Education Companies Claiming "Non-Profit" Status are Making Huge Profits on State Tests for Common Core Standards

With Common Core, federal forces cleverly circumvented the law that prevents federal direction of states’ educational systems, making it impossible for the Congressional Budget Office to look at costs of implementation. Common Core advocates slid this "state-led" initiative under the radar of the taxpaying public. Researchers estimate that Common Core implementation will cost consortium states $16 billion collectively over the next seven years, a sum that goes on top of the costs states already struggle to come up with for schools. States adopting Common Core will need to spend approximately $2.47 billion in one-time costs to obtain aligned English language arts and mathematics instructional materials. [Source]

The misnamed “Common Core State Standards” are not state standards. They're national standards, created by Gates-funded consultants for the National Governors Association (NGA). They were designed, in part, to circumvent federal restrictions on the adoption of a national curriculum, hence the insertion of the word “state” in the brand name. States were coerced into adopting the Common Core by requirements attached to the federal Race to the Top grants and, later, the No Child Left Behind waivers. (This is one reason many conservative groups opposed to any federal role in education policy oppose the Common Core.)

No law states that the federal government can withhold educational funding from states if they refuse to adopt Common Core. Yet the U.S. Dept. of Education tries. The federal government is attempting to bribe states to stay in Common Core by holding out the No Child Left Behind waivers as a trade. We are protected by the U.S. Constitution and cannot be force to submit by our Executive Branch, which holds no legal authority over education in any state in our country.  Three federal laws in addition to the U.S. Constitution state that the federal government has zero authority to direct states’ education. [Source]

[The entire country just finished a decade-long experiment in standards-based, test-driven school reform called No Child Left Behind. NCLB required states to adopt “rigorous” curriculum standards and test students annually to gauge progress towards reaching them. Under threat of losing federal funds, all 50 states adopted or revised their standards and began testing every student, every year in every grade from 3–8 and again in high school. (Before NCLB, only 19 states tested all kids every year, after NCLB all 50 did.)] [Source]

Written mostly by academics and assessment experts—many with ties to testing companies—the Common Core standards have never been fully implemented and tested in real schools anywhere. Of the 135 members on the official Common Core review panels convened by Achieve Inc., the consulting firm that has directed the Common Core project for the NGA, few were classroom teachers or current administrators. K–12 educators were mostly brought in after the fact to tweak and endorse the standards—and lend legitimacy to the results. [Source] Parents were tricked into advocating for Common Core. In Utah, The PTA accepted a $2 million donation to advocate for Common Core without ever analyzing whether Common Core was for the best of our nation’s children and teachers.  This might be one reason why nobody, not even educators, seem to know more than catch phrases and rhetoric concerning Common Core. [Source]

Achieve, Inc.,  is a Washington, D.C. group formed in 1996 by a group of corporate leaders and some governors who wanted “standards-based education” across states. Michael Cohen has been president of Achieve, Inc. since 2003. Before that, he was a career-long federal education officer: Michael Cohen has been Director of Education Policy at the National Governors Association (1985-90) and Director of Planning and Policy Development at the National Association of State Boards of Education (1983-1985). During the Clinton Administration he served as Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education, Special Assistant to President Clinton for Education Policy, and Senior Advisor to U.S. Secretary of Education Richard Riley. Thus, Michael Cohen went from a career in the U.S. Department of Education to leading Achieve, the national-standards group that wrote the CCSS, to then working for the national standards’ testing arm, PARCC, as its project manager, thus writing the tests for those standards which his group had written, that now will be federally directed and overseen by the Department he long worked for.

Forty-five states and the District of Columbia decided to follow the new guidelines. Alaska, Nebraska, Texas and Virginia opted out, while Minnesota decided to only adopt the English standards (with others perhaps joining them soon). These states began implementing the standards last year. State governments and governors teamed up with a few nonprofit organizations to create a rubric that all participating states could follow.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker asked the state legislature to abandon Common Core. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is asking the state to examine the standards. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, one of the Common Core standards' big supporters in the beginning, called on his state to develop its own standards. A group of teachers and parents are now suing him, saying that school is starting in a few weeks and they have no idea what to teach the incoming children now. Sens. Rand Paul (Ken.), Ted Cruz (Tex.) and Marco Rubio (Fla.) were all against the standards last year. [Source]

In March 2014, the state Department of Education announced that it would give a $220 million, 6-year contract to American Institutes for Research to develop and administer new accountability tests to replace Florida’s old testing system, the FCAT. The Washington-based "nonprofit" will develop tests aligned to the Florida Standards, the new education benchmarks based on the controversial Common Core State Standards. The new tests are expected to be ready for the 2014-15 school year. AIR has contracts to develop tests for about 10 states including Florida.

The global eduction company Pearson landed a major contact in  2014 to administer tests for common-core standards. While a number of companies inquired in response to Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC)'s request for proposals for the project, ultimately Pearson was the only bidder. Despite that, PARCC state officials (a 20-state consortium) are convinced the process was sound and resulted in the best vendor getting hired. The contract with Pearson is one of "unprecedented scale in terms of states coming together." One aspect of the deal with Pearson that is sure to get attention is the PARCC states' prediction that it will result in an assessment price of about $24 per student. The list of experienced subcontractors secured by Pearson, who include ETS, WestEd, Caveon, and Measured Progress, also gave PARCC state officials confidence, a Mississippi official said. "PARCC states wanted to ensure we got the best assessment at the best price possible," said Christopher A. Koch, superintendent of education in Illinois, another PARCC state, in a statement. Pearson has a worldwide footprint in education. The company says it operates in 70 countries, though 60 percent of its sales are in North America. The $24-per-student price was reached after "very aggressive negotiating" between PARCC state officials and Pearson, a back-and-forth that lasted weeks, he said. He attributed the lower-than-previously-estimated per-student cost partly to economies of scale that can be achieved through having large numbers of states and students participating at once. The PARCC states to date have had three contracts with Pearson, according to the consortium. One of those contracts calls for the London- and New York-based company, along with ETS, to do test-item development during year one of the common core, which includes the process of extensive field-testing underway in the states this year. [Pearson Wins Major Contract From Common-Core Testing Consortium, May 2, 2014, Education Week - Education Week is funded by Bill Gates]

Cuomo, Common Core and Pearson-for-Profit

By Alan Singer, Huffington Post
February 28, 2012

It will probably take more than a billion dollars in the bank to run for President of the United States in 2016. It looks like New York State Governor is already lining up corporate support. My concern is that he will sell out the education of New York State's children to for-profit companies, particularly Pearson, to position himself for the run. 

Pearson is one of the most aggressive companies seeking to profit from what they and others euphemistically call educational reform, but which teachers from groups like Rethinking Schools and FairTest see as an effort to sell, sell, sell substandard remedial education programs seamlessly aligned with the high stakes standardized tests for students and teacher assessments they are also selling.

Pearson reported revenues of approximately $9 billion in 2010 and generated approximately $3 billion on just digital revenues in 2011.

If it has its way, Pearson will soon be determining what gets taught in schools across the United States with little or no parental or educational oversight. Pearson standardized exams will assess how well teachers implement Pearson instruction modules and Pearson's common core standards, but not what students really learn or whether students are actually learning things that are important to know.

Pearson is already creating teacher certification exams for eighteen states including New York, organizing staff development workshops to promote Pearson products, and providing school district Pearson assessment tools. In New York, Pearson Education currently has a five-year, $32 million contract to administer state test and provides other "testing services" to the State Education Department.

It also recently received a share of a federal Race to the Top grant to create what the company calls the "next-generation" of online assessments.

Pearson, which claims to be the "world's leading learning company," is in the process of designing mind-numbing "multimedia textbooks... designed for pre-schoolers, school students and learners of all ages" for use on Apple's iPad so school systems will have more products to purchase instead of investing in quality teaching and instruction. In case you are not already worried about children seating dazed in front of computer screens for hours on end, Pearson promises its "respected learning content" will be "brought to life with video, audio, assessment, interactive images and 3D animations."

According to the New York Times, New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is "investigating whether the Pearson Foundation, the nonprofit arm of one of the nation's largest educational publishers, acted improperly to influence state education officials by paying for overseas trips and other perks." Since 2008, state education officials have been treated to trips to London, Helsinki, Finland, Singapore, and Rio de Janeiro.

From February 9-11, Pearson organized a National Summit in Orlando, Florida to promote its concept of "Best Practices in School Improvement" and to sell its programs for integrating Common Core State Standards into curriculum, instruction and assessment. These include providing "struggling and successful schools alike with professional development and consultative services that have helped their leaders transform instruction in the classroom and raise students' achievement levels."

The company brags that senior America's Choice fellows Sally Hampton and Phil Daro, employees of a Pearson sub-division, "not only led the development of the Common Core Standards, but also helped design Pearson's CCSS services, helping us tailor our professional development, district level consultative services, job-embedded coaching, learning teams for building capacity, and even whole school CCSS implementation services in order to meet your specific needs and interests as you align curriculum content and practices to the standards."

In September, Pearson cemented its ties with the New York State governor and the State Education Department when David Wakelyn was appointed Deputy Secretary for Education. Governor Cuomo claimed:

"With his extensive experience in improving the performance of schools all across the nation, David Wakelyn is the right person to help turn around our schools. He is an expert in state policy for education, and together we will deliver results for students and families in New York." 

However, Wakelyn's resume shows that after briefly working as a teacher as part of the Teach for America program, he moved into educational policy and decision making, primarily as a Senior Associate for America's Choice School Design, which is now a leading Pearson sub-division.

Of course, Wakelyn is not the only corporate representative to move into a government position where they can sell products produced by their former (and future?) employer. Karen Cator, the Director of the federal Department of Education 's educational technology section previously was an executive at Apple Computers for eight years.

Education Giant Pearson Wins 'Unprecedented' Common Core Test Contract (Excerpt)

Breitbart
May 5, 2014

...Regarding the announcement [of Pearson winning the contract for Common Core testing], Valerie Strauss at the Washington Post observed that two years ago, the nonprofit group FairTest predicted that while education policy makers promised Common Core reforms would increase competition and innovation, the same education firms that scored the big contracts in the past would still do so in the age of Common Core.

