Category: Education

Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen!

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The FBI has a new program to spy on high school students:

Under new guidelines, the FBI is instructing high schools across the country to report students who criticize government policies and “western corruption” as potential future terrorists, warning that “anarchist extremists” are in the same category as ISIS and young people who are poor, immigrants or travel to “suspicious” countries are more likely to commit horrific violence.

Based on the widely unpopular British “anti-terror” mass surveillance program, the FBI’s “Preventing Violent Extremism in Schools” guidelines, released in January, are almost certainly designed to single out and target Muslim-American communities. However, in its caution to avoid the appearance of discrimination, the agency identifies risk factors that are so broad and vague that virtually any young person could be deemed dangerous and worthy of surveillance, especially if she is socio-economically marginalized or politically outspoken.

This overwhelming threat is then used to justify a massive surveillance apparatus, wherein educators and pupils function as extensions of the FBI by watching and informing on each other.

The FBI’s justification for such surveillance is based on McCarthy-era theories of radicalization, in which authorities monitor thoughts and behaviors that they claim to lead to acts of violent subversion, even if those people being watched have not committed any wrongdoing. This model has been widely discredited as a violence prevention method, including by the U.S. government, but it is now being imported to schools nationwide as official federal policy.


………

According to the FBI’s educational materials for teenagers, circulated as a visual aide to their new guidelines, the following offenses constitute signs that “could mean that someone plans to commit violence” and therefore should be reported: “Talking about traveling to places that sound suspicious”; “Using code words or unusual language”; “Using several different cell phones and private messaging apps”; and “Studying or taking pictures of potential targets (like a government building).”

Under the category of domestic terrorists, the educational materials warn of the threat posed by “anarchist extremists.” The FBI states, “Anarchist extremists believe that society should have no government, laws, or police, and they are loosely organized, with no central leadership… Violent anarchist extremists usually target symbols of capitalism they believe to be the cause of all problems in society—such as large corporations, government organizations, and police agencies.”

Similarly, “Animal Rights Extremists and Environmental Extremists” are placed alongside “white supremacy extremists”, ISIS and Al Qaeda as terrorists out to recruit high school students. The materials also instruct students to watch out for extremist propaganda messages that communicate criticisms of “corrupt western nations” and express “government mistrust.”

………

At the surface level, the FBI’s new guidelines do not appear to single out Muslim students. The document and supplementary educational materials warn of a broad array of threats, including anti-abortion and white supremacist extremists. The Jewish Defense League is listed alongside Hizbollah and Al Qaeda as an imminent danger to young people in the United States.

But a closer read reveals that the FBI consistently invokes an Islamic threat without naming it. Cultural and religious differences, as well as criticisms of western imperialism, are repeatedly mentioned as risk factors for future extremism. “Some immigrant families may not be sufficiently present in a youth’s life due to work constraints to foster critical thinking,” the guidelines state.

BTW, the science also shows that these programs do not work, but that doesn’t stop lazy cops, and lazy school administrators, from using bigotry as a justification.

What Happens When You Bring in a Finance Type to Shake Things Up

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First, the break everything, and then they get fired:

Simon Newman, the Mount St. Mary’s University president who astonished many with a brutal remark, inspired some to a new vision for the university, and set off an intense national debate about academic freedom, will step down effective immediately.

Karl Einolf, the dean of the Richard J.Bolte, Sr., School of Business at the university will serve as acting president, the board of trustees announced Monday night.

The change came after weeks of turmoil at the country’s second-oldest Catholic university, which faced questions from its faculty, alumni and national groups — including the organization that provides the crucial accreditation for the university — over its future direction and leadership. Some saw it as a clash between those open to change and those mired in tradition. Others felt it had become a debate over the very soul of the university: Catholic or corporate?

………

Newman came to the Maryland campus in 2015 with plans for sweeping changes, such as boosting enrollment, shoring up the university’s finances and raising its national profile. His blunt business manner — he had been in the financial industry for his entire career — was welcome to some and jarring to others. Several people were abruptly fired and escorted off campus, and retiree benefits were cut in the fall. But the real turmoil began this year after the student newspaper, the Mountain Echo, reported that Newman had planned to cull struggling freshmen early in the semester, before a federal reporting deadline, to improve the university’s retention rate.

No students left the school as a result of the survey, but Newman’s remarks after some faculty members expressed concerns about the plan shocked many; he said a professor was thinking of the students as cuddly bunnies but that they had to drown the bunnies, “put a Glock to their heads.”

When two professors were subsequently fired — one with tenure, one who had been the adviser to the Echo — many interpreted it as retaliation for opposing Newman’s policies despite the administration’s denial that it was retribution.

………

There was another fear, as well: The Mount’s accreditation was just reaffirmed in June, with its next scheduled review report in 2020. But this month the Middle States Commission on Higher Education requested “a supplemental information report, due March 15, 2016, addressing recent developments at the University which may have implications for continued compliance with Requirement of Affiliation #9, Standard 4 (Leadership and Governance), Standard 6 (Integrity), Standard 8 (Student Admissions and Retention), and Standard 10 (Faculty).”

This sh%$ is what happens when you hire someone whose qualifications basically consist of being a parasite from the finance industry.

The Stupidest Argument This Side of a Republican Debate

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Jim Clyburn (D-SC) has just come up with the stupidest argument against Bernie Sanders plan for free tuition for college students that I have ever heard:

Days after endorsing Hillary Clinton, Rep. Jim Clyburn has a specific and sharp critique of her opponent: Bernie Sanders’ education plan would threaten the existence of smaller, private historically black colleges, Clyburn told BuzzFeed News in an interview.

 The third-ranking Democrat in the House is one of the fiercest and most prominent champions for historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in politics.

