Eric Holder turned into a political hack for Rahm

Shame on Attorney General Eric Holder for allowing himself and his office to be used to kickstart Rahm Emanuel's re-election campaign. Holder was in town Wednesday to hail the “amazing” turnaround in school safety since the 2009 beating death of Fenger Academy student Derrion Albert — even after 50 school closings.

“There are a lot of great things going on in Chicago. There is an organized, a galvanized community led by a great mayor that has led to reductions in all the viable statistics — really amazing reductions,” Holder said during a roundtable at police headquarters.

What a bunch of horsebleep! Remember, Rahm is the same guy who, as Obama's chief of staff, told Holder to "STFU' when it came to drafting any gun-control legislation. It may be borderline legal for a cabinet guy to campaign for politicians, but it's shady, as Holder well knows. Especially when an administration like Rahm's is so notorious for corruption and with Holder's Justice Dept. possibly having to carry out investigations an prosecutions.

Yes, "galvanized community" indeed. It's galvanized alright, galvanized against the mayor's school closings and against his failure to control the growing gun violence epidemic. I'm certain Holder has seen Rahm's single-digit approval ratings on the south and west sides.

Emanuel and Holder both claimed that the just-ended school year was the "safest on record" in the seven years since the Chicago Public Schools started tracking safety.

What Holder failed to mention or worse, failed to notice was, thousands of black and Latino children having to navigate through cordons of "safe passage" guards just to get to their receiving schools an the psychological impact that has on students and families. Holder might have pointed out that there was never many in-school shootings. Even Albert wasn't killed in his school. Schools have always been a safe haven for kids, especially in neighborhoods lacking in jobs and after-school programs. Another reason why Rahm's mass school closings may be a great contributor to the dramatic rise in gun violence this year. It's on the streets, not just in the hour preceding or following school, where these same children, thousand of them afraid to go out and play after school, are facing the threat of gun violence every day, primarily in the very neighborhoods where the mayor has closed their schools.

Holder might have also noticed that Rahm and his top cop Garry McCarthy have been caught tinkering with the crime stats to try and make the city's gun violence pandemic look more palatable to voters.So whatever numbers he and the mayor are tossing around are hardly worthy of serious consideration.  Even with the tinkering and political spinning, there no question that Chicago remains among the worst cities in the nation when it comes to shootings. The shooting numbers this year are even higher than last and continue to rise during the summer months.

Hardly "amazing", Mr. Holder.

Shades of 2010 when Sec. of Ed Arne Duncan went out on the stump for then-mayor Adrian Fenty (and Michelle Rhee) in D.C. Duncan had no juice in D.C. communities and couldn't deliver for Fenty. I think the same applies to Holder here in Chicago. But whether Rahm wins or loses, Holder has denigrated himself and his office on many levels by singling Rahm out for  undue praise on the violence issue as the campaign season approaches.

D.C.'s Mayor Gray under fire for Rhee-ism without Rhee

Like President Obama, who campaigned as a critic of the war in Iraq but then continued many of George W. Bush’s military policies once in office, Gray ran as a skeptic of the reforms being implemented by Rhee but continued them under Henderson, who also has closed more than a dozen schools and fired hundreds of teachers. -- Melinda Henneberger, Washington Post

D.C. students protest 2010 teacher firings.

Following up on Monday's post which was critical of WaPo's excellent education writer Valerie Strauss. Remember, Strauss was dismissive in her response to D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray's drawing parallels between the conditions black people face today in the nation's capital with those faced under South African apartheid. I defended Gray on that one, but also pointed out that I was also critical of Gray who seems to be following in the path of his horrible predecessors Adrian Fenty and Michelle Rhee.

It was Fenty who brought in Rhee as his appointed school chancellor. In a matter of months, Rhee, with heavy backing from corporate school reformers and power philanthropists, threw the school system into financial chaos. Her regime was marked by a massive test-cheating scandal along with a successful effort to weaken the teachers union and take away many of the teachers' collective bargaining rights. Rhee fired hundreds of good teachers and regularly debased the entire teaching force, promoted vouchers for Catholic schools, and put many the district's schools into the hands of private charter operators. The list goes on. But while Rhee became the darling of the corporate school reformers,  including Arne Duncan, she drew the ire of parents and of the city's under-served black community.

Henderson and Rhee

Fortunately, both Fenty and Rhee were run out of D.C. in a populist revolt by district voters. Unfortunately, Mayor Gray, who ran as an outspoken critic of Fenty's policies, quickly appointed Rhee's deputy “for human capital” Kaya Henderson as his chancellor. She is now following in Rhee's footsteps. Back in 2010 I called it, Rhee-ism without Rhee. 

