.”^xvii Kahn would also eventually migrate to the IRC board, as did future CIA director William Casey, Henry Kissinger, and Donald Rumsfeld.^xviii

As the 1976 elections drew near, the SD/USA-CDM-AFL-CIO network was placed in an awkward position. A Jackson presidency was the desired goal, yet the liberal elite contingencies had already selected their man – Jimmy Carter. In 1972 Carter had thrown his support behind Jackson instead of McGovern, and through the Trilateral Commission had garnered the respect of heavyweights such as David Rockefeller and the hawkish Brzezinski.^xix For the former socialists, whose political views where truly all over the map, the prospects of their figurehead in the Oval Office was looking rather dim. Regardless, Jackson launched an attack on the contender at a SD/USA dinner, characterizing Carter as a rightist-in-sheep’s clothing. Referencing the anti-government mottoes in his rival’s campaign, Jackson said “Call it what you will, it represents an attack on the idea that the government can do things to help people… The attacks on big government remind me of the attacks on big labor.”^xx Rustin, Kahn, and other SD/USA members had toiled years before on the Freedom Budget, the center piece of which was a federal jobs program, and the stance of Carter seemed counterintuitive to these goals that, despite the hardline stance on foreign policy, continued to linger. Much to their dismay, Jackson eventually lost out to Carter in the primaries.

President Jimmy Carter

The CDM reluctantly switched their support to Carter. He was, in many respects, in agreement with the majority of the coalition’s views: he was extremely anti-communist, he had supported the Vietnam War, and he had garnered the endorsement of the Israeli lobby. However, after the elections they were locked out from any policy positions save for Peter Rosenblatt, who was given a job in faraway Micronesia. Elliot Abrams bemoaned what the organization saw as a betrayal. “They froze us out completely,” he said. “They froze us out completely. It was a special negotiator position. Not for Polynesia. Not even for Macronesia. But for Micronesia.”^xxi In return for the actions, the CDM-SD/USA launched a counterattack on the new president. When it was reported that Carter was going to announce Paul Warnke, an old associate of George McGovern, as a potential candidate to head up the arms negotiation, the CDM saw an opening. Penn Kemble and Joshua Muravchik drafted and circulated an anonymous memo charging that Warnke sought to undermine the US’s military deterrence by calling for “unilateral abandonment by the US of every weapons system that is subject to negotiations at SALT.”^xxii
These events helped to push the network further rightward, and the intricate ties they continued to establish reflected this mentality. During the latter days of Gerard Ford’s presidency, CIA director George H.W. Bush launched “Team B,” a private team of intellectuals, military analysts, and public servants tasked with evaluating the CIA’s intelligence reports on the Soviet Union.^xxiii The group, whose members included the old Rockefeller ally Paul Nitze and Jackson’s staffer Paul Wolfowitz, launched a vicious attack on the agency; their consensus was that the CIA, much akin to the reconciliatory tone of much of the Washington establishment, was severely underestimating the Soviet threat. Even after their tenure ended, the team continued to beat their war drums by creating the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD).
The CPD, essentially a pro-war lobbying organization brimming with neoconservative interests, utilized the CDM as their primary base of support. Bayard Rustin and Lane Kirkland took positions in the committee, joined by Jeane Kirkpatrick, Albert Shanker, Rachelle Horowitz, Jay Lovestone, and the AIFLD’s J. Peter Grace. Major business interests also populated the organization – representatives from the RAND Corporation, Goldman Sachs, and Honeywell rubbed shoulders with the former peace activists. If Jackson had been the trigger for the SD/USA’s alignment with the military-industrial complex, the CPD was the ultimate culmination of the evolution: start-up funding was provided by David Packard of Hewlett Packard fame. Packard stood much to gaining from derailing the SALT mentality, as it limited production of antiballistic missiles (AMB); his company was the primary manufacturer of AMB guidance chips.^xxiv
Membership in the CPD not only indicated a partnership with military industrial interests, but their further integration into the upper levels of the political establishment. The AFL-CIO had long been the main linkage, but now a direct access to the policy-making network had been created:
Among the most prominent members and directors [of the CPD] are ex-President Ronald Reagan, David Packard, Nathan Glaser, Saul Bellow, and President George Bush. Moreover, the CPD has director interlocks with many very central upper class policy making and consensus building organizations including the Trilateral Commission, the Atlantic Council, the Brookings Institution board of trustees, the Business Roundtable, the Business Council, the Committee for Economic Development, and the Council on Foreign Relations. Many directors such as David Packard, C. Douglas Dillon, and John T. Connor hold positions on several of these policy groups.^xxv
Even though the SD/USA took an adversarial stance to the Carter presidency, the CPD provided them with a direct line to the more hard-lined members of his administration. CDM member Samuel Huntington had been brought in the National Security Council where he worked under Brzezinski, and he would meet with the CPD’s executive committee to keep them abreast of weapons development and the progress of arms negotiations.^xxvi Concurrent with this entry into the unofficial channels of governance, the small cabal’s commitment to alternative economics was finally beginning to wane. Rustin, Bayard, Kemble, and the ex-Marxist intellectual Sidney Hook^xxvii teamed up to published an essay in Commentary titled “Capitalism, Democracy and Socialism.” In it they wrote that  “The idea that there may an inescapable connection between capitalism and democracy has recently begun to seem plausible to a number of intellectuals who would once have regarded such a view as not only wrong but even as politically dangerous.” This “inescapable conclusion,” the former socialists conceded, “often begins more as a rejection of totalitarianism than as a positive endorsement of capitalism.”^xxviii

