Michelle Rhee Joins L.A. School Board Funding Free For All

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

Michelle Rhee’s organization, StudentsFirst, has contributed $250,000 to support the campaigns of incumbent Los Angeles school board president Monica Garcia, as well as those of Kate Anderson and Antonio Sanchez. The donation comes on the heels of a $1 million donation to the same candidates by New York Mayor Bloomberg, and several $100,000 donations by L.A. billionaires Eli Broad and A. Jerrold Perenchio.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Rhee believes her involvement in Los Angeles could advance her school reform agenda statewide. This agenda includes the conversion of public schools into charter schools, increasing reliance on high stakes tests, and tying teachers’ evaluations to student test scores.

Rhee is not unique in this belief. All the big outside money is intended to influence the free market school reform agenda statewide and even nationwide. One of their goals is to weaken teachers unions, both as a voting bloc and as an impediment to their money-making scams. Garcia and Anderson, for example, are outright union busters and the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) has indicated it would spend millions of dollars to defeat them. (Garcia said that if she were president of UTLA she would go on a rampage and fire all “ineffective” teachers and eliminate seniority). Sanchez has been more subtle. Consequently, he was won the support of UTLA, despite having made comments that suggest he intends to bully the union into submitting to the will of the free market reformers. For example, he said he wants to “break” the divide between unions and school choice and accountability advocates, which is just a politically strategic way of saying he wants the union to accept harmful concessions.

All three of the candidates supported by Rhee, Bloomberg and the Coalition for School Reform are backers of privatization and charter school conversions. LAUSD already has one of the largest numbers of charter schools of any district in the nation, as well as its own sordid history of charter school scandals (see here and here).

Considering LAUSD’s history of budget shortfalls, low student achievement and administrator scandals, it would seem politically irresponsible to give away even more oversight and revenue to private education management organizations which can run charter schools with only minimal district oversight and which have a track record that is no better (and often worse than traditional public schools. Then again, it should be obvious by now that promoters of charter schools, vouchers and parental “choice” have no interest in improving educational outcomes. Rather, their motivations are purely financial: increase profit-making opportunities for themselves and for the funders of their political careers.  

Sacramento to Shutter 11 Low Income Elementary Schools

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

Sacramento City Unified School District plans to close 11 elementary schools, primarily in low income neighborhoods around South Sacramento and the downtown area, the WSWS reports. With only 50 public elementary schools in the city, this amounts to closing one-fifth of the city’s elementary schools.

The district’s rationale for closing the schools is that they are “underutilized,” operating at 40% of capacity. However, as the WSWS correctly notes, this is based on the backward logic that their classrooms aren’t crowded enough [to justify funding them]. The 40% figure is based on a maximum class size of 32 students (even for grades K-2), which is up from 20 students per teacher last year and 16 per teacher in 2000. It is also based on the district’s fear of another budget shortfall, projected to be $10-12 million, despite the passage of Proposition 30, which was supposed to keep education funding steady at 2011-2012 levels. Rather than chopping from the top by laying-off administrators or cutting their bloated salaries, Sacramento (like most other school districts) has chosen to cut teachers and close schools in low income neighborhoods.

If schools were funded based on their actual needs, it would make sense to keep these schools open, even at “40%” of capacity, as this comes to just under 13 students per teacher—slightly less than the 2000 average class size of 16-to-1. The overwhelming body of evidence indicates that smaller class sizes benefit students academically. Teachers are better able to attend to the individual needs of each student, including being able to identify and support learning, emotional and behavior problems that often go unnoticed in larger classrooms. This, alone, could go a long way toward improving attendance, graduation rates and school safety. Smaller class sizes also allow teachers more time to plan, implement and assess more complex and meaningful lessons and activities (or rely less on multiple choice tests and lectures). Lower income schools also have a greater need for smaller class sizes as they tend to have higher numbers of students who are reading below grade level and in need of extra support or remediation.

By closing these schools, students will have to be bused or driven to neighborhoods far from their homes to be crammed into overcrowded classrooms where they will be more likely to slip through the cracks. But this is not the concern of Sacramento’s mayor Kevin Johnson, who built his education credentials by using Gates Foundation money to promote the conversion of public schools into charter schools, (nor his wife Michelle Rhee, who built her career by overseeing one of the largest cheating scandals in U.S. history, while mass-firing D.C. teachers, bashing teachers unions and promoting privatization), Indeed, the mayor’s long-term plans for the soon to be abandoned facilities may in fact be to sell them off to private charter companies.

The closing of these schools (and the growing class sizes) are part of the growing rationalization of public education which, until recently, had been run in a relatively inefficient and wasteful way from the perspective of capitalists. Increased class sizes support a reduction in state spending on education. Assuming that the schools continue to churn out graduates who are sufficiently educated to fill existing job openings and consume existing products, increased class sizes increase the efficiency of education (i.e., the number of workers produced per dollar spent). The desperate pleas by Obama, Bill Gates and others for a better educated workforce so we can compete with India and China are not pleas for the masses to have doctorates or expertise in programming and biotechnology. Rather, our successful competition depends on having a few who can create innovations that keep our domestic capitalists ahead of their foreign peers and a large docile, low wage workforce that churns out these innovations at the lowest wages and highest profits possible.

