Tag Archives: Common Core

Billionaires Want Poor Children’s Brains to Work Better

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By Gerald Coles

Source: CounterPunch

Why are many poor children not learning and succeeding in school? For billionaire Bill Gates, who funded the start-up of the failed Common Core Curriculum Standards, and has been bankrolling the failing charter schools movement, and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, it’s time to look for another answer, this one at the neurological level. Poor children’s malfunctioning brains, particularly their brains’ “executive functioning”–that is, the brain’s working memory, cognitive flexibility, and inhibitory control–must be the reason why their academic performance isn’t better.

Proposing to fund research on the issue, the billionaires reason that not only can executive malfunctioning cause substantial classroom learning problems and school failure, it also can adversely affect socio-economic status, physical health, drug problems, and criminal convictions in adulthood. Consequently, if teachers of poor students know how to improve executive function, their students will do well academically and reap future “real-world benefits.” For Gates, who is always looking for “the next big thing,” this can be it in education.

Most people looking at this reasoning would likely think, “If executive functioning is poorer in poor children, why not eliminate the apparent cause of the deficiency, i.e., poverty?” Not so for the billionaires. For them, the “adverse life situations” of poor students are the can’t-be-changed-givens. Neither can instructional conditions that cost more money provide an answer. For example, considerable research on small class size teaching has demonstrated its substantially positive academic benefits, especially for poor children, from grammar school through high school and college. Gates claims to know about this instructional reform, but money-minded as he is, he insists these findings amount to nothing more than a “belief” whose worst impact has been to drive “school budget increases for more than 50 years.”

Cash–rather, the lack of it–that’s the issue: “You can’t fund reforms without money and there is no more money,” he insists. Of course, nowhere in Gates’ rebuke of excessive school spending does he mention corporate tax dodging of state income taxes, which robs schools of billions of dollars. Microsoft, for example, in which Gates continues to play a prominent role as “founder and technology advisor” on the company’s Board of Directors would provide almost $29.6 billion in taxes that could fund schools were its billions stashed offshore repatriated.

In a detailed example of Microsoft’s calculated tax scheming and dodging that would provide material for a good classroom geography lesson, Seattle Times reporter, Matt Day, outlined one of the transcontinental routes taken by a dollar spent for a Microsoft product in Seattle. Immediately after the purchase, the dollar takes a short trip to Microsoft’s company headquarters in nearby Redmond, Washington, after which it moves to a Microsoft sales subsidiary in Nevada. Following a brief rest, the dollar breathlessly zigzags from one offshore tax haven to another, finally arriving in sunny Bermuda where it joins $108 billion of Microsoft’s other dollars. Zuckerberg’s Facebook has similarly kept its earnings away from U.S. school budgets.

By blaming poor children’s school learning failure on their brains, the billionaires are continuing a long pseudoscientific charade extending back to 19th century “craniology,” which used head shape-and-size to explain the intellectual inferiority of “lesser” groups, such as southern Europeans and blacks. When craniology finally was debunked in the early 20thcentury, psychologists devised the IQ test, which sustained the mental classification business. Purportedly a more scientific instrument, it was heavily used not only to continue craniology’s identification of intellectually inferior ethnic and racial groups, but also to “explain” the educational underachievement of black and poor-white students.

After decades of use, IQ tests were substantially debunked from the 1960s onward, but new, more neurologically complex, so-called brain-based explanations emerged for differing educational outcomes. These explanations conceived of the overall brain as normal, but contended that brain glitches impeded school learning and success. Thus entered “learning disabilities,” “dyslexia,”and “attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)” as major neuropsychological concepts to (1) explain school failure, particularly for poor children, although the labels also extended to many middle-class students; and (2) serve as “scientific” justification for scripted, narrow, pedagogy in which teachers seemingly reigned in the classroom, but in fact, were themselves controlled by the prefabricated curricula.

