WikiLeaks and Gulen charter schools

Today, the Philadelphia Inquirer took the lead on exposing the Gulen movement’s involvement in US charter schools by publishing a second article by Martha Woodall and Claudio Gatti, “WikiLeaks files detail U.S. unease over Turks and charter schools.”

Classified documents recently released by WikiLeaks recount U.S. officials' growing concern over large numbers of Turkish men seeking visas to work at American charter schools founded by followers of Fethullah Gulen, a powerful Turkish Muslim political figure who lives in the Poconos.

"Gulen supporters account for an increasing proportion of [the] . . . nonimmigrant visa applicant pool," a consular official in Istanbul, Turkey, wrote in 2006, according to one of the documents posted by WikiLeaks two weeks ago.

"Consular officials have noticed that most of these applicants share a common characteristic: They are generally evasive about their purpose of travel to the United States."...

An analysis of H1-B visas conducted for The Inquirer showed that the number granted for Gulen charter schools has grown substantially since that 2006 report. More than 2,500 have been issued since 2007...

As The Inquirer has reported, several federal agencies - including the FBI and the U.S. Departments of Labor and Education - are investigating whether charter employees working in this country on H1-B visas are kicking back part of their salaries to a Muslim movement Gulen founded known as Hizmet, or "Service," according to sources...

Many scholars consider Gulen's movement a peaceable, moderate strain of Islam, and the federal inquiries have nothing to do with terrorism...

In Turkey, however, Gulen's followers have been accused of pushing for an authoritarian Islamic state.

Last month, the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan - the pro-Islamic prime minister - detained Turkish journalists who had alleged that Gulen followers were infiltrating security agencies.

One of the detained journalists, Ahmet Sik, wrote an unpublished book about Gulen, The Imam's Army. A criminal court in Istanbul recently banned it and confiscated copies of the manuscript. A draft was leaked online a few days ago...

Other U.S. documents released by WikiLeaks detail diplomats' efforts to follow the Gulen movement in Turkey and their growing unease as they observed an increase in its followers heading to the United States to teach...

The embassy report questioned Gulen's ultimate aims and said the embassy had evidence the movement pressured Turkish businessmen to give money to Gulenist schools and activities.

"We have multiple reliable reports that the Gulenists use their school network (including dozens of schools in the U.S.) to cherry-pick students they think are susceptible to being molded as proselytizers and we have steadily heard reports about how the schools indoctrinate boarding students," the report said.

Many Gulen-sponsored high schools in Turkey are boarding schools. Scholars who have studied the Gulen movement in Turkey have found that many of those students wind up teaching in U.S. charter schools after earning degrees from Turkish universities with Gulen's support.

One of the most detailed reports in the WikiLeaks cache is titled "Fethullah Gulen: Why Are His Followers Traveling?"

Written from Istanbul in 2006, it describes Gulen as "at the apex of a growing global network of organizations that profess a peace-loving, ecumenical vision of Islam."

The writer continued: "Gulen's activities first piqued consular officers' interest several years ago when applicants began to appear seeking to visit a number of charter schools in the U.S. with which consular officers were unfamiliar."

After interviewing "thousands" of Turks seeking permission to travel to the United States, the consular office in Istanbul compiled "a substantial list of organizations that seem in some way affiliated with Gulen." The roster included the Zaman newspaper in Turkey and 30 charter schools the consular office had identified as of May 2006.

The report said that after U.S. authorities in Istanbul and Ankara denied many of the applicants permission to enter the United States on other types of visas, many returned in 2004 seeking H1-B visas "sponsored by Gulen-affiliated science academies."...

The former teacher also provided a document called a tuzuk, which resembles a contract and prescribes how much money teachers employed on H1-B visas are supposed to return to Hizmet.

But parents and American teachers complain that the Turks employed on H1-B visas - often as math and science teachers - have limited English skills and are paid more than their American counterparts who are certified.

Some have described how uncertified Turkish teachers are moved from one charter school to another when their "emergency" teaching credentials expire. Others recount a pattern of sudden turnovers of Turkish business managers, administrators, and board members...

Last July, I posted some of my findings on the schools' use of H1-B visas, “Gulen schools and their booming H1B visa applications.” 

