Radio show on Al Sharpton's involvement in corporate ed reform and overturning term limits

Gary Glennell Toms, known as "The G-Man", interviewed Leonie Haimson last week for his radio show about the involvement of Al Sharpton in school reform, when Sharpton allied himself with Joel Klein and Michael Bloomberg by supporting charter schools, attacking teacher unions, and keeping quiet when Bloomberg successfully overturned term limits.  He was apparently influenced by large contributions from Bloomberg and hedge-funders to his organization, funneled through the political arm of Democrats for Education Reform, and Joel Klein's Education Equality Project, money which helped keep him out of jail when he was indicted for tax evasion.  We wrote about this previously here and here.  You can find Gary's other radio shows on YouTube here.  The interview is below.  Enjoy!

What the NY Post left out: how Sharpton was persuaded to ally himself with Joel Klein & stay mum on term limits

Today, the NY Post ran a story about how Al Sharpton accepts money from corporations in exchange for shielding them of accusations of racism.  It contained nothing very new to report, except for Sharpton having met with Amy Pascal of Sony after the company's embarrassing email breach – though the article offered no evidence Sony has paid him a dime.  

Presumably the Post is targeting Sharpton because of his association with the Mayor: “Sharpton, who now boasts a close relationship with Obama and Mayor de Blasio, is in a stronger negotiating position than ever.”  Yet the main example cited in the article happened years ago, during the Bloomberg administration:

In 2008, Plainfield Asset Management, a Greenwich, Conn.-based hedge fund, made a $500,000 contribution to New York nonprofit Education Reform Now. That money was immediately funneled to the National Action Network [Sharpton’s organization].

The donation raised eyebrows. Although the money was ostensibly to support NAN’s efforts to bring “educational equality,” it also came at a time that Plainfield was trying to get a lucrative gambling deal in New York.

Plainfield had a $250 million stake in Capital Play, a group trying to secure a license to run the coming racino at Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens. Capital Play employed a lobbyist named Charlie King, who also was the acting executive director of NAN.

Left out of this account is the most interesting part of the story.  It's not just that the money for Sharpton was ostensibly for “equity” and funneled through Education Reform Now, the non-profit arm of Joe William’s pro-charter Democrats for Education Reform. The larger context is that ERN was merely a pass-through, and the money was directed to Sharpton through the Education Equity Project, founded by then-Chancellor Joel Klein, in exchange for Sharpton agreeing  to co-chair the group and adopt Klein’s aggressive anti-teacher, pro-charter stance.  Juan Gonzalez extensively reported the tangled story of how these funds went to benefit Sharpton in 2009, and how they helped him stay out of jail when he owed millions in taxes to the IRS.  

Also left out of the Post article is how Bloomberg, the Gates and Broad Foundations also put big money into EEP to Sharpton's benefit, though the DOE flack, David Cantor denied any involvement of either Bloomberg or Gates in emails he sent to our NYC Ed list serv, when I speculated about the involvement of both.  Perhaps he was lied to as well.  See my timeline of events here. In fact, Sharpton’s organization directly received a big portion of the $250,000 donation Mayor Bloomberg gave EEP, the day Bloomberg announced he would try to overturn term limits.  As a result, Sharpton never said a word against Bloomberg’s successful coup. 

Despite big infusions of cash and the coupling of Klein and Sharpton, EEP didn’t last long.  It held a  rally in DC on MLK day in January of 2009, at which Sharpton spoke.  After joining forces with Newt Gingrich, he and Klein met with President Obama.  The organization folded in 2011 when it merged with the similar corporate reform group, Stand For Children.  Sharpton had already left EEP by then, replaced by two Gates grantees, United Negro College Fund President Michael Lomax, and Janet Murguia of the National Council of La Raza. 

Perhaps the Post reporter's omissions are understandable, given that Klein now works for the Post’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, who is also a member of the Billionaire’s Boys Club, pushing for more charters along with his old friend and ally Bloomberg.  But the story should have been told nonetheless. In his new memoir, I highly doubt  Klein explains the full circumstances surrounding his cynical and mutually exploitative partnership with Sharpton.  I certainly didn't read this mentioned in any of the reviews.

Joel Klein's failed record as NYC Chancellor

Whatever favorable reviews Joel Klein has gotten for his new book, "Lessons of Hope" have mostly been written by people who did not experience his failed policies as NYC Chancellor.  If you want to read illuminating accounts, I recommend Diane Ravitch, Helen Zelon in the Observer, or Gary Rubinstein's blog, all of whom offer important reflections on Klein's record. 