Instead of dismantling Fenty's "reforms", Gray has continued them. Henderson, has closed more than a dozen schools and has fired hundreds of more teachers and librarians. D.C. charters now have the third-highest market share in the nation, enrolling a larger proportion of students than in every city except New Orleans and Detroit

Gray is now running for a second term and like Fenty, he's coming under heavy fire from educators, parents and school activists for his Rhee(ism)-without-Rhee approach. At Monday's community meeting, Gray was confronted by a hostile crowd that packed Eastern High School's auditorium to slam his education policies and his appointment of Henderson.

The Post reports:

On Monday, upstart candidates including restaurateur Andy Shallal, the owner of Busboys and Poets, and Reta Jo Lewis, a Democrat and former State Department official, drew the biggest applause, indicting both Gray and members of the council who seek to replace him for alienating parents and teachers amid a forceful push for school reform.

It looks like the mayor is in for tough sledding in the months leading up to the election. But as we have seen, getting rid of a mayor or a corrupt schools chancellor is one thing. Getting rid of the powerful corporate interests behind them is quite another. They don't have to run for office.

WHO WILL DE BLASIO PICK?

On that point -- Now that New Yorkers have elected progressive Bill deBlasio as their mayor along with a slate of councilmen backed by the Working Families Party, all eyes are on that city to see who the new mayor will pick as his chancellor. Rumors abound that Henderson and Chicago school chief Barbara Byrd-Bennett have made the short list.

I hope those rumors are false. I'm also glad to see Valerie Strauss is back on track. Here's her take on a possible Henderson appointment in N.Y.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

April 4, 1968

Dr. King's Legacy

On this, the 43rd anniversary of Dr. Kings assassination, thousands of union workers, including teachers, will be marching around the country remembering that King died fighting for the rights of city workers to unionize. In Detroit and march and rally is being organized to protest the legislature's recent passage of union busting legislation. 

"The Detroit 5000" March Co-Organizer; Mr. Ernest Johnson, Chairman of Community Coalition feels strongly that allowing the new bill to be exercised will be "detrimental to the civil rights and liberties that Dr. King and countless others fought and died for.

"...this dark cloud makes our pension susceptible to takeover! Everybody who believes in civil rights should be alarmed about what is taking place. If they can do this in Detroit, they can and will do it in any city that has fallen on hard times." -- Detroit 5000

Transocean execs get big bonuses

 "As measured by these standards, we recorded the best year in safety performance in our company's history, which is a reflection on our commitment to achieving an incident free environment, all the time, everywhere." -- Company report to the SEC

I'm glad he qualified it

 "Nuclear energy is per kilogram 250,000 times better than hydrocarbons or any chemical ... as long as the earth exists, you wouldn't run into fuel problems." --Bill Gates

Rhee's former deputy 

Kaya Henderson wants to ease a testing regimen that she concedes has left students and school staff “stressed-out and crazy.” -- Bill Torque at WaPo

Duncan's for mayoral control only if he can control the mayor

Rhee & Gray

Arne Duncan is a big fan of mayoral control of the schools--or at least he says he is. In fact, when Duncan was first appointed as secretary of education, he staked his very reputation on placing many more urban school districts under one-man, top-down control by their mayors. He even told us:

"At the end of my tenure, if only seven mayors are in control, I think I will have failed," Duncan said. He offered to do whatever he can to make the case. "I'll come to your cities," Duncan said. "I'll meet with your editorial boards. I'll talk with your business communities. I will be there."

So now we have a new popularly-elected mayor in D.C., Vincent Gray, who won by a substantial margin over incumbent Adrian Fenty. Voters, especially those in predominantly black wards, made it clear that they were voting in large part against  the continuation of Michelle Rhee as schools chancellor and especially against her firings of hundred of D.C. teachers. Rhee is the very embodiment of Duncan's Race-To-The-Top reform, a strategy focused on  school closings, privately-run charter schools,  mass teacher firings, and the undermining of collective-bargaining agreements.

Duncan campaigned actively for Fenty in the days leading up to the election. He used federal dollars to shower the district with grants and awards, as well as personal school tours and photo ops with Fenty and Rhee. Never before in history had an education secretary been so personally involved in trying to shape the outcome of a local mayor's race. He, along with several of the powerhouse foundations underwriting Rhee's efforts, even threatened to withhold more than $75 million in badly-needed school dollars should Gray defeat Fenty and replace Rhee with a leader more acceptable to the community.

But those threats obviously backfired, seeming to energize D.C. voters even more against Fenty, Rhee and Duncan.

