Rhee the Reformer: A Cautionary Tale

By the brilliant Teacher Sabrina (Shupe)

I know up on top, you are seeing great sights,
But down at the bottom, it doesn’t look right.
At home, I struggle with my son’s errant math,
But on your new tests, he’s proficient at that!”

Pilsen neighborhood school kids ingesting toxic lead

Alderman Solis, supported by Rahm, is taking big bucks from polluters

Today's Trib reports highly toxic levels of lead found in schools in Chicago's heavily Mexican Pilsen neighborhood.

Residents in Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood complained for years about metallic-tasting smoke rolling down their narrow streets but had little evidence it was harmful. Now they have proof.

Perez Elementary and Juarez High School sit in the middle of one of the city's most toxic areas where lead is being poured into the air by polluters like: H. Kramer & Co., Crawford Power Plant, Fisk Power Plant, United Scrap Metal, Ames Metal, and yes-- UIC.

Why is all this only now coming to light after years of school children being poisoned by toxic lead? Part of the reason is that there's a hotly contested aldermanic election  taking place with challenger Cuahutemoc "Temoc" Morfin taking on incumbent and Daley machine operative Danny Solis. Solis enjoys the backing of Mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel who has opened his war chest to pay for Solis' TV ads.

Morfin, an underdog who garnered enough support to force the heavily-funded Solis into a runoff, has been out front in exposing the lead polluters and pressuring Solis to do the same.

Problem is, Solis is virtually on the payroll of at least the three biggest toxic polluters. Can he now suddenly pretend to bite the hand that's feeding him?

BTW, Morfin has won support from the Chicago Teachers Union. 

April's fools

Finn, far right.

No joke, Finn is stil a teacher basher

Always tops on my list of April fools is Checker Finn, wing-nut-in-chief at the Fordham Institute's stink tank. His April 1 riffs are never as clever as he and his mentee, Mike Petrilli, would like to think. This year's spoof features a faux Finn book cover with this description:

In this inspiring motivational book, patterned after some of the more celebrated works of Tony Robbins and Deepak Chopra, Fordham’s Chester E. Finn, Jr. walks hand-in-hand with America’s teachers down the path to self-discovery and self-actualization (reuniting with Diane Ravitch along the way). Through the book’s pages, emotionally-abused teachers will confront our nation’s long history of teacher bashing and overcome bullies who assert that collective-bargaining rights “should not be sacred” and that “ineffective teachers should be let go.” Come step with Fordham and the universe and let us heal your karmic soul. 

Apparently Finn thinks thousands of teachers losing their jobs, health benefits and collective-bargaining rights at the hands of T-Party governors is a real knee-slapper. Notice how he even tries to drag his old pal Diane Ravitch back into the ditch. Oh stop please, Chester. You're killing me. 

More April folly

It's hard to tell whether this one is a bad joke or simply for-real Libertarian goofyness (it's always difficult).  Something called the Sam Adams Alliance has made Michelle Rhee a finalist for their National Activism Award.

The fact that we can't tell if this is a spoof or not, shows how far to the right Rhee has drifted since she was run out of D.C. by the voters. Rhee is now splitting her time between a consulting gig with T-Party governor Rick Scott in Florida and running her supposed billion-dollar, anti-union Students First campaign  (look out kids) with Gates and Broad money. While her bank account may be growing, her political capital is dwindling rapidly following USA Today's exposure of her fraudulent test-score gains in D.C. and her insulting responses to her critics during her Tavis Smiley interview. She even embarrassed long-time Rhee apologist Jay Mathews. Not funny, Michelle.

Then of course, there's that power wedding to worry about.

Good read--No joke

Tom Hayden on Samantha Power, the voice behind Obama’s Libya action.” Bombing for human rights. Remember, Obama shelved her after she called Hillary Clinton a “monster” during the 2008 presidential primaries. Now she's a member of Obama's National Security Council.

"Ching Chong, Ling Long, Ting Tong..."