Pearson has had its share of interesting associations and controversy as well.

In 2010, the year most state boards of education were adopting the Common Core standards, Pearson purchased America’s Choice, the for-profit subsidiary of progressive Marc Tucker’s National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE), which had assisted Bill and Hillary Clinton in achieving their education goals during President Clinton’s two terms. Later, Tucker served on the feedback team for the Common Core English/Language Arts standards, and two senior fellows from America’s Choice, Phil Daro and Sally Hampton, served, respectively, on the math and ELA work groups that drafted the Common Core standards.

Pearson acquired America’s Choice for $80 million, and proceeds from the sale created a $3.6 million per year endowment for NCEE. In addition, Daro and Hampton then became senior fellows at Pearson.

In December, the Pearson Foundation, the nonprofit arm of the education giant, agreed to a settlement of $7.7 million after accusations by the attorney general of New York that it helped develop Common Core-aligned courses for Pearson, Inc., its corporate parent.

As Breitbart News reported, New York State’s attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman argued that Pearson, Inc. worked to develop a series of courses, instructional materials, and software aligned with the Common Core standards.

“Pearson, Inc. decided to develop its Common Core aligned course offerings within the Foundation, with substantial funding by Pearson, Inc., in order to attract foundation support and credibility for its commercial products,” Schneiderman said in a statement.

“Pearson, Inc. and the Pearson Charitable Foundation planned that the courses developed within the Foundation would be sold commercially by Pearson, Inc.,” he continued. “Internal business analyses prepared by Pearson, Inc. projected that potential profits from sales of the courses and related offerings could be in the tens of millions of dollars.”

According to a report in the New York Times, Schneiderman also asserted that Pearson, Inc. had planned to use its charitable foundation “to win endorsements and donations from a ‘prominent foundation.’ That group appears to be the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,” which has been the primary source of private funding for the Common Core standards.

WHO IS BEHIND COMMON CORE?

By Arizonians Against Common Core 

A nonprofit organization called Achieve, Inc., in Washington, D.C. is the main driving force behind creating the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI). The Common Core (CC) standards were initiated by private interests in Washington, D.C., without any representation from the states. See Common Core: Myths vs. Facts here written by American Principles Project.

From the Achieve, Inc. website: "To this day, Achieve remains the only education reform organization led by a Board of Directors of governors and business leaders. This unique perspective has enabled Achieve to set a bold and visionary agenda over the past 15 years, leading Education Week in 2006 to rank Achieve as one of the most influential education policy organizations in the nation." Achieve is a Washington, D.C. "think tank" which does not include membership from all of the states.

In Achieve's "Common Core Implementation Workbook" they state, "After 30 years of fits and starts, true transformational reform in education is not only possible but also entirely within our grasp." So Achieve has been working on "national education standards" for 30 years! They continue on, "The implementation challenge looms large. In response, Achieve and the U.S. Education Delivery Institute have developed a practical Common Core Implementation Workbook for all states in the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC). The workbook uses a proven performance management methodology known as 'delivery' to lay out clear action steps for states and districts. It provides relevant information, case stories of good practice, key questions and hands-on exercises for leadership teams to complete together. Regardless of your timeline, the workbook offers state and district leaders the means to plan for the CCSS and then drive successful implementation. The discipline of delivery was first developed in 2001 under U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair. "So the system of delivery was not first developed by the states but from from the United Kingdom's Tony Blair and in 2001! So much for the Common Core standards being a "state-led" effort! This is long before what is stated on the CCSSI website of this process starting in 2009!

"Eventually the creators of the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI) realized the need to present a facade of state involvement, and therefore, enlisted the National Governors Association (NGA) {a trade association that doesn't include all governors}, and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), another DC-based trade association. Neither of these groups have grant authority from any particular state or states to write the standards. The bulk of the creative work was done by Achieve, Inc., a DC-based nonprofit that includes many progressive education reformers who have been advocating national standards and curriculum for decades. Massive funding for all this came from private interests such as The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. which has donated $150 million in grants to implement the Common Core Standards (See Common Core: Myths vs. Facts as well for further information).



For a quick visual overview on how the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI) {actually Federal Standards} view this flowchart: How is it implemented in our "States"? below:

WHAT COMPANIES HAVE TO GAIN FROM COMMON CORE?

By Arizonians Against Common Core

You can see from the "How is it Implemented in our 'States'?" flowchart, there are companies that will directly benefit by implementing Common Core. Some of these companies are:

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, pledged $150 million dollars in Grants in 2007. Bill and Melinda Gates are directly tied to the United Nations, and they will directly benefit from the software packages that are sold to train teachers in the classroom through Microsoft.

Publishing Companies- Pearson, Scholastic News, MacGraw Hill, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, (AZ textbooks used in Public Schools are primarily from the publisher Harcourt) etc., will benefit from Common Core because they will provide the textbooks, for training teachers and teaching students, and curriculum changes that will need to be made to implement Common Core. Pearson, the largest on-line book company in the world, announced in their 2012 Earnings Report that "The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC)...awarded Pearson and Educational Testing Service (ETS) the contract to develop test items that will be part of the new English and Mathematics assessments to be administered from the 2014-2015 school year. We continued to produce strong growth in secure online testing, an important market for the future. We increased online testing volumes by more than 10%, delivering 6.5 million state accountability tests, 4.5 million constructed response items and 21 million spoken tests. We now assess oral proficiency in English, Spanish, French, Dutch, Arabic and Chinese. We also launched the Online Assessment Readiness Tool for the PARCC and the Smarter Balance Assessment Consortium (SBAC) Common Core consortia to help 45 states prepare for the transition to online assessments." Can you say more $$$ for Pearson???

Achieve, Inc. connections- who will benefit from Common Core? Craig Barrett is the Chairman of the Board of Directors of Achieve, Inc., he is the current Chairman for the AZ Ready Education Council; and he is a Thunderbird Faculty member promoting United Nation Principles. (He is also the Former CEO/Chairman of the Board of Intel). Computer companies will directly benefit from computer sales to the states and local school districts. All of the Common Core student assessment testing will now be computer based. See (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers {PARCC} website for more details on the new student testing that will replace AIMS).

We Are Information-age Serfs Ruled Over by a Global Elite, Our Minds Enslaved to Celebrating Diversity, Embracing Tolerance, and Worshipping Mother Earth

In anticipation of Earth Day 2011, The Goddard School in Urbana, Maryland (educating children from the ages of 6 weeks to 5 years) joined World Wildlife Fund’s Earth Hour 2011 with nearly 400 Goddard Schools nationwide to help spread the message of working together to make a positive impact toward a sustainable future. Children designed invitations asking parents and neighbors to join them in Earth Hour, decorated a banner with only recycled materials to present to Maryland Sen. Ron Young, and paraded wearing outfits created out of recycled materials. “We are proud to incorporate this in school so children will go home and do it with their families,” said the school's director Traci Keyes. “As time goes on, we create more pollutants in the air. Our Earth is fragile, so this is an opportunity to teach students how we can keep the environment clean for future generations by throwing our trash away,” said John Pelicano, co-owner of the school. Since its inception, Earth Hour has become a global initiative with over 1 billion people in 4,100 cities, 87 countries and seven continents participating by turning off their electricity for an hour. “Children are like little sponges. They will take what they learn with them as they grow older,” said Keyes. - Urbana Preschoolers ‘Step Up’ for Environment, The Town Courier, March 30, 2011

The modern division of labor consists of a ruling class (top 1%) that control about 40% of all financial assets, a managerial class ( the top 2%-10%) who control about 35% of all assets, with the other 90% of the working masses dividing up the 25% that’s left. The pyramid is organized by a complex and highly specialized division of labor, state-run education, massive corporations, government bureaucracy, the judiciary, intelligence organizations, mediatic propaganda machines and mainstream religion. Those rare few that actually wake up and see the zombie world are quickly diagnosed by the DSM-5 and given anti-depressants. There are two things everyone wants all the time, and one of them is money. Control of the money is the magic wand that rules the world. All the other religious, patriotic and historical paraphernalia are directly related to allowing the 1% to control the creation of money. Take that away, and they are nothing but media hacks. The current era which began with the creation of the Federal Reserve and the involvement of the United States in WWI is coming to an end. The great mistake most “awake” people make is believing redemption is at hand while underestimating the ruling class. The masters of propaganda and finance and are much more in control then they will ever reveal through their own channels. Their imaginations are immense and their capacity to orchestrate drama has no limits. They are the voice of reason while the dissenters are “diagnosed” with a collection of ailments that quickly marginalize them. - Robert Bonomo, What QE3 Will Look Like, Activist Post, August 12, 2011

FedEd: Education for Global Government

FedEd: The New Federal Curriculum and How It’s Enforced. St. Paul, MN: Maple River Education Coalition, 2002. Pp. 153.

By Steven Yates, LewRockwell.com
February 22, 2003

Suppose your aim is to obtain power over an entire society. You’ve decided that violent revolution is not the way to go. It’s disruptive, and if history is any guide, you might get your own nose bloodied a time or two. What do you do? This question has been asked — and answered — more than once.

The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s answer — undertaking a "long march through the institutions" to infiltrate and "capture the culture" by stealth — is perhaps the best known. Gramsci wasn’t the first to come up with this idea, though. An earlier version already existed. It involved capturing the minds of the young. Moreover, if the job of transmitting a civilization’s aggregate knowledge and cultural heritage is entrusted to a single network of institutions, then so much the better.

We’ve had such a network for well over a hundred years. It’s called the public education system. We have Horace Mann and his Harvard Unitarians to thank for doing more than anyone else to get it started back in the 1840s. Mann studied the "Prussian model" in Europe and returned home to found the first such schools in this country. This model involves the state raising children to meet the needs of the state. This model gave us the word kindergarten, the product of an analogy between raising children (kinder) and growing vegetables in a garden (garten).

I’ve long considered the phrase public education a misnomer. It implies an institution that serves the public. It has been quite a while since government schools served the public, however. The slow decline in their capacity to educate since embracing Deweyan "progressive education" early in the last century is so well documented I need not repeat it here. Nor need I discuss more recent fads like OBE.