 ………

 The next Democratic primary contest is here, where Clyburn is immensely popular. He said he will speak on Clinton’s behalf at Union Baptist Church in Charleston on Sunday — and also to Clinton herself to map out a game plan about whether the two will campaign together in South Carolina before the Feb. 27 primary.

 But on Saturday he told BuzzFeed News in a telephone interview that while he acknowledged Sanders’ campaign is gaining traction with college-aged students in South Carolina, the education plan they’re attracted to doesn’t protect institutions like nearby Claflin University, which is private.

 “You’ve got to think about the consequences of things,” Clyburn said. “[If] you start handing out two years of free college at public institutions are you ready for all the black, private HBCUs to close down? That’s what’s going to happen,” Clyburn said.

 “Tougaloo College in Misssissippi will be closed if you can go to Jackson State for free,” he said.

Let me get this straight: You want college students, specifically black college students, to start their lives Enslaved by crushing debt because it might inconvenience some institutions that he has a sentimental attachment to.

This is without a doubt the stupidest thing that I’ve heard all week, and given that it’s an elections year, that is a mind boggling concept.

Given that Donald Trump is leading the Republican field, it being the stupidest thing that I have heard all week is a complete mind f%$#.

Baltimore’s Man From Teach for America

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With the rather hapless Stephanie Rawlings Blake not running for reelection as Mayor of Baltimore, it it is a bit of a free for all, with pretty much everyone, including her larcenous (she was convicted and served time) predecessor.

Needless to say, there is much opportunity for mischief, and it appears that the hedge funds first choice for pillaging the public school system, Teach for America, has a candidate in the race:

For those who’ve never paid much attention, Teach For America sounds like a benevolent and benign idea: recruit bright college grads, give them some teacher-training and place them in some of the nation’s neediest schools for a two-year commitment to teach kids.

The reality behind TFA’s sunny exterior is somewhat more sinister. Education policy experts today consider the nonprofit founded by Wendy Kopp in 1990 to be at the vanguard of the school privatization movement. TFA is also a media juggernaut in its own right, known for deploying a sophisticated public relations arsenal to advance an agenda focused on crushing teachers’ unions and privatizing public school systems. TFA’s funders, including the Waltons, Bill and Melinda Gates and top Fortune 500 corporations, all have plenty to gain from the commodification of public goods and the destruction of public service unions, and its 11,000 corps members provide a valuable service to that end.
………

When Mckesson announced his campaign for mayor of Baltimore this month, his name topped the list of trending topics on Twitter for several hours. Even without outlining a strategy to defeat better-known, more entrenched candidates, Mckesson received nearly $130,000 in online donations, met with President Barack Obama (who said Mckesson and associates “were better organizers than I was”), and secured his status as one of the country’s most closely watched political outsiders. Headlines appeared across national media, from Slate to the Guardian to the Washington Post, with the progressive online magazine Truthdig proclaiming Mckesson “Truthdigger of the Week.”

With his candidacy for a city whose public schools are a key target of the education reform movement, the time seems right to scrutinize Mckesson’s relationship with Teach for America more closely. His high-profile appearance at the TFA gala only days after filing his last-minute bid to enter the race was only the latest collaboration with the organization spearheading a sustained attack on teacher’s unions and traditional public schools.

………

As Mckesson rose to prominence, TFA was there to provide promotion through its powerful PR apparatus.

Mckesson had no connection to Ferguson when he first arrived on Aug. 16, 2014, according to an interview he gave Huffington Post later the same year. But it didn’t take him long to connect with another protester named Brittany Packnett, with whom he began working the same day. The fact that Packnett is executive director of TFA’s St. Louis chapter likely contributed to their immediate rapport.

At the time, Mckesson was senior director of human capital for Minneapolis Public Schools. He says he commuted to Ferguson on weekends before eventually quitting his job to protest full-time.

A Twitter search query produces a clear timeline of Mckesson’s subsequent transition from human resources manager to social justice talent, aided by promotion from Teach For America. It begins with a post to TFA’s official blog, in which Mckesson pontificates on his activities in Ferguson. TFA tweeted a link to that post on Aug. 21, 2014, at which point Mckesson would have been in the besieged midwestern town for five days.

………

I reached Mckesson by phone soon after he announced his candidacy for mayor. When I asked him how he funded all of his travel despite not having a job, he initially replied, “I don’t have an answer to that. There’s an answer in the New York Times article.”

After being informed that the Times offered no such answer, Mckesson stated, “You know, people ask me this, and I haven’t even had to answer this. I, you know, me and you don’t have a relationship. You know, you’re a reporter to me, you know—I’ve answered it many times. I will put that on my list of things and try to double back with you.” Several hours later, Mckesson texted me the link to a Tweet from last spring claiming that his excursions were funded by unnamed “family and friends.”

………

Mckesson the ruthless administrator is a difficult characterization to reconcile with Mckesson the protester, as he’s typically portrayed in print, nor does it come through in his television appearances. But commentary from some activists who have encountered him on the ground in Ferguson and Baltimore suggests that the public image he’s cultivated is a media fiction.

Baltimore activist Duane Davis, in a tweet addressed to DeRay, says, “[W]e crossed paths. On more than one occasion….you never engaged in conversation. [Y]ou were more focused on media attention.”

In a February 15 interview with Jared Ball on Real News Network, Hands Up United Coalition co-founder Taureen Russell offered a withering assessment of Mckesson’s alleged role as a protest organizer. “I never worked with DeRay. I’m really hard-pressed to find any local people who have worked with DeRay. All the local people that I know worked with DeRay…work with the establishment,” he said. “So when I hear him go on Colbert and Colbert is saying he’s organized protests in Ferguson…I don’t know an action or a protest that he was a part of.”