Great parody of UCLA student Alexandra Wallace's Anti-Asian Rant



h/t Russo

IN MY MAILBOX

We have a great department chair. Here's what she sent us this morning:

Hello EPSR Faculty,

I am forwarding the email below and attached flyer for your information.

Thank you.

Dr. Proweller

Amira Proweller, Ph.D.
Associate Professor and Chair
Department of Educational Policy Studies and Research School of Education DePaul University

March 29, 2011

Dear Friend of Higher Education,

I am writing to ask you to join in an effort to stop the attacks on public education and on our universities' education programs.

I invite you and your colleagues and students to join Save Our Schools March & National Call to Action. This national grassroots organization began as an effort by classroom teachers to stand together against the destructive, corporate-driven, free-market reforms that are being foisted on our K-12 public schools. Three of the founding members of our organization are professors of education in Maryland, Connecticut, and New Mexico. Many of our new members are professors of education, as well as college students majoring in education.

Although our mission began over two years ago as an effort to prevent the reauthorization of the worst aspects of No Child Left Behind, we believe it is time for all of us with a professional commitment to education to speak with one voice.

I am writing to ask you, as the chairperson of your department, to share my letter with your faculty and students. Please visit our website at www.saveourschoolsmarch.org , where you will find our list of endorsers and our guiding principles. Please post the attached flyer on your faculty and student bulletin boards.

We invite your faculty members and students to sign up through our webpage and join with us to defend public education and our profession. We invite all of you to join us in Washington, D.C. this summer for Four Days of Action, July 28 -31, which includes our march on July 30. If either your department or your individual faculty members or any student associations wish to endorse us, we will be adding a new endorsement page on our website where we will list endorsements related only to higher education. Endorsements can be e-mailed to us through the e-mail link on our website.

Only by standing together can we awaken the public and our elected officials to the dangerous movement to privatize large sectors of public education and to demoralize and weaken our profession. Our schools are at risk, the public sector is at risk, and democracy is at risk. Please stand with us.

Sincerely,

Diane Ravitch

The Information Coordinator for Illinois is Helen Hoffman
saveschoolsil@gmail.com
--
Save Our Schools March and National Call to Action

Mathews says Rhee made "stupid" remarks because she didn't have time to read USA Today story

"I was stupid."

Michelle Rhee tells her pal Jay Mathews that her remarks about D.C. test cheating were "stupid." Mathews adds, "thoughtless" and "insulting." But he's still making excuses for her.

"I sensed from my talk with Rhee that one reason she misspoke on Monday was that she had not had time to read either the USA Today [written in part by Mathews' wife] story or the investigators’ reports, or to probe the weaknesses of test security protocols in Washington and other districts."

Right Jay. She's much to busy to read the article she knew Tavis Smiley would ask her about. After all, there's all that consulting for teacher-bashing T-Party Gov. Scott in Florida, plus a wedding coming up. 

Boring double-talk on testing

Speaking at a townhall event in Washington, D.C. President Obama said that too much testing makes education boring, and that performance should be measured in more ways than test scores:

"Too often what we have been doing is using these tests to punish students or to, in some cases, punish schools," the president told students and parents at a town hall hosted by the Univision Spanish-language television network at Bell Multicultural High School in Washington, D.C.

"All you’re learning about is how to fill out a little bubble on an exam and little tricks that you need to do in order to take a test and that’s not going to make education interesting." --  Forbes

Following the speech, Obama pushed his ed secretary Arne Duncan to plan the next wave of Race To the Top grants which force school districts to fire teachers and close schools based on standardized test scores.

Classic administration double-talk. It's getting boring.

The money behind school reform

Proposed TEPCO plant on Texas Gulf coast.

Disaster capitalists Gates, Buffett...

Whenever there's an environmental disaster in the world, I always look to see how deeply Bill Gates, his partners, and his foundation are involved. The Gates Foundation's investments in Nigeria have helped turn much of that country into an unlivable, oil-polluted wasteland.