But in the 1990s we went from the frying pan into the fire. As literacy levels plummeted to embarrassing lows, the feds began the largest power grab over education in U.S. history — in a move intended to pull in private schools and home schooling parents as well, eventually. At this point we come to the latest attempt to expose what the feds are doing to American children and why: Professor Allen Quist’s FedEd: The New Federal Curriculum and How It’s Enforced. Quist is imminently qualified to write it.

An author and political scientist who also has a divinity degree, he was in the Minnesota House of Representatives in the 1980s, where he served on the House Education Committee and was influential in legalizing home schooling in that state. He has been involved with school boards. He currently teaches political science at Bethany Lutheran College in Mankato, Minnesota.

FedEd is a slim volume packs a colossal wallop. If there were any remaining doubts how much of the decline of government schools can be explained in terms of stealth social engineering, Quist’s study should lay them to rest.

In certain respects, FedEd picks up where Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt’s the deliberate dumbing down of america leaves off. Her account was historical, going back over a hundred years, and literally overwhelms you with original documentation. Quist’s book is a much shorter and more succinct account of where we are now. Unlike Iserbyt’s encyclopedic tome it can be read in one or two sittings. Quist lays out the reasons for the anti-academic and anti-cognitive biases in government schools that are producing graduates who cannot walk up to a map of the world and find the United States — much less grasp our founding principles.

In a sense, given their aims, government schools have to be regarded as spectacular successes rather than dismal failures. The evidence all points in a single direction: their intent has been to dumb down the citizenry of this country and produce a "new serfdom" — a global workforce totally subservient to the needs of omnipotent world government and its internationalist corporate partners.

In 1994 alone, this effort received three major boosts, in the form of the Goals 2000 Educate America Act, the School-To-Work Opportunities Act (STW), and a bill known simply as HR6, a funding appropriations bill for most federal education programs. Bill Clinton signed all three. (More recently, of course, George W. Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, which we are led to believe superceded STW.)

Taken together, these bills hand control over curricular content to federal educrats, resulting in the New Federal Curriculum: FedEd, for short. Quist identifies seven themes running through FedEd (p. 43, p. 100, pp. 131-32, etc.):

1. Undermining national sovereignty (moving us toward world government under the auspices of the United Nations).
2. Redefining natural rights (substituting for the American view a Marxist and internationalist view justifying massive redistribution of wealth).
3. Minimizing natural law (essentially by neglect).
4. Promoting environmentalism (emphasizing the global nature of environmental issues, including promoting the pagan pseudo-religion of Gaia, Mother Earth).
5. Requiring multiculturalism (including acceptance of homosexuality).
6. Restructuring government (toward the idea that we live in a "global village," defining citizenship in global terms).
7. Redefining education as job skills (preparing "human resources" for the global workforce).

He names names and organizations (p. 13). Some will be quite familiar; others have been operating behind the scenes for years:

1. The Clintons, obviously. ("It takes a village," remember?)
2. Marc Tucker, Director of the National Center for Education and the Economy, author of a certain letter addressed to Hillary Clinton you may read here.
3. Lauren Resnick, Co-director of the New Standards Project.
4. Charles Quigley, Director of the Center for Civic Education (CCE). (No relation to Carroll Quigley I know of.)
5. Margaret Stimmon Branson, Associate Director of the CCE.
6. Shirley McCune, a federal education researcher.

Others deeply involved in this broad based effort include the National Education Association and, of course, numerous multiculturalist and environmentalist groups who stand to extend their own turf.

The overriding purpose, however, is a world in which the majority of people are Information Age serfs ruled over by a global elite, their minds enslaved to such notions as celebrating diversity, embracing tolerance, and worshipping Mother Earth. They will know how to "multitask," but will have no grasp of economics or Constitutional principles, any significant knowledge or their historical origins or even much knowledge of basic math (they will have calculators, after all).

One of the most pertinent prior developments was the UN’s World Declaration on Education for All (1990). The idea sounds good. It involves weighty phrases like "world class standards" (p. 91). But in practice, it threatens to impose an educational agenda that, once in place, would be enforced at an international level by a global government — the chief long-term goal of FedEd’s masterminds.

None of this is possible, of course, with a citizenry that knows something of its roots. It is not compatible with a political philosophy that limits government to a few carefully defined functions, and who see rights as anteceding government instead of created by it.

An agenda such as FedEd would not be possible among those who understand enough economics and enough history to know that open-ended, market-based economies tend to deliver prosperity while micromanaged, command-driven systems eventually deliver poverty and de facto slavery (it may just take a while).

There are still too many educated citizens around for central planners to operate openly. Their agenda would not "play in Peoria," even today. Hence the stealth measures aimed at obtaining entry into the minds of small children. The guiding theme behind FedEd is a certain philosophy of education. It might be called statist-vocationalism.

The purpose of education, according to this philosophy, is not to graduate citizens who can think independently of the group or of authority, are suited for entrepreneurship and peaceful trade with their neighbors, are informed, and can participate responsibly in a Constitutional republic. It is rather to produce subjects who will be cognitively dependent: on government, on an employer, and on groupthink — a socialized mass, that is.

According to the American tradition, education aims to give individuals knowledge and tools to find their own ways of flourishing in the world. According to FedEd, in accordance with the basic thrust of its Prussian ancestor, education is subordinate to the purposes of the state and business in "public-private partnerships" or other arrangements, to raise a population fit for life and work in the global-socialist new world order in the making.

Above we listed seven themes Quist identifies running through the New Federal Curriculum. The word theme is very important. In the New World Edubabble, a theme is not an academic subject. Traditional academic subjects such as mathematics, literature, history, geography and so on, emphasized content. Themes emphasize attitudes, values and beliefs in what educrats call the affective domain (cf. p. 42). They aim not at communicating information and real cognitive skills but inculcating the right attitudes and values. They aim, where necessary, at changing students’ minds — indoctrinating, in other words, instead of educating. Cognitive content is subordinate to this purpose. Quist provides a revealing example, penned by Shirley McCune:

All learning begins with the affective [attitudes and values]. A major task of education is to extend the worldview of the child; this should include a view of careers, of the community, our nation and our global community (quoted on p. 25; emphases Quist’s).

So in teaching the Constitution and the Bill of Rights (for example), the New Federal Curriculum does not offer a comprehensive account of what the documents say. Rather it carefully selects, emphasizing what serves FedEd’s goals and ignoring what doesn’t.

For example, National Standards for Civics and Government, one of the key texts of FedEd, makes 81 references to the First Amendment but none to the Second Amendment. This is unsurprising; the goal, after all, is not merely dumbed down subjects but disarmed ones as well, a people encouraged to fear guns.

This part of the agenda already has the full cooperation of national media that consistently portray guns as evil and dangerous, and gun owners and their defenders as backward rednecks or potentially violent extremists. The Tenth Amendment also disappears. It would suggest to thoughtful readers that the entire federal-educratic edifice is unconstitutional. Out of sight, out of mind.

In providing a framework for "civic education" FedEd presents the following "fundamental values": (1) the public good, (2) individual rights, (3) justice, (4) equality, (5) diversity, (6) truth and (7) patriotism. One may note that some of these are not compatible with others unless they are radically redefined. But debasing the language is part of FedEd’s indoctrination process; by using familiar terms in new ways it can change students’ attitudes while seeming to be educating them.

Quist outlines how FedEd substitutes a collectivist and internationalist conception of rights, the one drawn from the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for the one we inherited from the classical liberal tradition and incorporated into our Declaration of Independence (see pp. 56-59).

For any concept of individual rights with teeth in it is going to undermine equality, for example, understood here not as equality under the law but equality of condition. Truth and patriotism, finally, are redefined. Truth means consensus (in accordance with the postmodernist idea that truth is a "social construct," not correspondence to reality — cf. p. 80); patriotism is unconditional loyalty to government and its agents, not to a set of ideals government is expected to live up to. Indeed, as we have said, the indoctrination process sets out to prepare students for a global workforce in an emerging world government.

Thus Quist can mine out of National Standards this discussion of sovereignty:

The world is divided into nation-states that claim sovereignty over a defined territory and jurisdiction over everyone within it (quoted on p. 47).

He then undertakes some very good linguistic analysis (the sort of thing professional analytic philosophers ought to be doing but aren’t). Note the phrase divided into, tacitly implying that a unified world is, or should be, the primary political unit with nations as secondary units. Wouldn’t a more accurate wording be, "The world consists of nation-states … " And do these nation-states merely claim sovereignty? If so, from whom? This way of putting the matter drops the subtle implication that the claim is not really legitimate — or at best, that its legitimacy is conditional on the approval of a transnational power left unidentified. How about: "The world consists of sovereign nation-states." That would be a neutral, non-agenda-driven account of the true state of affairs.

Quist observes that the wording in official documents driving the New Federal Curriculum is chosen with great care, to achieve very specific effects on students when repeated throughout their "educations" from early childhood into their impressionable teen years.

Internationalism, likewise, is consistently viewed not just as desirable but inevitable:

… the issues confronting American citizens are increasingly international [textbook’s emphasis]. Issues of economic competition, the environment, and the movement of peoples around the world require an awareness of political associations that are larger than the nation state [emphasis added … ] (quoted on p. 94).

The international organization the author has in mind, of course, is the UN or some successor organization. Some readers might wonder at this point, "Isn’t business going global?" or "Isn’t there a great deal of movement across national borders, including ours?" Fair enough, but much of this activity — whether of business or of populations — is spurred on by internationalist organizations who see it as a means of engendering control, particularly over cultures such as that of Western born whites with strong traditions of freedom and individualism.

For world government to work, such peoples must be diluted and their influence nullified, so that a new generation, fully accepting of "diversity" and focused on global issues, thinks of citizenship in global, not in local, regional or national terms. A major FedEd text, We the People: the Citizen and the Constitution, invites students to consider the question, "Do you think world citizenship will be possible in your lifetime?" World citizenship makes little sense without world government.

