January 4, 2013

Turkish charter schools, Harmony, finalist for 30 million from Race to the Top federal money.

I think this is wrong. I think public schools are losing great amounts of money as not only federal money but local taxpayer money as well are going to charter schools. This 29 plus million is going to these schools that appear to be connected to the Turkish Gulen movement.

Here is a brief summary from Education Week.

District Race to Top Winners Turn to Implementation

The first federal Race to the Top competition that reaches down to the local level leaves most large, urban districts out of the winners’ circle in favor of charter schools, midsize systems, and two large consortia of school districts—all of which must now turn to implementing proposals that collectively have won them $400 million.

The 16 winners, announced last month by the U.S. Department of Education, beat out more than 350 other applicants and include three charter school organizations, traditional districts such as Carson City, Nev., and Guilford County, N.C., and a group of 22 rural districts from Kentucky.

Here is a list of the finalists from Ed.gov.

Race to the Top District Applications Winners

It is in chart form. Harmony Science Academy, TX, will receive almost 30 million dollars.

Here is more info on the Gulen connected charter schools from the Washington Post.

Largest charter network in U.S.: Schools tied to Turkey

The largest charter school network in the United States is operated by people in and associated with the Gulen Movement (GM), a secretive and controversial Turkish religious sect. With 135 schools enrolling more than 45,000 students, this network is substantially larger than KIPP, the well-known charter management organization with only 109 schools. A lack of awareness about this situation persists despite it being addressed in a national paper and in articles about Gulen charter schools in Utah (also here), Arizona, (also here), Illinois, Tennessee, Pennsylvania (also here), Indiana, Oklahoma (and here), Texas (also here), Arkansas, Louisiana (also here), New Jersey, Georgia, and North Carolina. It was also reported that the FBI and the Departments of Labor and Education are investigating practices at these schools.

..."The Gulen Movement originated in Turkey in the late 1960s and has become increasingly powerful. Its members are followers of Fethullah Gulen (b. 1941) a self-exiled Turkish preacher who has been living on a secluded compound in rural Pennsylvania since 1998. Members call themselves hizmet, meaning “volunteer services” movement. The GM conducts four primary activities around the world: a media empire, business organizations, an enormous number of Turkish culture-promoting and interfaith dialog organizations, and a network of schools in over 100 countries, a large portion of which are U.S. charter schools.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the GM began to establish schools outside of Turkey, first in the newly established republics of Central Asia and then beyond. One expert noted that the “...worldwide extent of Fethullah Gulen’s educational network testifies to the internationalist, even imperialist, nature of the movement.” Last year an analyst viewed the raison d'être for the schools “spreading across the globe” in this way: “Students will learn how to speak Turkish, the national anthem, how to be the 'right kind of Muslim', etc. In essence, it buys (the GM) loyalty.”

The New York Times also covered this group of charter schools.

Charter Schools Tied to Turkey Grow in Texas

The secret lay in the meteoric rise and financial clout of the Cosmos Foundation, a charter school operator founded a decade ago by a group of professors and businessmen from Turkey. Operating under the name Harmony Schools, Cosmos has moved quickly to become the largest charter school operator in Texas, with 33 schools receiving more than $100 million a year in taxpayer funds.

While educating schoolchildren across Texas, the group has also nurtured a close-knit network of businesses and organizations run by Turkish immigrants. The businesses include not just big contractors like TDM but also a growing assemblage of smaller vendors selling school lunches, uniforms, after-school programs, Web design, teacher training and even special education assessments.

Some of the schools’ operators and founders, and many of their suppliers, are followers of Fethullah Gulen, a charismatic Turkish preacher of a moderate brand of Islam whose devotees have built a worldwide religious, social and nationalistic movement in his name. Gulen followers have been involved in starting similar schools around the country — there are about 120 in all, mostly in urban centers in 25 states, one of the largest collections of charter schools in America.

..."But an examination by The New York Times of the Harmony Schools in Texas casts light on a different area: the way they spend public money. And it raises questions about whether, ultimately, the schools are using taxpayer dollars to benefit the Gulen movement — by giving business to Gulen followers, or through financial arrangements with local foundations that promote Gulen teachings and Turkish culture.

Here is the website of Harmony Science Academy's FAQ. There is a response by Arne Duncan which troubles me.

Why does Harmony recruit teachers from outside of the United States?