Russell is a founder of the organization that initiated the protests in Ferguson against the police killing of Michael Brown and the acquittal of the officer who gunned him down. He told Ball he was relieved that Mckesson had moved on to politics because “it makes my job [as a grassroots organizer] a little easier.”

Addressing Baltimore, Russell said of Mckesson: “He’s a proponent for charter schools. He’s not typically a fan of public schools. So the educational issue comes up. His policy, to be honest, most people see as a neoliberal kind of policy. And we know his policy comes from Teach For America.”
………

Mckesson’s political platform, which he has begun rolling out on the DeRay For Mayor website, seems modeled in part on those who have forced corporate education reforms under big-city mayors like Rahm Emanuel and Michael Bloomberg. Both of those mayors have justified unilateral takeovers of the public school districts in their respective cities using teacher evaluations based on standardized test scores, which have consistently been debunked as unreliable measures of academic performance.

The language in his section on education is typical of school privatization advocates, according to Dr. Julian Vasquez Heilig, a professor of education at California State University at Sacremento who has written extensively about Teach For America on his website, Cloaking Inequity.

………

The lack of transparency in the DeRay For Mayor campaign means the public will have to wait until March to identify all the contributors to its six-figure finances. But if history is any indicator, we can expect it to include many of the same financial interests that have waged assaults on public school teachers and students across the country. It remains to be seen if Teach For America and one of its most famous cadres will finally be held to account for their privatization agenda, before it begins to take hold in Baltimore.

Yes, I know that this sounds tin-foil hat, until one looks at the history of the charter school movement.

There is a lot of  money to made from sucking the marrow from pub lic education, and when there is a lot of money to be made, people work very hard to make it.

It’s basic economics, or to quote Willie Sutton, “Because that’s where the money is.”

Wall Street is hip deep in privatizing education, and leveraging politics to create ill gotten gains is their “A” game.

Mount St. Mary’s Update: This Is What Happens When You Trust a Finance Guy

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William Agee, former CEO of Bendix is a man of many failures, but his destruction of Morrison Knudson is particularly instructive on the skill set of finance types:

………

 Mr. Agee further estranged insiders by quietly moving the CEO’s office to his Pebble Beach estate, and worse, scoffing at the company’s engineer-oriented culture. “You construction guys have been trying to run the company for 75 years,” Keith Price, who headed Morrison Knudsen’s MK Ferguson unit until he retired in April 1991, recalls Mr. Agee telling him. “Now I’m going to show you how the financial guys do it.”

 The November letter pointed out just how the financial guy did his numbers. Using numbers available from earnings reports and filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the letter writers pointed out that the percentage of the company’s pretax income from nonoperating sources such as asset sales and interest for the five years ending 1993 averaged 43%. In other words, Mr. Agee was sweetening profit reports by selling Morrison off piece by piece, and investing Morrison’s cash.

 Meanwhile, lease obligations had rocketed. During the five years ended 1993, they had jumped, to $266 million at the end of 1993 from $38 million at the end of 1988. (To shore up cash, Mr. Agee had begun selling assets, such as equipment, and leasing them back, Morrison executives say.)

This is how finance works.  Find out a loophole, and use it to benefit personally, the future be damned.

At Mount St. Mary’s, Simon Newman, the recently appointed college President, a hedge fund type, decided to try to expel 5% of the freshman class to create the illusion that the retention rates.

When people complained, he fired them including a tenured professor with no due process.

We are now seeing the push back, with the faculty calling for his resignation by a vote of 87 to 3, which he promptly ignored.

Additionally, the alumni are freaking out, and the The Washington Post condemned the behavior of the President and the Board of Directors in no uncertain terms:

Mr. Newman has only himself to blame for the mess at “the Mount,” as the university is known, despite his and the board of trustees’ despicable efforts to deflect fault to what they regard as a cabal of infidels among the faculty and alumni. It was Mr. Newman who, in a conversation with professors, said that struggling freshmen should be culled in order to improve Mount St. Mary’s student retention rate, which affects its standing in U.S. News and World Report’s rankings of colleges and universities.

(Emphasis mine)

When I first posted about this, I jokingly suggested that Newman’s plan was to burn down the university for the insurance money.

More and more, it seems like my joke is reality.

Remember When I Wrote About a College President Who Described Shooting His Student and Drowning Them Like Bunnies?

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Basically, it was his plan to game the college ratings.

Well, as I mentioned in the above link, the President of Mount St. Marys University used these analogies for his plan to artificially boost the retention numbers throwing out higher risk students in the first 3 weeks of class, when they don’t count:

You just have to drown the bunnies … put a Glock to their heads.

It made the national news, and the college, and its President, former bankster Simon Newman, were held up for condemnation.

Unsurprisingly, President Newman is handling this like the guardian of capitalism that he is: killing he messenger:

When student reporters at Mount St. Mary’s University, a small Catholic institution in Maryland, published an article in January that quoted the university’s president likening struggling freshmen to bunnies that should be drowned, they knew it might get a big reaction.

 It finally came this week, it appears — in the form of a pink slip for the faculty adviser of the campus newspaper.

 The university informed the adviser, Ed Egan, that he had been disloyal and was now fired, a move seen by many on the campus in Emmitsburg as a retaliatory strike.

 The decision, along with other recent punishments of faculty members at Mount St. Mary’s, has triggered outrage well beyond its rural campus in northern Maryland, earning condemnation from thousands of academics across the country as well as national monitors of academic and journalistic freedom.

 The article, by Rebecca Schisler and Ryan Golden, was published in The Mountain Echo under Mr. Egan’s tutelage on Jan. 19 and presented two explosive pieces of news.