I could write about the tremendous waste and corruption of the many multi-million dollar contracts he handed off so recklessly, for example to Wireless Generation for ARIS and/or Future Technology Associates.  I could write about his obvious mismanagement style, re-organizing the governance structure continually, creating more chaos and confusion than the steady hand the school district needed and deserved.  I could also write about his evident contempt for parents, teachers, and the law itself, with one of his favorite phrases when challenged being, "So sue me." 

But in the below I focus on the evidence that Klein himself would recognize as damning if he were to be intellectually consistent in his emphasis on test scores as the best measure of accountability:  the fact that NYC made less progress than any other city as measured by results on the federal assessments known as the NAEPs, except for Cleveland, over the course of his administration.

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Why I won't be watching Education Nation this year

In 2010, the first  year of Education Nation, NBC used the occasion to hype the propaganda film "Waiting for Superman" and  told prominent critics there was "no space" for them to speak on panels (Yong Zhao) or refused to make accommodations to enable them to be included (Diane Ravitch). They invited no public school parents, and their panel on teacher quality was moderated by Steve Brill, a journalist who made a second career out of attacking teacher unions and promoting charter schools, in articles full of exaggerated claims and factual errors. (See "Steve Brill's Imperviousness to the Facts.")  We sponsored a petition to NBC News,  urging them to involve more real life parents in the discussion, and I wrote a column in HuffingtonPost when I saw how biased and one-sided this indoctrination fest was threatening to be.

Indeed,  the vast majority of panelists appeared to have been pre-selected by the Gates and Broad Foundations, Education Nation's sponsors, who have spent billions trying to subvert democracy and have successfully imposed their rigid and damaging prescriptions on the nation's urban public schools.

The worst outrage was a panel discussion entitled, "Does Education Need a Katrina?" Though the name of the panel was changed after protests, it was still described to examine "the advantages to the New Orleans school district of starting over post-Katrina."  We even held a protest/press conference in the rain outside Rockefeller Center, where NBC housed the event, and snippets of interviews with the parents outside were used in the brilliant film, Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman.

The second year of Education Nation, in 2011, we again sponsored an email campaign to NBC News, asking them to featured a more balanced set of panelists.  This was the only year that Diane Ravitch was included as a speaker,  in a debate with Geoffrey Canada of the Harlem Children’s Zone. Yet most of the panelists were just as doctrinaire as the year before, and almost exclusively corporate reformers drawn from Gates-funded astroturf  organizations. 

I along with a handful of NYC parents were invited to sit in the audience during the panel on “parent advocacy”, which featured Chancellor Walcott and Ben Austin of the Parent Revolution (God help us). I pointed out that the voices of parents have never been shut out as much as they have under Mayor Bloomberg and Walcott.  I said that the Parent Trigger, or as Diane calls it, the Parent Tricker, is really a ruse to allow privatizers to take over the public schools.  In response, Austin accused me of being a puppet of the teachers union.  Mona Davids, head of the NYC Parents Union, strongly defended me. The video is here.

Last year, 2012,  was the worst of all.  This time, Education Nation was intent on promoting the film “Won’t Back Down,” produced by right wing ideologues, Philip Anschutz and Rupert Murdoch, again to convince the public that the Parent Trigger should be adopted in states around the country and that charters were the answer to the ills of inner-city schools.  Thankfully, this time reviewers caught on early how the movie was a naked piece of propaganda,and weren’t fooled like they were by Waiting For Superman.  We handed out our fact sheet on the movie to people waiting on line to get into Education Nation, and “Won’t Back Down” turned out to be a mega-flop with both critics and the public alike.   

While NBC had been offered the wonderful documentary, Brooklyn Castle, to feature instead, that film focused on an middle school in Brooklyn with a terrific chess team threatened by repeated budget cuts from the Bloomberg administration, which refused to pay for their trips to competitions even though they had the #1 chess team in the nation.  Clearly, this message did not resonate with the Gates Foundation or the other corporate reformers who argue that our urban schools are failing, that more resources don’t matter, and that we should turn them into charters instead.

Though I along a few other NYC parents were invited to sit in the audience during what was billed as “a parent engagement town hall” and had been promised we could ask questions, we had to endure an awful hour and a half of Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein and the stars of the movie “Won’t Back Down” spouting nonsense, selling their snake oil of charters and online learning.  Not a single parent in the audience was given an opportunity to speak.