In the forefront of this pedagogy was the No Child Left Behind legislation (NCLB), with its lock-step instruction, created under George W. Bush and continued by Barack Obama. Supposedly “scientifically-based,” federal funds supported research on “brain-based” teaching that would be in tune with the mental make-up of poor children, thereby serving to substitute for policy that would address poverty’s influence on educational outcomes. My review of the initial evidence supposedly justifying the launching of this diversionary pedagogy revealed it had no empirical support. However, for the students this instruction targeted, a decade had to pass before national test results confirmed its failure.

The history of “scientific brain-based” pedagogy for poor children has invariably been a dodge from addressing obvious social-class influences. In its newest iteration– improve poor children’s  executive functioning–billionaires Gates and Zuckerberg will gladly put some cash into promoting a new neurological fix for poor children, thereby helping (and hoping) to divert the thinking of education policy-makers, teachers and parents. Never mind that over three years ago, a review of research on executive functioning and academic achievement failed to find “compelling evidence that a causal association between the two exists.” What’s critical for these billionaires and the class they represent is that the nation continues to concoct policy that does not deplete the wealth of the rich and helps explain away continued poverty. Just because research on improving executive functioning in poor children has not been found to be a solution for their educational underachievement, doesn’t mean it can’t be!

Now that’s slick executive functioning!

 

Gerald Coles is an educational psychologist who has written extensively on the psychology, policy and politics of education. He is the author of Miseducating for the Global Economy: How Corporate Power Damages Education and Subverts Students’ Futures (Monthly Review Press).

MEET HILLARY’S CAMPAIGN CHAIR: “Moneyman” John Podesta and his Revolving Door

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By Gustav Wynn

Source: OpEdNews.com

If you haven’t heard yet about John Podesta, don’t be surprised – the major media’s radio silence belies his power and influence, working both inside and outside the US government to bundle campaign money and influence policy. Outside the US, his family’s lobbying firm is a magnet for gobs of cash coming from Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iraq, Azerbaijan, Qatar and many others hoping to curry favor on the inside track.

The above video demonstrates the bluntness of Mr. Podesta, one time chief of staff to Bill Clinton, as he lay out his ill-fated scheme for public education, raining aggressive standardized testing policies, Common Core and charter schools onto the states through an avalanche of money. Buddied up with Jeb Bush, this 42 minute conference unpacked in 2012 how the Race to the Top initiative would transform every 3rd-8th grade public school into testing factories built on unproven, secret logarithmic formulas to rank students, teachers and schools.

PEARSON PAYDAY: The clip shows Bush and Podesta laughing about how strongly they agreed that billionaire philanthropists, corporations, hedge fund managers and political action committees should pump money into “infrastructure” for education reform. The plot would succeed, farming out major education functions to testing firms and consultants as schools lost student funding, precious learning time, arts, sports and counseling services.

Part of the plan was to generate PR and “communications” through advocacy organizations, but the heavy lifting came as hedge funders flooded statehouses with campaign cash. Once elected, Podesta’s revolving door came into use, dispatching staffers to write the policy for busy politicians. He founded Center for American Progress, the think tank Politico calls Hillary’s “policy shop” and hired a slew of former Dept of Education officials to write articles.

The implementation of Common Core has been roundly panned, with Hillary Clinton herself deeming it a botch-job after it led to explosive test refusals across the states, led in striking fashion by New York. Podesta noted in the video that education “reform” would go through ups and downs, insisting the donors anticipate fierce, sustained resistance.

He accurately described how teachers would reject his corporatization, but he left out how parents and students would opt-out of exams en masse, turning the resultant data into “swiss cheese” and thereby, making expectations of standardization pointless. Yet Hillary doubled down just last week, saying she would encourage her granddaughter to take the Common Core exams. This signals to education reformers to keep funding candidates and keep promoting the “valuable data” claim.

DEEDS, NOT WORDS: Hillary promised last month to end the revolving door onstage in televised debates, but her closest advisers took funding from the Gates, Waltons and Wall Street to promote privatization. Her current staff includes lobbyists for Keystone XL, private prisons and big finance firms.

The idea that she takes Wall Street money yet would still be tough on them defies common sense, as did the claim Obama was tough on banks after he took their millions. Like David Dayen, those following the issue know Obama went exceedingly soft on banks, failing to prosecute securities fraud, robosigning and granting backdoor immunity deals that only cut in the government on the heist.