 ………

 The report said that the administration was planning to cull struggling freshmen from the institution as part of an effort to improve retention numbers — a big factor in rankings published in outlets like U.S. News & World Report — and that the university’s president, Simon Newman, had used disturbing language to sell the idea to a skeptical professor last fall.

 “This is hard for you because you think of the students as cuddly bunnies, but you can’t,” Mr. Newman is quoted as saying. “You just have to drown the bunnies.”

 He added, “Put a Glock to their heads.”

 ………

 “Ed, as the faculty adviser, could really frame the battlefield, if you will, around what the issue was,” Mr. Coyne said. “We had a president in a private conversation with a colleague says the bad-metaphor-hall-of-fame statement, and that was the story. And the position behind it about a retention program that was never enacted, was suddenly lost in the conversation.”

 Mr. Egan and both student reporters, who said they had spent weeks investigating their article, rejected Mr. Coyne’s depiction of editorial manipulation. (The private conversation, the students reported, was relayed by two professors who were there.)

 “There was no pressure at all,” Ms. Schisler, a junior, said. “We are a student-run paper. All of the articles are the ideas of students, and all of them are written by students.”

 Mr. Golden, a senior who is also The Echo’s managing editor, said the newspaper’s staff members had been blindsided by the administration’s move to fire Mr. Egan, who, he said, had been a staunch advocate of their work.

 “We were really appalled by it,” Mr. Golden said. “He’s really a good mentor for a lot of students at this school. He absolutely encouraged us to pursue journalistic integrity, absolutely encouraged us to be ethical, to be fair, to be thorough, to be objective and to do the best work that we could.”

 Mr. Newman, a former private equity chief executive, was hired last spring to help raise the college’s national profile and increase its endowment. Some faculty members have since pushed back against what they see as his sharp-elbowed business approach.

 Mr. Egan’s dismissal was the third case in less than a week of faculty members’ facing censure from Mr. Newman’s administration. The cases were being portrayed by some professors and alumni as a concerted effort to purge the faculty of those with dissenting views.

There have been two other people fired, including a tenured faculty member, and get a load this bit from his dismissal letter:

“As an employee of Mount St. Mary’s University, you owe a duty of loyalty to this university and to act in a manner consistent with the duty,” read the letter addressed to Dr. Naberhaus and signed by Mr. Newman. “However, your recent actions, in my opinion and that of others, have violated that duty and clearly justify your termination.”

Between potential lawsuits, bad PR, and what I am sure is quite a few enraged alumni, Egan is a 2nd generation alumnus, it does appear that I was being prophetic, and not just sarcastic, when I suggested that when Simon Newman wanted to run the University like a business, it meant, “Burning it down for insurance money.”

This is what happens when you hire finance types to do real jobs, BTW.

Today in IP Stupidity

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The Harvard Law Review Society publishes a book called the “A Uniform System of Citation,” for lawyers.

It’s more generally referred to as “The Blue Book”, and a group of law students at NYU are publishing a similar set of instructions, which they have referred to as the “Baby Blue”.

The response from the HLRS? A cease and desist letter to the students from their lawyer:

War is brewing over the most boring piece of intellectual property imaginable: the “Bluebook,” the 580-page quasi-authoritative source of proper legal citation formats published by the Harvard Law Review, described by Adam Liptak of the New York Times a few months ago as “a comically elaborate thicket of random and counterintuitive rules about how to cite judicial decisions, law review articles and the like [that] is both grotesque and indispensable.”

Students at NYU Law School have prepared a new, streamlined, open-access citation system and gotten it ready for publication; but Chris Sprigman, a law prof at NYU, posted this open letter to his “law professor friends” yesterday:

I am writing to ask you to help me with something important. You may know that for the last year, I’ve been working on a public domain implementation of the Bluebook’s Uniform System of Citation.

The work, which I’ve named ‪#‎BabyBlue‬, is now done, but we’re holding it, because the Harvard Law Review Association has hired counsel and is threatening to sue (me, and Carl Malamud of PublicResource.org, the publisher).

………

The conflict has been brewing for a few months — starting with a letter from Harvard Law Review’s lawyers to publisher Carl Malamud of PublicResource.org:

I write concerning . . . your imminent release of an “implementation of the Bluebook’s Uniform System of Citation” called “BabyBlue,” possibly as soon as December 31, 2015. Based on the description of “BabyBlue” … we believe that “BabyBlue” may include content identical or substantially similar to content or other aspects of The Bluebook that constitute original works of authorship protected by copyright, and which are covered by various United States copyright registrations.


………

It’s copyright nonsense, and Harvard should be ashamed of itself for loosing its legal hounds to dispense it in order to protect its (apparently fairly lucrative) publication monopoly.

Here’s a bit of free legal advice: If you want to assert copyright protection over something, don’t call it “A Uniform System of Citation” — because systems are, by definition, unprotected by copyright. Section 102(b) of the Copyright Act couldn’t be clearer:

In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, [or] method of operation, … regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.

It gets even better.

It appears the Harvard Law Review Society is not the creator of this document:

Among the low points in an American legal education is the law student’s first encounter with The Bluebook, a 582-page style manual formally known as “A Uniform System of Citation.” It is a comically elaborate thicket of random and counterintuitive rules about how to cite judicial decisions, law review articles and the like. It is both grotesque and indispensable.

The Harvard Law Review has long claimed credit for creating The Bluebook. But a new article from two librarians at Yale Law School says its rival’s account is “wildly erroneous.” The librarians, Fred R. Shapiro and Julie Graves Krishnaswami, have done impressive archival research and make a persuasive case that their own institution is the guilty party.