Later than night we along with other parent groups crashed the red carpet premiere of the film, and our protest was mentioned in some of the stories by reporters there to cover the event.  We even got mentioned in the Hollywood Reporter – though they claimed the UFT was involved in the protest, which was false. In any case, I promised myself I would never force myself to listen in agony to the lies spread by one-sided Education Nation panels again.

This year, there were apparently a sprinkling of “dissident” voices of students and teachers at Sunday’s student and teacher Town halls, which is good; but next week, the line-up promises to be more of the same empty rhetoric about how our schools are failing, and what kids need is even more testing, Common Core, charter expansion and online learning.  Not coincidentally, this is the exact same agenda that the Gates foundation has been imposing on America’s schools with the help of their agents in the US Department of Education.   

The panelists will include Arne Duncan AND Michael Bloomberg, Chancellor Walcott AND LAUSD Superintendent John Deasy, David Coleman AND Jonah Edelman of Stand for Children, (or as some like to call it, Stand on Children) Jeb Bush AND Andrew Rotherham, and yes, once more Joel Klein, our former chancellor, hawking online learning as head of Amplify, Rupert Murdoch’s education tech division, all spouting the company line.  Clearly, the producers of Education Nation have proven themselves to be uneducable.

Will Bloomberg or Walcott be asked about how their education agenda has failed, according to the vast majority of New Yorkers, and how Bill de Blasio, the leading NYC candidate for mayor, has promised to reject their policies of privatization and test-based accountability? Will Deasy be asked about the fiasco of LA’s billion dollar  IPad initiative, or Joel Klein about the fact that his Amplify tablets were defective and  recalled by the Guilford schools?   

Will Joel Rose, head of the overhyped and super-expensive School of One, now renamed New Classrooms, be asked about the many studies and reports that show his program has faltered in nearly every school it has been tried?  Will any of them be asked about parents across the country rising up against high-stakes testing and  protesting inBloom, the devious Gates-funded plan to share children’s most private data with for-profit vendors? Don’t hold your breath.  I won’t hold mine, because I won’t be watching.

Shock Doctrine: five reasons not to trust the results of the new state tests

Dear parents: As you may have probably heard, the new state test scores were released to the press and they are disastrous. 

Only 31% of students in New York State passed the new Common Core exams in reading and math. More than one third -- or 36% -- of 3^rd graders throughout the state got a level I in English; which means they essentially flunked.  In NYC, only 26 percent of students passed the exams in English, and 30 percent passed in math – meaning they had a level 3 or 4.  Only 5% of students in Rochester passed.  

Though children’s individual scores won’t be available to parents until late August, I urge you not to panic when you see them.  My advice is not to believe a word of any of this. 

The new Common Core exams and test scores are politically motivated, and are based neither on reason or evidence.  They were pre-ordained to fit the ideological goals of Commissioner King and the other educrats who are intent on imposing damaging policies on our schools.  

Here are five reasons not to trust the new scores:

1-     1. The NY State Education Department has not been able to produce a decent, reliable exam with a credible scoring system in at least ten years. That’s why there have been wild gyrations from year to year in the percent of students making the grade.  For example, 77% of NYS students were at level 3 or 4 in English in 2009; this dropped to 53% in 2010 and 31% now. The last two years of exams created by Pearson have been especially disastrous; from the multiple errors in questions and scoring on the 2012 exams (including the infamous Pineapple passage)  to the epic fail of this year’s tests – which were too long, riddled with ambiguous questions and replete with commercial logos for products like Mug Root Beer.  Top students were unable to finish these shoddy exams, and many left in tears and had anxiety attacks.  To make things worse, the exams featured reading passages drawn straight from Pearson textbooks which were assigned to some students in the state and not to others.

2-     2. For nearly a decade, from at least 2003-2010, there was rampant test score inflation in NY state, with many of the same people who are now supporting the current low scores claiming with equal conviction that the earlier, rising test scores showed that NY State and NYC schools were improving rapidly.  The state test score bubble  allowed NYC Mayor Bloomberg to coast to a third term, renew mayoral control and maintain that his high-stakes testing regime was working, when the reality  was that, according to everyone who was paying attention, the exams had gotten overly predictable and the scoring too easy over time.  At the same time as the state exams showed huge increases, scores on the more reliable national exams called the NAEPs showed little progress. In fact, NYC made smaller gains on the NAEPs than nearly any other large school district in the country during these years.  

3.     3. The truth is that the new cut scores that determine the different proficiency levels on the state exams – which decide how many kids “pass” or are at Level 3 and 4 -- are arbitrary and set by Commissioner King.  He can set them to create the illusion that our schools are rapidly improving, as the previous Commissioner did, or he can set them to make it look that our public schools are failing, as King now is doing, to bolster support for his other policies.