The past decade of budget cuts, layoffs, increased class sizes and emphasis on lectures and high stakes tests have had no noticeable effect on American industry, which has made record profits for each of the past several years and throughout most of the past decade (minus one or two years at the beginning of the recession). Despite the attacks on and gutting of the U.S. public education system, American children are graduating with sufficient skills to keep the system running, while a small minority of students (overwhelmingly coming from affluent families) continue to graduate with the skills to run the businesses and develop new technologies and innovations.

California Flunks Rhee’s Reform Ratings—Badge of Honor?

Image adapted from Flickr image by Calsidyrose

Michelle Rhee’s Students First advocacy group issued its ratings of state reform efforts last week. California was ranked 41^st nationally, with an overall score of F, according to the Los Angeles Times.  According to Students First, California has been asleep at the wheel with respect to the “reforms,” failing to limit teacher tenure and require student test scores to evaluate teachers.

Richard Zeiger, Deputy Supt. at the California Department of Education called the F grade a "badge of honor."

While it may be refreshing to hear a high ranking education official disparage Rhee’s astroturf school privatization organization, the fact that California ranked so high on her list should still be an embarrassment. Consider that there are 9 other states that ranked lower than California which, according to the backward logic of Rhee, means there are 9 that have done a better job than California at resisting free market reforms. Furthermore, the only high mark California did receive was for being the birthplace of “parent trigger” laws, which are essentially a Trojan horse for corporate education profiteers and for-profit charter school operators to grab taxpayer dollars—hardly a mark of honor.

No states received an A from Rhee’s organization. The two top states were Louisiana and Florida, which each earned a B-. Louisiana has been one the quickest to give away its public schools to non-unionized private charter school operators, particularly in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. In New Orleans, over 70% of students now go to charter schools. Florida bases 50% of teacher evaluations on student test scores even though those scores are highly variable from year to year and completely unreliable for all but those at the extremes.

Even though Massachusetts has among the highest levels of student achievement, the state only received a D+ because it did not do enough to crush teachers unions and give away control of its schools to education profiteers. Montana received an F for strongly supporting local control of its schools.

End Due Process for Abusive Administrators?

One of the most vitriolic and idiotic elements of the Ed Deform and Teacher Bashing movements is their assertion that the schools are filled with terrible or dangerous teachers who are impossible to remove because of tenure and due process protections and that these parasites force novice teachers (who are all presumed to be better than their more senior colleagues) out of jobs.

But what about administrators who lack the time or competency to effectively monitor and evaluate their employees or who wield evaluations as a weapon to harass teachers they do not like? The fact is that administrators themselves can be incompetent, abusive and even guilty of criminal misconduct.

Should we end due process, seniority and tenure for administrators?

Oh yeah, they don’t have these protections. They have something better: status and power.

Consider the case of Ramon Cortines, former superintendent of LAUSD, SFUSD, Pasadena and New York. He was accused of sexually harassing a colleague and allowed to retire with benefits, while LAUSD was forced to pay out $200,000, plus lifetime health benefits worth $250-300,000 to Scot Graham, LAUSD’s former director of leasing and asset management, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Cortines, like other high powered abusers, denied that he harassed anyone, but admitted that he engaged "adult behavior," and insisted that it was consensual. Yet Graham had complained of Cortine’s behavior to superiors on three occasions. Meanwhile, the district refused to investigate and encouraged him to drop his complaints.

While the out-of-court settlement precludes us from ever knowing whether Cortines was guilty of wrongdoing, some are asserting that the large size of the settlement is an indication of his guilt and the district’s fear of going to court and losing. What is clear is that Cortines enjoyed the protection of his district, which refused to pursue the allegations, investigate his behavior, or otherwise threaten his professional or social wellbeing.

San Francisco Breeding Ground for Corrupt, Inept and Abusive Administrators

Not long after Cortines left San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD), the Bill Rojas administration oversaw the misallocation (and theft) of millions of dollars from the district. Up to $68 million disappeared into the hands of nonteaching staff, including several who were indicted. Rojas ultimately fled to Dallas, bringing with him several of his loyal criminal cronies, where he managed to continue his incompetence and corruption while evading the long arm of the law. William Coleman, who was Rojas’ No. 2 guy in SFUSD and continued in Rojas’ new administration in Dallas, eventually pled guilty to charges of attempting to influence a grand jury. However, while Rojas was fired from his job in Dallas, he quickly landed a job at a for-profit charter school in Boston, proving that no bad deed goes unrewarded.

