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Est. April 5, 2002
 
           
November 05, 2015 - Issue 628

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The Koch Brothers.
President Obama,
Corruption
And the
Transformation of Public Education
and the Public Sector



"High-performing charters have attained
their results by methodically getting rid
of the most difficult to teach students and
that, overall, based on third-party assessments,
traditional public schools perform as well as
charters although they do not have the same
options to create a student population
with a lower risk of failure."

The Koch Bros., key leaders of a Cartel of corporate, foundation, and Wall Street financial institutions, have been getting positive press of late and very kind words from President Barack Obama with whom they are collaborating to reform the U.S criminal justice system. In his historic visit to an Oklahoma federal prison and his November 2nd stopover at a Newark, New Jersey drug treatment facility to meet with inmates and patients to discuss improvements for the criminal justice system, President Obama went out of his way to praise the efforts of Koch Industries. During the past year, Mark Holden, Koch Industries legal counsel, and Valerie Jarrett, President Obama’s closest advisor, have teamed up to advance a joint criminal justice agenda. However, the Obama-Koch Bros. partnership, despite the public acrimony leading up to and during Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign, has persisted since Koch Bros. and Cartel representatives handed Obama, his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, the fully-developed Race to the Top (RTTT) legislation on January 29, 2009. RTTT was designed to move public schools and services into the private sector via privately-managed charter schools, publicly-funded private school vouchers, and the aggressive privatizing of services traditionally provided by the public schools (e.g., teacher and administrator development, teacher evaluation, provision of substitute teachers and clerical staff, etc.) As these practices have escalated, so has the corruption of public school superintendents, many of whom are associated with the Broad Superintendents Academy in Los Angeles, California as students, mentees, and/or scholars in residence. Eli Broad, a member of the Cartel, and in effect, its minister of education, created the academy to foster his view that K-12 education should be run as a business. As a result, the amount of fraud has increased dramatically, especially in the nation’s school systems that are disproportionately populated by students of color.

Most recently, Dr. Barbara Byrd-Bennett, former superintendent of the Chicago Public Schools (CPS), was indicted and pleaded guilty to rigging a scheme involving $23 million of CPS contracts for the SUPES Academy and a sister company, Synesi Associates (whose specialty is the training of principals), in anticipation of getting a 10 percent kickback. Ongoing investigations have indicated that Byrd-Bennet engaged in similar practices during administrative stints in Detroit, Michigan where she was hired by Dr. Robert Bobb, the district CEO, as the chief academic and accountability officer, and in Cleveland, Ohio where she served as superintendent. The controversy has enveloped superintendents S. Dallas Dance in Baltimore, Maryland; Stephen Murley in Iowa City, Iowa; and Kelvin Adams in St. Louis, Missouri, all of whom have served as SUPES consultants after awarding no-bid contracts to the company. Other school districts that have given SUPES contracts and have had their top officials work for the organization include Huntsville, Alabama; Rochester, New York; Prince Georges County, Maryland; and Washoe County, Nevada. Earlier, Dr. Andre Hornsby, former superintendent of the Prince Georges County, Maryland Public Schools, was indicted and served prison time for receiving kickbacks from LeapFrog Enterprises, Inc. a technology vendor; the late Dr. Beverly Hall, superintendent of the Atlanta, Georgia Public Schools was indicted for manipulating and falsifying students’ standardized test score data from which she received upwards of $500,000 in bonus compensation; and her fellow colleagues, the late Dr. Arlene Ackerman, former Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Public Schools Superintendent and Michelle Rhee, former Chancellor of the Washington, D.C. Public Schools were accused of similar testing offenses (but escaped indictment). Hall and Ackerman were praised, during funeral eulogies, as guardians and saviors of children of color during their service as superintendents of San Francisco, California and Washington, D.C. (Ackerman) and Newark, New Jersey (Hall). A field analysis of their performance revealed that they did very little educationally for the children in their charge. In addition, there are dozens of other school superintendents from Los Angeles, California to Houston, Texas to Camden, New Jersey who have also been involved in questionable contracting schemes.



At the same time, charter school operators have pursued unethical, and perhaps illegal, practices to ensure high student achievement outcomes. Last week, the New York Times reported that Eva Moskowitz, founder of Success Academy, New York City’s largest charter school network, that enrolls mostly black and Hispanic students who perform much better on state tests than the citywide averages, had systematically pushed out/expelled/counseled out the most challenging students in order to keep its test scores up. The principal of one of the network’s schools identified sixteen students that he said were a threat to his turnaround plans and implemented the following strategies to get rid of them: parents were told that the school was not right for their children and that they should withdraw, targeted students were repeatedly suspended for minor infractions, and parents received multiple daily phone calls and frequent requests for early pick-up of their children from school. This harassment made parents’ lives difficult and contributed to their decisions to leave the Success Academy network, often with the belief that they and their children had failed the school rather than that the school had failed them. Critics of Success Academy and other charter schools have consistently made the case that high-performing charters have attained their results by methodically getting rid of the most difficult to teach students and that, overall, based on third-party assessments, traditional public schools perform as well as charters although they do not have the same options to create a student population with a lower risk of failure.

Even more interesting is the fact that the city and state education agencies that fund these charter schools are not required to keep records of the number of students who leave charter schools and return to the traditional public schools that they left. Furthermore, when these students transition, it is usually shortly after the charter schools have received payment for their enrollment, thus enabling the charters to benefit from the funding they leave behind. Meanwhile, the public schools have to absorb these returning students without any additional revenue for their instruction. The Obama Administration and education secretary, Arne Duncan, have turned a blind eye toward these charter school practices, and the attendant corruption by privatization advocates, while ramping up the number of charter schools with loose oversight throughout the nation, and unequivocally claiming that charters are the salvation of public education. Charter management organizations (CMOs) have raked in billions during Obama’s tenure, making K-12 education the newest corporate profit center. This is the face of their alleged transformation of public education.

As mentioned earlier, the Koch Bros. are also working with the Obama Administration to change the criminal justice system, another major component of the public sector, which has long been a corporate target, from juvenile facilities to maximum security prisons. Mass incarceration has increasingly become a corporatized entity, yielding billions of dollars in annual profits. It appears that criminal justice reform is following the pattern of success that we are witnessing in the privatization of public schools. Restructuring of the public sector has been the mantra of both Democrats and Republicans, alike, as increasingly larger amounts of public dollars are moved into private hands. The Koch Bros. and the Cartel are on all sides of the emerging corporate takeover of the public sector and are rapidly moving into higher education to supposedly make it more efficient. Corruption and ethical lapses are replete in these privatized incursions into education and criminal justice systems and have generated no substantial improvements for K-12 students or their incarcerated neighbors, relatives, and friends. Sadly, the primary victims of this transformation of public education and the public sector are low-income blacks and Hispanics who are already suffering from the vicissitudes of social and economic inequality.


BlackCommentator.com Columnist, Dr. Walter C. Farrell, Jr., PhD, MSPH, is a Fellow of the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) at the University of Colorado-Boulder and has written widely on vouchers, charter schools, and public school privatization. He has appeared on the Today Show with Matt Lauer and National Public Radio’s The Connection to discuss public school privatization, and he has lectured to parent, teacher, and union groups throughout the nation. Contact Dr. Farrell. 


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