The Gulen charter school network is larger than any other network in the US (KIPP, Imagine Schools, etc.) Some of the Gulen charter schools earn high test scores, and it is standard practice for the schools to heavily promote themselves. But with the Gulen movement engaging in deceptive practices, their schools' success may also be questionable. One might ask if this is "Success in Education or Success in Marketing?"

Last summer, students from one of Ohio's Gulen charter schools provided entertainment in Chicago at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools-sponsored National Charter Schools Conference. Naturally, Bill Gates and Arne Duncan were speakers at that event.

Turkified students from the Gulenist Horizon Science Academy-Cleveland dancing for charter school supporters.

The Gates Foundation donated millions of dollars ($10,550,000) to the Cosmos Foundation, the Gulen charter school network in Texas, via the Texas High School Project.

Also, it's very strange that, in the midst of a federal investigation about the practices at the Gulen charter schools, Arne Duncan’s Senior Advisor Kenneth Bedell accepted an award on Duncan's behalf from the Rumi Forum (on October 26, 2010), perhaps the premier Gulenist organization in the U.S. Bedell even quotes Fethullah Gulen as he does so! 

The Rumi Forum’s “Honorary President” is Fethullah Gulen “regarded as the founder and inspirer of the global social movement known as the Hizmet (Service) Movement, more popularly known as the Gulen Movement.” 

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Added on April 6, 2011: From "Objectives of charter schools with Turkish ties questioned" in USA Today (August 17, 2010):  

"Nelson Smith, former president of the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group, sees no evidence of an "active network. What I do see is a really impressive group of educators."

More lies from the head honcho corporate reformer

Richard Rothstein is both smart AND honest. Bill Gates is not.

The American public should storm the Gates Foundation headquarters and demand that that know-nothing, ed reform dabbler, public policy-driving, and Ed Dept billionaire puppeteer, Bill Gates, appears in a televised public debate with Richard Rothstein. From the National Journal Education Expert blog (my red bolding).

Fact-Challenged Policy

Richard Rothstein

Research Associate, Economic Policy Institute

Last week, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates published an op-ed in the Washington Post, “How Teacher Development could Revolutionize our Schools,” proposing that American public schools should do a better job of evaluating the effectiveness of teachers, a goal with which none can disagree. But his specific prescriptions, and the urgency he attaches to them, are based on the misrepresentation of one fact, the misinterpretation of another and the demagogic presentation of a third. It is remarkable that someone associated with technology and progress should have such a careless disregard for accuracy when it comes to the education policy in which he is now so deeply involved.

Gates’ most important factual claim is that “over the past four decades, the per-student cost of running our K-12 schools has more than doubled, while our student achievement has remained virtually flat.” And, he adds, “spending has climbed, but our percentage of college graduates has dropped compared with other countries.” Let’s examine these factual claims:

Bill Gates says: “Our student achievement has remained virtually flat”

The only longitudinal measure of student achievement that is available to Bill Gates or anyone else is the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)…

On these exams, American students have improved substantially, in some cases phenomenally. In general, the improvements have been greatest for African-American students, and among these, for the most disadvantaged. The improvements have been greatest for both black and white 4th and 8th graders in math…

Bill Gates may think that these improvements are insufficient, and perhaps he is correct. But, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan reportedly quipped, “everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not to their own facts.” No rational reading of these NAEP data can support Bill Gates’ claim that “student achievement has remained virtually flat” over the last four decades. And, to repeat, no other longitudinal data are available that describe student achievement over time.

These facts also don’t support the story that the typical teacher of disadvantaged children is ineffective. Certainly, some teachers are ineffective, and schools should do a better job of removing them. But that should not, if facts are to be believed, be the main story.

Yet it seems to be. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan recently asserted that “many, if not most, teacher-training programs are mediocre.” This may be true, but how does he know? What is his evidence? It wouldn’t seem that mediocre teacher training programs could consistently be turning out teachers who have posted the kinds of gains we’ve seen on NAEP in the last generation and more…

…It is also important to investigate why teachers have apparently been more effective during most (though not all) of the last few decades in teaching math than reading, but it is difficult to motivate anyone to investigate this if our vision is clouded by the myth that all student achievement has been flat.

Bill Gates says: “The per-student cost of running our K-12 schools has more than doubled.”