Gates got off scott free after the massive BP oil spill in the Gulf, even though his foundation owns millions of shares of BP and his hedge-fund school reform partners Warren Buffett and Whitney Tilson own NALCO the company that makes COREXIT, the dispersant that is even more harmful to the environment than the oil.

Now comes the horrific nuclear disaster at Fukushima which has even greater world-wide implications. Gates has been among the loudest champions of building more nukes in this country. He and his foundation have billions of dollars invested in nuclear development, here and around the world.

The reactors at Fukushima were built by Gates partner, G.E. and operated by TEPCO. TEPCO, which is being bashed by the Japanese government for spreading lies and misinformation in order to protect themselves and their investors from liability, is currently building more nukes down in South Texas. Partners in the South Texas project include--yes, you guessed it-- Gates and Buffett.

Gates is also the largest single owner and board chairman of TerraPower, Washington state's nuclear energy company. Other TerraPower investors include, Microsoft, Apple and Intel to Sony and Nokia to Google and eBay — that have poured about $5 billion into Gates' nuke projects.

His partner in the nuclear power industry is the Japanese company, Toshiba and Toshiba along with NRG Energy and G.E. are the direct partners with TEPCO in the U.S.and Japanese nuke business.

Warren Buffett, owns Constellation Energy--67% of which is nukes.

Gates recently put $35 million into Charles River Ventures and Khosla Ventures to build nukes.

It it any wonder then that U.S. politicians, including Pres.Obama are still singing, "NUKE BABY, NUKE" and "DRILL BABY, DRILL"? There's lots of reasons for Gates and his nuke partners to exert influence over pols in both parties. Among them, huge corporate tax breaks. G.E., the nation's largest corporation, pays only about 12% of its earnings in taxes. Don't you wish you were taxed at that rate? Gates does them one better. By investing so heavily through his $36 billion foundation, he is taxed at about a 1% rate on profits from corporate investments. Bad news for Gates--the rate may soon go up to 1.9%.

Finally, it's worth thinking about how much public school reform and public schooling itself, have become dependent of these non-taxable profits gained from these dirty and destructive Gates Foundation investments.

How Deasy will decide who's a good teacher

Here's his value-added formula

Want to know how L.A.'s incoming supt. John Deasy (the man from Gates) is going to sort good teachers from bad? How he's going to decide who gets fired and who stays? Who has their careers destroyed? Who will get paid? How much?

It's all right here:

y = Xβ + Zv + ε where β is a p-by-1 vector of fixed effects; X is an n-by-p matrix; v is a q-by-1 vector of random effects; Z is an n-by-q matrix; E(v) = 0, Var(v) = G; E(ε) = 0, Var(ε) = R; Cov(v,ε) = 0. V = Var(y) = Var(y - Xβ) = Var(Zv + ε) = ZGZ^T + R.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Marcus Yam for The New York Times

A sign at 168th St. and Broadway in Manhattan announcing enrollment for KIPP Star Elementary, a charter school.

Educator Takes On Charter Chain

"There is a quiet but fierce battle going on in education today, between the unions that represent the public school teachers and the hedge-fund managers who finance the big charter chains, between those who trust teachers to assess a child’s progress and those who trust standardized tests, and occasionally it flares out into the open over something as seemingly minor as the location of a school." -- Michael Winerip, NYT

Biden visits Delaware high school

Biden acknowledged that “beating up unions” had become en vogue for some, but credited the key role unions were playing in improving Howard High. “Do you know what these guys did?” Biden asked. “They said, ‘We’ll take a chance.’" -- Education Votes

Experience makes teachers better

"Having $40 billion or $50 billion does not mean you know how to engage, entertain, inspire, motivate and educate a classroom of 25 10- and 11-year-olds for 6½ hours each day. Have any of these people even set foot in a classroom in the last 20 or 30 years, other than for the occasional photo-op?" -- Edward Johnson, teacher at West Elementary School in Sycamore, Il 

Al L.A. rally

"This is a direct attack" on all unions and the entire middle class, Mitchell shouted, warning that similar policies could soon be introduced by politicians in California, which is grappling with an estimated $26-billion deficit. "An injury to one is an injury to us all!" -- Mahlon Mitchell, president of the Professional Fire Fighters of Wisconsin.