Thus the multiculturalism and environmentalism that permeate FedEd. Let’s consider both briefly. National Standards makes 42 references to multiculturalism / diversity (p. 46) and 17 to the environment. Multiculturalism has become (part of) the official ideology of this country’s dominant intellectual class, which includes its educratic class. Now multicultural education in the sense of education about other cultures could be a legitimate goal wherever members of different cultures find themselves coming into contact, and this has been going on spontaneously for centuries. But multicultural education in this sense is not the goal of the multiculturalism evidenced in FedEd. Multiculturalism portrays a single culture, that of straight white Western males and their Christian and "bourgeois" values, in as hostile a light as possible (pp. 77-78).

Likewise with environmentalism. Quist emphasizes that he is not opposed to teaching students about environmental issues (p. 65). However, he does question the brand of environmentalism incorporated into FedEd. He observes (p. 66) that this brand of environmentalism:

1. is exaggerated in comparison with other concerns;
   
2. includes identifiable religious content, not just respecting but actually worshipping Mother Earth, sometimes called Gaia in the literature of radical "deep ecology"; and
   
3. as part of the larger agenda of consolidating power and centralized economic planning, with the aim of eventually bringing all political and economic activity under the one central authority.
   

It should be noted that the global environmentalist movement is far better funded by a wide array of enormously wealthy tax-exempt foundations than most Americans realize. It has become powerful enough to have generated its own "scientific" orthodoxy, so that visible dissident scientists face efforts to destroy their reputations — as Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, recently discovered.

Among the chief goals of FedEd is to turn out "global villagers." A major tool here is the reinterpretation of education as job skills. Now it is true that we are heirs of a national mythology holding that everyone should go to college. We should get over whatever disdain exists for people who work with their hands. But again, these are not the goals of FedEd. Its goals would impose a purely vocational model on children, with vocational choices imparted via "career clusters" as early as eighth grade. This is long before many children are ready to make a serious vocational choice. (Readers, did you know what you wanted to be when you grew up when you were in the eighth grade? If I remember right, I wanted to be an astronaut!) And by the way, people who work with their hands are more than capable of understanding when agents of government are stepping on their Constitutional rights — if they are taught Constitutional government in the eighth grade!

This effort, involving stealthy devaluation of the autonomous individual, has been underway for some time. It is reflected in such apparently innocent changes in terminology such as from personnel to human resources (cf. p. 98). The former, to my ears anyway, implies autonomous persons applying for work, being hired, paid, etc. The latter suggests, again to my ears, the comparability of human beings to inanimate natural resources such as land, water, oil and so on.

Persons have autonomy and rights — are ends in themselves. Resources are objects to be manipulated — are means to the ends of those in power. This essentially how FedEd looks at students (future members of the global workforce) — hearkening back to the Prussian model and its growing children as if in a garden. It is likely not coincidental that during the 1990s we also saw abominations such as NAFTA, which has destroyed much of our manufacturing base, and that unchecked immigration ran out of control, not just eroding national borders but ensuring a steady supply of low-wage workers who, not assimilating, will also remain unfamiliar with Constitutional principles.

We should say a word about the view of business implicit in FedEd. Many so-called education reforms are promoted as "good for business," and this is often enough to gain the support of business and business organizations such as the local branch of the Chamber of Commerce. FedEd paints a rosy picture of "reformed" public schools turning out loyal, technology-savvy and business-savvy employees. Businesspeople cannot necessarily be faulted for failing to see through the smokescreen of deceptive language — although an inability to find employees who can read and understand instruction manuals should clue them in that something is wrong.

A key is the phrase public-private partnership that has been seen more and more often during the past decade. This means close ties between government and business. What results is not capitalism but corporatism — in which corporations and government cooperate both to discourage the open competition characteristic of genuine capitalism in favor of policy that is established and administered jointly, with each side doing favors with the other (e.g., "tax incentives" for business; support going to certain candidates for political office from business).

This method is clearly a species of central planning. It may be used to establish what kinds of vocations and jobs are desirable and available in a given region — to the point of laying out actual job descriptions (sometimes doing it badly — cf. pp 86-89). "Education" then sets out to train students for these specific vocations and jobs.

On the surface, corporatism sounds very pro-business, and no doubt there are established business leaders who like it very much. But its overall view of society is statist and collectivist — and, of course, authoritarian. The New Federal Curriculum sets out to indoctrinate and train individuals to meet the needs of the state and its corporate partners.

At one time, this kind of system was known as fascism. Both Nazis and Communists employed purely vocational models of education, so that students would learn what they needed to serve the state, and no more. Excessive intellectual curiosity was discouraged. It wasted time and resources (and might lead to students asking too many of the wrong kinds of questions). FedEd takes this model and modifies it for the new world order being quietly constructed, with each successive UN confab laying new girders onto the scaffolding.

How is all this to be enforced? Aside from the fact that much of the public does not even know about it, the first thing to note is that the New Federal Curriculum is, for all practical purposes, federal law. It is perfect for an educational environment where money is tight, with state education departments and local school districts having grown dependent on federal dollars.

Thus even though the exact wording of bills like Goals 2000 described them as "voluntary," in the postmodernist-Orwellian universe of FedEd where nothing means what it says, and where HR 6 stipulates that the U.S. Department of education can simply withhold federal money from any state not signing on to the new program (pp. 92-93), states won’t choose autonomy.

Surprise, surprise; "voluntary" or not, all 50 states eventually signed on. After all, school districts were already dependent on federal money, and every federal dollar comes with strings attached. They had no choice except to introduce the official textbooks of FedEd, such as the above-mentioned We the People: The Citizen and the Constitution. Despite the title, this text portrays the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights as superior to the U.S. Constitution.

Another means of enforcement is through gaining control of early childhood education, including infant education. It is interesting to compare such statements with one of the slogans thrown around back in the 1990s, associated with both Goals 2000 and STW: "All children will begin school ready to learn." Ready to learn how, by what means, and in what respect?

What this statement is really promoting is not families’ beginning educating very small children but rather "arrangements involving families, communities, or institutional programmes, as appropriate…" (quoted on p. 107). A logical mind will want to know: what kinds of arrangements, what kinds of "programmes," and who decides what is "appropriate"? But if there is anything FedEd is not about, it is logic.

The phrase again comes from the UN; it is part of the 1990 World Declaration on Education For All. It is more about attempting to instill affective loyalty to such ideas as multiculturalism and universal tolerance, including for homosexuality, into children before they can grasp them cognitively.

It has long been known that a great deal of cognitive development occurs in the first few years of a child’s life; hence the enormous effort to gain control of early childhood education and even care of newborn infants. Groups of children so "educated" will be vulnerable to the rewriting of history already underway (pp. 115-21).

FedEd takes a dim view of the teaching of history either as an ordered collection of events or facts but focuses on "perspectives and values." This kind of rewriting ultimately allows for the enormous oversimplification of events that make it possible to inculcate into students, e.g., the idea that the War Between the States was exclusively about slavery or that phrases such as states’ rights — although implied in the vanquished Tenth Amendment — are code words for racism and bigotry. Such students, educated this way practically from infancy, might even embrace the new world order, never having been exposed to anything else.

Perhaps the most significant method of enforcement, however, is requiring standardized tests that reflect the preoccupations and values of FedEd. Students who for whatever reason have not adopted the desired attitudes will simply not do well on the test. One such test is the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP): referred to euphemistically in educratic circles as "the nation’s report card" (p. 123).

The most recent federal education funding bill, HR1, passed just last year, requires that all fifty states administer this test. This will lead to the redesigning of earlier tests such as the SAT. Quist reports on the focus of the NAEP: key terms relating to environmentalism: 14. Terms relating to multiculturalism: 18. Terms related to vocationalism: 39. Terms involving geography: 0. Terms involving history (apart from the history of government-designated victim groups): 0. Terms referring to national sovereignty, natural law or natural rights: 0.

Through such means as the NAEP, FedEd proposes to pull private schools and home schooling parents under its umbrella of control. Its rules speak of all students, not just students in government schools.

It has been known for some time that home schooled children are usually years ahead of their government-schooled counterparts. Reliance on such tests as the NAEP could create an illusion that home schooling doesn’t work after all, because home schooled students will not have adopted the "attitudes and values" necessary to do well on such a test. The test, meanwhile, will have become necessary for admission to a good college or university or finding good employment.

Let’s make no mistake about it: FedEd endangers the largest and most successful independent educational movement in the country of the past few years!

What should we do? The first step, obviously, is to become aware of the problem. Authors such as Quist and organizations such as the Maple River Education Coalition (MREC) are doing their part. We now have at our disposal extensive arguments that although the idea wasn’t new, of course, the legal scaffolding necessary for integrating the American federal government into a world government advanced rapidly during the 1990s under Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton’s watch, although in fairness, the two Bushes are hardly free of the globalist temptation.

During the past decade, "partnerships" arose aplenty and fostered large-scale interdependence — we even saw the appearance of a (UN-sponsored) Declaration of Interdependence! The relationships are triangular: from the federal government to the educratic elites to corporations (MREC has a very good diagram on their home page). Corporations have fallen hook, line and sinker for such movements as diversity engineering. In accordance with the multiculturalism that has swept the nation, they have begun offering job benefits packages that include homosexual partners, something almost unheard of before the Clinton era.

Those who believe they can escape this problem merely by sending their children to private schools or home schooling them need to see that this is not the case. FedEd sports an introduction by Phyllis Schafly, who unfortunately came out in favor of vouchers. In fact, schools accepting vouchered students will be easily pulled in.

I’ve argued elsewhere that vouchers are a bad idea: a Trojan horse rendering private schools vulnerable to control by those holding the purse strings. State governments may dole out vouchers that seem to give choice to parents, but participating schools must follow "voluntary" federal guidelines or they don’t get the money.

I’ll say it again (maybe those pro-voucher libertarians who launched superficial criticisms of my initial article on the subject or sent me angry email last year will get the point this time): every federal dollar comes with strings attached.

Once we are aware of the problem and recognize that movements like vouchers offer only traps for the unwary, what is the next step? Allen Quist raises this query in his concluding chapter:

What if ten percent of the public knew what was happening and were committed to rescuing our nation? Would that be enough to turn around this attack against our nation? It would be more than enough. It takes less than ten percent to decide most elections. Most lawmakers will do whatever a committed ten percent wants them to do, especially when the other 90 percent doesn’t know and / or doesn’t care (pp. 136-37).