Here, Bill Gates is nominally correct, but misleading. When properly adjusted for inflation, K-12 per pupil spending has about doubled over the last four decades, but less than half of this new money has gone to regular education (including compensatory education for disadvantaged children, programs for English-language learners, integration programs like magnet schools, and special schools for dropout recovery and prevention). The biggest single recipient of new money has been special education for children with disabilities. Four decades ago, special education consumed less than 4% of all K-12 spending. It now consumes 21%...

The increase in regular education spending has still been substantial, even if not nearly as great as Bill Gates implies. Should this spending increase have produced even greater improvement in achievement than has in fact occurred? This is a more difficult judgment to make. But in light of the actual achievement improvements documented by NAEP, it is not reasonable to jump to the facile conclusion of a productivity collapse in K-12 education. A more reasonable story is that spending has increased and achievement has increased as well. Perhaps we have gotten what we paid for.

Bill Gates says: “Spending has climbed, but our percentage of college graduates has dropped compared with other countries.”

This is the Bill Gates claim that can properly be called demagogic. It attempts to agitate readers by presenting a positive development in a negative light. A climb in spending should produce an increase in the percentage of college graduates. And it has. In the last four decades, the percentage of college graduates in the United States has nearly doubled. In 1970, 16% of young adults (ages 25 to 29) were college graduates. Today, it is 31%. The improvement has been across the board: the share of African-American young adults who are college graduates has gone from 10% to 19%; for whites it has gone from 17% to 37%. Somehow, Bill Gates saw fit to present this as an indictment…

It is commonplace to imply, as Bill Gates does in his Washington Post op-ed, that our failure to increase our college graduation rate “compared with other countries” will prevent us from “build[ing] a dynamic 21st-century economy.” Certainly, we need a sufficient number of well-trained college graduates for such an economy, but there is no reason to believe that a graduate rate in excess of 30% is too small for this purpose, or that economic dynamism can, after reaching sufficiency, increase linearly with increases in the share of young people who graduate from college. The threats to a dynamic 21st century economy are likely to come from a failure of macroeconomic policy, regulation of speculation, and investment in education, not from inefficiency in the investment we already make.

We only need to examine the list of international college graduation rates to see the absurdity of efforts to make a direct link between college graduation rates and economic success. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) publishes comparative data. One country that outranks the U.S. in college graduation rates is Ireland, whose economy has now collapsed because its regulation of the real estate bubble was even more careless and corrupt than ours. Another is Portugal, whose economic health is also worse than that of the U.S. Of course there are also nations on the list that are not on the verge of bankruptcy, but the chief lesson of the list is this: provided a nation has a sufficient number of college graduates for a dynamic economy, rankings above that point are irrelevant. Of course we should increase our college graduation rate, and there are many civic and cultural reasons to do so, even if we may already produce (as some analyses suggest) an apparent surplus, for economic purposes, of science, technology, engineering, and math graduates.

Education is complex, and the relationship between education and the economy even more so. Our ability to grapple with the challenges these present is not enhanced by factually inaccurate and hyperventilated appeals from those who should know better.

Like lambs being led to the slaughter

Newsflash! Bill Gates has now been publicly heckled. Watch the July 9 video here.

And just three days after being subjected to that humiliation in his hometown of Seattle, the Washington Post rushed in to his defense. Bright and early on the morning of Monday, July 12, WaPo readers opened their papers to find the following: “Gates Foundation playing pivotal role in changes for education system.”

Of course, it is especially important to note that both Melinda Gates and Warren E. Buffett, who is a major donor to the Gates Foundation, sit on the board of directors of The Washington Post Co.

The reason Bill Gates was heckled by a group of teacher protesters during his appearance at the AFT convention is because they oppose the enormous role which the Gates Foundation is playing re the privatization of public education and the weakening of the teachers' unions. Among other efforts, the foundation has poured millions of dollars into supporting mayoral control, dismantling neighborhood schools, and expanding charter schools. These teachers labeled Gates as a "Trojan Horse in the AFT House.”

The day following his AFT appearance, Leonie Haimson called Gates “The most dangerous man in America,” a Huffington Post piece which widely circulated in the edu-blogosphere.

A Monday post by Norm Scott (a retired teacher, reporter, and activist in NYC) discussed AFT President Randi Weingarten’s reaction to the anti-Gates protest, as well as the way in which other teachers at the convention ridiculed and shunned the protesters.

