Kudos to the Philadelphia Student Union

This is a letter written by students and staff of the Philadelphia Student Union. It’s their review of the traveling show which stars Arne Duncan, Al Sharpton, and Newt Gingrich. The show had recently visited their city and the students were so "inspired" by the experience, they wanted to share it with the world. Thank you, students!

Last March, the NY Daily News broke a story about Rev. Al Sharpton's $500G link to education reform. It helps explain why he is in the picture.

As far as Gingrich's national security scare goes, this is an old blame-the-public-schools game that’s been going on since Sputnik. It also ties in with the neo-liberal technique to move things toward privatization by working up a "crisis." Naomi Klein does quite a credible job at explaining the strategy in "Shock Doctrine." I highly recommend the book, but need to warn you it's quite a lengthy read.

To learn how the crisis approach has been/is being used to destroy public education, look up Gerald Bracey and read some of what he's written. One place to start is Believing the Worst About Schools: A Lack of Logic From Sputnik to Tough Choices. Bracey, an academic researcher, is just one of the voices who calls out the lies and the twisted truths. He desperately needs to get in the national spotlight so he can counteract some of the toxic crap that's put out. His new book is Education Hell: Rhetoric vs. Reality. Read it and see if you don't agree.

Now for the letter and its accompanying video:

Dear Friends and Allies,

Last week Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, the Reverend Al Sharpton and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich came to our city as part of their “Listening and Learning Tour” regarding a national agenda for public education reform. Students, parents, teachers, and community organizations were left wondering who the group was really listening to, since none of us were included in the tour’s agenda. We were only able to speak with them through a locked and guarded wrought-iron fence.

In the weeks leading up to the visit the Philadelphia Student Union (PSU) sent several requests for the trio to meet with those who would be most affected by the reforms they plan to implement. PSU reached out through letters, calls, and emails on behalf of over 20 community organizations including Youth United for Change, Teacher Action Group, Education Not Incarceration, the Southeast PA Network, the United Taxi Workers Alliance, West Philly High Community Partners, Parents United, Radio Tlacuache, the Community Education Network, Labor Justice Radio, PA ACORN, and William Penn Community Stakeholders.

Because we believe in transparency, we attempted to get information to circulate to the entire community on the itinerary of the tour, but found that it was not public information. Every office assured us that someone else had control over the schedule. We received notice of the tour schedule at the same time the press did, approximately two days prior to the event. District leaders did not support our request to demonstrate to the members of the Listening and Learning Tour that there is an active, mobilized community in Philadelphia that supports our public schools.

The tour stopped at one of the Mastery Charter Schools located in West Philadelphia and also McDaniel Elementary School in the Point Breeze section of the city. There were no stops in any comprehensive neighborhood high schools, arguably the schools in most need of attention here in the city. We had been told that a press conference was to be held in the parking lot of McDaniel Elementary at 2:15 p.m., an impossible time for students, and an inconvenient one for parents. Nevertheless, and on extremely short notice, PSU and YUC mobilized a group of 30 students, parents and allies from among our stakeholder groups to attend the press conference. We arrived to find an empty parking lot with a lonely podium and a multitude of police and security agents on hand to deny us entry to the building. The press conference had been moved inside.

We spoke to neighbors and parents who had no idea what was happening inside. As we told them what was going on many came outside of their houses and grabbed signs demanding to be heard. As our crowd got bigger and bigger many elected officials including Mayor Nutter, Councilwoman Jannie Blackwell, and Congressman Chaka Fattah and various Philadelphia School District and SRC members exited the building. They were leaving the “round table stakeholders meeting” that preceded the press conference. Surely “education stakeholders” must be defined more broadly than elected officials and school district employees!

An hour and a half later Mr. Duncan, Rev. Sharpton, and Mr. Gingrich exited through the side door of the building. We later found out that a member of the media had asked inside if they were going to address the crowd assembled outside. They approached us to speak through a high, wrought iron fence.

Two student organizers, one from PSU (Koby's first hand reaction to the encounter) [A must read] and one from YUC requested that Mr. Duncan and Reverend Sharpton return to Philadelphia to meet with grassroots stakeholders and those who are most impacted by educational reform policies. The students were surprised to be told that they were “meeting right now”. The pair did eventually commit to setting up a meeting on substantive issues such as teacher quality and transforming low performing schools. Footage showing us sealing the meeting

With help from the Media Mobilizing Project, PSU also produced a video piece (From the Other Side of the Fence) from footage of the closed-door press conference. It chronicles the whole experience and details more of the messages in this tour about what the national agenda for public education in the United States is.