This challenge to launch a nationwide movement aimed at taking back the entire educational system is worth thinking about. Real leadership in a society does come from an often unheralded but dedicated minority. It might be up to this "remnant" to save education and, in so doing, save this civilization if it still can be saved. If they act in time, and it is not already too late!

It is worthwhile, however, for this "remnant" to be aware of what it will confront. Its resources will invariably be limited. Many educational fads that paved the way for FedEd came about through the ongoing support of huge tax-exempt organizations such as the Rockefeller Foundation or Carnegie Corporation. There is no Rockefeller Foundation or Carnegie Corporation bankrolling any movement to free education from federal dominance.

Most works such as Quist’s are published and distributed by small, private publishers operating on shoestring budgets, as are many private schools. Home schooling parents sometimes have to sacrifice mightily to make the effort work. It is clear that the major media solidly back government involvement in education as "good for business." Moreover, the "facilitators" are often extremely well trained in such methods for achieving an appearance of public consensus as the Delphi Technique, and even though the fact that such methods are used is better known that it used to be, parent groups who lack the training will be at a disadvantage.

It is unlikely, finally, that a movement to "take back the schools" will even be reported (except on the Internet, of course) — or, if it is, will be relegated to Sunday supplements and late night talk shows as a "fringe" movement. All this is part of the price paid by those who have chosen to resist an increasingly dominant paradigm, which in our case is now one of centralization, economic micromanagement and political correctness (and secular materialism). Thus it is unlikely that the "remnant" will have the resources available to those doing the bidding of the educrats.

My fear, therefore, is that going to the voting booths will not be sufficient — candidates who would turn back the tide of federal control will invariably find their resources drying up while money, including corporate dollars, flows into the coffers of those who promise cooperation. The bottom line, here, is the longstanding inability of so many people, including many in business as well as education, to refuse easy money.

Another solution worth considering is for the "remnant" to abandon this system and embrace parallel institutions — working toward financial independence for as many such institutions as possible as quickly as possible. Paul Weyrich used this term a few years ago in his call to Christians in particular to secede from the dominant culture, in the wake of the failure of Republicans to remove Bill Clinton from office for lying under oath and obstructing justice following the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

He recommended building up new institutions and eventually a whole new infrastructure, existing alongside (parallel to) the dominant one but independent of it: culturally, educationally, economically. No parallel institution would take federal money under any circumstances. Its entanglements with the feds would be kept to an absolute minimum. These would be its primary distinguishing characteristics.

Weyrich did not recommend a ceasefire in the culture war. That is not a live option, because if movements such as FedEd are not publicly opposed those behind them will eventually be strong enough to come after anyone seen as a threat.

Total separation, that is, is neither possible nor desirable. This means allocating "remnant" resources on two different fronts: building up parallel institutions, and exposing the motivations of those behind the dominant ones. The first will preserve and transmit our heritage of limited government, study markets and outline reasons for the success of market-based systems as well as why command-driven ones fail, and preserve academically-focused education in addition to vocational training of the sort that leads individuals into entrepreneurial career paths. Education conceived this way will provide the perfect backdrop for exposes such as Quist’s.

We all need to be entrepreneurs, whether of ideas, educational programs or in other arenas if we are to survive — because although he doesn’t raise the issue openly, Quist’s document leaves little doubt that making it as difficult as possible for dissidents to earn a living legally in the world empire to come is an unstated consequence — and possibly a goal — of global-village ideology.

In the meantime, both I and others have argued extensively for getting one’s children out of government schools as fast as possible — whether in favor of private schools or home schooling — while joining organizations of others doing the same and preparing for what could be a nasty donnybrook somewhere down the road. Evangelical Christians have long taken the lead here, although there is nothing stopping non-Christians who sense the danger from getting involved.

The information in FedEd makes action imperative. If no one acts, we shall shortly see the emergence into adulthood of an "STW generation" or that can "multitask" and respects "diversity" but has no knowledge of its Constitutional heritage — and sees nothing inherently wrong with world government.

Copies of Allen Quist’s FedEd: The New Federal Curriculum and How It’s Enforced can be ordered from the Maple River Education Coalition, 1402 Concordia Avenue, St. Paul, MN 55104.

Steven Yates [send him mail] has a PhD in philosophy and is a Margaret "Peg" Rowley Fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He is the author of Civil Wrongs: What Went Wrong With Affirmative Action (ICS Press, 1994), and numerous articles and reviews. His new book In Defense of Logic will be completed shortly. He is beginning work on a new book to be entitled The Twilight of Materialism, and is also at work on a sci-fi novel tentatively entitled Skywatcher’s World.

The Charter School Movement and the Corporate Takeover of Education in America

When the Corporate Takeover of Education is Complete, School Employees Will See Reductions in Wages and Benefits and the Elimination of Pensions Just Like Their Private Sector Counterparts (the Charter School Movement is Really About Funding Privately-controlled Schools with Public Money)

Some parents of students at McKinley elementary in Compton, Calif., are fed up. It's a tough town and the school is one of the worst in the state -- ranked in the bottom 10 percent. Sixty-two percent of McKinley parents signed a petition forcing the school district to make it a charter school -- publicly funded but privately run. It's the first use of California's so-called "Parent Trigger Law" where a majority of parents can demand a school shut down, change staff, or become a charter [the parent trigger was created by the organization Parent Revolution, which is not a parent group but was founded by charter school operators, backed financially by billionaires and corporate interests]. However, some parents now say they were tricked or intimidated into signing the petition. If enough of them withdraw their signatures, this whole trigger effort could backfire. Yet, those calling for reform say they're the ones being threatened -- told their kids will be kicked out of school or parents could be deported. These parents are getting support from Michelle Rhee, former head of Washington, DC's schools and the darling of the reform movement. - Fed Up With Failing School, Parents Take Over, CBS News, December 25, 2010

Globalists are Moving at Lightning Speed to Convert Public Schools (and Catholic Schools) to Charter Schools

There has been much public praise for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s efforts to reform public education. However, few scholars have engaged substantively and critically with the organization’s work. While the Gates Foundation is the single largest supporter by far of "choice" initiatives particularly with regard to charter school formation, it is pushing public school privatization through a wide array of initiatives and in conjunction with a number of other foundations. What are the implications for a public system as control over educational policy and priority is concentrated under one of the richest people on the planet in ways that foster de-unionization and teacher de-skilling while homogenizing school models and curriculum? The Gates Foundation and the Future of US "Public" Schools addresses this crucial, unanswered question while investigating the relationships between the Gates Foundation and other think tanks, government, and corporate institutions. - How Bill Gates Plans On Privatizing us Public Schools, The Frustrated Teacher, November 22, 2010

Return of the One-Room Schoolhouse

The American Spectator
March 29, 2011

Even among the nation's woeful traditional big-city school districts, Detroit Public Schools is a particular abomination. Between falling into state receivership for the second time in the past 12 years, facing $327 million in budget deficits for the next four years, wrangling with scandals such as the travails of literacy-bereft now-former school board president Otis Mathis (who resigned last year after the district's superintendent complained that he had engaged in lewd acts during meetings), and constant news about its failure to educate its students, the Motor City district has secured its place as the Superfund site of education.

So it wasn't a surprise when Detroit's state-appointed czar, Robert Bobb , announced on March 12 that the district would slash its deficit -- and eliminate as much as $99 million in costs from operating its bureaucracy -- by getting rid of 29 percent of the 142 dropout factories and failure mills. But instead of just shutting down the 41 schools (as the district originally planned to do) it would convert them into charter schools, handing off instruction, curriculum, and operations to nonprofits, parents groups, and others interested in running schools.

While Detroit's move is certainly driven by cost-cutting, the district is conceding to the reality that the school district model -- with its expensive central bureaucracy, woeful inefficiency, and lengthy record of academic failure -- no longer works either for children or taxpayers. With states and districts facing $260 billion in budget shortfalls over the next two years (and $1.4 trillion in pension deficits and unfunded teacher retirement liabilities in the long haul), charter-like ways of operating schools have become more appealing than ever.

Just outside of Atlanta, the suburban Fulton County school district is taking advantage of a Georgia state law and beginning to convert itself into a charter system. Under the contractual status, the district would be free from traditional degree- and seniority-based pay scales and be allowed to use such innovations as teacher performance pay plans; in turn, school operations move from the central bureaucracies to school-based councils run by adults, teachers and principals. Six other school systems in the Peach State have already converted into charter school systems, and others will likely do follow suit.

In tiny Elkton, Oregon, a town better known as a hotspot for bass-fishing than for school innovation, the one-school district there has taken advantage of a state loophole and fully converted itself into a charter. This has allowed the district to attract students from nearby traditional school systems, creating a form of competition that hadn't previously existed. In the three years since it converted to a charter, Elkton's enrollment increased by 54 percent. Eleven other rural districts in the Beaver State have abandoned the traditional district model in the past eight years; three more have already applied to do so this year.

Then there is New Orleans, which has become the nation's model for school reform. Right after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Louisiana state officials moved to take over 107 of the Crescent City's failing public schools from the faltering traditional school district and began aggressively launching new charter schools. Since then, the traditional district model has been all but abandoned, with both the state-controlled Recovery School District and the old Orleans Parish system operating just 26 of the city's 84 schools; charters account for 70 percent of all New Orleans school enrollment. And even the schools under state control have become de facto charters and, under a plan approved by the state in December, will remain so even after they return to Orleans Parish oversight.

Certainly, traditional school districts still educate the overwhelming majority of the nation's students -- and if the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, and other defenders of traditional public education have their say, it will remain that way. As in the private sector, the advantages of size -- including greater purchasing power -- means that there will always be some large school operators of some sort; even big names within the charter school movement, such as KIPP (which runs 99 schools throughout the nation), Aspire (30 schools in California), and Green Dot Public Schools (17 in California and New York), have enrollments as sizable as some mid-sized traditional districts.

But with just 69 percent of the nation's students ever graduating from high school, big-city districts such as Cleveland and Los Angeles failing to reach even those low graduation rates, and one out of every three fourth-graders reading at levels of functional illiteracy, any thought that big districts equals better student achievement is clearly mistaken. Size (and corresponding big-spending) doesn't turn out to equal efficiency or achievement either. Just 17 percent of the top-spending districts in Florida were among the top third of districts in student achievement, according to a report released in January by the Center for American Progress.

