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From Angie Sullivan in Nevada, where the rich play, kep taxes low, and are privatizing the public schools:

“Some of the most wealthy people in the world live in Nevada.

What do billionaires and business people do for fun in Nevada?

Reform public education of course!

What do Casino Tycoon Elaine Wynn, Amazon.com Jeff Bezos, and Zappos Tony Hsieh have in common? Teach for America and ALEC inspired education reform. The return on investment model should be applied everywhere!

All this experimentation with public education – without research or time tested results , wouldn’t bother me so much if the situation were not so financially dire in the State of Nevada. Last in the nation in funding, huge at-risk populations, and limited funds to siphon for billionaire fly-by-night ideas.

Did you know that Nevada will vote on a 2% tax on businesses earning $1 million or more in November 2014?…

It is all the rage among the pseudo-reformers to dismiss the importance of poverty. Although most of the pseudo-reformers grew up in affluence, attended elite private school, and send their own children to equally splendid private schools, they feel certain in their hearts that poverty is a state of mind that can be easily overcome. All it takes is one great teacher. Or three effective teachers in a row. Or lots of grit. Or a no-excuses school where children dress for success, follow rules without questioning, and act like little test-taking machines. One by one, the pseudo-reformers insist, they will end poverty.

No one needs a higher minimum wage. No one needs a change in the tax structure. Nothing need be done except fire teachers who can’t raise test scores and hire lots of TFA, whose enthusiasm is sure to overcome their lack of training and experience.

The fact that…

This morning, Joe Williams, the executive director of the hedge-fund managers’ “education reform” front group (“Democrats for Education Reform”) published an opinion piece in the New York Daily News opposing Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan to fund universal pre-kindergarten by taxing incomes over $500,000. As Mayor de Blasio has pointed out, the incremental tax to pay for U-PK would be the equivalent of a soy latte at Starbucks every day, about $1,000 a year for the city’s wealthiest residents. But the hedge fund managers say no. This may explain why the California Democratic party called out DFER last year and urged them to stop calling themselves “Democrats” when they are fronts for Republicans and corporate interests. Imagine someone who has a take home pay of half a million a year unwilling to pay another $1,000 to ensure that every child in the city has pre-kindergarten class. How embarrassing for DFER…

Veteran journalist Bob Braun reports that Cami Anderson–the Christie administration’s state-appointed superintendent in Newark (and a graduate of Teach for America)–may lay off 700 Newark teachers and replace many or most of them with TFA.

He writes:

“The state administration of the Newark Public Schools (NPS) is expected to lay off hundreds of experienced city teachers and replace many with new hires, including more than 300 members of Teach for America (TFA). The report comes from union sources but is supported both by the latest version of the state’s “One Newark” plan and by the Walton Family Foundation website. The foundation is expected to subsidize the hiring of the new teachers.

“The NPS has not responded to requests for information or confirmation or denial of previous reports that Cami Anderson, the state-appointed superintendent of Newark schools, will ask outgoing state Education Commissioner Christopher Cerf to waive seniority rights of hundreds…

“Education may be the hardest civil rights fight of all,” Gates said. “Discrimination is harder to prove and people often don’t know what levers to pull to fix the problem.”

Dear Bill and Melinda,

The minds of Americans are on Martin Luther King, Jr. today.  The fact is, your corporate education reforms are all a terrible undoing of all that Martin Luther King, Jr. worked for, sacrificed for, organized for, and ultimately lost his life for in the summer of 1968.  So what has happened to Dr. King’s dream?

I wonder,what if corporate reformers re-wrote Dr. King’s, “I Have a Dream” speech to create their own version?  Deconstructing Dr. King’s famous speech, here is what we are witnessing across America — as corporate reformers have engaged in the unholy marriage between non-partisan neoliberals and neoconservatives — through the wedded ring of BIG business.

Here I present what…

A reader asked the question:

Money for Education Misplaced
If Ohio legislators truly want the best education for all children then why are most public school students from third to tenth graders required to take 17 standardized tests, written by a variety of educational vendors, while private school students take one, the OGT?

Why is the state of Ohio giving tax credit scholarships for some students to attend one of at least 20 private schools that teach creationism and the age of the Earth to be between 6-10,000 years old?

Why are legislators defunding public schools to handover nearly a billion dollars annually to for profit businesses to manage charter schools?

The Columbus Dispatch reported in September 2013 that nearly 84,000 Ohio students, or roughly 87 percent of the state’s charter-school students, attend a charter ranked D or F by the state. For comparison, 75% of public schools were rated…

This article by Michael Brenner, a professor of international relations at the University of Pittsburgh, is a trenchant summary of the relentless attack on public education launched by the Obama administration and backed by billions of federal and private dollars.

Brenner begins:

“A feature of the Obama presidency has been his campaign against the American public school system, eating way at the foundations of elementary education. That means the erosion of an institution that has been one of the keystones of the Republic. The project to remake it as a mixed public/private hybrid is inspired by a discredited dogma that charter schools perform better. This article of faith serves an alliance of interests — ideological and commercial — for whom the White House has been point man. A President whose tenure in office is best known for indecision, temporizing and vacillation has been relentless since day one in using the…

David Sirota, a crack investigative journalist, has written an expose of the financing behind the PBS series on pension reform.

Sirota calls it:” The Wolf of Sesame Street: Revealing the secret corruption inside PBS’s news division.”

You may be surprised to learn the secret. You may be disturbed to learn who is paying the bills.

Sirota’s hard-hitting article prompted an immediate response from the PR firm for “the Wolf of Sesame Street.” Read it.

In today’s world, language often means the opposite of what it says. We must deconstruct everything we read.

A “reformer” is someone who wants not to “reform” public schools but to replace them with privately managed schools, sometimes operated for-profit or by non-educators making exorbitant salaries.

“Pension reform” these days means someone has a plan to get rid of your pension if you are a public-sector worker.

“Turnaround” means that someone in D.C. decided that everyone…

When, in the course of a teaching career, it becomes essential to break from excessively rational beliefs and schemes and to begin thinking openly and freely, disregarding the dictatorial influences of political hacks, the insidious prodding of education gurus and the bleating of complacent peers, it is necessary that the thinking educator admonish the world with the whys and wherefores of their intended independence from those scourges of productive learning, Corporations and their Behaviorist lackeys.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that education is best described as a journey, not a destination; that education is not a medicine or treatment to be inflicted upon learners; that a partnership between willing learner, skilled teacher, and supportive guardian forms the foundation of productive education; and that a democratic society sustains itself by practice of its ideals within the educational environment. Numerous corporations and anti-public education fronts—including, but not limited…

Bill Phillis, leader of the Ohio Equity and Adequacy Coalition, is a dedicated advocate for equitable funding of public schools. He reports here that charter schools–many of which are very low-performing–receive nearly $1 billion a year.

He writes:

Total payment to charter schools is $903,344,671.24 as of the January 2014 report. This is a one-year figure.

You may wish to examine the State Report Card at http://reportcard.education.ohio.gov/Pages/School-Search.aspx. You must enter a charter school name in the search box on the right hand side.

Ohio has spent $1.4 billion on charters that never received a C or higher on the report card and/or scores below the average performance index score for Big 8 Urban buildings.

Initial estimates show that Ohio has spent about $1 billion on charters that have closed for a variety of reasons since the 2002-2003 school year, only 25% of that can be attributed to charters that were…