If you know anyone in Baltimore or New Orleans let them know the tour is headed their way. The trio will be in New Orleans on November 3rd and Baltimore on November 13th.

Please communicate with your elected officials, as we will be. Ask them if they were included in the roundtable and if they spoke up in favor of the inclusion of independent parents and students.

We will be sure to communicate with you when the date and time of the meeting is secured. As we prepare to welcome Reverend Sharpton and Secretary Duncan back into our city, we are committed to bringing impacted communities to the table. We would like to thank all our allies and friends for making an impression on the Listening and Learning Tour “From the Other Side of the Fence”.

Staff and Youth Leadership Team of the Philadelphia Student Union.

Duncan, Robber Barons, and Victims

Clay Burrell over at Change.org is bothered by Arne's Duncanisms. Scary Duncan has been out and about saying all sorts of things. As Burrell excerpted:

In a recent interview, Secretary Duncan discussed how he went about assembling his team, targeting people like Ms. Melendez who came from modest backgrounds, had a passion for the work, and showed an entrepreneurial spirit—and were willing to take what was likely a big pay cut to work in a federal job. No education policy or district superstars with big egos were welcome, he said.

“If they’re scared off because they won’t make more money ... or if they wanted a certain job title, ... that’s not the kind of person we want,” Mr. Duncan said. “We want people for whom this is a real passion. This is mission-driven work. Everyone is taking pay cuts.”

To which Burrell responded

Call me crazy, but you'd think people who were "education policy superstars," who spent their lives in classrooms and later in research, would qualify as "passionate" more than the "missionaries" with an "entrepreneurial spirit." People like, you know, Linda Darling-Hammond, who's devoted her life to knowing through research how to improve education, rather than taking a left turn from entrepreneurialism out of some "money + passion = change you can believe in" zeal.

... Duncan's rhetoric smacks of a sort of anti-intellectualism and pro-entrepreneurialism, and his staff picks reflect that as well. His DoE staffers are overwhelmingly connected more to Eli Broad and Bill Gates than to universities and classrooms.

To put this all into perspective, it's time to review how Duncan got his position.

Duncan earned a B.A. in Sociology from Harvard. That is pretty much the extent of his intellectual foundation. After graduating, he immediately went to Australia to play professional basketball for four years.

When he returned to Chicago, Duncan needed a job (Wanted: employment for a not-particularly-go-getting, perpetually grinning, newly married, only-bachelor-degree-earning Ivy League graduate). Fortunately John Rogers - a fanatic basketball-playing, longtime friend and private high school co-alum - had become extremely wealthy and needed someone to run a new, small, local education-related non-profit he was starting. He slipped Duncan right in to that position. One of the enormous benefits of attending elite private schools is making these sorts of useful connections; it's probably more important than the education itself.

Duncan's only accomplishment in working in urban education at this point was that he had tutored poor kids in high school. We all know how much he likes to tell this story over and over again. By the way, his mother forced ALL of her kids to tutor at her center; she also wouldn't ever let them watch TV.

After a few years of running his friend's non-profit, this mushy, likable bureaucrat got a job in Chicago Public Schools as Deputy Chief of Staff, most likely because of his great connections. A few years later, Mayor Daley appointed the malleable Duncan as CEO of Chicago Public Schools. This was just after the public-school-system-hating, Broad-connected, education reformer-destroyers had settled down in town. I'm sure they immediately recognized that Duncan would be perfect to work with, and be the sort of perfect blank they could mold.

Meanwhile, having never attended public schools, nor be willing to use them for his own kids, Obama really didn't know all that much about public education. However, for years he had been regularly playing basketball with Duncan, who he met through Michelle's brother (a close friend, and former Princeton basketball teammate, of John Rogers). This is a tight foursome, folks.

And that's how our nation is now stuck with a cheerful, but bumbling, average bureaucrat who Obama has assigned authority for running the whole show. I repeat: one of the benefits of attending elite private schools is making these sorts of useful connections. Did I mention that the Obama's sent their girls to the same Chicago private school that Duncan and Rogers attended?