State laws that govern how school districts manage spending and labor -- including collective bargaining rules that were at the heart of the battles last month between unions and governors such as Wisconsin's Scott Walker -- are part of the problem. Detroit, for example, must negotiate with 10 different unions, including locals of the AFT, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

Decades of dealmaking between districts, states and the NEA and AFT have also saddled school systems with teacher pay plans -- including defined-benefit pensions and near-free healthcare -- that have become too expensive to bear; in Jersey City, N.J., for example, the district there spent 184 percent more on teacher benefits in 2007-2008 than it did a decade earlier. These burdens, along with federal regulations such as "supplement-not-supplant" (which requires districts to essentially use Title 1 dollars to fund field trips to prove that they aren't shortchanging students instead of programs that might actually improve their performance), add to taxpayer burdens without improving graduation rates.

The other problem lies with the unwillingness of districts to move to into the 21st century. The refusal to ditch antiquated academic, financial, and management information systems -- even as the federal government has begun embracing the use of MySQL databases and Drupal content management systems -- and the failure to use outsourcing as a way to wring out efficiencies are two examples. Just 69 percent of school buses are kept in operation throughout the school year, according to a 2010 study by Michael Casserly of the Council of the Great City Schools. The contracts districts strike with NEA and AFT locals, along with the bloat in central bureaucracies, also restrict the ability of school principals to actually run schools. School budgets often run in the millions -- usually in the form of teacher salaries -- yet the average principal only controls $60,000 of it, according to education policy analyst (and former Clinton administration honcho) Andrew Rotherham.

But technological advancements offer opportunities to run schools differently. Online learning, for example, offers schools a chance to provide more students with good-to-great teachers -- especially in areas in which districts struggle to staff such as math and science; it's sensible especially given that even poor kids have Internet access. As seen in Detroit, more districts (and states) recognize that they need to adapt charter-like approaches to running schools. New York City took an important (albeit costly) step four years ago when it handed principals the authority to remove laggard teachers from their classrooms.

But cutting down bureaucracies and handing over decisions to schools can only be the start. The need to reform how the nation recruits and train teachers -- which, along with woeful reading and math curricula, is the main reason for the low quality of the nation's schools -- remains paramount. While charter schools have had greater success in improving student achievement than traditional districts, the fact that they still draw from the same university schools of education as traditional district counterparts still means there are many runts in the proverbial litter.

While President Barack Obama's Race to the Top effort has helped force states to ditch laws that restrict the ability of districts to subject teachers to private sector-style performance management, the threat of future restrictions (and the ability of the NEA and AFT to use their lobbying and campaign clout to stop reforms) remains in place. And more districts will be forced to embrace smaller bureaucracies (or out of business), once families are given wider arrays of options through school choice and parent trigger laws that can take schools out of district control. The threat of parent power (along with pressure from school reformers such as Green Dot founder Steve Barr) is why the gargantuan Los Angeles Unified School District is spinning off 186 of its schools into private hands and will authorize 200 charter schools by the 2011-2012 school year.

Given the woes of America's schools and their high costs, returning to the one-room schoolhouse would be better than bloated school bureaucracies.

D.C. Public Charter Schools Since Enrollment Trend SY1998-SY2011

Since the early 1990s, 40 states and the District of Columbia have passed charter school laws, allowing educators and nonprofit organizations to start new public schools. Today 5,453 charter schools are serving more than 1.7 million students during the 2010-2011 school year. - Seton Partners, Catholic Schools Become Charter Schools

In 2010 about 38% of Washington, D.C. 65,099 public school students attended 60 charter schools. Currently, there are 108 charter schools in DC.

Charter schools are independently-operated public schools which receive public funds based upon the number of students enrolled. They receive an allocation based on a per pupil formula developed by the Mayor and the DC City Council. They also receive a per pupil facilities allotment, based on the per pupil DCPS capital budget. Public charter schools must comply with the provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act by hiring qualified teachers and teaching students so that they perform well on standardized tests. In exchange for an unusually high level of accountability, charter schools are granted greater autonomy than traditional public schools. They have control over all aspects of the educational program, staff, faculty, and 100% of their budget. [Source]

Based on the belief that America's public schools should meet standards of excellence and be held accountable, parents and teachers are lining up to choose innovative public schools – charter schools – that are able to meet the individual needs of our children. Charter Schools are one part of a five-part cure for fixing public education detailed in Mandate for Change, and a critical component in American schools' Race to the Top. [Source]

District of Columbia Public School Performance

No Child Left Behind - Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP)

This table provides the count of schools that met the AYP targets for each year, by school type.

Under NCLB, every year the federal government looks at whether the students’ schools have “Adequate Yearly Progress,” or AYP. AYP is the term that the No Child Left Behind law uses to demonstrate a school’s progress towards reaching the national goal of 100% student proficiency in Reading and Mathematics in all schools by the year 2014.

Every DC Public School has been assigned an NCLB status based upon its performance on the DC CAS. Every year a school does not meet AYP for every group of students the government is tracking (black students, white students, Hispanic students, students who receive Free or Reduced Lunch, etc.), it is “flagged” with a status that requires more attention to that school. If a school does not meet AYP for five years in a row, it enters “restructuring” status requiring a significant school turnaround.

School Grade Type	SY06-07	SY07-08	SY 08-09 (preliminary)
Elementary Schools Meeting AYP	27	36	28
Middle Schools Meeting AYP	1	2	2
High Schools Meeting AYP	3	4	4

National Charter School and Enrollment Statistics 2010

Charter School Salaries Lower

Specific goals and operating procedures for a charter school are detailed in the agreement between the charter authorizing entity and the charter developer. A charter school is exempted from many of the statutes and regulations that apply to school districts but must meet the accountability standards that are outlined in their charter. Charter schools are supposed to receive the same government money per student as traditional public schools, although in reality they often receive somewhat less. Many seek additional support from foundations and private donors. - FAQs on Charter Schools, La Jolla Cluster Association

The legal status of charter schools usually dictates how salary decisions are made. If charter schools are a part of the district, then district salaries and collective bargaining policies likely will apply. If charter schools have nonprofit status, then the decisions usually are made by the charter school. - The Charter School Roadmap, September 1998

The Journal Gazette (Fort Wayne, IN)
April 24, 2011

Allen County charter school teachers made $21,000 less on average than their regular public school counterparts in 2010, according to a Journal Gazette analysis.

The average public school teacher salary in Northwest Allen County Schools, Southwest Allen County Schools and Fort Wayne Community Schools was $49,987, while the average teacher salary in Fort Wayne’s three charter schools was $28,584.

Averages included salaries of all teachers, aside from temporary substitutes, and did not factor in wages from East Allen County Schools because of how the district organizes its data.

Charter school leaders said budget constraints make it difficult to match traditional public school salaries. Nevertheless, they said, teachers are drawn to charters out of an appreciation of their mission, a love for the kids they serve, and a desire for autonomy not granted in traditional public school environments.

Critics of charter school wages, however, said teachers deserve more money for their work.

Charter schools are public schools that are free from many of the regulations that govern traditional public schools; most do not have teachers unions.

Indiana is likely to have more charter schools in coming years now that both the Indiana Senate and House have passed bills allowing dozens more entities to sponsor charters. Currently, only the mayor of Indianapolis, six public universities and school districts are able to do so.

According to a 2010 study by Vanderbilt University, charter schools tend to have higher teacher turnover rates than traditional schools. They also tend to have less-experienced, and therefore lower-paid, teachers.

Locally, teachers at FWCS had 14 years of experience on average, compared to five years or less at the city’s charter schools. Those numbers are from the 2008-09 school year, the latest available on the Indiana Department of Education’s website.

Supporters contend that charter schools allow for more innovative teaching techniques and give administrators more freedom to reward and fire teachers based on their performance. Allen County has three charter schools: Imagine Schools on Broadway, Imagine MASTer Academy and Timothy L. Johnson Academy.

Russ Simnick, president of the Indiana Public Charter Schools Association, said charter schools aren’t able to offer high salaries because of the way their budgets are structured.

While public school districts have separate funds and can raise property taxes to pay for transportation and capital projects, he said, charter schools must rely solely on their general fund budgets. Paying employee salaries, he said, takes up a major portion of that fund.

“Sometimes decisions have to be made to fix something in the building, like a roof, and that comes out of the same pool of money that salaries come from,” he said.

Peaks vary widely

According to The Journal Gazette’s analysis, the highest-paid traditional public school teacher in Allen County made about $49,000 more in 2010 than the highest-paid charter school teacher.

Wayne High School teacher Gregg Taylor was the highest-paid, earning $90,924, while Timothy L. Johnson teacher and curriculum coach Carrie Drudge, who earned $41,635, was the highest-paid teacher in a charter school.

FWCS teachers have a base salary cap of $63,055, but they can earn more if they are involved in coaching or other activities and have obtained additional credit hours of education beyond a master’s degree.

That’s the case with Taylor, who is a club adviser, coach and department head, and receives extra pay for college courses and working with students at home.

“For a guy like me, I’ve got to work the extra stuff to get the money,” he said, adding that he enjoys all of his work.

Drudge, who has been with Timothy L. Johnson since its start nine years ago, said she never fretted about her compensation, even when she first joined the school and earned a salary in the low $30,000s.

“I don’t work here for my paycheck. I work here for my kids,” said Drudge, 36. “I’m getting paid to do what I love, so I think that I’m more than fairly compensated.”

Simnick said responses like Drudge’s are common among charter school teachers and leaders. Teachers are drawn to charters because they have more freedom in getting students to learn and because they love the mission of the school, he said.

“I’ve never heard a teacher complain about pay,” he said.

Indiana State Teachers Association President Nate Schnellenberger, however, thinks teachers have a right to complain. Without the protections of unions, he said, charter school teachers are often underpaid – a trend that leads to high turnover rates.

“No one goes into teaching to become rich,” he said. “At the same time, (teachers) should be able to expect a reasonable salary and benefit structure that allows them to focus on their profession and not have to work another job to pay the bills.”