Hillary says she needs corporate cash to compete with Republicans, but this was proven wrong by Bernie, raising record-breaking amounts at the same time making PAC money a liability. Hillary’s lack of vision shows how little faith she had in working class Americans.

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THE ESTABLISHMENT HELPS IT’S OWN: But it also shows how entrenched Hillary is in the money-fueled status quo. Podesta has been running SuperPACs since the Obama years, but was also given powerful advisory positions in the White House, picking Obama’s cabinet members and advising on education and environmental issues.

Podesta’s family lobbies for a variety of corporate interests, foreign governments and fossil fuel producers, including Sberbank, the biggest state-influenced bank in Russia, who was looking to avoid sanctions following the occupation of Crimea. The same bank was just found to have shell corporations in the Panama Papers.

The major media won’t report this, but here, Salon exposes how foreign entities ply The Podesta Group with rich lobbying fees, notably Saudi royalty, the governments of Iraq and Kuwait, Qatari liquid natural gas producers and many US corporations including Walmart, Monsanto and Lockheed Martin.

The Podesta Group was founded by John Podesta but is now run by Tony Podesta, also a large bundler for Hillary. The firm was instrumental in brokering unconscionable deals as Clinton administration officials like Madeline Albright and Wesley Clark actually acquired major telecoms in Kosovo, capitalizing on their diplomatic contacts. The revolving door is still in full swing today. Dubbing John Podesta the “Hillary moneyman”, reporter Michael Isikoff listed a number of foreign lobbyists who also bundle big bucks for Hillary including some who served with her at the State Dept.

ABOVE REPROACH: The Podestas maintain that the millions the firm receives do not affect John’s work on policy matters. John also told Politico that speeches the Clintons gave to Wall Street and overseas conglomerates don’t affect their decisions. Podesta himself advised Bill Clinton to repeal Glass-Steagall, in a hasty 3-day decision that is today seen as a contributing cause of the 2008 fiscal crisis, only to lobby for Bank of America and others after leaving office.

Writing for The Nation in 2013, Ken Silverstein described CAP as an uncommonly secretive revolving door to the Obama White House, basically an unregistered lobby shop promising access to important officials for large contributions. CAP took exception, yet refused to disclose donors or basic financial statements.

Time and again, the Podesta’s controversial deeds never seem to reflect back on Hillary. For example, John co-hosted this recent fundraiser with an NRA lobbyist, another with a big pharma lobbyist, and nuclear power producers. Tony’s wife Heather, also a major bundler, lobbies for the health insurance industry.

PRO-UNION, THIS WEEK: In NY, Hillary visited the picket line of striking Verizon workers but she has taken major campaign cash from Verizon. She also took over $330k from the Waltons, the largest anti-union employer in the US. But Hillary’s union support is decidedly top-down. Here the NY Post, Fox News, Jacobin, the LA Times, Slate, and union teachers themselves disapprove of the extremely early endorsement of Clinton by the AFT, followed later by the NEA.

MEDIA MALPRACTICE: The fix will not be televised. CNN’s parent corp is a top donor to Hillary’s campaign which is hard to ignore seeing their “Bernie Blackout”. Here a CNN anchor actually tells Amy Goodman that Bernie’s speech was censored because he didn’t win more states than Hillary.

In order to paint Hillary’s win as a foregone conclusion, media regularly reports delegate totals including superdelegates which are subject to change. But the media didn’t cover Bernie at all for 2-3 months until Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes started reporting his large crowds. The NY Times was caught stealth-editing a positive Bernie article after it was shared widely. The WaPo’s bias was evident as they publushed 16 anti-Bernie articles right before Super Tuesday.

THANKS HILLARY: Since the first Citizens United ruling in January 2012, media firms have enjoyed over $5 billion per year in expanded ad spending. Ironically, the case began as a lawsuit pitting Citiens United, a right wing organization against Hillary Clinton who wanted to block them from distributing DVDs called Hillary The Movie. The Supreme Court however greatly expanded the scope of the case to categorize almost all political spending in national races as “free speech”.