Duncan's presence at the Department of Education is not because of an incredible intelligence, a wide range of experience, or an exceptional level of knowledge; it's because he provides the White House with a level of comfort and familiarity (and honors mutual friend Rogers for his years of Obama political $upport, and who knows who else). By the way, Rogers’ ex-wife is the White House social secretary.

Mr. Casual "call me Arne" Duncan wouldn't select cabinet members with more intellectual gravitas than he has because he is fundamentally insecure about his own. He certainly realizes his status would be challenged by the presence of someone who is actually distinguished in the field of education, and who may not agree with him on every point, and who would probably win all the debates.

The fact that Duncan signed on to both the Broader Bolder Approach and the Education Equality Project (manifestos with two VERY different points of view) demonstrates to me that the mutable Duncan wasn't sure where to stand. He makes a perfect puppet for the corporate edu-schemers.

By the way, Alexander Russo recently blogged about Arne’s weighing in on a number of issues including raising the driving age in Ohio (against), a split lunch at Patterson Elementary next year (for), and changing monthly board meeting locations for Chattanooga public schools to the Denny's on Dalton Boulevard (against). Why would he do this? Sorry, but it makes me wonder about his level of intellect.

On the recommendation of Elijah Anderson, I am now reading Blaming the Victim, a classic work by William Ryan. As someone who is paying attention to the methodology of the corporateer-led destruction of public education, all in the name of doing "good," I couldn’t help but be struck by two lines on page 20:

In order to persuade a good and moral man to do evil, then, it is not necessary first to persuade him to become evil. It is only necessary to teach him that he is doing good.

This explains the disconnect I sense between the rhetoric spewed by the corporateers and Harvard MBA-type reformers, (“Education is the civil rights issue of the 21st century!”), and the fact that they never make a peep about the extent of our nation’s poverty and how it affects impoverished families, or our growing class divisions. Fervently believing that what they are saying and doing is good, they bristle and aggressively confront anyone who challenges their position. They declare that those who disagree with them is 1. a racist and 2. a traitor to the cause of wanting to help poor, disadvantaged children. Only their perspective is "good."

Ryan’s book was originally published in 1971. A revised edition was released in 1976 with a new introduction. By then Ryan says he had enlarged his vision of who the “victims” in American society really were.

In fact, everyone who depends for the sustenance of himself and his family on salary and wages, and who does not have a separate source of income through some substantial ownership of wealth, is a potential victim in America. He is vulnerable to the disaster of catastrophic illness in a private-enterprise medical-care system; he is vulnerable to the deliberate manipulation of inflation and unemployment; he is vulnerable to the burden of grossly unfair taxes; he is vulnerable to the endemic pollution of air and food and to the unattended hazards of the factory and the highway that will likely kill him before his time; he is vulnerable to the greed of the great oil companies and food corporations.

The victims in American society are not simply the 10 percent of us who are Black, the 15 percent or so who are officially below the “poverty line." The majority of us who are non-Black and, officially at least, non-poor, are also victims. At least two-thirds, perhaps three-fourths of us are relatively poor compared to the standards of the top 10 or 5 percent, and relatively vulnerable. Others own America, we’re just workers, whether we realize it or not. Some of us may think we’re flying pretty high and are much better off than those below us, but in the end, we’re just ‘house niggers,” allowed better food than the “field niggers” and wearing fancier clothes. But none of us owns even a corner of the cotton field. Massa owns it all and Massa – the two or three per cent who essentially own America—is the real problem.

It's probably good to be clear about who is really running things; it is Bill Gates, Eli Broad, Michael Bloomberg, the Wal-Mart family, and other millionaires and billionaires along that line. If you are under the impression that we live in a democracy, this will bother you, or perhaps not.

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education

Periodically I’ll take a look at Whitney Tilson’s blog. The first time I became aware of Tilson was when word went out about his account of Ben Chavis’ verbal attack on New York City Council Member Charles Barron at Sharpton’s National Action Network EEP forum. Chavis, Oakland’s notorious and poorly-behaved American Indian Public Charter School founder, had been invited to sit on the panel.

According to Tilson, Chavis approached Barron and said, “You're a mother f-ing black pimp, you're f-ing our kids. Come to the reservation and I'll beat your ass. You want our kids to take Home Ec? YOU should wear a dress!"