4.     4. The primary evidence that Commissioner King now bases his overly-harsh cut scores upon is that the results are mirror the percent of students who test “proficient” or above on the NAEPs.  Yet while the NAEPs are reliable to discern trends in test scores, because they remain relatively stable over time, the cut scores that determine the various NAEP achievement levels are VERY controversial. See Diane Ravitch on how the NAEP’s benchmarks are “unreasonably high”; or this article that reveals that even the National Academy of Sciences has questioned the setting of the NAEP proficiency levels, and how many experts believe that level 2 on the NAEPs – or basic -- should be used instead to estimate which students are on track for college:

Fully 50% of 17-year-olds judged to be only basic by NAEP ultimately obtained four-year degrees. Just one third of American fourth graders were said to be proficient in reading by NAEP in the mid-1990s at the very time that international assessments of fourth-grade reading judged American students to rank Number Two in the world.

In fact, by using NAEP levels as support for his cut scores, King is either confused or disingenuous about what these levels really represent.

5.     5. So why are King, Arne Duncan, Joel Klein and the billionaires like Bill Gates and Rupert Murdoch who are pulling the strings, so determined to prove that more that 69% of the students throughout New York State are failing?  This is the Shock Doctrine at work.  Naomi Klein has observed that when you scare people enough, it is easier to persuade them to allow you to make whatever radical changes you want, since the status quo will be perceived as so disastrous. In the case of these men, they would like to convince parents that their corporate agenda, including a steady diet of developmentally unsound standards, the Common Core’s rigid quota for “informational text” and overemphasis on testing,  and their favorite policies of closing schools and firing teachers based on test scores, expanding charter schools and online learning, data-mining and outsourcing educational services to for-profit vendors will somehow improve the quality of education in our state, even though there is little or no evidence for any of these policies.  

NYSED has even tried to persuade parents to accept their unethical plan to share the personal data of the state’s children with inBloom and for-profit vendors by claiming this will help ensure these students are “college and career ready.”  (By the way, as Politico reported last week, North Carolina became the fifth state to pull out of inBloom; now only New York, Illinois, and Colorado are still involved, and Massachusetts is sitting on the fence.) 

Joel Klein, who wrote an oped for Rupert Murdoch’s NY Post this morning in support of the new exams, appropriately entitled the The Good News in Lower Test Scores, now heads Amplify, Rupert Murdoch’s online learning division, which is the largest contractor for inBloom.  For Klein and Murdoch, the drastic fall in state test scores is indeed good news, because it will help them market their computer tablets, data systems, and software products to make more profit.  In the case of Pearson, the world’s largest educational corporation, more schools will now be convinced to buy their textbooks, workbooks, and test prep materials, as 900 NYC schools have now done – in hope that their students may do better on the Pearson-state exams, that may even include the same reading passages as happened this year.

Rick Hess, the conservative commentator at Education Week, revealed the motives behind the promoters of these exams in a column called the “Common Core Kool-aid”:

First, politicians will actually embrace the Common Core assessments and then will use them to set cut scores that suggest huge numbers of suburban schools are failing. Then, parents and community members who previously liked their schools are going to believe the assessment results rather than their own lying eyes… Finally, newly convinced that their schools stink, parents and voters will embrace "reform." However, most of today's proffered remedies--including test-based teacher evaluation, efforts to move "effective" teachers to low-income schools, charter schooling, and school turnarounds--don't have a lot of fans in the suburbs or speak to the things that suburban parents are most concerned about….Common Core advocates now evince an eerie confidence that they can scare these voters into embracing the "reform" agenda. 

My advice is not to let this ruin your summer or your view of your child’s school.  When you receive your children’s scores, do not allow the results to wreck their self-confidence.  These new Common Core exams and harsh proficiency levels are meant to scare parents.  

To achieve their ideological ends, politicians, billionaires, and educrats are not only willing to define your children in terms of their test scores, but also to redefine them as failures – to help them implement their mechanistic, reductionist, and ultimately inhumane vision of education.  It is all a high-stakes game, carried out by people with little thought about how these wild test score gyrations affect the self-esteem of the children whose fate they claim to care about.

For an eloquent critique of the callous thinking at work, please also read Carol Burris, NYS principal of the year, in today’s Washington Post, and Diane Ravitch, on the political motives of the people who are setting these standards.

Here is the NYT on the decline in scores, the NYSED press release and slides, and the district and school-based aggregate results.