Later that year, a second Citizens United ruling made unlimited, anonymous spending legal in all political races, including state and local contests. So what started as a bitter vendetta against Hillary became a key ruling greenlighting uncontrollable money orgies during elections, particularly encouraging negative ads as “independent” expenditures are less controversial. The prohibition against coordination between PACs and campaigns has become something of an open joke, but the greater irony is the way Hillary now harnesses the PAC money and unlimited spending as the frontrunner.

THE SUPERDELEGATE FIX: Leaving little to chance, Hillary “bought” hundreds of superdelegates in 2015 before Bernie was even running. The Hillary Victory Fund is a PAC run by her campaign and the DNC which uses the campaign finance loophole created by the awful McKutcheon SCOTUS decision.

Hillary’s wealthy supporters max out contributions to 33 different state parties who then transfer the money to Hillary. It’s legal but this is money laundering. Then, the fund distributes less than a third of the donations to local candidates, securing the votes of superdelegates long before a single primary vote was cast.

They double the money by maxing out spouses, and then double it again by doing it in calendar years 2015 and 2016. So even though we have limits, Hillary found a way to get $25 million from her core contributors and hundred of superdelegates committed. This is how the game was rigged before votes were cast. Wyoming showed us that people’s votes don’t matter, Bernie won by 12% but got 7 delegates to Hillary’s 11.

As the primary progresses, many voters are realizing how byzantine and unfair party primaries are, with many controls on the idea of one person-one vote, not the least of which has been voting improprieties such as the hours-long lines in Arizona, reports of unrequested party affiliation switching in NY, PA and elsewhere.

The bottom line here is class war, with the 1% doing their all to secure a win for the most corporatist candidate they can. An anti-establishment Republican voter backlash has led to unimaginable success by Donald Trump, but so too have Democratic voters flocked to Bernie Sanders as 2016 increasingly becomes an election about rejecting money-in-politics. We can only hope the truth somehow gets out to the largest voting block in the country – the non-voter – to motivate them to get active and defend the middle class.

 

About the Author:

(OpEdNews Contributing Editor since October 2006) Inner city schoolteacher from New York, mostly covering media manipulation. I put election/finance reform ahead of all issues but also advocate for fiscal conservatism, ethics in journalism and curbing overpopulation. I enjoy open debate, history, the arts and hope to adopt a third child. Gustav Wynn is a pseudonym, but you knew that.

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Feds Panic on Mass Common Core Test Refusals, Threaten Reprisals

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By Alex Newman

Source: The New American

Public resistance to Common Core is exploding across America, and officials are not happy about it. The Obama administration’s Department of Education, along with pro-Common Core government officials across the country under pressure from the feds, appear to be in panic mode. Facing a growing nationwide “opt out” movement to refuse participation in the unconstitutional federally funded testing regime aligned with the Obama-backed national school standards, senior bureaucrats, including Education Secretary Arne Duncan, have actually started resorting to lawless threats against parents, teachers, students, and entire state governments. Some parents were threatened by officials with jail time. Even small children are being punished by the state for “opting out” of the deeply controversial tests, with one California mother telling The New American that her daughter was publicly denied ice cream in retaliation.

But so far, the threats are only emboldening the opposition.

Perhaps the most outrageous threat so far came from Obama’s education chief, Duncan, who boasted in recent years of using government schools to create “green citizens” with UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) as a “global partner.” Late last month, Duncan, who was greeted by protesters urging him to “stop test bullying,” threatened federal intervention to force Americans to take the Common Core tests if states would not do the job. “We think most states will do that,” Duncan proclaimed at an Education Writers Association conference in Chicago. “If states don’t do that, then we [the federal government] have an obligation to step in.” In reality, of course, the federal government has an obligation under the U.S. Constitution to butt out. But despite swearing an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution, including the 10th Amendment, Duncan has led the charge in recent years to finish federalizing the government school system — and to use it as what he called a “weapon” to “change to world.”