For those of us in Oakland who have been experiencing Chavis for years, hearing something like this was nothing new. But then there was Whitney Tilson’s enthusiastic response of, “I LIKE this guy!”

Tilson's day job is as the founder and managing partner of a New York company that manages investments. He also writes about financial investing and is a minor TV business celebrity. He has posted some of his appearances on YouTube.

In addition to the things above, Tilson's super-intense hobby is being involved with education reform-minded things. He co-founded Democrats for Education Reform, and is on the board of directors of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. He has spoken to Philanthropy Roundtable members, guiding and reinforcing their K-12 education philosophy. Tilson is a huge fan of Joel Klein, according to whom he meets regularly, he adores Michelle Rhee, and Jay Green gives him praise.

Whitney Tilson was the first person to join Wendy Kopp as a founding member of Teach For America. He is the vice chairman of KIPP Academy Charter Schools in NYC. All-in-all he is a big pro-charter, pro-voucher cheerleader of TFA and KIPP; possibly the ultimate neo-liberal education reformer of our day.

Tilson explains on his blog that his parents spent most of their careers doing international development. His interest in education came about because of both the work of his parents and from his experience with TFA.

“I remember the many times, going back to my teenage years, that she [his mother] reminded me of all the good fortune I’ve had in my life and told me that I had a duty to give back and make the world a better place.”

A photo posted online reveals that he was a high school student at Northfield Mount Hermon School (where today's current tuition, room, and board charge is $43,400+, and $30,500+ for day students). He attended Harvard, and eventually Harvard Business School. His education trajectory is very much like Duncan and Obama's.

Tilson invites his readers to look at the photos and videos of KIPP celebrations which he has posted online. I was surprised to see them intertwined with photos and videos of his personal life, and have no idea why someone involved in a controversial, public topic would do such a thing. But since he made them available to the world and I'm a curious person, I thought I’d take a look. I’m fascinated with trying to understand the make-up of people who think so differently from me. For some reason, or the other, I keep looking for a bridge.

The photos and videos feature the travel and activities of an extraordinarily privileged American family; Machu Picchu, Kenya, Prague, Jackson Hole, skiing, golfing, water skiing, private plane flying, white-water rafting, paragliding, and on and on and on. It strikes me that Whitney Tilson is one entitled dude. Incidentally, I learned that his children attend a private school who a mother described as "one of the most elite girls’ schools in the nation." It has a student to faculty ratio of 7:1 and its tuition is around $34,000/year. No public schools will be experienced here.

This all brings me to a fascinating and useful article I discovered during my googling of “elite schools,” The Disadvantages of an Elite Education by William Deresiewicz, a literary critic and former Yale professor. I love how he begins his piece:

It didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work. Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League degrees, and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness. “Ivy retardation,” a friend of mine calls this. I could carry on conversations with people from other countries, in other languages, but I couldn’t talk to the man who was standing in my own house.

Here are nine additional excerpts which not only relate to Tilson and TFA, but also to the current state of education reform, the vision of which has been conceived, and is being pushed, by our nation’s elite. The article also gives us a clue as to why other social classes are being excluded from participating in important conversations about their own schools. Deresiewicz writes:

(1) It’s not surprising that it took me so long to discover the extent of my miseducation, because the last thing an elite education will teach you is its own inadequacy. As two dozen years at Yale and Columbia have shown me, elite colleges relentlessly encourage their students to flatter themselves for being there, and for what being there can do for them. The advantages of an elite education are indeed undeniable. You learn to think, at least in certain ways, and you make the contacts needed to launch yourself into a life rich in all of society’s most cherished rewards. To consider that while some opportunities are being created, others are being cancelled and that while some abilities are being developed, others are being crippled is, within this context, not only outrageous, but inconceivable.

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

(2) The first disadvantage of an elite education, as I learned in my kitchen that day, is that it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you. Elite schools pride themselves on their diversity, but that diversity is almost entirely a matter of ethnicity and race. With respect to class, these schools are largely—indeed increasingly—homogeneous.

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

(3) At the same time, because these schools tend to cultivate liberal attitudes, they leave their students in the paradoxical position of wanting to advocate on behalf of the working class while being unable to hold a simple conversation with anyone in it. Witness the last two Democratic presidential nominees, Al Gore and John Kerry: one each from Harvard and Yale, both earnest, decent, intelligent men, both utterly incapable of communicating with the larger electorate.