Now suddenly, mayoral control seems to have slid from atop Duncan's priority list. Cheered on by a host of Washington's rich and powerful attending the recent premiere screening of the anti-union propaganda film Waiting for Superman, Duncan went into full arm-twisting mode, repeatedly calling Gray to cajole, threaten, and demand that he keep Rhee and her failed, divisive policies in place. Voters be damned. According to Newsweek:

Duncan has some influence with Gray, since the federal department recently announced that D.C. was one of the winners of the national Race to the Top school-reform competition, and stands to win $75 million if it implements the reforms Rhee’s administration outlined in its application... Duncan said he knows that Gray “knows what’s at stake” and “wants D.C. schools to continue to make progress.”

At this point, we don't know whether or not the man the Washington Post refers to as the "presumptive mayor" will fold under the pressure from Duncan and the foundations. But one thing seems clear. For Duncan, mayoral control really means control of the mayor.

Fenty/Rhee backwash

Anschutz

NYT columnist Bob Herbert rips into Fenty and Rhee for their "ham-handed approach to governing and disregard of the sensibilities of their constituents."

Mr. Fenty was cheered by whites for bringing in the cold-blooded Michelle Rhee as schools chancellor. She attacked D.C.’s admittedly failing school system with an unseemly ferocity and seemed to take great delight in doing it. Hundreds of teachers were fired and concerns raised by parents about Ms. Rhee’s take-no-prisoners approach were ignored. It was disrespectful. 

Duncan's revenge
Headline in the Washington Examiner: "D.C. risks losing Fed school funds -- Will forfeit $75m if reforms are halted." Translation, Arne Duncan, who campaigned actively for Fenty, is threatening revenge against newly-elected Mayor Vincent Gray and the District's mainly black voters who elected him, should Gray resist any of his predecessor's divisive school policies. This guy is out of control.

Also, take note of the role played by consultant Andrew Rotherham in all this. In the Examiner article, he's the barking dog for Duncan.

Anschutz bankrolled "Superman"

Finally there's Phillip Anschutz, the owner of the Examiner, which is nothing but a filthy little right-wing tabloid, disguised as a newspaper.  But Anshutz also bankrolled the hot anti-union propaganda film, Waiting for Superman. Just in case you thought this film was made only by a group of well-intentioned, but misguided liberals.

Anschutz is a far right-wing, evangelical billionaire who inherited his fortune from his father's oil business and who has become a media mogul, publisher of the Weekly Standard, the S.F. Examiner,  and owner of  L.A.'s Staples Center. He was also the force behind California's anti-gay initiative

"Payback is a . . . well, you know what they say. "

It was a "populist revolt" in D.C.

Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy let 'em have it today. 'Em being, the current version of D.C.'s "ruling troika," Mayor Fenty, Chancellor Rhee and Attorney General Nichols.

What happened Tuesday involved more than just the unseating of a mayor with an abrasive style. It was a populist revolt against Fenty's arrogant efforts to restructure government on behalf of a privileged few. The scheme was odious: re-create a more sophisticated version of the plantation-style, federally appointed three-member commission that ruled the city for more than a century until 1967.

It all makes for a kind of friendly fascism in which D.C. government serves the interest of business leaders and landed gentry.

D.C. voters make a statement

 As predicted, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty took a pounding from voters in yesterday's primary election, losing to Vincent Gray who received 53% of the vote to Fenty's 46%.

The vote was as much a rejection of Michelle Rhee's top-down, divisive, anti-teacher school-reform as it was of Fenty himself. It came despite frantic, last-minute campaigning from none other than the Sec. of Ed. Arne Duncan who has spent an inordinate amount of time recently, visiting schools with Rhee and Fenty, handing out obviously politically-motivated awards and grants, looking for photo ops and badly overstating the results of the Rhee reforms.

On the eve of the election Duncan told the press that "by any measure, by every measure, D.C. has made real and substantive progress" even though District schools saw math and reading scores drop in the last year--the very measures that Duncan and Rhee have put at the center of their reform.

But voters weren't buying Duncan's pitch and as a result, the vote represents an embarrassing defeat for Obama and Duncan and a rejection of their own Race To The Top. It should be noted that the president himself never endorsed Fenty and passed up several opportunities to speak out on the mayor's behalf despite Fenty's desperate plea for help.

Rhee's reform was also propped up with millions of dollars from power philanthropists like Walton and Broad who threatened to pull $75 million in foundation funding should Fenty lose the election. Pro-charter, pro-voucher, and anti-union groups like Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) also rallied behind Fenty and an anti-union film bashing the teacher unions and touting Rhee, Waiting for Superman, was released just before the election.