In 1978 Kirkland succeeded Meany as president of the AFL-CIO, and like his longtime mentor, continued to utilize the federation in mobilizing forces against communism abroad. He appointed Irving Brown as the official head of the International Affairs Department. Brown, however, had been stationed in the AFL-CIO’s Paris offices for several years, and was reluctant to leave France for Washington. A compromise was reached, and Kahn was placed in charge as his representative in the capital.^xxix It was a major move for Kahn, bestowing him with a larger degree of influence on the anti-Left counterinsurgency worldwide than he ever had before. He moved the union to work closely with Freedom House, where Rustin had set up camp, in protesting the US’s wavering stance on human rights at the Helsinki Accords. He also set up the Free Trade Union Institute (FTUI) to better streamline the AFL-CIO’s overseas operation. The FTUI would work directly under the International Affairs Department, which Kahn had come to envision “as the center of a web of policy and program committee[s] and institutes.”^xxx
It had been a long road for Kahn and his colleagues – they had travelled from the underground world of student activism to the highest levels of the Cold War, from the picket lines to a place populated by intelligence agencies and other shadowy entities. The transition for Rustin itself is remarkable. He had done his time as the general secretary of the War Resister’s League, and within a decade and a half was a member of the Committee on the Present Danger – a virtual front organization for defense contractors lining up at the money trough of a government fueled by Cold War paranoia. Socialism had given way to neoconservative, but it also marked something important – the influx of alternative ideas into foreign policies. The benefits of capital-directed humanitarianism had collapsed into dictatorship in Chile, but the AFL-CIO, working with the CIA, had spent the 1970s adjusting its approach to progressive-style anti-communism. With the Reagan administration just around the door, this quasi-Wilsonian methodology was rapidly becoming a contender for the centerpiece of American foreign policy, something to replace the disenfranchisement from both above and below in the wake of the Vietnam War.

i Maurice Isserman The Other America: The Life of Michael Harrington Scriber, 1997 pg. 297

ii Ibid, pg. 298

iii Ibid

iv Gerald Sorin, The Prophetic Minority: American Jewish Immigrant Radicals, 1880-1920 Indiana University Press, 1985,  pg. 155

v “The American challenge: A social-democratic program for the seventies” Social Democrats USA/Young People’s Socialist League, December 1972

vi Richard D. Kahlenberg Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles Over Schools, Unions, Race, and Democracy Columbia University Press, 2009 pg. 193

vii Ibid

viii Andrew Cockburn Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy Scribner, 2011 pg. 42

ix Sara Diamond Road to Dominion: Right Wing Movements and Political Power and the United States Guilford Press, 1995 pg. 385, note 113

x J. Richard Piper Ideologies and Institutions Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1997 pg. 205

xi Hugh Wilford The CIA, the British Left and the Cold War: Calling the Tune? Routledge, 2003, pg. 39

xii Horowitz “Tom Kahn and the Fight for Democracy”

xiii Andrew F. Smith Rescuing the World: The Life and Times of Leo Cherne State University of New York Press, 2002 pg. 42

xiv Eric Thomas Chester Covert Networks: Progressives, the International Rescue Committee, and the CIA M E Sharp, Inc, 1995 pg. 14-15

xv Peter M. Rutkoff, William B. Scott New School: A History of the New School for Social Research The Free Press, 1986 pgs. 129-130

xvi Ibid, pgs. 50-53

xvii Robert Scheer and Warren Hinckle,”The `Vietnam Lobby” Ramparts, July 1965

xviii Letter from Robert P. DeVecchi (executive director of the IRC), Dec 6, 1988, cited in Dorienne Truskoff Miner,”The Covert Use of Refugees,” Aug 25, 1987

xix Steven F. Hayward The Real Jimmy Carter: How Our Worst Ex-President Undermines American Foreign Policy, Coddles Dictators and Created the Party of Clinton and Kerry Regnery Publishers Inc., 2004 pgs. 60-61

xx Kahlenberg Tough Liberal pg. 200

xxi Tevi Troy Intellectuals and the American Presidency: Philosophers, Jesters, or Technicians? Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2003 pg. 175

xxii Jerry Wayne Sander Peddlers of Crisis: The Committee on the Present Danger and the Politics of Containment South Press End, 1999 pgs. 204-205

xxiii Steven F. Hayward The Age of Reagan: 964-1980: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order Prima Lifestyle, 2001 pg. 424

xxiv Peter Dale Scott The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America University of California Press, 2007, pg. 59

xxv John Boies and Nelson A. Pichardo “The Committee on the Present Danger: A Case for the Importance of Elite SocialMovement Organizations” Berkley Journal of Sociology March, 1990

xxvi Brian J. Auten Carter’s Conversion: The Hardening of American Defense Policy University of Missouri, 2008 pg. 165

xxvii Sidney Hook, years earlier, had assisted in the creation of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), a progressive anti-Communist organization based in West Berlin. Assisting Hook were various luminaries including the LID’s John Dewey, Irving Kristol, Fabian socialist Bertrand Russell, and State Department icon Arthur Schlesinger. In was in the mid-1960s that the CCF was revealed as being intimately tied to the corridors of intelligence agency; its primary funders were, in fact, the Ford Foundation and the CIA. Joshua Muravchik Exporting Democracy pg. 125; Chester Covert Network pg. 52

xxviii Sidney Hook, Bayard Rustin, Carl Gershman, Penn Kemble “Capitalism, Democracy and Socialism” Commentary April, 1978 pp. 29–71

xxix Rachel Horowitz “Tom Kahn and the Fight for Democracy”

xxx Ibid

Carol Burris on Test Scores Scam

How come officials could predict results on new test scores?