I placed a comment on Norm’s post which contained the following:

If the teachers at the convention had any idea how much money Gates has put into developing non-unionized charter schools, and that his vision includes an extreme reduction in the membership -- and power -- of their union, they might not have been so willing to cheer for him…

As a follow-up to that comment, I've collected a few facts that might help to enlighten some of those Gates teacher-fans. I think they should be aware that, as a direct consequence of Bill Gates' decisions, a number of them who were cheering for him will likely be saying goodbye to their jobs in the not-too-distant future. If they're lucky and not too old, they might get re-hired by some non-unionized charter school.

The Washington Post article informs us that the Gates Foundation gave “More than $81 million to charter schools and related initiatives” in the 29-months between January 2008 through May 2010.

This figure does not include the $4 million dollars that Gates secretly paid to Learn-NY from his own pocket to bankroll the campaign to extend Michael Bloomberg’s mayoral control. From the NY Post, August 2009:

“The donation helped pay for Learn-NY's extensive public-relations, media and lobbying efforts in Albany and the city. The effort include [sic] advertisements, parent organizing and canvassing -- including a five-borough bus tour and trips to the state capital.”

Michael Bloomberg is strongly pro-charter and anti-union. As the Gotham Gazette explained in February 2010, “Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his Schools Chancellor Joel Klein envision doubling the number of charters in the city to 200 schools accommodating for 10 percent of city students --more than 100,000 kids.” Learn about the master plan to eliminate public school districts at the end of this piece (as outlined in 2008 by Andy Smarick of the Fordham Foundation).*

It is important to realize that the big venture philanthropists like Bill Gates and Eli Broad are using their wealth to advance charter schools on a number of different levels simultaneously; it’s a collective strategy where efforts potentiate each other. Janelle Scott describes the strategy in her paper, "The Politics of Venture Philanthropy in Charter School Policy and Advocacy", and informs us that foundations are being used as the philanthropists' vehicle in order to fund a wide range of:

1. charter advocacy groups
2. pro-charter research organizations
3. alternative teacher, principal, and superintendent training programs
4. charter school development organizations

If you study the Gates Foundation grants, you’ll notice that many of them can be categorized into one of the four above groups. Read more about Scott’s investigation here.

Now for a quick, but incomplete, look at the destinations to which Bill Gates is funneling his money.

“The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provided The Washington Post with this spreadsheet of its grants since January 2008 related to elementary and secondary education.” Here are some examples relating to the expansion of charter schools:

• $75,300 to the New York City Center for Charter School Excellence (City Based Proposal for What Works Fund - NYC Charter Center)
• $224,030 to the President and Fellows of Harvard College (Charter School Initiative)
• $500,000 to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (General Operating Support)
• $950,000 to the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (PRI Guaranty To Unlock Facilities Financing for High Quality Charter Schools)
• $2,605,527 to the National Alliance For Public Charter Schools (NAPCS Industry Development)
• $2,979,186 to the National Association Of Charter School Authorizers (National Impact Initiative grant)
• $1,891,265 to the New Schools Fund dba NewSchools Venture Fund (CMO Research Study Project Management) Note for newbies: CMO means Charter Management Organization
• $246,070 to the New Schools Fund dba NewSchools Venture Fund (Support access to ARRA funds for strong CMOs)

That sub-total comes to $9,471,378. Without any doubt, the Gates Foundation is a primary supporter of a wide range of organizations which are working in unison to replace unionized public schools with non-unionized charter schools.This effort has been going on for some time.

Kenneth Libby tracked destinations of the foundation’s largess and reports some of his findings at the Gates Education Report. Among other things, there we learn that the Gates Foundation gave:

• $22 million to the NewSchools Venture Fund in 2003 for charter school expansion
• $30 million to the NewSchools Venture Fund in 2006 for charter school expansion

Diane Ravitch writes about the venture philanthropists like Bill Gates in her now-famous chapter “The Billionaire Boys’ Club” (Chapter 10 of “The Death and Life of the Great American School System”). In discussing how the Gates Foundation has blanketed think tanks and education advocacy groups with its wealth, she writes (p. 210):