Fenty's only pockets of support were found n predominantly white, wealthier parts of the district where fewer voters send their children to public school. It was in the black precincts where Fenty really took a pounding. Gray even beat Fenty in his home precinct in Crestwood with 56 percent of the vote. According the Post,

...despite the mayor's frenetic, expensive efforts to promote his accomplishments in all eight wards, he was unable to reverse the widespread belief among black Washingtonians that he favored residents of predominantly white, wealthier neighborhoods. 

Gray did not directly address Rhee's future, saying only: 

"Make no mistake -- school reform will move forward in a Gray administration. And it will be done in a holistic way, with a strong, empowered chancellor who works with parents and teachers."

Someone quick, call Batman

A gang of evil billionaires is holding the school children in the nation's capitol hostage. A note says, "Vote for Fenty or else we will take away $75 million and bankrupt your schools."

Duncan does D.C.

Doesn't do politics, my...


Arne Duncan is walking the precincts with Mayor Fenty, desperately trying to drum up votes and support for the D.C. mayor's sinking re-election campaign and for his broom lady, Michelle Rhee. As election day draws near, he's spending every day he can in the District, using every means at his disposal, even dragging out awards from his closet to give to some D.C. school, as well as a big fat Race To the Top grant. Timing is everything, he hopes.

With less than a week before the District's hotly contested mayoral primary, Duncan was asked whether he was delivering an endorsement on behalf of President Obama, whom Fenty has asked for support.

"I don't do politics," Duncan said. "I'm the secretary of education." (WaPo)

Race to the Top: The Surge Phase II

Fallout from yesterday's grant announcements

Phase 2 of Race To The Top marks a new stage, and escalation, a surge (to borrow from past and current administration war rhetoric) in Arne Duncan's politically triangulated war on the schools. The early casualty reports are already trickling in.

It's clear now that last week's widely-criticized L.A. Times report, which published names and pictures of inner-city teachers and their supposed "value-added" test-score quotients, was no ill-considered aberration, but rather a calculated part of the surge. Duncan sat poised, press release at the ready, waiting to salute the Times board and dangle the prospect of Race To The Top funding if the public exposure of teachers continues. Of course, no RTTT money was forthcoming for bankrupt California. The Times' denigration of teachers and the teaching profession was not nearly enough to divert $700 million from politically hot-button states and the District of Columbia.

This morning's Times confirms all this with a follow-up by embedded hatchet-man/reporter Jason Song. 

The lack of public accountability in California's schools compared with those in some other states could have been a factor Tuesday in the state's failure to win any money in the federal government's competitive Race to the Top education grant program.

Duncan chimes in calling for more such public teacher exposures.

"The truth is always hard to swallow, but it can only make us better, stronger and smarter," according to remarks he plans to deliver in Little Rock, Ark. "That's what accountability is all about — facing the truth and taking responsibility."

The "truth" to Duncan is nothing more than a factoid--an equation--linking a child's standardized test score to an individual teacher. Hard-to-swallow? Sure, no credible researcher of educator buys into this crass, unethical, and probably illegal use of questionable school data.

One interesting sidelight in the Song piece: Gates Foundation implant, Deputy Supt. John Deasy, grabbing control of the district's rudder from Supt. Contines, voiced his support for value-added, albeit, a softer version than Duncan's. In a memo Tuesday to the Board of Education, Deasy said that a teacher's value-added score should NOT be reported publicly and that including it in a performance review "would shield it" from public disclosure. He also said the district had had "positive" preliminary talks with the unions on a new evaluation system. UTLA prez Duffy seems to confirm this, as well as his own willingness to comply with the surge.


Getting crass in D.C.


Speaking of crass, Duncan's election campaigning for D.C.'s Mayor Fenty, the morning of the grant announcement, followed up by a $75 million RTTT grant, has to raise more questions about granting process itself. The power-philanthropists underwriting Chancellor Rhee's crumbling teacher-bashing reforms, have threatened to pull the plug if Fenty loses in the upcoming elections.


Rhee used the grant award to make claims way beyond the award's scope:

"Winning this grant is a testament to the extraordinary progress we've made as a city," Rhee said in a statement issued early this afternoon. "The U.S. Department of Education clearly recognizes that students in Washington D.C. are progressing at an unprecedented pace, and that the reforms DCPS has instituted are working and should be expanded." (D.C. Schools Insider)

More fallout from the surge to follow. Stay tuned.

If anyone had any doubts...

Nothing subtle about this

Thanks to Turque at Wapo for pointing out the obvious:

If any doubt remained about where the Obama Administration's sympathies are in the District primary, they were eliminated at a morning photo op that preceded the official RTTT announcement by the Department of Education. Education Secretary Arne Duncan started his day with Fenty and Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee, leading a walk of children from Lincoln Park to Maury Elementary on Capital Hill to tout a federal initiative promoting safe routes to school. 