Sounding oblivious to America’s federalist system of constitutional government, Duncan proclaimed that he expected state governments to hold “districts’ and schools’ feet to the fire on this,” as if state governments were mere administrative units to enforce decrees from the all-powerful federal executive branch. Hundreds of thousands of students in New York recently opted out. Almost nobody took the tests in some districts amid a full-scale uprising by teachers, students, and parents. In Chicago, where even the teachers’ union has blasted the federal takeover, school officials were threatened with the loss of more than $1 billion in state and federal “education aid” if not enough students were successfully coerced into taking the Common Core-aligned tests. Still, few details were provided on what it might look like to have the Obama administration “step in” and force students to take the controversial tests — an outrageous threat he also made in a discussion with Motoko Rich of the New York Times.

Critics, however, ridiculed the threat, daring the administration to try it. “Assuming that Duncan is not planning to call in the National Guard to haul off opt-outing 8 year olds, the only possible ‘sanction’ would be withholding funds,” observed Carol Burris, an award-winning New York principal who recently stepped down to fight back against what she sees as problems with the public education system. “That would surely lead to court challenges forcing the Education Department to justify penalizing schools when parents exercise their legitimate right to refuse the test — an impossible position to defend.” Noting that students of all races and backgrounds were opting out of the testing scheme, Burris pointed out that the rates “defy the stereotype that the movement is a rebellion of petulant ‘white suburban moms.’”

In a recent statement published by the Washington Post, the New York “2013 High School Principal of the Year” also highlighted a number of troubling government abuses targeting parents. Among other concerns, she said, citing activists and teachers, that administrators in some districts took advantage of non-English speaking parents by lying to them about the tests, saying they were mandatory or that children would be held back for refusal to take them. One critic called it “blatant discrimination at best.” Burris also lambasted the Common Core tests and noted that Duncan’s own children go to a non-Common Core school — as do the children of Common Core financier Bill Gates, and Common Core strongman Obama. She concluded the scathing commentary by noting that the movement to refuse the tests puts the entire “education reform” agenda in serious trouble.

Beyond targeting states and schools, education officials in some areas, responding to federal pressure, have strayed into the realm of potential criminal activity in seeking to boost participation in the tests. In one especially extreme case from Georgia, school officials, citing supposed “federal and state mandates” on the tests, said parents could not refuse to allow their children to take the tests. A meeting was scheduled for the parents to meet with the principal. However, when they arrived, they were met by a police officer, who reportedly warned them that they may be “trespassing” on school property due to their opposition to the testing regime. In the end, it was apparently sorted out without arrest, but the incident was deeply troubling to parents.

In South Carolina, education bureaucrats went even further. The officials reportedly warned parents that they could be imprisoned for 30 days for refusing to allow their children to participate in the national testing regime, which was mandated under the unconstitutional Bush-era No Child Left Behind scheme. According to news reports citing the group South Carolina Parents Involved in Education, South Carolina Education Department Chief Operating Officer Elizabeth Carpentier also threatened groups or organizations that encourage testing refusals with potential criminal charges of “aiding and abetting a crime.” School officials cited in media reports downplayed the threats, saying that parents and groups were merely threatened with existing statutes on “truancy” for not sending children to school for the testing.

In California, mother Amy Watson and her husband decided that their 10-year-old daughter would not be taking the unconstitutional federally funded Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) test. She was placed in an alternate classroom each testing day with other “opt out” students. In response to the refusal, though, on the day after testing was finished, “the three girls who opted out again were identified, ‘called out,’ and given instructions to go to the same classrooms as during SBAC testing,” Watson told The New American. “The girls were sent out so the ‘test takers’ could have an ice cream party. My daughter returned to her classroom with the trashcan full of empty ice cream containers. There were three ‘left over’ containers. The three opt-out students were not permitted to have them. These three containers were given to teachers instead.” The same thing happened to opt-out students in other grades, she added, calling it an “egregious act.”

Now, Watson has filed a privacy law-violation complaint with the U.S. Department of Education after her daughter and other opt-out students were “intentionally targeted.” The 10-year old is now fearful of additional retaliation from school officials, and Watson is seeking counseling for her daughter due to the emotional and psychological impact the targeting had on her. “I described the situation to the representative at the federal Department of Education,” Watson said. “He verified that ‘yes, this is a violation of FERPA [federal privacy law to protect students].’” The outraged mother is also in contact with attorneys and vowed to continue pursuing the case. Since the scandal, school officials have tried to downplay the incident as a “misunderstanding,” Watson said. But she is not buying it.