“It’s clear that the idea of a uniform citation manual came from Yale, and a lot of the specifics of the early rules came from Yale,” Mr. Shapiro said in an interview. “Harvard entered into the picture later.”

………

The new article ends on a sheepish note.

“Some readers may question whether originating the hyper-complicated Bluebook should be a source of pride for Yale,” it says. “Our response is that, although the Bluebook version that subsequently developed under the leadership of Harvard Law Review currently consists of 582 fairly large pages, the two earliest Yale precursors of the Bluebook were, respectively, one page and fifteen pages long.”

“And these were,” the article says, “very small pages.”

Shades of the song, Happy Birthday to You, where the evidence is fairly clear that the copyright holders never actually wrote the song.

Our IP system is broken, and needs to be fixed.

Actually, it needs to be burned to the ground, because the system has engendered attitudes that lead to this crap.

Business as Usual in the Charter School Industry

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The man at the center of dozens of charter school deals in southern California has been arraigned for corruption and self-dealing:

By the time Steve Van Zant left the Mountain Empire Unified School District in 2013, he had overseen the authorization of more than a dozen charter schools to operate in other districts throughout San Diego County — with several going on to hire his education consulting firm.

 All the while, Van Zant coached at least one other district on how to approve out-of-town charters, according to emails obtained by the San Diego Union-Tribune. As more districts approved far-flung charters, Van Zant’s EdHive consultant business took on some of the schools as clients.

 The San Diego district attorney’s office arraigned Van Zant on Jan. 15 on a felony conflict-of-interest charge from an undisclosed incident in May 2010 while he was superintendent of Mountain Empire.

 The district attorney’s office declined to disclose details of its investigation, and it is unclear whether the charge relates to his work with charter schools. According to the criminal complaint, Van Zant violated laws that prohibited him “from being financially interested in contracts made by him in his official capacity.”

 The Union-Tribune has tracked a charter empire built by Van Zant by taking advantage of what some call a shortcoming in state law that gives districts a financial incentive to place charters in other school districts. By placing charters outside its boundaries, a district can raise new funds — up to 3 percent of a charter’s revenue — without any threat to enrollment or state attendance funds.

 More than 80 out-of-district charters have been approved in San Diego County, the vast majority of which were authorized by small East County districts — several with help from Van Zant, who includes a list of charter clients on his LinkedIn professional network profile.

 ………

 When Van Zant accepted the job in 2013 as superintendent of the Sausalito Marin City School District, he was positioned to devote even more time growing his consulting business. He would commute from his Mission Bay home for the three-day-a-week position in Northern California with a starting salary of $165,000 and still run EdHive, which recently opened an office in Symphony Towers in downtown San Diego.

 The EdHive website says it can “find an authorizing district for your charter and cut a deal that provides the financial incentive for the district and still save your school money” among services such as negotiating leases and setting salaries.

 ………

 Van Zant has been placed on indefinite paid leave in Sausalito. He was seen leaving EdHive’s Symphony Towers office Friday.

There are way too many stories like this.

I know that there is an opportunity for corruption in schools of any sort, as there is with any sort of public funds, but the degree to which charter schools are a petri dish for corruption strongly implies that this is a feature of the system, not a bug.

This is So Not a Surprise

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In news that surprise no one, Eve Moskowitz’s Success Academy has been sued for systematic discrimination against disabled students:

When it was revealed that a Brooklyn school run by the Success Academy charter network was systematically pushing out struggling and disabled students identified on a “Got to Go” list, the company’s head Eva Moskowitz said the list was the work of a rogue principal, unrepresentative of any broader policy. Critics of the lucrative, influential 36-school network have long alleged that it maintains high test scores by pressuring parents of students with disabilities to pull them from its schools. A federal civil rights complaint filed yesterday by 13 parents along with politicians and advocacy groups bolsters the case, alleging that difficulties faced by special-needs kids are actually the result of a company-wide policy that has been in effect for years.

“Success Academy operates schools in some of the most distressed neighborhoods of this city and receives considerable public funding but fails to serve students with disabilities in accordance with the law,” Legal Services NYC direct Raun Rasmussen said in a statement. “These children deserve better.”

………

When it was revealed that a Brooklyn school run by the Success Academy charter network was systematically pushing out struggling and disabled students identified on a “Got to Go” list, the company’s head Eva Moskowitz said the list was the work of a rogue principal, unrepresentative of any broader policy. Critics of the lucrative, influential 36-school network have long alleged that it maintains high test scores by pressuring parents of students with disabilities to pull them from its schools. A federal civil rights complaint filed yesterday by 13 parents along with politicians and advocacy groups bolsters the case, alleging that difficulties faced by special-needs kids are actually the result of a company-wide policy that has been in effect for years.

“Success Academy operates schools in some of the most distressed neighborhoods of this city and receives considerable public funding but fails to serve students with disabilities in accordance with the law,” Legal Services NYC direct Raun Rasmussen said in a statement. “These children deserve better.”

 ………

The other cases all echo this one, with some variations—some parents have already withdrawn their child, one was expelled in his fourth year, and some parents, like Jackson, are still fighting to receive special education within Success schools.

Each set of allegations involves school administrators ignoring or downplaying disability diagnoses, and when confronted with them, failing to provide such support measures as small classes or paraprofessionals. When behavioral problems arise with the inadequately accommodated special-needs child, rather than reassessing, the schools allegedly suspend the kids, force parents to pick them up early, and in some cases, call paramedics to take them to emergency rooms.

 ………

Meanwhile, the State University of New York, which licenses charter schools, is planning to investigate Success’s alleged pressure tactics, according to a New York Post report.

This is how charter schools work, because this is what we pay them for.