By Valerie Strauss, Published: August 12 at 10:45 amE-mail the writer

New scores from standardized tests   aligned with the Common Core State Standards were released earlier this month in New York, and, as expected, the number of students who did well plummeted. This decline was predicted by New York State officials. How did they know? Here to explain in an eye-opening piece is award-winning Principal Carol Burris of South Side High School in New York, who has for more than a year chronicled on the test-driven reform in her state (here, and here and here and here, for example). Burris was named New York’s 2013 High School Principal of the Year by the School Administrators Association of New York and the National Association of Secondary School Principals, and in 2010,  tapped as the 2010 New York State Outstanding Educator by the School Administrators Association of New York State. She is the co-author of the New York Principals letter of concern regarding the evaluation of teachers by student test scores. It has been signed by more than 1,535 New York principals and more than 6,500 teachers, parents, professors, administrators and citizens. You can read the letter by clicking here.
(Update: New details)
By Carol Burris
The mystery and complexity that surrounds the setting of test cut-scores evoke feelings of awe and puzzlement. It is a method as stupefying as those used by the Amazing Kreskin to make predictions and read minds.  We, the audience, are to suspend our disbelief and accept the meaning attached to the number as if it were reality.
Which brings us to New York State’s recent cut-score process to find proficiency.  New York State’s grades 3-8 cut scores caused the percentage of students deemed to be “proficient” on grade level to drop by 30 points.  Yet, before the tests were even taken, John King, commissioner of education in New York State, was predicting the drop, while blaming “all of the adults” for so many kids not being prepared for high school and college.
So, how did New York’s Amazing Kreskin know how the scores would turn out before the kids even finished the test?  How did he know that his committee of 95 educators would produce cut scores in line with his prediction? The answer is simple. The State Education Department knew the point drop because it had put in place a process that would create the predicted rates.
When teachers create tests, we think about what we believe students should know, and then we create questions designed to check if students can show they know it.   For the most part, schools agree that if they “show they know” about 65%, they know enough to pass.  It is not perfect, but we use other performance measures as well, and the rules of the game are known ahead of time.
In contrast, the New York State Education Department, with the help of Pearson, creates a test and then after it is taken and scored, decide what constitutes passing.   By showing those chosen to participate in the cut-score setting process other measures that they claim indicate college readiness (such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, SAT scores, Regents exams), they are able to get the outcome they want.
You can read the account of the cut score creation process from participant, Dr. Maria Baldassarre-Hopkins, of Nazareth College here: as well as blogger, Jersey Jazzman’s, hilarious interpretation here.
In this blog, I will present my “big picture” view of the process, because I think it is important for parents and taxpayers to understand how “the magic” works and why you should not believe that the scores are true indicators of proficient performance.
Let’s begin with a quick primer on what correlations between tests mean.
A correlation is a relationship. For example, there is a correlation between height and weight — the taller you are, the greater the likelihood you weigh more. That being said, we cannot say that one causes the other, or that if we change one, the other changes as well. I could blissfully eat my way to morbid obesity, but I would not grow an inch.
The State Education Department defined proficiency by making correlations with scores on tests they called “college ready indicators,” created probability values, and then walked those values backwards through each test, all the way to third grade.  By doing so, the cut scores can become what they want them to be.

So, what tests did they use to determine college readiness? Along with NAEP scores, they used the SAT and the PSAT.
What do we know about the SAT?
1) The SAT is mainly a test of g (general intelligence). In 2004, Researchers Meredith Frey and Douglas Detterman published a paper entitled “Scholastic Assessment or g? The Relationship Between the Scholastic Assessment Test and General Cognitive Ability.” That paper can be found here. [The SAT used to be an acronym for the Scholastic Assessment TEST but it no longer is; the admissions test is now simply the SAT.] Frey and Detterman found the relationship between the SAT and two tests used for the measurement of general intelligence to be so strong (in once case .82) that they were able to create equations to convert SAT scores to IQ scores. That is why even intensive coaching doesn’t make a huge difference in SAT scores.
2) Now here is the good news.  According to the College Board’s own research, the SAT is not such a great predictor of college grades. The correlation between the SAT and college grades is about .48, which means that its predictive power (r squared) is only 23 percent. High school grades are a better predictor of how students will do in college courses (nearly 30 percent).  In addition, other research has found that high school GPA is three to five times more important in predicting college graduation than an SAT or ACT score. Even with all of that known, the State Education Department aligned students 3-8 scores with later performance on the SAT to create cut scores that give the illusion of being on the road to college readiness.
They justified their assumptions with a commissioned report  to determine “college readiness” (Thank you to Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters for finding it.)  The College Board, led by David Coleman, a primary author of the English language Common Core State Standards, did the research for the report.
Blow is the chart from their report that guided them.

The State Education Department “chose” the values 560 for reading, 530 for writing and 540 for math and called them “college-ready indicators.”  And as the cut-score committee went through questions, members said, according to Dr. Baldassarre-Hopkins , “If you put your bookmark on page X for level 3, it would be aligned with these data,” thus nudging the cut score to where they wanted it to be.
Here is where it gets really interesting.  In 2011, the College Board created a College Readiness index.   It was a combined index of 1550, which only 43 percent of all SAT test takers achieved. You can find it here. Now add up New York’s chosen index.  It is 1630, significantly higher than the 2011 College Board’s index associated with a B- in college.
The above illustrates how one can manipulate the percentage of college readiness by hopping between the columns and changing the definition of “college ready” to suit oneself. If the State Education Department had increased or decreased the grade and/or the probability, the college readiness indicator would move up or down.  In the end, they chose values that are extraordinarily high, producing an index that exceeds the College Board’s index for achieving a B- average.
So how many students in New York achieve the chosen “college-ready” scores?  According to the report, only 25 percent of New York State students met the chosen score in reading and only 36 percent in math.   The average of those two numbers is 31 percent -- exactly the same percentage of students that were found to be proficient on the 3-8 exams.
It does not matter that SATs are nearly immovable. It does not matter that there is absolutely no proof that if you increase a third grader’s scores that his SATs, nearly a decade later, will go up. It does not matter that those pesky, unscientific grades that teachers give are better predictors of college success.  It does not matter that the hard work that a student puts into her GPA is a far better predictor of college graduation than her test scores.  We are to believe that if we buy all of those Common Core products and data systems and our third-graders sit through days of difficult SAT, NAEP and PSAT aligned tests, their scores will soar and they will do better in college.
And that is how the Amazing Kreskin works the room. By putting a created college readiness standard into participants’ minds, the predicted cut scores emerge.
But that is where the entertainment ends. The scores on these tests are used by schools to make decisions about kids—to retain students, as screening devices for middle school and high school entrance, for entry into gifted or accelerated programs, and to decide which kids need remediation. They are part of a great sort and select machine within school systems.  We now know that the tests further increased the achievement gap, which will result in the shutting out of more students of color, of poverty and English Language Learners from desired schools and programs and the enrichment opportunities they need.
And so to all of the wannabe Kreskins in other Common Core States, here is my plea — align your proficiency cut scores with SATs that predict A+ in college courses.  Your proficiency rates will drop to less than 1 percent and then all of the gaps will close.  It will be the greatest disappearing act of all time, and perhaps then we can end the show and get back to the business of teaching kids.

Lee Sustar, Socialist Worker: Building fighting teachers unions

http://socialistworker.org/2013/08/08/building-fighting-teachers-unions

 

ANALYSIS: LEE SUSTAR

 

Building fighting teachers unions

 

As rank-and-file teachers around the U.S. seek to revitalize their unions, Lee Sustar looks at the high stakes in the struggles ahead.

 

August 8, 2013

 

THE SCHOOL year is set to begin with teachers looking to the example of last year's successful Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) strike as their union locals face their toughest struggles in 50 years.