At Harmony Public Schools, we are committed to providing the very best education for our students, and we recruit international teachers within and outside the U.S. Today, Texas and America have a shortage of qualified math and science teachers. This unfortunate situation was highlighted in a January 2011 report from the U.S. Department of Education, which identified specific areas of deficiency (including math and science) and called for the hiring of teachers in those areas as rapidly as possible. Secretary Duncan also says, "Schools across the nation are in need of a diverse set of talented teachers, especially in our big cities and rural areas, and especially in the areas of Math, Science, Technology, Special Education, and English Language Learning."

That is the sound of our Secretary of Education for a Democratic president...just plain lying.

I suggest that someone talk to the unemployed America teachers of math, science, technology, special education, and ELL.

That is Arne going along with the same kind of propaganda that has demeaned our teachers and education system so they could turn it over to private companies.

Just imagine. Almost 30 million of our taxpayer money is going to a charter school with ties to another country.

Just imagine what that money would do for school systems being defunded and neighborhood schools being closed.

All it took to allow the steamroller to keep going was both parties being on board with the corporatization of education.

No, I am not a whiner, not a troll, not an Obama-hater. I am retired teacher with a breaking heart at what is rapidly being done to our schools.

January 3, 2013

Here is the Inside Story Americas page from Al Jazeera English.

Inside Story Americas

Here is a list of some of the stories linked at that page today.

Which stories did the media ignore this year?
From climate change to the violation of civil liberties, we look at some of the under-reported stories of 2012.

Have US police forces become too militarised?
We ask whether civilian police operating as paramilitary forces actually make the US safer.

US cities struggling post-Hurricane Sandy
Entire neighbourhoods are struggling to overcome the serious state of disrepair nearly two months after the devastation.

Will the US ever change its gun laws?
We analyse the failure of US gun control laws in preventing recurring mass shootings.

How can tax avoidance be stopped?
As top tech firms legally avoid paying trillions in tax dollars we examine how such practices could be eliminated.

The US' school to prison pipeline
Are punitive school discipline policies pushing children out of education and into the criminal justice system?

So much better than Glenn Beck propaganda.

January 3, 2013

Labor board decides Chicago charter school is really private, subject to private sector laws.

I am assuming they will still get public taxpayer money. Yet they will not be subject to any regulation by elected school boards or local districts.

Jersey Jazzman caught the implications of the ruling right away. Reformers like Michelle Rhee et al have repeated over and over that charter schools are public schools. Now it has been ruled that these charters in Chicago are not.

There will be many educators waiting on all the implications of this ruling. I don't see how they can claim to be one thing and be ruled to be something else. Is Arne Duncan aware of this? Does he approve?

It's Official: Charters are NOT Public Schools

The National Labor Relations Board gives its verdict: charter schools are NOT public schools!

Teachers at a Chicago charter school are now subject to private-sector labor laws, rather than state laws governing public workers. The move could impact how public schools are run down the road.

The ruling, made by the National Labor Relations Board last month, said the Chicago Math and Science Academy is a “private entity” and therefore covered under the federal law governing the private sector.

The decision overrules a vote taken by teachers last year to form a union in accordance with the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Act. At the time, two-thirds of teachers at the school approved the union and it became official under state law.

...“This case was really about whether you organize via one method or another,” said Andrew Broy, director of the Illinois Network of Charter Schools. “It wasn’t about you can organize at all, whether you can bust unions, or anything like that.”

I believe that is the very same school that last year decided they were private so the teachers could not form a union. Here is what I reported on this last year.

Chicago charter school claims to be private so teachers won't unionize. Got 23 million public money

Another Chicago charter has claimed it's a "private" school in order to stop its teachers from unionizing. The school has received $23 million in public funds since it opened in 2004. But eight months ago, a solid majority of the school's teachers voted to organize. The school's board, with backing from the charter school association and the Civic Committee, decided to spend tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees in hopes of stalling off union certification.

"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. -- Tribune"

Teachers report threats by principal, Ali Yilmaz as well as the firing of a popular and well-respected teacher who was part of the union organizing drive.

In the same Trib article, University of Chicago's Tim Knowles is sounding more and more like Wisconsin's Gov. Walker, claiming that collective-bargaining rights for teachers are "a risk to those basic freedoms".

Here is more from the article today at WBEZ91.5.

Labor board decision that school is "private entity" may set precedent

In many ways, they are like government contractors, said James Powers, the attorney representing CMSA. A school district signs a contract with a private group, usually a non-profit organization, to run a school and allocates public money based on the number of students served.

But as the charter sector grows in cities across the country, teachers unions and other pro-labor groups have said expanding charters is a “union-busting” tactic.

Charter schools want to be public schools so they can get taxpayer's money. Then they want to be private so teachers can't unionize.