Essentially, they get paid for high test scores, and the easiest way to do this is to make sure that under-performing or difficult students never enroll, and to make sure that those who do enroll leave.

Running a University Like a Business: Burning it Down for the Insurance Money

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Current President of Mount St. Marys University, and former finance type, attempted to boot about 5% of the incoming freshman class in the first weeks of class. He called it Drowning Bunnies:

Amid a conversation about student retention this fall, the president of Mount St. Mary’s University told some professors that they need to stop thinking of freshmen as “cuddly bunnies,” and said: “You just have to drown the bunnies … put a Glock to their heads.”

Simon Newman was quoted in the campus newspaper, The Mountain Echo, on Tuesday, in a special edition that reported the university’s president had pushed a plan to improve retention rates by dismissing 20 to 25 freshmen judged unlikely to succeed early in the academic year. Removing students who are more likely to drop out could hypothetically lead to an improvement in a school’s federal retention data; the deadline for submitting enrollment data is in late September.

Newman, a private-equity chief executive officer and entrepreneur who was appointed president of the private university in Emmitsburg, Md., in 2015, said Tuesday that there are some accurate facts in the Echo story, but “the overall tone of the thing is highly inaccurate.”

“The inferences, the innuendo, it’s not accurate at all — the conclusions one would naturally draw from reading it,” Newman said in an interview with The Washington Post. He described an intensive, multi-pronged effort to improve retention rates, because the school loses 20 to 25 percent of its first-year students. School administrators, he said, want to be sure their customers, the students, are successful.

………

A professor who was part of the conversation The Echo quoted confirmed to The Post that the quotes were accurate.

(emphasis mine)

“Their customers, the students,” 4 little words that show everything that is wrong with corporate management of education.

They call it, “Bringing a blunt, analytical business perspective to the management of the school.” I call it arrogance and running their company into the ground, because after this, and the story is on their Wiki Page, (I put it there) they are in for a well deserved world of hurt.

BTW, the way he was running it was unethical and profoundly dishonest:

The Mountain Echo reporters wrote that Newman’s retention plan included administering a survey to all freshmen, with this introduction: “This year, we are going to start the Veritas Symposium by providing you with a very valuable tool that will help you discover more about yourself. This survey has been developed by a leadership team here at The Mount, and it is based on some of the leading thinking in the area of personal motivation and key factors that determine motivation, success, and happiness. We will ask you some questions about yourself that we would like you to answer as honestly as possible. There are no wrong answers.”

But the paper reported on an email exchange that expressed a desire to eliminate a certain number of students, based on the survey results, by the Sept. 25 cutoff date when the university would be required to report enrollment numbers to the federal government.

The plan, the paper reported, sparked strong pushback from some members of the faculty and the administration.

An email from Newman, the paper reported, explained: “My short term goal is to have 20-25 people leave by the 25th [of Sep.]. This one thing will boost our retention 4-5%. A larger committee or group needs to work on the details but I think you get the objective.”

………One of the goals of the symposium was to help ease students’ transition to college, and with this proposal they might be kicking out some students who would be successful.

Newman responded that “there will be some collateral damage.”

This is not only everything that is wrong the increasingly corporate business of education in the country, it is an indictment of business culture generally in the US, where callous selfishiness and indifference are viewed as virtues.

H/t CURMUDGUCATION.

About Bloody Time

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After years of Orthodox Jewish control of the East Ramapo School Board, where they have done little but strip the school system for parts, parents have sued the New York State Department of Education demanding a state takeover.

From their press release:

On January 14, parents of public school children in East Ramapo Central School District filed a petition in State Supreme Court in Albany, asking the court to direct the New York State Board of Regents and the State Education Department (SED) to take concrete remedial action to safeguard their children’s right to a sound basic education as guaranteed by the New York State Constitution.

The petition describes numerous State and federal investigations and reports documenting a continuing pattern of fiscal mismanagement and neglect by the East Ramapo Board of Education over the last decade. The Board’s mismanagement has resulted in a severe lack critical educational resources, resulting in poor student outcomes and depriving district students of a sound basic education. The reports, including two in the last year by State-appointed monitors, provide compelling and overwhelming evidence of a district on the brink of financial collapse. 

In these reports, State and federal officials document the Board’s failures to provide essential programs and services to vulnerable student populations, including English Language Learners (ELL) and students with disabilities. They also spell out the signficiant cuts made by the Board in the number of classroom teachers and support staff employed by the district and in essential school programs.

Over a year ago, a comprehensive report by a fiscal monitor appointed by former State Commissioner John King made numerous recommendations to address the Board’s mismanagement, reallocate funding within the district’s budget, and begin restoring essential resources cut from district schools. These recommendations were echoed in a December 14, 2015, report to the Board of Regents by Dennis Walcott and a team of monitors appointed by State Commissioner Mary Ellen Elia in August.

Despite the State’s best efforts to secure their voluntary cooperation, the Board has steadfastly refused to take meaningful steps to fix the problems identified in the reports and take prompt corrective action to provide students with a sound basic education.

The East Ramapo school board is attempt to destroy the public school system for two reasons:

  • They don’t want to pay any taxes.
  • They are attempting to ethnically cleanse the town, and killing the public schools is a good start.

Unfortunately, the politicians, and hence the bureaucracy, is unwilling to take any political heat from New York’s frum Jewish community, so nothing has happened.

If I were a plaintiff, I would be asking to move the elections to the November elections for President and Congress.

Having the elections at an odd time, Spring of odd-numbered years, is a recipe for this sort of crap.

I would also see any number of the board members prosecuted for corruption, as it is clear that they are engaging in sweetheart deals with the local Yeshivas, but I don’t see that as being politically possible unless the Feds step in.