Broom Lady takes it from there:

"Winning this grant is a testament to the extraordinary progress we've made as a city," D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee said. "The U.S. Department of Education clearly recognizes that students in Washington, D.C., are progressing at an unprecedented pace, and that the reforms DCPS has instituted are working and should be expanded."

The impact of IMPACT

Here in D.C., Chancellor Rhee is sailing through the floodgates, opened when union leaders signed on to a bogus contract. The agreement allowed pay increases based mainly on the good will of a few private foundations, in exchange for Rhee's ability to fire teachers in mass, using the IMPACT evaluation process. IMPACT is mainly an attempt to link student test scores with individual teachers. It also includes 22 other measurement points which are supposed to be assessed in a 30 minute-observation by a master-teacher.  

Valerie Strauss shows why the entire process in suspect in this post on the Answer Sheet.

A number of teachers never got the full five evaluations, apparently because a number of master teachers hired to do the jobs quit, according to sources in the school system. But even if they all were, let’s look closely at this: In 30 minutes, a teacher is supposed to demonstrate all 22 different teaching elements. What teacher demonstrates 22 teaching elements -- some of which are not particularly related -- in 30 minutes? Suppose a teacher takes 30 minutes to introduce new material and doesn’t have time to show. ... Oh well. Bad evaluation.

In many cases, Rhee is even ignoring her own evaluation process and firing teachers and school staff arbitrarily, in hopes of impressing her corporate and foundation patrons and getting a leg-up on Race To The Top funding.

Rhee has used the vagaries of the contract to fire the first volley in what's bound to be a full-scale war, with the firing of 241 teachers. So far, the war has been one-sided with only Rhee's side on the attack. Hopefully, that will change.

Oh good, they found the $39 million in D.C.

"We had to open things up and move some things around."-- Mayor Fenty

WaPo's Bill Turque reports that D.C. district crats have "found" the $39 million they needed to pay for Rhee's bogus contract. Was it in a drawer somewhere? Stuck to somebody's shoe? No, it will come from cuts to after-school programs, and stim $$$ that should have gone to pay salaries of hundreds of laid-off teachers.

Private foundations have promised to pick up $21 million of the tab. Of course, they promise lots of things. D.C. teachers are being asked to abandon all remaining job protections in the contract in exchange for a one-time salary increase. They have to hope that the foundations keep their promise and sustain their funding (which they've made contingent on Rhee staying in D.C.). And if Rhee decides to fire a few hundred more? Well, I guess they don't get the promised raise.

Union prez George Parker calls that "good news" for teachers. Hey George, that condo in Florida is still on the market.

Bloomberg: "We're going to have people in the streets..."

Mayoral Out of Control News

During last week’s radio address, Mayor Bloomberg sounded the alarm:

“they want to have this slush fund to train parents so that parents can disrupt the schools. I want our principals and our teachers to run the classroom…. [C]an you imagine?! We’re going to have people on the streets to tell our police department how to work? No, we don’t want to do that.”

Bloomberg was referring to a portion of the revised Better Schools Act that calls for the creation of a center for parent and student service and empowerment. The center would educate parents and students about ways to get involved in the school system and would encourage more participation in parent-teacher associations and school leadership teams.

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Then comes this item from the NYT reporting that as classrooms grow more crowded, New York public schools have been told to stop independently hiring teaching assistants with money raised by parents.

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How Mayor B gets charter scores up

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If Fenty is re-elected...

Harry Jaffe at WashingtonExaminer.com on Rhee's tenure

Rhee is here for the long haul. She's counting on Adrian Fenty getting elected to another term, which would give her six more years to remake the schools. "At the end of the second term," she tells me, "there's a good chance the achievement gap between white and black students will be closed."

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Gerald Bracey at Huffington: Mayoral control is "the new tyranny."

Jerks convention at Morning Joe

"Freeing teachers" from their collective bargaining rights...

It was D.C. Mayor Fenty exchanging banter and giggles with education "reformers" Joe Scarborough and Pat Buchanan .

Scarborough: "Is Congress standing in the way of some reform by getting in the way of charter schools?
Fenty: "Not yet...What we're hoping is that they will...incentivize public schools to do what charter schools have done. That is, to use privatization more. To free teachers from the burden of contracts."
Buchanan: "What you're saying in effect, we've got to bust the union."
Fenty: "You've got to do things differently."
Buchanan (laughing): "But why not be honest about it and just say, you can't have a union any more?"