 

It's difficult to overstate the challenges facing public school teachers--and the children, parents and communities they serve--as the next wave of corporate-driven "education reform" takes shape.

 

Privatization is rampant, with chunks of entire school systems like New Orleans and Detroit being turned over to charter operators--or with plans to turn them over. Half of the schools in Kansas City, Mo., have already been closed. In Los Angeles, charter schools have siphoned some 10 percent of student enrollment away from traditional public schools. In Philadelphia, budget cuts are being used to threaten the layoff of thousands of teachers unless their union agrees to staggering contract concessions [1].

 

What's more, new legislation in states across the U.S. mandate harsh evaluation schemes, attacks on teacher tenure and the proliferation of charters, thanks to the Obama administration's federal Race to the Top grant program that requires such changes.

 

The CTU strike was far and away the biggest and most successful example of teacher resistance to this onslaught. At a time when the CTU's national affiliate, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), is in full retreat, the Chicago teachers showed that an active, determined rank-and-file, in close alliance with parents and community allies, could take on the politically powerful Mayor Rahm Emanuel--and win.

 

The contract did include some concessions--including reduced compensation for laid-off teachers and an intrusive "wellness" health care program in exchange for a freeze in employee-paid health insurance costs. But Emanuel completely failed to achieve his main goals [2] of establishing higher merit pay, harsher teacher evaluation schemes and fast-track firings of teachers rated as weak. The CTU also won contract language to help strengthen the union at school sites.

 

The struggle in Chicago continues, of course [3]. Some 49 elementary schools are set to close while budget cuts are costing teacher jobs and setting the stage for a massive increase in class sizes. But an energized CTU continues to fight back alongside its allies--a direct result of a strike that hinged on a continuous mass mobilization and democratic decision-making.

 

The CTU contract could--and should--have become a model for other locals of the AFT and the much larger National Education Association (NEA). In fact, teacher union locals such as the Berkeley Federation of Teachers have hosted CTU speakers to help gear up for contract campaigns.

 

But AFT President Randi Weingarten, by contrast, has continued her strategy [4] of surrendering key elements of teacher unionism like tenure and opposition to merit pay in order to preserve a one-sided "partnership" with school districts and politicians. Weingarten played a direct role in finalizing such a deal in Cleveland [5], which was also tied to state legislation that will funnel tax money to charter schools.

 

Weingarten was personally involved in the negotiation of the Newark Teachers Union (NTU) contract that was negotiated in the wake of the CTU strike. The AFT president greeted the approval of the deal [6] in a television appearance with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, the Republican who built a national profile with his attacks on his state's teachers’ unions.

 

The Newark contract, underwritten with $100 million from Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, ties pay raises to performance and offers as much as $12,000 in merit pay to "high performing" teachers in hard-to-staff schools and subject areas. It also clears the way for the dismissal of low-performing teachers based on the state's new law on teacher evaluations [7]. The New York Times editorial board was quick to contrast Newark teachers with their Chicago counterparts [8], having earlier denounced the strike as "Chicago teachers' folly." [9]

 

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AFTER EXPERIENCING their new contract, however, Newark teachers opted for the Chicago model instead. Reformers in the NEW caucus nearly toppled the incumbent president of the NTU, and won a majority of the union's executive board [10].

 

The reformers' success in Newark came just a few weeks after their counterparts in New York had an unexpectedly strong showing [11] in elections in the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), the largest and dominant local of the AFT. The Movement of Rank and File Educators (MORE) managed to win 40 percent of the votes of high school teachers, albeit in a record low turnout. Inspired by the Chicago experience, MORE was created by a merger of several other currents in a bid to boost activism and fight for democracy in a bureaucratic local that's adrift after going years without a contract.

 

The impact of CORE can be seen in other cities, too. Teacher union militants got another recent boost in Washington, D.C., where reformer-turned-bureaucrat Nathan Saunders was was ousted as president of the Washington Teachers Union (WTU) [12].

 

A similar dynamic is unfolding in United Teachers Los Angeles, where a two-term reform leadership failed to halt the decline in wages and compensation, opening the way for the current union president, Warren Fletcher, to win office on a platform of being a more professional and effective negotiator. But Fletcher's inability or unwillingness to stand up to a series of attacks on the union has spurred a revived UTLA reform network to initiate successful membership referendum on preparing for a strike [13]. A reform challenge to Fletcher is likely in next year's union elections.

 

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

 

CERTAINLY, OUSTING ineffective or conservative leaders is an important goal of militants among teachers, as it is for other union activists. And as the Chicago experience shows, a fighting union leadership can make a critical difference. But for most teachers union locals, those are long-term goals. So what do they do now?

 

That's where CORE's history is key. While the caucus only came into existence a couple of years before taking office, its roots go back decades to previous CTU reform movements [14]. More recently, many CORE members were part of the reform administration of Deborah Lynch from 2001-2004, which was ousted after negotiating a weak contract. Others were active in the fight against the militarization of schools as well as school closures. Many first met in organizing around issues of violence that claimed their students.

 

As CTU President Karen Lewis often points out [15], CORE wasn't formed with the idea of taking over the union, but simply making it more effective. The first step was understanding the enemy: hence a study group around Naomi Klein's book, The Shock Doctrine [16]. CORE's first big public meeting in January 2009 drew 500 people in the midst of a classic Chicago blizzard, compelling the then-union president to show up to speak.

 

Long before it took office--before that was even conceivable to most of its activists--CORE succeeded in shifting the debate in the union on a critical issue. That meant putting the issue of racism at the forefront of the fight against school closures and charter schools.

 

The success of that meeting--and the removal of some schools from the closure list--wasn't sufficient to catapult CORE into office 17 months later, however. It was the split in the union's old guard [17] that opened the way for an untested group of militants to take over the second-biggest union in the AFT. It took another two years of intensive work to mobilize the membership for a strike--a task made easier by Rahm Emanuel's constant insults and provocations, such as cancelling a contractual 4 percent raise.

 

Certainly there's much to be learned by trade unionists everywhere in studying CORE's activist orientation and organizational savvy. But what makes CORE different is the politics behind the operation. While it is far from a politically homogenous group--CORE unites everyone from Democrats to socialists--the role of the left has been crucial. Socialists, radicals and militants from various organizations and political currents work together in CORE to emphasize union democracy, rank-and-file activism and militant action. This comes not from a nostalgia from labor's better days, but from a sober recognition of the prospects for unions in an era of a depressed economy, a rollback of the public sector and rampant social inequality.