“If They Want the Germans to Accept Arab Women Wearing Headscarves Then They Must Accept Germans Sunbathing and Swimming Naked in Public Parks and Rivers.”

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One of the reasons that there are problems integrating immigrants into European societies is because there is very little effort to actual integrate them into society.

So this course in Europe is a very positive step:

Skinny-dipping, gay relationships and parenting all form part of Magdi Gohary’s crash-course introduction to a strange new home, Learn to Understand Germany, given at a huge refugee camp on the outskirts of Munich.

 Many of those who join his seminars headed to the country in search of security and gave little thought to what else awaited them there, says the 74-year-old, a retired chemist who left his native Egypt for Munich half a century ago.

 “We talk about homosexuality, which a lot of my course members tend to see as criminal. I go on to explain to them that Germans don’t see it that way and that they will have to accept that if they want to live here,” he says.

 They are warned that their children will have more independence if they grow up German than they might have expected in the Arab world.

 “Arabs are often shocked here when they see the Bavarians go swimming naked in the River Isar. But I tell them that if they want the Germans to accept Arab women wearing headscarves then they must accept Germans sunbathing and swimming naked in public parks and rivers.”

 In the wake of mass assaults on women in Cologne on New Year’s Eve – which police believe were largely carried out by men of Arab and North African backgrounds, including several asylum seekers – Germany is being pushed into a public debate about the challenges of integration.

 The conversation is a delicate one. Refugees, those who work with them and the millions of Germans who support chancellor Angela Merkel’s policy of welcoming new arrivals are all very wary of giving more ammunition to far-right groups who have already made political capital from the attacks. But many are also frustrated by assumptions that it would take little more than a change of clothes and passports for new arrivals to settle in, and say the conversation is a very necessary one for Germans and refugees alike.

There is very little effort to make immigrants in Germany, France, Italy, Holland, etc. into Germans, French, Italians, Dutch, etc.

Instead, Europe has tacitly accepted the creation of segregated ghettos, with little meaningful integration into the surrounding culture.

Misquoting Deming

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It turns out that a common argument for expanded school testing is based on a selective quote of the efficiency expert Edward Deming which reverses its meaning:

………

If challenged, test fans often quote the late Dr. W. Edward Deming, the world-famous quality guru who showed Japanese companies how to build better stuff than anybody else. In his book, “The New Economics,” Deming wrote, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”

Here’s the whole sentence as he wrote it: “It is wrong to suppose that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it — a costly myth.”

This full Demings quote is not a surprise.

One of the central conceits of his theories statistical quality control is that testing is a sign of faulty process and faulty product.

Of course accurate quotes do not matter to the educational reform community. Mendacity is at the core of their modus operandi.

The school reform movement is largely driven by two things, the desire to crush teachers’ unions, and the desire to turn public tax dollars into private profit.

Truth is not, nor has it ever been, a meaningful part of their process.

David Whorowitz Strikes Again

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In case you are unaware, David Whororitz is a self styled expert on the Middle East and Islam.

He’s a nut and a bigot.

It’s kind of like Nathan Bedrord Forrest claiming to be an expert on Civil rights.

Well, he’s come up with a list of the 10 most anti Semitic and pro-Muslim colleges in the country, and one of them is a complete mind f%$#, Brandeis University.

That’s right, he’s calling what is arguably the most Jewish non-sectarian school in the nation a den of anti-Semitic Muslim extremists:

David Horowitz used to hang at the Café a lot. In fact, when we first opened, he was here for lunch every day. [Charle’s Pierce’s, have some stupid for lunch cafe] We haven’t seem much of him, largely because he’d been obscured by the lunch rush of customers that we now get every day. So it was nice to see him pop up in his old booth today. Edroso, our brilliant daytime bartender, spotted him first.

Harvard, Columbia, and Brandeis are among 10 leading American universities named by the David Horowitz Freedom Center as being the “most friendly” to radical Islamic propaganda and anti-Israel incitement.

Contemptible, bigoted, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.

Today in Stupid

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In Marshfield, Wisconsin, a school board member is trying to ban a Muppet book:

File this under “Why even local elections are important.”

In Marshfield, Wisconsin, the school board decided last summer to slightly change the curriculum to include kindergarten teachers to read a Muppets-themed book called “For Every Child A Better World.” Per the Amazon description of the book, it is about this:

The familiar character of Kermit the Frog teaches young readers about the plight of young children who lack the basic human necessities and the efforts of the United Nations to provide such essentials as housing, water, food, and medical aid.

The goal of reading this book was to help make the little tykes better citizens, something that this world does desperately need.

But one of the school board members, Mary Carney, had a complete breakdown about this book and threatened to not send her kids to her school district. Carney’s beef was that she felt that the new curriculum downplayed “American exceptionalism”:

As near as I can determine, Marshfield is a place for people who aren’t cool enough to live in Wausau, Wisconsin.

The Stupid, It Burns!

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In Canada, a Yoga class has been canceled because of accusations of cultural appropriation:

In studios across the nation, as many as 20 million Americans practice yoga every day. Few worry that their downward dogs or warrior poses disrespect other cultures.

But yoga comes from India, once a British colony. And now, at one Canadian university, a yoga class designed to include disabled students has been canceled after concerns the practice was taken from a culture that “experienced oppression, cultural genocide and diasporas due to colonialism and western supremacy,” according to the group that once sponsored it.

In a telephone interview with The Washington Post, Jennifer Scharf, who taught the class for up to 60 people at the University of Ottawa, said she was unhappy about the decision, but accepted it.

“This particular class was intro to beginners’ yoga because I’m very sensitive to this issue,” she said. “I would never want anyone to think I was making some sort of spiritual claim other than the pure joy of being human that belongs to everyone free of religion.”