Florida for sale

"The Florida Legislature proved this past week, once and for all, that it is the utter Whore of Babylon." -- St. Pete Times columnist, Howard Trolxer

A New Poem for Chicago by Luis J. Rodriguez

 

A Hungry Song in the Shadows

When I think about Chicago’s first settlers, migrants, jobseekers,

who sought haven or the hope of one,

I think about a place fierce with wails, noises in all decibels,

tongues from all reaches, and how this is not just a city,

but a dream state of brick and chain-link fences, where poetry clatters

along with the El train on iron rails, where temples hold every

belief and street corners every color, a city that nourishes all palates,

holds all thoughts, and still contains the seed of this vital idea:

In accord with nature, all is possible. This is a city that steam built.

That muscle and sweat solidified into a church

of organized labor. Where a swampy onion field in a few generations

could become home to the brightest and most jagged skyline,

where fossil fuels are holy water and smokestacks and silos remain

as soot-stained monuments to industry—from horse-drawn plows,

to the foulest stockyards, the roar of combustion engines, the rattle

of metal-tipped tools, and smoke-curling big rigs streaming along

cluttered expressways and upturned streets. I came to this city on my knees,

laden with heartaches, bitter in the shadows, seeking a thousand voices

that spoke in one voice, where steel no longer reigned, but where open mics

and poetry slams kept the steel in our verses, lamenting a life of work,

in a time of no work, and where the inventive and inspiring

could finally burst through the cement viaducts and snowy terrains.

Now we are artists or we die. From the fractured neighborhoods where

bootblacks and news hawking boys once held sway, to this daunting

gentrified metropolis of ghosts, toxic waste, and countless poor ripped

from their housing projects, three-flat graystones, or trash-lined

bungalows, yet nothing can truly uproot the uprooted. The energy for what

Chicago can become is buried inside people, in callings, passions,

and technologies, but only if this manufactured garden aligns

with real nature, no longer limited, finite, fixed on scarcity, but abundant,

cooperative, regenerative, like a song across the lakeshore, blooming

with lights, music, dance, banners, and words into a cornucopia

of potentials, possibilities, even the impossible. It’s an imagination

for the intrinsic beauty and bounty in all things.

Chicago. Clean. Just. Free. It’s the city we’ve wept and bled to see.

c/s
www.luisjrodriguez.com

Spring training and the death of small schools

I was in Ft. Myers Wednesday, where we had a chance to meet fantastic teacher/parent/activist and tweeter Bonnie Cunard, a leader in Florida's Save Our Schools movement. After that, we decided to head over a few blocks to City of Palms Park, the spring training home of the Boston Red Sox.

It's a beautiful night and the Sox are hosting Tampa Bay. But on our way, I have to pull the car over when the cell phone rings. It's Linda Lutton from WBEZ radio telling me that Chicago's interim schools CEO, Terry Mazany is going to announce up to 20 school closings the next day, including the remaining small schools at Bowen High, which we -- the Small Schools Workshop -- helped start. Linda wanted to know what I thought about all that and I told her in the most direct way I could.

******

The small schools at Bowen were originally conceived, organized and led by teachers with lots of support from the school's principal and its Local School Council, headed by Neil Bosanko. They were trying to deal with rising dropout rates and endemic violence in and around the school, by building smaller learning communities that would hopefully make students more visible through personalization. They would also try to give teachers greater responsibility, autonomy and control of their classroom environments while helping them organize into collaborative teams.

The small schools initially showed great potential. TAP scores in reading and math rose steadily for four years and by 1999 were above the level required to lift Bowen off of academic probation. Then, in 2000, TAP scores fell back a few points in reading and math.