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

(4) My education taught me to believe that people who didn’t go to an Ivy League or equivalent school weren’t worth talking to, regardless of their class. I was given the unmistakable message that such people were beneath me. We were “the best and the brightest,” as these places love to say, and everyone else was, well, something else: less good, less bright.

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

(5) [Elite universities] …select for and develop one form of intelligence: the analytic. While this is broadly true of all universities, elite schools, precisely because their students (and faculty, and administrators) possess this one form of intelligence to such a high degree, are more apt to ignore the value of others. One naturally prizes what one most possesses and what most makes for one’s advantages. But social intelligence and emotional intelligence and creative ability, to name just three other forms, are not distributed preferentially among the educational elite. The “best” are the brightest only in one narrow sense. One needs to wander away from the educational elite to begin to discover this.

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

(6) Elite institutions are supposed to provide a humanistic education, but the first principle of humanism is Terence’s: “nothing human is alien to me.” The first disadvantage of an elite education is how very much of the human it alienates you from.

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

(7) The second disadvantage, implicit in what I’ve been saying, is that an elite education inculcates a false sense of self-worth… It’s been said that what those tests [SAT, GRE, and other numerical rankings] really measure is your ability to take tests, but even if they measure something real, it is only a small slice of the real. The problem begins when students are encouraged to forget this truth, when academic excellence becomes excellence in some absolute sense, when “better at X” becomes simply “better.”

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

(8) One of the great errors of an elite education, then, is that it teaches you to think that measures of intelligence and academic achievement are measures of value in some moral or metaphysical sense. But they’re not. Graduates of elite schools are not more valuable than stupid people, or talentless people, or even lazy people. Their pain does not hurt more. Their souls do not weigh more.

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

(9) This is not to say that students from elite colleges never pursue a riskier or less lucrative course after graduation, but even when they do, they tend to give up more quickly than others… Because students from elite schools expect success, and expect it now. They have, by definition, never experienced anything else, and their sense of self has been built around their ability to succeed. The idea of not being successful terrifies them, disorients them, defeats them. They’ve been driven their whole lives by a fear of failure—often, in the first instance, by their parents’ fear of failure.

We need to have a public discussion about the extent of the patronizing contempt for the middle-class-on-down held by some of those in the non-public school using elite, and how it is manifesting itself in the way our public education system is being treated and where education reform is being headed. The People who actually use the public schools, and the providers who work in them, are being excluded from important decisions on both the local and national levels.
The response by the elite is always about how much they are trying to "help." Sorry, I just don't buy that, especially because so many of the reforms are being pushed onto communities after the elite arranges for general public input to be forcefully disengaged.*

Before a reader charges me with inciting class warfare, I hope they realize how much class tension is already there, and growing by the minute. Think of these entries as reports about what is going on at the ground level.

*Remember Joe Williams' (Tilson's buddy) description in his report for the Center of Education Reform of a desirable "politics free zone" conveniently created by the state control of Oakland's school district, and which opened the door for Eli Broad's reform ideas to be implemented?

The Scheming Called "Venture Philanthropy"

Over the weekend I read "The Politics of Venture Philanthropy in Charter School Policy and Advocacy," by Janelle Scott (Associate Professor at UC Berkeley, formerly NYU). It is published by SAGE which gives free access to their publications until April 30, 2009.

Scott explains the billionaires' strategy to push charter schools onto communities by careful maneuvering of their immense foundation-giving. She also describes the not-always-well-intentioned, and/or misguided, history of foundation "giving" which has targeted communities of color in the past.

The outcome of the foundation-giving programs of today requires an important trade-off from the local communities, namely, the relinquishment of interest and power over their own public schools to the public education notions of a few immensely wealthy oligarchs. What does it tell us that the communities where this is occurring necessitated first being placed under authoritarian rule (a.k.a. wealthy oligarch/billionaire-influenced mayoral &/or state control)?

[The backroom deals are being made in every city where pro-charter school forces have gained a foothold. The parent informant of one of my associates explained that the Federal City Council, a group of business leaders who really run Washington D.C., met with Mayor Fenty immediately after he took office. As the D.C native describes it, Fenty emerged from the meeting and immediately announced the mayoral takeover of the D.C. schools; this is the circumstance that brought in Michelle Rhee in June 2007. The D.C. native says Fenty never hinted about this scenario during his campaign.]