In the fall of 2006, Erik W. Robelen reported in Education Week that the foundation had increased its giving to advocacy groups from $276,000 in 2002 to nearly $57,000,000 in 2005. Writing about the foundation's efforts to "broaden and deepen its reach," Robelen noted that almost everyone he interviewed was getting Gates money…Beginning in 2000, Gates supplied nearly $100 million to charter management organizations…

Ravitch points out the immense and publicly unaccountable power of the Gates Foundation to which those cheering AFT teachers stood on chairs, snapped photos and applauded:

But never in the history of the United States was there a foundation as rich and powerful as the Gates Foundation. Never was there one that sought to steer state and national policy in education. And never before was there a foundation that gave grants to almost every major think tank and advocacy group in the field of education, leaving almost no one willing to criticize its vast power and unchecked influence.

The teacher protesters in Seattle and a few assorted individuals aren't the only ones alarmed by the power and influence of Bill Gates and his foundation. A number of people involved with world health are also deeply concerned about the nature of the impact which the Gates Foundation is having in their arena. It would behoove those who pooh-pooh and ridicule the Gates' critics to read the 2008 report by Global Health Watch.

Occasionally I’ve mentioned these types of issues to teachers I know, most recently on a morning last April as I joined them on a picket line in front of my daughter’s school for a one-day OEA strike. I must confess that I'm consistently stunned at teachers' lack of awareness and interest in these matters, even those who are more heavily involved with the union. The reaction of those AFT members to the Gates' protesters in Seattle only confirms that, at this point, there is no reason to think that teachers – unless they do some cramming to learn about the issues – will catch on to what's happening and rise up to become the primary voice that speaks out in defense of public education.

Our public education system, its schools, and the profession of public K-12 teaching are intentionally being eroded by Bill Gates and others, in the name of "helping" children. And, as as far as the teachers go, a huge group of them has no good reason to believe that their leader is protecting them.

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*The Master Plan to eliminate urban public school districts, as clearly outlined by the Fordham Institute's Andy Smarick in "Wave of the Future" (Winter 2008):

First, commit to drastically increasing the charter market share in a few select communities until it is the dominant system and the district is reduced to a secondary provider. The target should be 75 percent.

Second, choose the target communities wisely. Each should begin with a solid charter base (at least 5 percent market share), a policy environment that will enable growth (fair funding, nondistrict authorizers, and no legislated caps), and a favorable political environment (friendly elected officials and editorial boards, a positive experience with charters to date, and unorganized opposition). [Smarick's suggests the "potentially fertile districts" of Albany, Buffalo, Denver, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, New Orleans, Oakland, and Washington, D.C.]

Third, secure proven operators to open new schools. To the greatest extent possible, growth should be driven by replicating successful local charters and recruiting high-performing operators from other areas.

Fourth, engage key allies like Teach For America, New Leaders for New Schools, and national and local foundation to ensure the effort has the human and financial capital needed.

Last, commit to rigorously assessing charter performance in each community and working with authorizers to close the charters that fail to significantly improve student achievement.

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Video added on June 17, 2010

Message for Vander Ark & the ed deform crowd

Tom Vander Ark is a participant on the National Journal’s Education blog. Recently he posted a comment on Crist's veto of the Florida teacher bill (SB-6) and called it “Putting the Brakes on Progress.” The bill sought to tie 50% of a teacher’s evaluation and pay to test scores, and to make it easier for them to be fired.

As an ed defomer mouthpiece responding to a defeat, here’s Vander Ark description of what happened in Florida: “…despite overwhelming public, philanthropic, and federal support for teacher effectiveness, the brakes have been applied by well organized and funded forces protecting the status quo.” Funny how he can put a negative spin on people in a democracy organizing themselves for a cause they believe in.

Indeed, Florida’s resistance forces became well organized, but the movement didn’t turn into a flood of opposition because of money. This movement was generated at the grassroots level using online social networking tools. Anthony Cody described how it worked in “From Facebook to YouTube: A Teacher Movement is Born.”

The large response in Florida may be an indication that a major pushback to the ed deform movement is finally getting underway. The drive is coming deep from people’s hearts and is emerging out of a sense of frustration and a desire for the truth to be told. It taps into anger that has been produced by one’s hard work being publicly insulted and disregarded for years.