As the rebellion against the unconstitutional Common Core testing regime continues to sweep across America like wildfire, the Obama administration is certain to continue doing everything possible to stop it — including lawlessly threatening the American people. But despite those threats, as awareness of Common Core spreads, opposition will keep spreading as well. The testing regime is crucial for enforcing Common Core, and for gathering vast amounts of private data on students for the federal government. Without it, the widely criticized standards regime foisted on America by taxpayer-funded bribes from the Obama administration may well crumble.

The education establishment is now in a serious bind. On one hand, it can rip off the mask and resort to more outright lawlessness and tyranny in an effort to enforce compliance with its deeply unpopular machinations. Such a reaction would almost certainly backfire and produce even more public outrage and resistance. Alternatively, the Obama administration and its backers can risk having the entire Common Core scheme come crashing down around them by ignoring the mushrooming national movement to refuse the tests. Either way, the American people can still win the battle for education in the long run, if the pressure stays on.

New Analysis Shatters Narrative of Charter School Success

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In Minnesota, ‘new information is fueling critics who say the charter school experiment has failed to deliver.’

By Deirdre Fulton

Source: CommonDreams.org

Public schools are outperforming charter schools in Minnesota, in some cases “dramatically,” according to a new analysis by the state’s Star-Tribune newspaper.

In addition, many charter schools fail to adequately support minority students, close examination of the data revealed.

Journalist Charlene Briner, the Minnesota Department of Education looked at 128 of the state’s 157 charter schools and found “that the gulf between the academic success of its white and minority students widened at nearly two-thirds of those schools last year. Slightly more than half of charter schools students were proficient in reading, dramatically worse than traditional public schools, where 72 percent were proficient.”

Between 2011 and 2014, McGuire reported, 20 charter schools failed to meet the state’s expectations for academic growth each year, “signaling that some of Minnesota’s most vulnerable students had stagnated academically.”

Charlene Briner, the Minnesota Department of Education’s chief of staff, told the newspaper that she was troubled by the information, “which runs counter to ‘the public narrative’ that charter schools are generally superior to public schools.”

“Minnesota is the birthplace of the charter school movement and a handful of schools have received national acclaim for their accomplishments, particularly when it comes to making strong academic gains with low-income students of color,” the Star-Tribune claims. “But the new information is fueling critics who say the charter school experiment has failed to deliver on teaching innovation.”

Education analyst Diane Ravitch notes: “Minnesota was the home of the charter movement, which began with high expectations as a progressive experiment but has turned into a favorite mechanism in many states to promote privatization of public education and to generate profits for charter corporations like Imagine, Charter Schools USA, and K12. Today, charter advocates claim that their privately managed charters will ‘save low-income students from failing public schools,’ but the Minnesota experience suggests that charters face the same challenges as public schools, which is magnified by high teacher turnover in charter schools.”

The findings back up a report (pdf) put out last fall by the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity at the University of Minnesota Law School, which examined the success and failures of the charter school system in Chicago, Illinois.

That study concluded:

Sadly the charters schools, which on average score lower that the Chicago public schools, have not improved the Chicago school system, but perhaps made it even weaker. Further charters, which are even more likely to be single race schools than the already hyper segregated Chicago school system, have not increased interracial contact, an often-stated goal of charter systems. Finally, the fact that Chicago charters use expulsion far more often that public schools deserves further study. In the end it is unlikely that the Chicago charter school experience provides a model for improving urban education in other big city school districts.

Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, the School Reform Commission plans to vote on no fewer than 39 charter school applications at a special meeting starting Wednesday afternoon. There will be opportunity for final statement by applicants and public commenting by just 39 speakers who registered in advance.

Earlier this month, a pro-charter, non-profit organization offered the cash-strapped city school district up to $35 million to help defray the costs of enrolling an additional 15,000 students in new charter schools.