Schools CEO Paul Vallas moved immediately to put the entire school under his failed intervention plan  and essentially liquidated Bowen's small schools, putting the entire high school on a test-prep regimen. Demoralization set in, dozens of teachers resigned in protest and Principal Alejandra Alvarez was fired. Things soon turned chaotic. Vallas' intervention was a disaster, and not just for Bowen. The whole story was told in a 2001 Catalyst piece by Jody Temkin, "Bowen High: School's fledgling progress 'destroyed' by intervention."
.

A year later, the Gates Foundation came to town and decided to invest in its own version of small schools. Local foundations, including the Chicago Community Trust, with Terry Mazany in the lead, joined in. The Trust received most of the Gates money and became the home of the new Chicago High School Redesign Initiative (CHSRI). A meeting at Bowen was soon called by CHSRI leaders who informed a group of remaining teacher leaders that small schools were back in vogue and that they would be expected to submit new proposals for reconstructing the small schools if Bowen was to receive any Gates money.

This top-down approach was doomed from the start, as was Gates' entire small-schools strategy. Today's announcement by Mazany was simply the final nail in the coffin. As my brother pointed out today in a blog post-- how ironic it was that Mazany was now closing the small schools simply because they were small.

As for the school's continued decline in test scores---well, just look at the deteriorating conditions around the school community where jobs were once plentiful and local steel mills used to produce 1/6 of the world's steel. Now Bowen sits amid a post-industrial wasteland, high in unemployment, poverty, crime and gang violence. As I explained to Linda Lutton, until something is done to relieve these conditions, no single school reform could be expected to produce high test scores. Small schools were never posed by us as a panacea, a singular cure for the so-called achievement gap, the way charters are currently being promoted.

******

So that was my response to Lutton. Here's the quote of mine WBEZ went with today.

"All the ideas that were the foundation of the small schools movement--like personalization, like kids staying together with teachers a long time so teachers could get to know them and connect curriculum with kids' own experiences—all those ideas are kind of being washed away to save money," says Michael Klonsky, director of the Small Schools Workshop and a faculty member in DePaul University's School of Education... Klonsky says the experiment shows kids need more than good schools. Their living conditions and the state of their neighborhoods must be improved as well, he said. 

 ******

Not a bad sound-byte. And if I would have left it at that during my phone interview with Linda, we probably could have made it to the game on time. But by the second inning, we were met with a SOLD OUT sign (how appropriate!) on the ticket window, and even the scalpers had retired for the night. At least I got to take a picture with the statue of the "Splendid Splinter," Ted Williams.

Lessons from the International Summit on Teaching

The great WaPo columnist Valerie Strauss has been reporting on the first ever International Summit on Teaching, convened last week in New York City. She takes note of the key difference between current U.S. ed policies and politics and those countries that are leading the world, like Finland and South Korea. The difference being that in those countries, teachers are "well-respected, well-paid, well-supported with resources and development, unionized, and considered capable of designing curriculum and lesson plans themselves without interference from non-educators.'

Strauss follows up with a commentary on the Summit by Stanford's Linda Darling-Hammond, who President Obama rightfully should have chosen to be our secretary of education over the corporate toadie who currently sits atop the DOE. Writes LDH:

For contrast, wade through Arne Duncan's (DOE's) murky, bureaucratic report on the Summit and see how all the meeting's important lessons sailed right past them.

"How poignant for Americans to listen to this account while nearly every successful program developed to support teachers’ learning in the United States is proposed for termination by the Obama administration or the Congress... These small programs total less than $1 billion annually, the cost of half a week in Afghanistan."

The view from Florida

More testing madness

I've been in Florida all week, trying to get a handle on Gov. Scott's train wreck of a school reform. The latest fiasco has to do with the state's testing madness and a new law that forces schools to evaluate and pay teachers on the basis of students' FCAT scores. The last time the legislature passed such a bill, it had to be repealed when the state ran out of money and couldn't afford "merit " pay.