People in the ed deformer crowd like to present themselves as supremely righteous warriors on a battleground where they are fighting for “teacher effectiveness” (their own personal view). They broad brush their opposition (= public school supporters) as an entity who never wants the public schools to improve, and doesn't mind if bad, lazy teachers are running the classrooms. And the ed deform propaganda constantly blurts that public school teachers ARE “bad, lazy” teachers who all deserve to be fired. The media and politicians have come to parrot and support their message.

But this oft-repeated, skewed outlook on teachers has never made sense, and, to me, has always been the main clue that something about their message just isn’t right. Anyone with a pinch of practical experience in an urban public school knows that the volume of teacher-bashing is turned up way too high. Any critical thinker can deduce that ulterior motives must be at work.

The presence of a tiny number of flawed employees – which will exist in any workplace – has been magnified and dwelled upon and talked about incessantly and loudly. What is being ignored is the fact that the majority of teachers in public schools are either perfectly okay or good, and some of them are even great.

If public school teachers were as bad as the ed deformers like to say, one would think that public school parents would be greatly dissatisfied. But as it happens, this is not the case.

In 2007, the National Center for Education Statistics conducted a Parent and Family Involvement in Education Survey (PFI) as a part of its National Household Education Surveys Program.* The final report, “Parent and Family Involvement in Education, 2006-07 School Year” was released in August 2008.

This study asked a large number of K-12 parents if they were 1. “very satisfied,” 2. “somewhat satisfied,” 3. “somewhat dissatisfied,” or 4. “very dissatisfied” with their child’s teachers. Interestingly, the report only revealed the first of the four possible responses. But it was produced under the Bush/Spellings regime, so it might have been intentionally written in such a way to make public school teacher satisfaction appear worse than it actually is.

Overall, 64% of surveyed parents were “very satisfied” with their teachers. Here’s the breakdown:

· Public, assigned – 61% (representing 37,168 students)

· Public, chosen** – 68% (representing 7,951 students)

· Private, religious – 79% (representing 4,560 students)

· Private, nonreligious – 78% (representing 1,438 students)

· City dwellers – 65% (representing 16,195 students)

· Poor families – 64% (representing 10,012 students)

· Non-poor families – 64% (representing 41,487 students)

When a clear majority of parents are reporting that they are “very satisfied” with their child’s teachers, things are certainly not as bad as the ed deform camp has been trying to make it seem.

I wanted to see a breakdown of the remaining three possible responses for all school types, because if the truth was as bad as we hear about public school teachers these days, I'd expect to see at least 50% of the parents report that they were "very dissatisfied."

I inquired with a staff member at the National Center for Education Statistics who promptly and politely directed me to “Trends in the Use of School Choice.” (so much for 'dissing' federal government employees!). He suggested the variability seen in the figures (eg. 61% vs. 57%) might due to the fact that the second report used data for grades 3-12, while the other used K-12. (He's put out that query and if I get a response I'll post it in the comments).

So here is the data-based truth about what parents think about their child’s teachers.

TEACHER SATISFACTION

Public, assigned	1993	1999	2003	2007
Satisfied (very satisfied + somewhat satisfied)	91% (56+35)	92% (54+38)	91% (56+35)	91% (57+34)
Dissatisfied (somewhat dissatisfied + very dissatisfied)	9% (7+2)	8% (6+2)	8% (6+2)	10% (7+3)

Public, chosen	1993	1999	2003	2007
Satisfied (very satisfied + somewhat satisfied)	95% (62+33)	93% (62+31)	94% (65+29)	94% (64+30)
Dissatisfied (somewhat dissatisfied + very dissatisfied)	6% (4+2)	6% (5+1)	6% (4+2)	7% (6+1)

Private, religious	1993	1999	2003	2007
Satisfied (very satisfied + somewhat satisfied)	98% (75+23)	98% (76+22)	95% (72+23)	97% (76+21)
Dissatisfied (somewhat dissatisfied + very dissatisfied)	2% (2+0)	2% (2+0)	4% (3+1)	3% (2+1)

Private, nonreligious	1993	1999	2003	2007
Satisfied (very satisfied + somewhat satisfied)	97% (77+20)	97% (75+22)	94% (70+24)	97% (74+23)
Dissatisfied (somewhat dissatisfied + very dissatisfied)	3% (1+2)	3% (2+1)	6% (4+2)	3% (3+0)

The difference in overall satisfaction between the assigned public schools and other school types only ranges from 3% to 6%.