I don't see how charter schools can legitimately have it both ways.

Crossposted at Daily Kos

January 2, 2013

Molly Ivins' last column. She died 6 years ago this month.

I always appreciated her bluntness and her ability not to let others sway her thinking. She did not care about those who attacked her words. I would like to be that way. I can be outspoken, but what others say does bother me.

Her last column:

Molly Ivins' last column

About the only politician out there besides Bush actively calling for a surge is Sen. John McCain. In a recent opinion piece, he wrote: “The presence of additional coalition forces would allow the Iraqi government to do what it cannot accomplish today on its own — impose its rule throughout the country. . . . By surging troops and bringing security to Baghdad and other areas, we will give the Iraqis the best possible chance to succeed.”

But with all due respect to the senator from Arizona, that ship has long since sailed.

A surge is not acceptable to the people in this country — we have voted overwhelmingly against this war in polls (about 80 percent of the public is against escalation, and a recent Military Times poll shows only 38 percent of active military want more troops sent) and at the polls.

Anyone who wants to talk knowledgably about our Iraq misadventure should pick up Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s “Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone.” It’s like reading a horror novel. You just want to put your face down and moan: How could we have let this happen? How could we have been so stupid?

She was one of the few to actually call George Bush out for his idiotic push for war.

In a column right after the 2006 election, she strongly criticized Bush.

OK, it’s not the 19th century anymore, but it is always the right time to point out that the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes. Honest. There stands George W. Bush, buck nekkid. We want to help him out of this fix because he’s dragging the whole Army, the country and the world down with him. But don’t ask us to call those clothes.

I remember her endorsement of Howard Dean. She pulled no punches about his fiscal conservative policies.

Molly Ivins endorsement of Howard Dean in 2003. Blunt, to the point, so like her unique style..

Meanwhile, there's old Dean, causin' excitement. I went up to Vermont and talked to a bunch of liberals there. They all said Howard Dean is no liberal. Funny, that's what Howard Dean says, too. And indeed, he isn't, but in politics, everything's relative. The conventional wisdom first dismissed Howard Dean (the man has never been to a Washington dinner party!), then condescended to him, then graciously offered him instruction on how he should be running his campaign -- which seemed to be going along quite well without their input.

I talked to some big money guys who assured me Dean Can't Win. But of course I'm noticing this interesting thing: Dean has so much money he actually turned down public campaign financing (since I'm a card-carrying liberal, I was naturally deeply unhappy over this. But since Dean's money comes from Real People instead of corporate special interests, I'm not that unhappy.) Let me second the notion that this year, the Internet is to politics what television was in the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon race.

She was very prescient in this paragraph...about anger.

For a while, I fretted over Dean being angry, or at least appealing to the political anger that is normally manipulated by right-wing radio jocks. Anger makes liberals uncomfortable: We prefer peace, reason and gentle persuasion. Beloveds, it is way past time for us to get mad -- social, economic and political justice are being perverted by the Bush administration.

January 1, 2013

Activists versus the governing class..a couple of thoughts.

I posted some of this in the comments in another thread yesterday. The theme of the activists in the party being pitted against the leaders was tossed out by Simon Rosenberg after the 2004 election.

A couple of quotes from Rosenberg, one of the founders of the DLC, painted a pretty clear picture of the way activists were thought of at that time.

A founder of the DLC actually predicted that any future party divide would not be centrists vs liberals, but activists vs the governing class.

First, he gives the reason they founded the think tank called the Democratic Leadership Council:

"freed... from positions making it difficult for us to win. "...Simon Rosenberg.

"Simon Rosenberg, the former field director for the DLC who directs the New Democrat Network, a spin-off political action committee, says, "We're trying to raise money to help them lessen their reliance on traditional interest groups in the Democratic Party. In that way," he adds, "they are ideologically freed, frankly, from taking positions that make it difficult for Democrats to win."

They did not want to "need" the traditional constituents of the party, like unions, minorities, common everyday people. They needed enough money to get things done their way.

And another quote just after we lost the 2004 presidential election.

The clash will be between the "governing class" and the "activist class."

From an article called "What Happens to the Losing Team".

If there's a battle for the soul of the Democratic Party, predicts Simon Rosenberg, president of the New Democrat Network, a moderate advocacy group, it won't be the usual skirmish between the liberals and moderates of the professional political class in Washington but one between the Washington insiders on one side and the rank-and-file activists spread out across the country on the other. "What's changed over the past two years is that activist Democrats believe that Republicans are venal people," says Rosenberg. These activists "are going to be very intolerant of Democrats in Washington who cooperate with the Republicans. There's going to be tremendous pressure to stand up and fight and not roll over and play dead."