The latest problem is that, for the second year in a row, the state can't get test scores back in time to enter student grades, allow seniors to graduate or figure teachers' pay into their budgets. What a mess!

Florida law requires test results be available within a week, but the state says it won't have them ready until after schools have closed for the summer in many districts. Last spring's late FCAT scores forced the Lee district to recall staff from summer vacations to process the data.

This year they're not blaming vendor, Minnesota-based NCS Pearson. Pearson was fined $14.7 million by the state for last spring's six-week delay in releasing Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test scores. Instead they say, the tests are just tied up in bureaucracy.
 
Among the repercussions for "merit pay" -- how is a teacher supposed to budget and plan things when they may not learn a student's peformance until June?

The civil rights revolution in the South never really arrived in Southern California,

Gary Orfield on failed L.A. deseg

Southern California is home to what is by far the nation's largest population of Latinos, the second largest Asian population and the West's largest population of African Americans but... 

"If one compares the outcomes in the "dropout factory" schools, where the major product is dropouts or students totally unprepared for college, with the kind of opportunities that exist in schools serving affluent communities, it seems they could be serving different countries. The fact that California's level of public funding for schools has become one of the worst in the U.S. makes the private resources more affluent communities can give their schools all the more important."  -- Huffington

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

David Orr -- "Chicago ain't broke..."

Chicago mayor's TIF slush fund

“There’s a giant myth being spread all across this land ... that local governments have no money, they need to take it out of the backs of teachers, take away their pensions. Chicago ain’t broke. Chicago has put $2 billion tax dollars that the public doesn’t know about into these TIFs and there’s another $500 million being added every year. There needs to be a moratorium on these TIFs because there has been enormous abuse. They are supposed to go to blighted areas. It’s gone to Willis Towers. It’s gone to Grossinger. It’s gone to other major corporations. As we uncover the mayor’s slush fund, which this is, we’re going to discover that money can go to help the schools.” -- Cook County Clerk David Orr

New study: NCLB is a total bust

"These methods satisfy the adults because you can walk away and say, 'I really kicked ass - I made them abolish their school,' " said Jennings, president of the group that conducted the study. "But instead of shaking up the school, it may be that we need to improve instruction."-- S.F. Chronicle

Bloomberg's parent liaisons

We're looking for "Happy Harrys,” and not “Angry Sallys." -- New York Times

Paying Florida's teachers based on test scores

"Currently, annual teacher evaluations are subjective and very few teachers receive negative reviews. For the first time, an objective measure of teacher effectiveness — based on standardized tests that measure student learning — will be part of annual evaluations." -- Jeb Bush in the Chicago Tribune

At my old high school

This morning, 3,400 students from Hamilton High School in Los Angeles (my alma mater) are walking out of school.

This is not a school wide "Ditch Day." We are walking out not to avoid our classrooms, but to save them. To protest the terrible budget cuts our school could face. To protest the 22 pink slips handed out to our beloved teachers, to protest the potential closure of our school library. We are walking out to protest the increase of class sizes by 50% or more. And we will walk out to stop our magnets from facing a 90% loss in funding. LAUSD stands to lose $500 million in funding.

In the aftermath of Obama's embrace of Jeb Bush

I'm back in Florida this week where Gov. Scott is set to sign the bill that would make state’s public school teachers lose their job security and work for "merit pay" based on student's FCAT scores. Of course this can only apply to teachers teaching in subjects tested on the FCAT. T-bagger Scott , encouraged by his chief ed consultant Michelle Rhee, is behind the teacher-bashing bill.

It creates a statewide teacher evaluation and merit pay system in 2014. New teachers hired after July 1 will have no tenure. At the same time teachers lose their right to collective bargaining and due process. The legislation is the first one that was sent to the Republican governor after he took office in January. A similar bill by his more moderate predecessor, Charlie Christ, was vetoed in the face of widespread opposition from teachers and the union.