Scott’s article explains how the "gifts" of these foundations are going to a broad range of charter advocacy groups, pro-charter research organizations, alternative teacher, principal, and superintendent training programs, charter school development organizations, etc. EdVoice, Center for Education Reform, TFA, NewSchools Venture Fund, NewLeaders for New Schools, KIPP, Green Dot, Democrats for Education Reform, and the EEP are just the teeny tiny tip of the you're-going-to-have-charter-schools-whether-you-want-them-or-not iceberg.

Scott describes the flow of money to these organizations with the intent to have them work as a network in unison to further the billionaires' goal. Very few of the donations go directly to individual schools and their students (just enough to make them look a lot better initially than their traditional school neighbors – read here and here). Their many, many dollars mostly go toward advocacy, propaganda, and the building of a national pro-charter school structure.

Speaking of propaganda, I've recently learned how Broad has bought off large, important portions of PBS, and how M. Gates, a major supporter of the KIPP organization, is on the board of the Washington Post, home to Jay Mathews, the staff writer with an education column who perpetually praises and promotes KIPP schools.

The extent to which the media has been co-opted by this force would be a good topic for someone to track. We know how heavily they have influenced the White House (just one person being John Doerr).

Be aware that there is little objective information coming from the media anymore, and that only the wealthy, top business elite (certainly not educators, scholars, or any other highly knowledgeable people) are determining the future of our nation's public educational system; any other input is being blocked.

The masses are also being used. For instance, Scott's article tells how the 2004 Philanthropy Roundtable donors guide describes a technique to push charter schools. It is "...the sponsorship of efforts that put parents of color out front instead of 'rich, white Republicans.' " The technique is exactly described here and here. This general strategy, which turns out to be bipartisan, may also explain why a deeply-in-debt-to-the-IRS Al Sharpton was persuaded to join the pro-charter force.

Another small item that may be of interest to some of you is that the Broad Foundation paid the Century Foundation $100,000 (in 2004) and $29,973 (in 2007) to "support research on the late union leader Albert Shanker." View the Broad Foundation 990's here. This interest of theirs is certainly connected to how much pro-charter forces like to mention that Albert Shanker was responsible for the idea of charter schools (as if to brush off any responsibility for them!). They use this statement frequently to both justify the existence of charter schools, and to attempt to disarm the teachers' union complaints about them. Of course, they don't tell the whole story.

Shanker's real views are revealed in Tough Liberal, Richard Kahlenberg's biography. Mike Klonsky’s review of the book states:

In a speech to the National Press Club in 1988, he [Shanker] proposed the idea of teacher-led "charter schools" where rules could be bent if the great majority of teachers in a small school approved. He called on districts to "create joint school board-union panels that would review preliminary proposals and help find seed money for the teachers to develop final proposals."

So Shanker's vision was for teachers to have more control over their schools, not the fringe others. Kahlenberg states:

Shanker "watched with alarm as the concept he put forward began to move away from a public-school reform effort to look more like a private-school voucher plan. Shanker came to believe that the charter school movement was largely hijacked by conservatives who made many charter schools vulnerable to the same groups that made voucher schools so dangerous: for-profit corporations, racial separatists, the religious right, and anti-union activists...Shanker watched with dismay as 'those who had tremendous contempt for public education' jumped on to the charter school bandwagon."

The breadth of the billionaires' maneuvers is extensive, and the details which confirm it are many. It is going to take a little more time to help the American public grasp the diabolical, anti-democratic nature of their strategy.

It's crystal clear that a set of this nation's upper business elite has overstepped its boundaries in too many ways, and for too long, from the managing of our nation's finances to its public education system. They have been forcing us with well-financed trickery to go down the wrong track. Even a not-too-long-ago politically mild-mannered person (myself) can see that when The People realize the degree of selfish, arrogant scheming that's been done, their response may be strong and accompanied by outrage, and possibly violence.

Which Crisis Where?