Most activists don't believe that about Republicans at all, but again it was the starting of keeping "netroots" in their place. There were other attempts toward the netroots...even Democratic bloggers calling us nutroots.

More from that link:

From the NYT Matt Bai in 2005.

What Dean's candidacy brought into the open, however, was another kind of
growing and powerful tension in Democratic politics that had little to do
with ideology. Activists often describe this divide as being between
"insiders" and "outsiders," but the best description I've heard came from
Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic operative who runs the advocacy group N.D.N.
(formerly New Democrat Network), which sprang from Clintonian centrism of
the early 1990's. As Rosenberg explained it, the party is currently riven
between its "governing class" and its "activist class." The former includes
the establishment types who populate Washington - politicians, interest
groups, consultants and policy makers. The second comprises "Net roots"
Democrats on the local level; that is, grass-roots Democrats, many of whom
were inspired by Dean and who connect to politics primarily online, through
blogs or Web-based activist groups like MoveOn.org. The argument between the
camps isn't about policy so much as about tactics, and a lot of Democrats in
Washington don't even seem to know it's happening.

I believe that is true. Dean during his campaign did fire up a lot of us as to how things could perhaps be. I think that was the first time I felt we could make a difference through activism. I signed petitions, made phone calls, wrote letters to the editors.

I haven't done that for a while, not sure anyone pays attention.

And though the terms activists and governing class were not used in this American Prospect article from 2001, it is clear there has been success in moving away from the traditional constituents of the party.

How the DLC does it.

Privately funded and operating as an extraparty organization without official Democratic sanction, and calling themselves "New Democrats," the DLC sought nothing less than the miraculous: the transubstantiation of America's oldest political party. Though the DLC painted itself using the palette of the liberal left--as "an effort to revive the Democratic Party's progressive tradition," with New Democrats being the "trustees of the real tradition of the Democratic Party"--its mission was far more confrontational. With few resources, and taking heavy flak from the big guns of the Democratic left, the DLC proclaimed its intention, Mighty Mouse?style, to rescue the Democratic Party from the influence of 1960s-era activists and the AFL-CIO, to ease its identification with hot-button social issues, and, perhaps most centrally, to reinvent the party as one pledged to fiscal restraint, less government, and a probusiness, pro?free market outlook.

..."We're a party that's going through a transition from one ideology to another," says NDN's Rosenberg. "It was 40 years between the creation of the National Review and Newt Gingrich's takeover of Congress in 1994. We're only 16 years into this. Are we challenging old ways and leaders who've been around for a while? Are we being contentious? Yes."

Indeed it has been contentious.

The DLC closed its doors, the Third Way has taken their place. It is led by a man who through the years has pushed for the privatization of Social Security, has pitted the younger generations against seniors. He has made the elderly sound greedy and selfish.

He has now formed a new group to divide the two generations even more.

Jon Cowan once again ginning up faux youth outrage.

Coming soon: a new pressure group called “The Can Kicks Back,” which aims to turn younger Americans into an anti-deficit avenging army. It will surely attempt to play a role in the post-election talks surrounding the “fiscal cliff.” This offensive bears a slight odor of deja vu, however, because one of its organizers is Jonathan Cowan, who 20 years ago attempted to recruit Gen Xers in a similar campaign propelled by a brash, ultimately buffoonish group called Lead … Or Leave.

Today, Jon Cowan is the president of Third Way, which calls itself “the nation’s leading centrist policy institution” and is certainly one of the most prominent center-right pressure groups in Washington. Its board of trustees reads like a Who’s Who of Wall Street, hedge fund and real estate barons and it enjoys privileged access to the national media. (Cowan himself is a close personal friend and guru to Matt Bai, the New York Times Magazine’s chief political correspondent and a leading cheerleader for center-right deficit hawks.)

Cowan popped up in a slightly different guise this summer, as an advisor to “The Can Kicks Back,” (http://www.thecankicksback.org/) billed as a new campaign by “Millennials … pushing for a non-partisan ‘grand bargain’ to fix our fiscal future.” Other advisors to the new group include such usual suspects as Erskine Bowles and former Sen. Alan Simpson (authors of the much-discussed Bowles-Simpson plan to balance the budget mostly through slashing Social Security, Medicare, and domestic social programs), former Sen. Evan Bayh, and former comptroller General David Walker.

Here is one of their videos featuring of all things, Alan Simpson dancing with a can.