 

Just as important, CORE militants saw from the beginning that the teachers' struggle had to be the same as that of students and parents. Thus, there was no difference between the CTU's message to its members during the strike and to the wider community: Chicago teachers were defending public education, and got overwhelming support as a result.

 

CORE's argument can be summed up as this: Teachers unions will have to struggle harder than they have for decades simply to hold on to what they have--and their fight must be part of a wider working-class movement to defend public services and a decent standard of living. If the revival of teacher reform groups is any indication, it's a message that teachers are ready to hear.

 

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Published by the International Socialist Organization.

Material on this Web site is licensed by SocialistWorker.org, under a Creative Commons (by-nc-nd 3.0) [18] license, except for articles that are republished with permission. Readers are welcome to share and use material belonging to this site for non-commercial purposes, as long as they are attributed to the author and SocialistWorker.org.

 

[1] http://articles.philly.com/2013-06-13/news/39927730_1_school-layoffs-union-members-jerry-jordan

[2] http://socialistworker.org/2012/09/26/what-the-ctu-accomplished

[3] http://socialistworker.org/2012/07/11/rahms-school-budget-assault

[4] http://socialistworker.org/2012/07/25/challenges-facing-the-aft%20

[5] http://socialistworker.org/2013/05/15/holding-the-line-for-teachers

[6] http://www.nj.com/essex/index.ssf/2012/11/newark_school_merit_pay_contra.html

[7] http://www.nj.com/essex/index.ssf/2012/11/newark_school_merit_pay_contra.html

[8] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/16/opinion/school-reform-in-newark-with-a-new-teachers-contract.html?_r=0&pagewanted=print

[9] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/12/opinion/chicago-teachers-folly.html?_r=1&smid=fb-share

[10] http://www.thenation.com/blog/175021/newark-union-head-barely-wins-re-election-after-zuckerberg-donation-funded-reform-plan#

[11] http://morecaucusnyc.org/2013/04/27/2013-uft-election-results-and-analysis/

[12] http://thewashingtonteacher.blogspot.com/2013/07/reformers-win-dc-teachers-union-election.html

[13] http://socialistworker.org/2013/04/08/a-vote-on-utlas-direction

[14] http://socialistworker.org/2013/05/07/will-the-ctu-keep-moving-forward

[15] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmaokSaAYvM

[16] http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine

[17] http://socialistworker.org/2010/06/08/challenges-facing-the-ctu

[18] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0

Lois Weiner: Will liberals stand up to “corporate school reform”?

Will liberals stand up to “corporate school reform”?

For too long, they've assumed that schools can be "fixed" without tackling social and economic inequality 

By Lois Weiner

Topics: Jacobin, Education, Liberals, neo-liberals, Education Reform, corporate school reform, Life News, News, Politics News

(Credit: Lissandra Melo/Shutterstock)

 

This article originally appeared on Jacobin.

An eloquent call to “reclaim the conversation” challenges leading liberal educators to repudiate their involvement in what’s being called “corporate school reform.” We finally see liberal activists opposing the bipartisan education project that has subjected school and teachers to “free market” policies. Liberals are starting to contest privatization, testing, and attacks on teacher unions, rather than accepting neoliberal assumptions and policies taken wholesale from right-wing think tanks and functions.
Since last fall’s Chicago teachers strike, we’ve seen an acceleration of critique in traditionally liberal media about school reform — from Teach for America to charter schools and Michelle Rhee. There’s even been a whiff of real reporting in the New York Times on the common core curriculum. Why did liberals urge teachers unions to back down on contractual issues that protect kids and miss what the unions should have been doing, like mobilizing their members?
And why do liberals who expose what’s wrong with standardized testing, as John Merrow has, continue to propagandize for charter schools, ignoring compelling research about the educational devastation in New Orleans because of “charterization”?