These changes were initiated by former Governor Jeb Bush who was embraced earlier this month by President Obama--a signal for Scott and the legislature that the new bill met with administration approval.

TWITTER FIGHT!

I don't think so.

Somehow Diane Ravitch and I ended up in a Twitter skirmish today with the Fordham Institute's Mike Petrilli. Petrilli is claiming that there's no privatization of public schools going on. Being a protege of conservative think-tank guru Checker Finn, he has learned the art of defining his way out of arguments, playing word games instead of getting to the heart of the matter. I already knew this going in, but bit anyway.

Petrilli fires the first shot at Ravitch:

Diane, name me one "reformer" who wants to privatize public schools.  

Ravitch quickly names not one, but 6, before she runs out of Tweet space:  George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Margaret Spellings, Michelle Rhee, Bill Gates, Arne Duncan=Corporate education reform.

 

I simply retweet Ravitch's answer, which draws Petrilli's fire towards me, narrowly nicking my Tweet finger. 

Michael Petrilli: None of those folks want to "privatize" public education.

 

I whirl and fire back:

Mike, what else would you call closing thousands of public schools & handing them over to private operators?

 

And again: 

Not to mention after-school programs, food services, security, curric. devlp., special ed, sports programs...

 

Oh, I ran out of space before I could mention tax-free real estate ownership of land including the ability of charter companies to leverage low-interest loans and pay execs huge compensation packages. Don't worry, Ravitch will bring that one up.

 

OK, so it's not a fatal blow. Petrilli ducks and fires with both barrels using the old re-definition gambit:

Michael Petrilli If the schools are open to the public, supported by public $$ and accountable to the public, they are public.

 

Uggh, I'm hit. He's got a point. But it's a weak one. It barely grazes me. Diane comes to my aid:

Diane Ravitch When charter schools pay $400,000 to CEO, when they fight public audits, when they kick kids out...not public.

 

I double-team: CMOs aren't accountable to the public, even admit they're private when it comes to NLRB and unions.

Then Petrilli goes where you knew he would:

Your definition of a public school seems to be "Staffed by members of public employee unions."

 

Now, I admit, I'm getting pissed: 

Save the union-baiting Mike. Not a question of who staffs them. It's who controls them, profits, signs pay checks

Nuts, I let him off too easy on that one. It takes a privatizer to ban unions when the public system is based on collective bargaining rights for teachers. It's precisely this union hating which puts Petrilli in league with the worst of the privatizers. Oh well, it was in the heat of battle. I'll get him next time. 

Diane Ravitch chimes in:  Privately managed deregulated charters are privatization. Decimates public sector. Nepotism ok.

 

I'm beginning to realize that this debate isn't moving anybody. It's an argument over the definition of the word privatization, and Petrilli won't move past that. He doesn't want to say he supports privatization and therefore is an enemy of public schools. It's only their union-free management he's after. Fordham is involved in the operation and authorization of privately-run charter schools in Ohio. 

 

But before signing off, I call on the old guy, Sun Tzu. Remember-- my enemy's enemy is my friend:

If u don't think they're private, Mike, your argument is with them--not me.

A Chicago charter school that has received more than $23 million in public money since opening in 2004 is arguing that it is a private institution, a move teachers say is designed to block them from forming a union. In papers filed with the National Labor Relations Board, attorneys for the Chicago Math and Science Academy on the city's North Side say the school should be exempt from an Illinois law that grants employees of all public schools the right to form unions for contract negotiations.-- Chicago Tribune, "Charter school says it's private"

Take that, Petrilli.  So far no response.

Quotables

La Cucaracha

"In Madison a new governor, Scott Walker, is applying the Rahm Emanuel axiom that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste." -- Michael Miner, Chicago Reader

******

David Brooks on Obama: "we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pants." -- TNR 

******

"There is something deeply shameful about continuing to use 9/11 as a justification for remaining in Afghanistan." -- Jeremy Scahill

******

"Walker kicked the hornet’s nest..." Victor Kamber, The Hill