As people talk about the crisis in America’s educational system, they aren’t talking about schools in places like Orinda, Lafayette, Piedmont, Danville, and San Ramon [for readers unfamiliar with the Bay Area, these are our leafy suburbs]. They use “America” broadly, but are actually referring to the “crisis” in schools and school districts which serve a large number of poor kids (ie. kids with brown skin). These schools are in every major urban area you can name.
America passed through a civil rights movement in the 1960’s thinking it would resolve the inequity that stemmed from our long history as slaveholders, but nearly fifty years later our schools are more racially and class stratified than ever before. In every community across the land, as one group was finally permitted to move in, the other group sold their homes, packed their bags, and moved away; it was all about self-selection and choice, you see.
So here we are in 2009, mostly believing that America’s race issue has been solved; Obama is president, right? However, you'll know for certain "it" hasn't been "fixed" if you live a life where you rub up against it everyday.


Certainly things have improved, and for some, things are getting better all the time. But for enormous numbers of people, their original problems have grown and been transformed into very, very deeply rooted issues relating to (hush hush, don't say it!) social class, where – after all that has been said and done – they have ended up in the very bottom stratum. Having been subjected to high rates of unemployment for generations now, these people and their children live an existence of geographic and social isolation. Their plight has come on America’s radar at this time, probably because of the immense and growing cost of incarceration, and our shock at the behaviors which have caused it (why we have a Three Strikes Law in California, for example). My God, take a look at its trajectory (one source is Kirwan Institute’s report “Brown Disparity Data: Then and Now,” April 2004).

http://4909e99d35cada63e7f757471b7243be73e53e14.gripelements.com/presentations/BrownPresDisparityData.ppt

Perhaps our nation has finally decided that it had better figure out a way to get all the kids in those communities more educated, but we definitely don’t want to spend too much. Oh yeah, and even though things have been really bad for a long, long time (we would all know this if we had been listening to the teachers all along), we are now going to call it a "crisis."

Crisis: 1.a. A crucial or decisive point or situation; a turning point. b. An unstable condition, as in political, social, or economic affairs, involving an impending abrupt or decisive change. 2. A sudden change in the course of a disease or fever, toward either improvement or deterioration. 3. An emotionally stressful event or traumatic change in a person's life. 4. A point in a story or drama when a conflict reaches its highest tension and must be resolved. (The American Heritage Dictionary)

As for the approach to handling this task, there appears to be a basic philosophical split between perfectly intelligent people.
On one hand are the people who believe that the teachers, schools, and school districts who have been serving those children for years are the ones to blame for their low achievement; they are simply ineffective and have been for a long time. The solution this side proposes is to highlight the children’s lack of achievement with regular testing, to close their existing schools, and to eliminate the teachers in them – then more schools can be started anew. For the most part, a force of upper-middle class recent college graduates who were raised in leafy suburbs – and then certified to teach in a streamlined way – will serve 60 hours/week at the schools for two-years and then "se fue." The new schools will be operated on the business (rather than traditional) model, and competition between them will produce superior schools.
And on the other hand are the people who believe that the teachers, schools, and school districts – which have been tasked with serving these exceptionally challenging children for decades – have also been short-changed for years in terms of fiscal support, social capital, professional respect and other resources that would have helped them to help the children to do better. The solution they propose is to provide the pre-existing schools with sufficient support at long last, to have empathy and respect demonstrated to the individuals who have been toiling under such difficult circumstances for so long, and to focus on strengthening the components that are already there. They seem to take a “whole child,” “whole family,” and “whole community” approach.
You will find that these two camps were formally defined last year, calling themselves the Education Equality Project and the Broader Bolder Approach.
Most people seem to have a natural inclination to align themselves with one side or the other. Oddly, some people signed up with both, like the mutable, and very-much-wants-to-be-liked Arne Duncan. By the way, guess which camp has the fanciest website?
Among the EEP signatories are:

• Antonio Villaraigosa
• Adrian Fenty
• Cory A. Booker
• John McCain
• Janet Murguía
• Michael Lomax
• Michael Bloomberg
• Margaret Spellings
• Roger Wilkins
• Al Sharpton
• Michelle Rhee
• Jeb Bush

Among the BBA signatories are:

• William Julius Wilson
• Ted Sizer
• Richard Rothstein
• Diane Ravitch
• Pedro Noguera, Ph.D.
• Susan B. Neuman
• Deborah W. Meier
• Christopher Jencks
• James J. Heckman
• M. Joycelyn Elders, M.D.
• Linda Darling-Hammond
• T. Berry Brazelton, M.D.

It’s an interesting assortment of people. Which point of view has been getting the most press?
Be sure to Google the ones you don’t know sometime.