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To be fair, liberals have not been alone in their confusion about policies cloaked in the rhetoric used by the civil rights movement about equalizing educational opportunity. The pace of change in education has been breathtaking, schools and teachers battered by the speed and force of mandates. The most profound changes in education were made more enticing with the carrot of increased funding. Cash-strapped school districts and states couldn’t turn down extra money they received as a quid pro quo for adopting the stranglehold of testing and privatization required by “No Child Left Behind” and, more recently, “Race to the Top.”  Still, for way too long, liberals assumed that schools could be “fixed” without tackling social and economic inequality
Liberals couldn’t see this big picture, partly because as Bhaskar Sunkara writes, “American liberalism is ineffective and analytically inadequate.” But why?  One reason is that they want to be non-ideological and practical, and without principles to guide them, they are pulled in the political direction exerting the most influence. David Steiner, currently Hunter College Dean and a former Commissioner of Education in New York State and Director of Arts at the country’s largest teachers union, the National Education Association, illustrates how liberals persuade themselves to support neoliberal policies. It’s essential, he argues, “to be non-aligned [ideologically]” and look at “policy recommendations, policy as executed based on its merits and not on whether it’s the darling child of the left or the right…”
When power relations are skewed, however, the “merits” are generally found in the right-hand column if one’s principles don’t configure the analysis. Steiner argues that teacher education should take up important questions like how often to make eye-contact with students and omit issues that are irrelevant for teaching, like schooling’s role in a democracy. Teaching about social justice is objectionable to Steiner because it challenges the status quo.
Confusion about whether they even have an ideology has allowed U.S. liberals to evade confronting the choice between “profits and people,” the contradiction embedded in capitalism at the heart of “free market” reforms.  Liberals accepted making public schools  compete with charters. They permitted outsourcing test creation and grading, teachers’ evaluation ,  professional development, as well as hiring to transnational corporations that  are virtually unregulated.  Many liberals persuaded themselves that corporations could make profits in the previously non-profit sector of education without hurting kids. But when is there ever enough money left over in school for profit?  When do you not need the money for children?
Take liberal confusion over charter schools. Advocating charter schools to boost academic outcomes for poor, minority kids presumes that we can provide equal educational opportunity and simultaneously maintain a status quo of segregated housing and schooling. If you are unwilling to wage the unpopular fight for residential and school integration and equalized (and adequate) school funding, charter schools can seem a “good enough” compromise. The controversy over charter schools is symptomatic of liberalism’s unwillingness to face racism’s embeddedness in almost every aspect of education. The claim of leaving “no child behind” had a powerful resonance in part because educational inequality persisted in the twenty-first century. To deny that reality, as do many liberals who have awakened to the dangers of “corporate school reform” (led by feisty born-again liberal Diane Ravitch), is to assume that schooling of white, middle-class parents and children was not previously that much different from what poor and working class children of color experienced. It was — and is.
The impact of the education counter-revolution, which has all but destroyed the gains in education made by progressive social movements in the Sixties and Seventies, has been most harmful to the children reforms were purportedly designed to help: poor children of color and children with special needs. Cornell West is on-target when he names the “shameful silence” of progressives on Obama and school reform, though he gives the Black Caucus too much of a pass when he excuses their “protective disposition” for a black president viciously attacked by the Right.
When white liberals advocate for schools to which they would never send their own children, as Ian Frazier does in his puff piece on a Harlem charter school (skewered so well by blogger “EduShyster”), what’s causing their inconsistency? Racism yes, and also more than a whisper of elitism, which can’t be disentangled from social class.
Many liberals assume they will be unable to win others to their way of thinking. In contrast to the Right, liberals lack confidence in the power of their ideas so they rely on electing politicians, Democrats and sometimes Republicans, who will carry out their ideals, perhaps in stealth. Because of their ideological confusion, liberals can’t imagine alternative social and political arrangements, so when their political friends betray them, they tend to either deny the reality or excuse it as inevitable and look for the new shining hope.
In regard to school reform, most liberals have accepted the “left-wing of the possible” (Michael Harrington’s seductive phrase). But this strategy led them to err about what may be the major moral and political issue of the day. Harrington refused to repudiate the War in Vietnam with enough vigor when he should have.  Liberals supported reforms that have almost destroyed public education. Like Harrington, they failed see options other than those created by the powerful.  In contrast, Daniel Singer, who wrote for the Nation, began his analysis with reference to what is needed. In “Whose Millennium: Theirs or ours?” he argues for policies not on the horizon, noting that freedoms are unattainable “only if present political and social arrangements are considered normative and immutable.”
We have so much evidence that school reforms being carried out by Democrats and Republicans aim to benefit the rich and powerful, that we can no longer excuse liberals who don’t “get’ what’s happening. School closings devastate communities and are often driven by developers who want to gentrify neighborhoods (the critical fact lost in a confused story in the Atlantic website about the real estate “mess” created by not having enough developers who will take over the closed schools). While standardized testing scandals are being exposed, Atlanta schools teachers and administrators, mostly black, are being indicted and jailed, Michelle Rhee, also implicated in a test scandal, is criticized mainly because she has more Republicans than Democrats donating to her front group “Students First.”
At this point, the notion that liberals who don’t “get” the big picture have good intentions is itself a form of denial. The best way to educate liberals is to stand up for principles of social justice and equality, as the recently re-elected reformers who lead the Chicago Teachers Union are doing. We need to fight smart and hard for what we believe in and let the liberals follow — or not.
Read more at Jacobinmag.com

 http://www.salon.com/2013/08/03/liberals_reclaim_the_conversation_on_corporate_school_reform_partner/

Counterpunch:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/08/05/inserting-democracy-in-the-iso/

August 05, 2013 

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Change From Within?

Inserting Democracy in the ISO

by JON HOCHSCHARTNER

Listening to the rhetoric at Socialism 2013, the summer conference run by the International Socialist Organization (ISO), a group claiming to have the largest membership on the American revolutionary left, one would get the impression that the ISO was moving in a less sectarian and more internally democratic direction. Unfortunately, this does not seem to be the case. This is frustrating for those of us who believe a more accountable organization with significantly fewer ideological litmus tests could be larger and more effective without moving rightward.
An example of this apparent newfound openness to debate and willingness to work with others can be found in remarks made at the conference by leading ISO member Ahmed Shawki (available at WeAreMany.org).
“We have to become a place which is habitable to people moving in a radical direction,” Shawki said. “And also the place that becomes a home to people who will not share every dotted eye and crossed ‘t’ on perspective.”
Elevating the need for “vigorous debate,” Shawki said that in order to “move beyond the margins of the left” socialists must stop insisting on “a common line on every question.” He even suggested the ISO would be interested in merging with other organizations, were there any of comparable size.
And yet this seeming glasnost only goes so far. Pham Binh, a former member who was with the organization for the better part of a decade, recently wrote a detailed critique of the ISO’s structure and practice. He submitted the piece to SocialistWorker.org and it was rejected. A link to the piece that was posted on the Socialist Worker’s Facebook page was promptly deleted. As far as I am aware, the organization’s leadership has not acknowledged the critique whatsoever.
In his piece, which is titled “Thinking of Joining the ISO?” and is available at TheNorthStar.info, Binh explains how the ISO uses a closed-slate election system.
“The previous year’s Steering Committee submits the coming year’s Steering Committee to the convention as a single bloc for an up-or-down vote by a show of hands rather than a secret ballot,” Binh writes.
A single Steering Committee member cannot be challenged without offering a whole new slate of a dozen names. As a result, Binh writes, “as far as anyone knows, the ISO has never had a competitive election for its Steering Committee since it was founded in 1977.”
Rank-and-file members are kept in the dark about everything from the organization’s size to its assets, so much so that most members, according to Binh, are unaware the ISO violated its support for the Palestinian boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign by purchasing and selling thousands of dollars worth of Caterpillar stock.
Additionally, the ISO insists on an ideological uniformity that stifles the goal of increased membership, which would require a big-tent organization.
“As you begin going to study groups,” Binh writes, “you discover the ISO as an organization has a whole range of positions on theoretical, historical, and foreign policy questions ranging from topics like privilege and the one-state solution in Palestine to Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution that you are expected (or even duty-bound) to defend even if you personally disagree with them.”
Search the archives of SocialistWorker.org, an ISO publication, and you will find the socialist intellectual Noam Chomsky quoted approvingly quite frequently. Yet the range of debate within the ISO is so limited that Chomsky, who has called the Bolshevik Revolution a “coup,” would presumably be drummed out of the group. At the very least he would likely not be allowed to express his views on the matter in ISO publications. And when the most widely-respected, living, anti-capitalist intellectual might not be able to make a home in your organization, that’s a decent indication you’re too sectarian.
That socialists must share an exact interpretation of an historical event that happened nearly a century ago in order to coordinate their class struggle efforts of course makes no sense, as Binh points out. Obviously capitalist parties don’t demand that prospective members accept a specific interpretation of, say, World War I, in order to join the organization. That would be ridiculous.
The ISO’s constant turnover and membership plateau, two things the group itself admits to be problems, should come as no surprise given the organization’s narrow-mindedness and anti-democratic structure. Who wants to belong to what, in many ways, I’m sorry to say, amounts to a cult-like sect, however well-intentioned it may be?
Let me be clear about my relationship to the ISO so I’m not accused of having a personal axe to grind. I attended some meetings of the organization’s Burlington branch in my freshman year of college. I was impressed by the members’ political knowledge and commitment, but I did not join the group because I was uncomfortable identifying as a Trotskyist, as I remain today. I’ve been a semi-regular reader of SocialistWorker.org for many years, and have been published on the site. I have recommended the site to members of my community, and took out a subscription to the print edition for my hometown library. ISO writers have greatly sharpened my thinking, dull as it still might be, and I have great respect for all the rank-and-file members with whom I’ve come in contact. So when I say this isn’t personal, I mean it.
Readers might ask, why not just start a new organization? To which the answer is, perhaps we should! But the ISO—with its dedicated membership, excellent writing staff, and well-respected publishing arm in Haymarket Books—is influential on today’s far left. By criticizing the organization constructively we may help it reform itself. At worst, we may help ensure that a future group doesn’t make the same mistakes.
Jon Hochschartner is a freelance writer from upstate New York.