Turnover not issue

The Vanderbilt study, which used data from the National Center for Education Statistics 2003-04 Schools and Staffing Survey, found that 47 percent of charter teachers who left their schools on their own accord did so because they were frustrated by their working conditions.

Western Michigan University professor Gary Miron, who evaluated charter school pay scales and attrition rates in six states, said it’s possible charter school teachers use their charter school experience as a steppingstone to move to public school districts where they earn higher salaries and benefits.

Simnick and other charter school advocates, however, argue that relatively high turnover rates might reflect the fact that charter school leaders are empowered to dismiss poor teachers.

Timothy L. Johnson school leader Steve Bollier said high teacher turnover hasn’t been a problem in his school. He tries to keep his teaching staff content, he said, by talking openly about budget concerns and trying to create a positive work environment.

“You want to create a work environment where people want to come to work,” he said. “So we go out of our way to create an atmosphere where people feel engaged, empowered and (have) a sense of connection to the mission. There’s a similar feeling here of people who go into the Peace Corps and those types of services.”

In general, The Journal Gazette’s analysis found that local charter school leaders’ salaries more closely mirrored the salaries of area principals than those of area superintendents.

Bollier, who in 2010 oversaw a school of about 230 students, was the top charter school earner, making $97,500 – about $97,000 less than FWCS Superintendent Wendy Robinson.

Imagine MASTer Academy Principal Jim Huth, who oversaw about 766 students, was right behind Bollier, earning $91,250 in 2010.

“A lot of these people are the founders of the school,” Simnick said. “If you are doing something you love, pay isn’t the main factor.”

Teachers Won’t Get Tenure, But Charter Schools Will

Retirement is usually packaged with salaries. If the district is controlling salaries, retirement and benefits usually follow. If separated, then the charter school is left to deal with benefit and retirement packages for all its employees. Teachers who work in charter schools do so at their own risk; they are not guaranteed the ability to make contributions to current retirement funds. Charter schools in most states, however, have the option of using the state teachers' pension system. - The Charter School Roadmap, September 1998

Orlando Sentinel
March, 28 2011

Teachers in Florida will have no job security under the merit pay bill that Gov. Rick Scott signed into law last week, but charter schools can get 15 year guaranteed contracts under legislation in the works.

And both will have to do a really good job to earn their contracts – teachers for one year and charters for 15.

The House Education Innovation committee this afternoon approved changes to charter school law that would allow for creation of high-performing charter school systems. A charter operation with three or more successful schools could set up others around the state without jumping through as many hoops with local school boards as charter applicants do now.

A school board would have to present “clear and convincing evidence” that an applicant should be denied, a measure that opponents said is much too high and would give the charter operations free rein to come in anywhere and set up a school. District school boards, as now, still would be left holding the bag to clean up a mess if anything goes wrong with the charter. Think Imani charter school in Orlando,where kids didn’t have books or computers this year and finances are scrambled.

But what really ticks off Chris Ott is the favoritism shown charters over teachers.

Ott, a kindergarten teacher from Alachua County, took a day of his spring break to drive to Tallahassee and testify before the committee today that the proposal is unfair. Highly effective charters get 15 years contracts so they can plan their lives and build schools facilities, committee members pushing the bill said. Highly effective teachers will get one year contracts- and presumably apartment leases for same.

A version of the bill giving charters more rights comes before a Senate committee Wednesday.

Behind the Conservative Curtain: Pseudo Grassroots Organizations Front for Corporate/Government Takeover (Excerpt)

Charter Schools, Character Education & the Eugenics Internationale

In order for the corporations to take control of the education system, the way in which all schools are governed must be changed. Both the binding state education laws and legislative oversight of the public school system must be eliminated.

In the language of the boiler plate charter school laws written for the various states (with help from RAND), charter schools are not bound by the state’s so-called burdensome education laws (except for civil rights and health laws).

For the corporate takeover of public schools to be complete, one more transition must occur––– removing the states’ legislative authority.

The Washington A+ Commission was set up in 1999 by legislative authority. The A+ Commission runs Washington state's Accountability System, which is steadily enlarging its list of “powers and duties” including: changing education laws, performing strategic interventions, and even implementing entire take-overs of school districts. The work of the A+ Commission is about the implementation of GOALS 2000 (achieving the completion of the Carnegie/Business Roundtable blueprint for education) under an accountability system “just beyond reach of public authority.” Mirror-images of the A+ Commission will some day create an interlocking network between the states.

Licking his wounds after the failure of his charter school initiative, Jim Spady issued a statement to his loyal followers:

NO CHARTER BILL AGAIN THIS YEAR

Dear Friends,

I'm sorry to report to you that Washington's bid, to become the 30th state in the nation to pass a charter school law, died today in the Senate Ways & Means Committee…

The last-minute hope of charter school supporters was that Seattle Public School Superintendent John Stanford (a former Army General who last year stated that he wanted to “convert all of Seattle's 100 schools to charters”) would join the Governor in publicly supporting the bipartisan compromise….

Until then, we can still cheer on our friends in the 29 states that have already authorized charter schools. Knowing that almost 200,000 kids are living the charter school dream in other states helps everyone “keep the dream alive” in WA.

Thanks again!

Jim Spady
3/2/98

The Corporate Takeover of Our Schools Continues

"The education industry represents, in our opinion, the final frontier of a number of sectors once under public control... represents the largest market opportunity... the K-12 market is the Big Enchilada." – Montgomery Securities prospectus quoted in Jonathan Kozol’s The Big Enchilada

DissidentVoice.org
February 11, 2011

If we ever needed more evidence that the entire charter-voucher charade is about market share and money making, Expand a Proven Finance Solution for All Charter Schools, by Ricardo Mireles, the well heeled Executive Director of Academia Avance, provides us with clear insight.

In the piece Mr. Mireles, without any regard to the fact that he's discussing public money, advocates "sell[ing] our state receivables to private companies." Let's bear in mind that the state receivables that Mireles refers to is our tax dollars. The last thing the public needs is unelected boards of privatized charter schools gambling with our hard earned tax dollars in cockamamy schemes smacking of the exotic mortgage derivatives market that crashed the economy and made a handful of Wall Street plutocrats even more rich.

By and large, nearly all charter schools (charter schools are schools that take public money, but are run by private entities including corporations), get huge grants from ideologically biased foundations like that of the neoliberal Broad/Gates/Walton Triumvirate. When charters cite studies by far-right think tanks that they tend to get slightly less public funding than public schools, they invariably leave out the fact that they more than make up for such minor shortfalls with a deluge of plutocrat funds to spend with little or no oversight.

No wonder hedge fund managers like the vile Whitney Tilson espouse charter-vouchers schools like they’re the next bubble to profit from. Here’s what the predatory parasite of Tilson Funds had to say in regards to the extremely lucrative charter-voucher industry he helped create:

"Hedge funds are always looking for ways to turn a small amount of capital into a large amount of capital. A wealthy hedge fund manager can spend more than $1 million financing a charter school start-up. But once it is up and running, it qualifies for state funding, just like a public school... It is extremely leveraged philanthropy," Mr. Tilson said. — Joel Klein’s Lesson Plan

Curiously Mireles says "CCSA is a great advocate." He doesn't say what they advocate, but we all know CCSA's advocacy story. Here's a few reminders:

• CCSA and Market Share: Setting the Table for Vouchers
• Racist Anti-Immigrant Speech from California Charter School Association
• The real question is, does the CCSA disseminate any information that isn’t biased and incorrect?

At first I was intrigued as to why Mireles would be pushing a very risky, but lucrative financial shell game. Turns our Mireles is somewhat exceptional in the highly paid charter-voucher CEO world. He only pays himself $65,327 according to his 2009 990 Part VII A, while most charter executives help themselves to lavish six figure salaries. So it isn't surprising he's on board with AIG style dupe-the-public financing. Such schemes give him a chance to further increase his fortunes at the public's expense via clever investing. We can all be sure that companies like Charter School Capital (CSC), discussed in Mireles' article, will be investment vehicles for all the vultures looking to profit off the privatization of public education.

Charter schools are notorious for gross malfeasance and financial mismanagement. Charter School Scandals is probably the best resource for viewing the scope of this endemic and ever growing problem. The site introduces itself with the following:

A compilation of news articles about charter schools which have been charged with, or are highly suspected of, tampering with admissions, grades, attendance and testing; misusing local, state, and federal funds; engaging in nepotism and conflicts of interest; engaging in complicated and shady real estate deals; and/or have been engaging in other questionable, unethical, borderline-legal, or illegal activities. This is also a record of charter school instability and other unsavory tidbits.

We don’t need to look too far for charter schools scandals though, it turns out that “[f]ormer employees and parents accuse[d] Ricardo Mireles of improprieties because of financial pressure at Academia Avance.” This is detailed in a Howard Blume piece “Critics assail director of L.A. charter.” The article details how Mireless, a Coro Fellow, was embroiled in a major scandal at his school. Why Los Angeles Unified School District renewed Academia Avance’s charter defies comprehension. Mireles must have gotten his financial advice from the notorious Mike Piscal of ICEF ignominy.

Privately managed charter schools are so rife with malfeasance, that the very birthplace of charter schools — Minnesota — recently placed a moratorium on them. This is because it was found that “75% [of charter schools] had a least one irregularity noted in their financial audit.” Rest assured, whenever you put public money into private hands, corporate charlatans will find a way to pocket it. All the while saying that they are doing it for the kids, and that theirs is a kids centered agenda.

I’ve got a better idea: If corporate charter-voucher schools were obligated, like public schools, to educate every child, we would see the proliferation of charters disappear almost overnight. Take the profitability out of the equation, and charter schools would return to their original mission.

To join the fight-back against corporate charters and the privatization of public schools, join your local chapters of Coalition for Educational Justice (CEJ) and Parents Across America (PAA). Together, collectively, we can stop the privatization of public education by demanding people before profits.