So, why would some people be working so hard to convince the public that 99.9% of the public school teachers are lazy, ineffective bums?

Because one of the things that the ed deform movement is after is to kill off the morale of public school teachers, and undermine any citizen support. They want to make the teachers weak, demoralized, and submissive, and they want to destroy their unions. This is the oligarchs' current national economic agenda.

And going back to Vander Ark’s original statement: “…despite overwhelming public, philanthropic, and federal support for teacher effectiveness…”

Well, “overwhelming” public support for his whatever-defined version of “teacher effectiveness” is pretty exaggerated. But I certainly know who he specifically means when he refers to philanthropic and federal support for the Florida bill. Naturally, this would be Eli Broad, Bill Gates and others, along with Arne Duncan and the Eli Broad and Bill Gates’ plants that Duncan installed as his senior staff members. These are Russlyn Ali, Assistant Secretary, Office for Civil Rights (former assistant director of policy and research at the Broad Foundation, and member of the review board of the Broad Prize), Thelma Meléndez de Santa Ana, Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education (Broad Superintendents Academy Class of 2006), Carl Harris, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy and Strategic Initiatives (Broad Superintendents Academy Class of 2002), James H. Shelton III, Assistant Deputy Secretary for Innovation and Improvement (former program director for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation who has strong ties to the NewSchools Venture Fund, a Broad/Gates, etc. supported, charter school start-up/financial support organization), and of course Joanne Weiss, who Duncan pulled from the NewSchools Venture Fund to become his Director of Race to the Top. And if you don't believe that some people who are working in government aren't there to fulfill other missions, just read here. So it does make sense that Vander Ark would consider these particular entities as the primary stakeholders in public education -- they are directly interested in its demise.

Broad, Gates, Bloomberg, the Waltons, the Dells, and other corporate malanthropies have poured billions of dollars into making their version of market-based ed deform happen. I hate that this country has become an oligarchy, as Simon Johnson defines as “political power based on economic power.”*** I hate that national education policy is now being dictated by a handful of wealthy, powerful forces who do their dirty work behind the scenes and never appear before the public for challenge or questioning. But enough about me.

Don’t forget that Teacher Appreciation Week & Day for 2010 are just around the corner:

• Teacher Appreciation Week is May 3-7
• Teacher Appreciation Day is Wednesday, May 4^th

The big foundations should send each of the nation’s urban school teachers a thank-you-for-your-hard-work note, a bouquet of flowers, and a box of chocolate. At least.

` ` ` ` ` ` `

*From the report:

The survey addressed many topics, including school choice, homeschooling, family involvement in children’s schools, factors affecting parent and family participation in school, parent support for and satisfaction with the school, parents’ communication with other parents, school efforts to involve families, parent involvement with children’s homework, parent and family involvement in activities outside of school, parent and family plans for postsecondary education, and child health and disability status.

The sample was selected using random-digit-dial methods, and the data were collected using computer assisted telephone interviewing technology. NHES:2007 was conducted by Westat, a social science research firm, from January 2 through May 6, 2007. PFI interviews were conducted with parents or guardians of a nationally representative sample of children enrolled in kindergarten through 12th grade including children who were enrolled in public or private schools or homeschooled. The total number of completed PFI interviews was 10,681, which represents a population of 53.2 million students in grades K through 12, when weighted to reflect national totals.

**Here’s something interesting about the “School Characteristics” definition in the glossary of the original report:

“Schools that are public are further classified using the variable SCHOICE according to whether the parent reported having chosen the school or whether the school had been assigned to the student by the school district. Students in public school whose parents reported that their assigned school is their school of choice are categorized as attending a chosen school.”

So, someone like me who is required to participate in my district’s “Options” program by filling out a form in which I list my neighborhood school as my first choice can be interpreted by the Department of Education as engaging in school choice. It just seems odd and a bit off.

***From Simon Johnson on the Bill Moyers Journal, April 16, 2010:

"Oligarchy is just- it's a very simple, straightforward idea from Aristotle. It's political power based on economic power… I know people react a little negatively when you use this term for the United States. But it means political power derived from economic power. That's what we're looking at here. It's disproportionate, it's unfair, it is very unproductive, by the way. Undermines business in this society. And it's an oligarchy like we see in other countries."