“Corporate Reform” or Failed, Desperate Corporate Management?

By the brilliant Bruce Baker.

“Corporate Reform” or Failed, Desperate Corporate Management?

Posted on July 26, 2013

http://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2013/07/26/corporate-reform-or-failed-desperate-corporate-management/

I suspect there are a lot of readers of my blog and twitter followers who frequently use the phrase “corporate reform” to characterize the current heavily privately financed movement to push specific “reforms” to public education systems.  My readers may not have noticed, but I tend not to use this phrase. I have a few reasons for my avoidance of this term.  First, it’s my impression that the term necessarily implies corporate to mean “evil.” That a corporate mindset – meaning private sector for profit business mindset can do no good. I’m cynical, but not that cynical.  I actually do think there are good, for profit corporations out there. Perhaps they are dwindling in their numbers and power base, but I still think they exist.
But here are my main reasons why I don’t roll with the whole “corporate reform” lingo. That the education reforms being pushed – that are cast as “corporate reforms” – a) really aren’t that common in private sector for profit business and b) they suck – even in (perhaps especially in) private for profit business. The supposed “corporate reforms” being advocated for the takeover of public education are reasonably well understood among analysts of private for profit business to be failed models. Models of desperation forcibly implemented by CEOs of businesses in decline – CEOs who often are on the verge of their own ouster due to their persistent failures of leadership. Thus, their solution – their secret sauce – blame the employees – force groups of employees to beat the hell out of each other – distracting from the failures of leadership. Sound familiar? Well, here are two vivid cases that should sound familiar.
The Portfolio Model at Sears
One popular component of what is referred to as the corporate reform movement in public education is the replacement of traditional public districts with a portfolio of public and private providers of schooling options who will compete to attract students and be accountable for posting good test scores. Thus, all boats will rise as a function of competitive pressures – and no child will be left without great schooling alternatives. A wonderful replacement for our current failing urban schools, right? Well, as I’ve explained previously, the system we’ve put in place to implement and evaluate schools under such models doesn’t actually work this way. Large segments of students go un-served entirely, as in New Orleans.  Schools aggressively cream skim each other’s desired students in order to post good numbers, and shed masses of students that don’t aid them in the rat-race.  The model has evolved over time from portfolio to parasitic, or perhaps even cannibalistic.
But hey, this stuff works great in the private sector, so why shouldn’t it work well for schools?
Not so fast. One of the most apt comparisons might be the recent follies of Sears.  The title of this article says it all:
At Sears, Eddie Lampert’s Warring Divisions Model Adds to the Troubles
Ya’ see, Eddie Lampert figured, like “ed reformers” that if we could simply capitalize on the inherent greed and selfishness of individuals (“rational” behavior as described in econ literature) in the corporate workforce, we can get them to work harder and harder to out-compete each other to achieve greater financial reward, and the obvious result will be greater profitability for the company as a whole? Right. The way to do this would be to break Sears into several parts, and make those parts compete with each other to post good measurable outcomes. As described in the article:
Although Lampert is notoriously media-averse, he agreed to answer questions about Sears’s organizational model via e-mail. “Decentralized systems and structures work better than centralized ones because they produce better information over time,” Lampert writes. “The downside is that, to some, it appears messier than centralized systems.” Lampert adds that the structure enables him to evaluate the individual parts of Sears, so he can collect “significantly better information and drive decision-making and accountability at a more appropriate level.”
Lampert created the model because he wanted deeper data, which he could use to analyze the company’s assets. It’s why he hired Paul DePodesta, the Harvard-educated statistician immortalized by Michael Lewis in his book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, to join Sears’s board. He wanted to use nontraditional metrics to gain an edge, like DePodesta did for the Oakland Athletics in Moneyball and is trying to repeat in his current job with the New York Mets. Only so far, Lampert’s experiment resembles a different book: The Hunger Games.
Personally, I enjoy that this is another example of using Moneyball as an excuse to implement a painfully ignorant adaptation of the concept.  How many times have we heard test-based teacher evaluation advocates similarly mindlessly invoke the moneyball comparison?  Far more predictably, as described above, the result was Hunger Games (which is far more applicable than moneyball to current ed reform strategies in so many ways).
As the article further explains, quite predictably:
As some employees had feared, individual business units started to focus solely on their own profitability and stopped caring about the welfare of the company as a whole. According to several former executives, the apparel division cut back on labor to save money, knowing that floor salesmen in other departments would inevitably pick up the slack. Turf wars sprang up over store displays. No one was willing to make sacrifices in pricing to boost store traffic.
Further:
Former Sears executives say their biggest objection to Lampert’s model is that it discourages cooperation. “Organizations need a holistic strategy,” says Erik Rosenstrauch, former head of Sears’s DieHard unit, who is now CEO of Fuel Partnerships, a retail marketing agency. As the business unit leaders pursued individual profits, rivalries broke out. Former executives say they began to bring laptops with screen protectors to meetings so their colleagues couldn’t see what they were doing.
Appliance maker Kenmore is a widely recognized brand sold exclusively at Sears. Under SOAR, the appliances unit had to pay fees to the Kenmore unit. Because the appliances unit could make more money selling devices manufactured by outside brands, such as LG Electronics, it began giving Kenmore’s rivals more prominent placement in stores. A similar problem arose when Craftsman, Sears’s beloved tool brand, considered selling a tool with a battery made by DieHard, also owned by Sears. Craftsman didn’t want to pay extra royalties to DieHard, so the idea was quashed.