Oh, you poor delicate flowers.

On a related note, I am starting a charity, the Association of Cranial Rectal Inversion Disease, (ACRID) for people with their heads chronically up their asses.

H/T Stephen Saroff      o o  The Bear who Swims      
                        (_)_____o      
                     ~~~~(______)~~~~~~~~~~
                         oo    oo

Another Reason Not to Vote Hillary

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She loves her some charter schools, even when they illegally exclude disabled students:

Good news! Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton just admitted there are significant problems with the nation’s charter schools!

Bad news! She has no interest in solving them! In fact, she thinks charters are just great.

Here’s Clinton criticizing charter schools:

Most charter schools — I don’t want to say every one — but most charter schools, they don’t take the hardest-to-teach kids, or, if they do, they don’t keep them. And so the public schools are often in a no-win situation, because they do, thankfully, take everybody, and then they don’t get the resources or the help and support that they need to be able to take care of every child’s education.

………

In short, most charter schools stink. Clinton admits we have a problem. But how do we solve it?

Clinton:

I have for many years now, about 30 years, supported the idea of charter schools, but not as a substitute for the public schools, but as a supplement for the public schools. And what I have worked on through my work with the Children’s Defense Fund and my work on education in Arkansas and through my time as first lady and senator is to continue to say charter schools can have a purpose, but you know there are good charter schools and there are bad charter schools, just like there are good public schools and bad public schools.

So I want parents to be able to exercise choice within the public school system — not outside of it — but within it because I am still a firm believer that the public school system is one of the real pillars of our democracy and it is a path for opportunity. …the original idea… behind charter schools was to learn what worked and then apply them in the public schools.

So Clinton’s solution to the charter school crisis is what exactly? She seems to be saying that charter schools have major problems, but the best way to fix them is to redouble our belief in this flawed and failing system.

Sanders has been dubious of charters, though he has not explicitly opposed them, and while Governor of Maryland, has presided over one of the most tightly regulated systems for charter schools in the nation.

Hillary, on the other hand, is big into Charters, which is not surprising, given that Wall Street is got its larcenous hooks well and fully into the whole process.

This is Not a Surprise

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Even in the ethically dubious world of charter schools, online charters seem to be dicey.

Now comes a study which indicates that online charters are about as effective as not going to school at all:

A new study on the effectiveness of online charter schools is nothing short of damning — even though it was at least partly funded by a private pro-charter foundation. It effectively says that the average student who attends might as well not enroll.

 The study was done by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, known as CREDO, and located at Stanford University, in collaboration with the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington and Mathematica Policy Research. CREDO’s founding director, Margaret Raymond, served as project director. CREDO receives funding from the pro-charter Walton Family Foundation, which provided support for the new research.

 CREDO has released a number of reports in recent years on the effectiveness of charters — using math and reading standardized test scores as the measure — which collectively conclude that some perform better than traditional public schools and some don’t. In its newest report, released this week, CREDO evaluated online K-12 charter schools. There are 17 states with online charter students: Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah and Wisconsin, as well as the District of Columbia.

 The study sought to answer this question: “How did enrollment in an online charter school affect the academic growth of students?” Academic growth, as mentioned before, is measured by standardized test scores for the purpose of this study, which evaluated scores from online charter students between 2008 and 2013 and compared them to students in traditional public schools (not brick-and-mortar charters). Here are some of the findings:

  • Students in online charters lost an average of about 72 days of learning in reading.
  • Students in online charters lost 180 days of learning in math during the course of a 180-day school year. Yes, you read that right. As my colleague Lyndsey Layton wrote in this story about the study, it’s as if the students did not attend school at all when it comes to math.
  • The average student in an online charter had lower reading scores than students in traditional schools everywhere except Wisconsin and Georgia, and had lower math scores everywhere except in Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin.


 Layton quoted Raymond as saying, “There’s still some possibility that there’s positive learning, but it’s so statistically significantly different from the average, it is literally as if the kid did not go to school for an entire year.”

(emphasis mine)

Fundamentally, the problem here is that many of the supporters of things like cyber-charter schools are autodidacts, the sort of people who would literally break into computer science lab in the dead of night to teach themselves about computers. (This is an actual example from the life of Bill Gates, a big charter supporter.)

People who are that aggressively self taught are few and far between, and there are simply not enough people who fit that mold (I don’t, for example) for the rapidly expanding rolls of internet academies, and those who could succeed with these institutions don’t really need them. They could learn anywhere.

BTW, this is also an indictment of MOOCs, (Massive Open Online Courses) which seem to be the latest fad in higher education.

I will note however that there are remote learning approaches that do work, most notably Open University in the UK, but these involve to use of tutors who actually have a significant amount of face time with their students, as well as face to face evaluations.

Of course those get in the way of profits, so in the charter and the MOOC world, these things are eschewed.

Not a Surprise………

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It turns out that when correcting for poverty, crime rate, and the like, the only thing that determines the level of law enforcement personnel at a school is solely determined by the percentage of black students:

With the viral video of a police officer violently arresting a black female student at high school in South Carolina reinvigorating the debate over school resource officers, new research bolsters critics’ claims that school security can have a negative effect on students, particularly African Americans.

The new study by two academics in New York showed that the mere presence of African American students at a school makes it more likely the school will take on security measures, even when controlling for neighborhood crime and school misconduct.

The study also found, among other things, greater racial disparities in student suspensions and arrests in schools where there are cops present or other security measures are taken. Those arrest and suspensions are believed to contribute to the so-called “school-to-prison pipeline.”

This is not a surprise.

It has been “Zero Tolerance”, and “Getting Tough On insertnounhere”, etc. have almost always been primarily an a ploy to excuse racism.