How Content Standards Enable Corporate Takeover of Public Education

Public education is under assault form both sides of the aisle, with the Bush-era No Child Left Behind and President Obama's Race to the Top. Schools have gone from “community-based, educator-initiated local efforts to spur alternative approaches for a small number of students, to nationally funded efforts by foundations, investors and educational management companies to create a parallel, more privatized system. - Stan Karp, Director of the Secondary Reform Project for New Jersey’s Education Law Center

We are giving away our schools and now we want to get rid of transparency… so we can do whatever we want in the dark of night. - Marguerite P. LaMotte in response to Yolie Flores Corporate Charter Choice Resolution

Open Left
March 28, 2010

Somewhere on Wall Street there is a frustrated investment banker. He's run model after model and he can't understand it. No matter what he tries, he's just not seeing the kind of numbers his high high-flying clients expect.

Instead of generating markets where more people are either buying more stuff or buying more expensive stuff, the fundamentals of the American economy just don't grow anymore. Population growth is treading water. Disposable income for most people is on a sharp decline. And globalism and the Internet have reduced everything to a commodity, so prices are driven into the dirt.

If only there were a way to break into a whole new market. A market where demand is certain, but competition is weak, and pricing can be highly controlled. Kind of like what those guys in the defense business have been enjoying.

Take public schools, for instance. It's almost 6% of our economy that is mostly off-limits to big business. Sure, you can get a contract here and there. But what about something going nation wide! Now that could yield double-digit growth right away. Maybe 20% or more!

The infrastructure has already been built. R&D is minimal. We've all been to school. We're not talking rocket science here. And everyone pushes education in a bad economy.

Once you get around the unions, teachers are a dime a dozen. Heck, some will practically volunteer for the job. And I'm sure we can get foundation money for the start-ups. After all, "it's for the kids."

Only problem is that each school and district is so different from one another. Everything is geared to the local population, and what works for one school doesn't necessarily work for another. That makes every deal a one-off with no economies of scale to work to your advantage. If only there were a way to get some standardization across the board.

Maybe our guys on the Hill can help us out with that . . .

jeffbinnc :: How Content Standards Enable Corporate Takeover of Public Education

If the above hypothetical sounds too far fetched to you, consider the story of Neil Bush and Ignite Learning.

When George H.W. Bush was elected in 1988, he vowed to be the "education president." A Nation at Risk had been published five years earlier, providing school bashers with the perfect propaganda piece to wale away at public education. The economy was sliding into recession, and Americans were being warned that they were in danger of "falling behind" in the global economic competition because of our "broken" schools.

The combination of a recessionary economy and the outspoken rage against American public schools combined to push forward an agenda for education reform. America, we were told, was being ill served by its locally controlled school governance that tended toward diverse approaches to curriculum and instruction to meet local needs. And in order for the US to "keep pace" in a rapidly changing world, schools desperately needed "standardization."

From Wikipedia:

"In 1989, an education summit involving all fifty state governors and President George H. W. Bush resulted in the adoption of national education goals for the year 2000; the goals included content standards."

With the influence of Diane Ravitch, the Assistant Secretary of Education, from 1991-1993, the content standards movement took the driver's seat in education policy, where it has remained throughout the past 20 years, peaking in 2001 with the passing of the No Child Left Behind legislation during the younger George Bush's presidency. NCLB became the perfect trigger for national standards as it enforced them by requiring all public schools to gear their programs toward having students score well on standardized tests.

Meanwhile, back in the Bush I presidency, Neil Bush, the fourth of the six Bush children, got into deep water in a savings and loan scandal. Like many other big-time investors, he was hard pressed to re-build and find new profit centers in a recessionary economy. But by the time the '90's rolled around, Neil was on to a new venture, and he was in the process of raising $23 million from U.S. investors to start a company called Ignite Learning. The business plan for Ignite Learning was to offer "standards-based" computer software learning centers, called Curriculum On Wheels (COWs), that had "demonstrated success in improving the test scores of economically disadvantaged children." And by the time NCLB rolled-out, Ignite was ready to rumble.

Very quickly, Ignite placed its COWs in at least 40 U.S. school districts. According to the Los Angeles Times,

"At least 13 U.S. school districts used federal funds available through the president's signature education reform, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, to buy Ignite's portable learning centers at $3,800 apiece."

Among the contracts were school districts in Florida where Neil's brother Jeb was governor. Neil Bush insists that Ignite's success is not due to any "interface with any agency of the federal government." But who needs "interface" when you have family? Just look at the cast of characters that's influenced the company's rise to success (emphasis, mine):

• "Most of Ignite's business has been obtained through sole-source contracts without competitive bidding.
• The Washington Times Foundation, backed by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, head of the South Korea-based Unification Church, has peppered classrooms throughout Virginia with Ignite's COWs under a $1-million grant.
• Oil companies and Middle East interests with long political ties to the Bush family have made similar bequests
• Barbara Bush has enthusiastically supported Ignite. In January 2004, she and Neil Bush were guests of honor at a $1,000-a-table fundraiser in Oklahoma City organized by a foundation supporting the Western Heights School District. Proceeds were earmarked for the purchase of Ignite products.
• The former first lady spurred controversy recently when she contributed to a Hurricane Katrina relief foundation for storm victims who had relocated to Texas. Her donation carried one stipulation: It had to be used by local schools for purchases of COWs.
• Texas accounts for 75% of Ignite's business."

So what have standards-driven COWs (I can barely write that without laughing) actually achieved in the classroom? Well if you're looking for genuine learning, not so much. The only "results" Ignite reports on its website are a series of "testimonial" videos, some of which are thoroughly discredited in the LAT article. But if you're looking for ROI, there's lots of good "results." According to watchdog group CREW, "some school districts spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal money" on COWs, including a $1,000 annual licensing and upkeep fee.

But the connection of content standards to corporate corruption of public education doesn't need to be based solely on the basis of Neil Bush and Ignite Learning.

Ex Secretary of Education Bill Bennet has also had his turn at the trough when he "teamed with a Virginia company backed by the education firm Knowledge Universe that is Michael Milikin's money to start up k12.com his home / cyber learning for-profit school which is also commodisizing [sic] educational products. Bill managed to cut a deal with the X [sic] Governor Ridge of Pennsylvania to be allowed into the state and because of his political connections has managed to secure business relationships with several other states."

So is there a genuine case for standards-driven education? Not much. As Alfie Kohn points out, the push for content standards has always been "driven more by political than educational considerations." (emphasis mine)

"To politicians, corporate CEOs, or companies that produce standardized tests, this prescription may seem to make sense. (Notice that this is exactly the cast of characters leading the initiative for national standards.) But if you spend your days with real kids in real classrooms, you're more likely to find yourself wondering how much longer those kids -- and the institution of public education -- can survive this accountability fad.

Are all kids entitled to a great education? Of course. But that doesn't mean all kids should get the same education. High standards don't require common standards. Uniformity is not the same thing as excellence - or equity. (In fact, one-size-fits-all demands may offer the illusion of fairness, setting back the cause of genuine equity.) To acknowledge these simple truths is to watch the rationale for national standards - or uniform state standards - collapse into a heap of intellectual rubble."

It's true that many nations whose students score well on international tests have content standards to guide their schools. But many of those countries, particularly in Asia, are reconsidering that. As Yong Zhao writes: (emphasis mine)

"The U.S. has been trying hard to implement what China has been trying to be rid of. An increasing number of states and the federal government have begun to dictate what students should learn, when they should learn it, and how their learning is measured through state-mandated curriculum standards, high school exit exams, and the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). There are calls for even more centralization and standardization through national standards and national testing, as well as through rewarding or measuring schools and teachers based on test scores.

I find this trend in American education perplexing. If China, a developing country aspiring to move into an innovative society, has been working to emulate U.S. education, why does America want to abandon it? Furthermore, why does America want to adopt practices that China and many other countries have been so eager to give up? But most vexing is why Americans, who hold individual rights and liberty in the highest regard, would allow the government to dictate what their children should learn, when they should learn it, and how they are evaluated?"

Despite the lack of solid evidence for nationalizing our curriculum, President Barak Obama and his Secretary of Education Arne Duncan have made "common core standards" a cornerstone of education policy. According to Education Week,

"President Obama recently proposed that Title I funding for disadvantaged students be tied to whether states have adopted the Common Core State Standards. And . . . in order to get the most bang for their buck in Race to the Top applications, states have to promise to adopt the common standards."

And once again, lining up behind the administration's push for standardization is the usual combination of business-related cronies, including corporate-trained school leaders, charter schools entrepreneurs, and billionaire-backed foundations. Only this time, adding to the powerful leverage of content standards and testing, the Obama administration is also pushing charter schools, widespread layoffs of teachers, and the shuttering of public schools.

As I noted in a QuickHit on OpenLeft earlier this week, you can draw a straight line from mass layoffs of teachers that recently occurred in Albany, NY directly to Wall Street investors:

"The mass layoffs are a direct result of Governor David Patterson's successful effort to lift the caps on charter schools in order to qualify for Race to the Top Funds. This allowed rightwing foundations and billionaires on Wall St. to pour, according to this report, "tens of millions of dollars" into the charter school movement in the Albany region." (Oh, and it's just coincidental that these deep-pocketed donors also gave money to Patterson's election fund.)

The main charter recipient was the Bright Choice chain of charter schools, whose president, according to EdWise, is an outspoken rightwing advocate and foe of teachers unions.

Other recipients, again according to EdWise, are 'for profit charter management firms Victory Schools and National Heritage Academies'"

Some could argue that we need national standards in order to keep religious, rightwing zealots rewriting curriculum at a local level to fit their philosophy, as a conservative Texas school board recently did. But isn't it dangerous and naive to assume that these sorts of conservative factions would not have the same level of influence at the national level? And does anyone really think that a curriculum designed and paid for by big business is going to be impartial to topics that are antithetical to corporate capitalism and the goals of getting children "career-ready" rather than truly educated?

Rather than a one-size-fits-all approach to educating the nation's children -- an approach that enables big businesses to connect the dots from standards, to testing, to charter schools and private takeover of public education -- it's time for politicians to listen to educators and look for systemic ideas for improving education in the classrooms of real teachers. Good teaching is not a "product" that can be packaged and rolled out nation wide. Our kids are not "consumers." And the drive for profit is not analogous to bequeathing the gift of lifelong learning to all children everywhere.