And here are some more detailed examples:
The bloodiest battles took place in the marketing meetings, where different units sent their CMOs to fight for space in the weekly circular. These sessions would often degenerate into screaming matches. Marketing chiefs would argue to the point of exhaustion. The result, former executives say, was a “Frankenstein” circular with incoherent product combinations (think screwdrivers being advertised next to lingerie).
Eventually Lampert’s advisory committee instituted a bidding system, forcing the units to pay for space in the circular. This eliminated some of the infighting but created a new problem: The wealthier business units, such as appliances, could purchase more space. Two former business unit heads recall how, for the 2011 Mother’s Day circular, the sporting-goods unit purchased space on the cover for a product called a Doodle Bug minibike, popular with young boys.
The details in this article are wonderfully applicable to portfolio management of urban schooling.  Please read the rest of it, and ponder it in relation to some of my other posts, like this, or this.
So, with respect to portfolio, I mean parasitic… or perhaps cannibalistic management strategies, I’ll go all reformy for a moment and adopt the phrase “sector agnosticism.” This strategy, often cast as a major element of “corporate reform,” is a failed strategy of the corporate sector and equally toxic in public education.  Indeed, the foolishness behind this approach knows no sector boundaries.
Note: interestingly, the article points out that one possible benefit of Lampert’s strategy is that if Sears were to fail so miserably that they eventually had to start selling off their parts, the decentralization of the company and establishment of independent boards for each unit facilitates that process.
IBM’s “Bad Employee” Problem and the Solution that Wasn’t
We all now know that the reason for our failing public education system is “bad teachers.” Teachers with fat pensions, big salaries and who are totally unaccountable for anything, really – especially for helping their students actually get those good test scores that pave the pathway to their future. And that the path to fixing our public education woes is to fire our way to Finland, and to use, really any variant, good bad or indifferent, of student test score growth to sort out the good teachers from bad and to ease the process of getting rid of the bad and incentivizing the good. Obviously, this is how any good private sector business works and so too, it should in schools. After all, we all know that teaching is the only profession where individuals aren’t paid based on their performance, or more specifically, based on a very noisy (and statistically biased) regression estimate of math and reading questions answered by 8 to 13 year old children who happen to spend a few hours of weekdays for 10 months with them. Right?
Let’s go back 20+ years now, to what b-school types actually seem to refer to as a “John Akers moment.” And just what is a “John Akers moment” you ask? Well, John Akers was CEO of a declining IBM in the early 1990s.  The simple response by Akers was to blame the employees, by constructing a new, toxic, employee evaluation scheme. Here’s how that eval  scheme was described at the time:
To identify the best and worst employees, every manager at IBM, beginning this year, will use a seven-page annual evaluation to rate employees on a scale of 1 to 4, with 10 percent receiving the top and bottom grades, and the rest getting 2s and 3s.
The managers will also rank employees by their relative contributions to the business. People who get high rankings are eligible for bonuses, while workers with the lowest grades will be given three months to improve performance or lose their jobs.
IBM says it is not abandoning its no-layoff policy. Rather, in trying to raise performance standards, it is retaining only the best people. “In the competitive world we`re in, we can`t drag along folks who aren`t“ making the grade, said Walton E. Burdick, senior vice president of personnel.
What do IBM employees think? “There are feelings that (IBM chief executive John) Akers has been screwing up, and now he`s turning around and trying to blame others,“ said a 10-year IBM employee who asked not to be named.
The employee`s story shows what a slippery slope IBM may be on. She said she received the second-highest rating — a 2, on what had been a 1-to-5 scale — for most of her career. A few years ago, she got a new boss and her grade slipped to a 3. She thinks the downgrading has more to do with her request for a job transfer than any change in her performance. Now, she says, she is in danger of a 4.
http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1992-02-03/business/9201060700_1_ibm-employees-ibm-chief-executive-ratings
Hmmm… does that sound familiar. Needless to say, Akers plan did not save IBM. Nor did it save Akers, who was ousted soon after.
But some other brilliant leaders in the tech industry, most notably Microsoft, did latch on to the IBM strategy… as a step toward their own long run stagnation. Heck, why would Microsoft ever consider veering from its path of simply copying and implementing even less efficiently, what others have already done? It’s gotten them this far.
This article from July 11, 2013 characterizes current conditions at Microsoft as analogous to IBM in 1992.
Most notably, this article explains that one of Microsoft’s greatest barriers to succeeding in their most recent (desperate) attempts to restructure, is the company’s toxic employee evaluation scheme, as described previously in Vanity Fair:
Major restructuring at any company is almost always traumatic, but Microsoft’s ultra-competitive corporate culture will amplify the impact.
Last year a Vanity Fair magazine story described Microsoft’s debilitating employee ranking system, in which team leaders are forced to hand out reviews based on a quota system. So at least one member of each group will get a bad review, no matter how well they perform.
That system has fostered a lack of cooperation and vicious office politics, a malady that is said to run through the entire company at all levels.
http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article41350.html
Put simply, this idea that one can raise the overall quality of the company – even improve its productivity and profitability – by rating, degrading, and dismissing “bad techies” – is simply unfounded.
Like the portfolio mismanagement above, the toxicity of this idea knows no sector boundaries. It’s as bad in big, private sector business as it is for schools.
So you see, “Corporate Reform” as currently being pitched for schools is, in fact, FAILED corporate management strategy – often hastily adopted in a moment of leadership desperation – and rarely if ever achieving the desired turn around