At SFUSD, Rojas was followed by Arlene Ackerman who finagled a $250,000 salary, plus a $2,000-a-month housing allowance and $375,000 severance package, payable even if she quit, which she was forced to do not long after taking over. As superintendent of SFUSD she pretended to clean up the district’s sloppy financial records and the scandals of the Rojas years, while completely missing Trish Bascom’s embezzlement scheme which was occurring right under her nose. This blunder was no doubt due to her obsession with quashing dissent and getting her underlings to toe the line. “I can’t continue to tolerate the dissension,” she said about her SFUSD staff and teachers.  Part of her strategy for reducing dissent was to spend $400,000 a year of district money on a PR firm to put a positive spin on her leadership, money that should have gone to classroom instruction.

Ackerman then went on to head Philadelphia public schools where she secured a raise that pushed her salary higher than those of the mayor or governor. While in office she gave a $7.5 million no-bid contract to cronies at IBS Communications to install surveillance cameras despite previous work with the district that involved cost overruns 12 times what they had originally estimated.  She then scapegoated underlings for the scandal and squeezed the Philadelphia school board for a $900,000 buyout package to get her to resign and go away.

Cheaters Prosper

In Washington, D.C., schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee presided over one of the largest cheating scandals in the nation. In Atlanta, Superintendent Beverly Hall oversaw an even larger cheating scandal. In both cases the administrators threatened to fire teachers if test scores didn’t go up. In both cases, there were abnormally high rates of erasures and implausibly high improvements in test scores.

Rather than relying on independent outside evaluators, both Rhee and Hall conducted their own biased internal investigations that not surprisingly absolved them and their districts (see New York Times), despite the flagging of numerous schools by McGraw Hill for the suspicious erasure patterns (see USA Today report). The State Superintendent of Education also recommended that the scores of many D.C. schools be investigated because of their unusually high gains, something Rhee’s administration refused to do.

Rhee was never fired, punished or held accountable for the cheating scandal. She did resign when the mayor who had appointed her, Adrian Fenty, lost his re-election bid. Yet she remained the darling of the right wing Ed Deform movement, securing millions of dollars in donations to her bogus student advocacy non-profit, Students First, and numerous $50,000 speaking engagements. To her supporters she is still seen as a hero who took a tough school district and turned it around by being tough on teachers and their unions. It doesn’t matter to them that those “gains” were fabricated because they don’t really care about improved educational outcomes for children. What is most important to them is improved business opportunities, something that Rhee has championed through her support of high stakes testing, private charter schools and her general attacks on unions.

Hall, who has since retired, may not get off so easily. There is currently a grand jury investigating the scandal and District Attorney Paul Howard has not yet determined whether to file charges against her. (See Atlanta Journal Constitution 4/22/12). However, her former top adviser Kathy Augustine resigned after one day on the job as superintendent of the DeSoto Independent School District, with a severance deal worth $188,000, which is a far cry from punishment for her role in the Atlanta cheating scandal. Three other former superintendents are still on the Atlanta Public Schools payroll earning six-figure salaries.

Michelle Rhee’s $1 Billion Union-Busting Superpac

According to the Ed Deform movement, teachers unions are the main impediment to student success. All they care about is protecting incompetent or perverted teachers, keeping working hours short and salaries high and blocking real and meaningful reforms like private charter schools, abolition of due process rights, increased high stakes tests, and dumbed down Common Core Standards.

Education reformers should thus be excited to hear that Students First, former Washington D.C. public schools chancellor Michelle Rhee’s fake student advocacy group, has dumped $2 million into a Superpac created to counter the corrupting influence of teachers unions in upcoming California legislative races, according to the Sacramento Bee.

Rhee hopes the new Superpac, called “Parents and Teachers for Putting Students First,” will ultimately raise over $1 billion in its fight against the California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers. One of their first campaigns has been to back Democrat Brian Johnson, a charter school executive running for the 46^th assembly district in Southern California, pumping over $400,000 into his campaign.

Just Another Superpac to Benefit Corporate Interests

Unions, especially teachers unions, have been increasingly relying on political campaign funding as their primary tool for promoting the interests of their members. From the standpoint of workers this has been disastrous as it has taken resources, time and energy away from organizing and the promotion of direct actions like strikes and working to rule and focused them on the very indirect and fickle beneficence of political leaders whose interests lie primarily with business, not workers. The consequence has been a continuing downward spiral in workers’ wages, working conditions and living standards, with legislation increasingly favoring the interests of bosses over those of workers.

The most explicit recent example of the bankruptcy of this strategy is the teachers’ unions’ continued support for President Obama despite the fact that Obama has promoted numerous programs that are terrible for students and teachers (e.g., private charter schools, Race to the Top, Common Core Standards, evaluation reform, etc.). It is irrelevant that Romney might be even worse for teachers. A union is supposed to promote the interests of its workers and therefore should never endorse a political leader with a demonstrated track record of attacking those interests. They should especially not waste their members’ dues on that campaign, when those resources would be much more effectively spent resisting the candidate’s anti-worker policies.

From the perspective of the ruling elite, however, this strategy by unions has been much more of a frustration than a disaster. It has not stopped them from consolidating political power and increasing their wealth to levels unseen in nearly a century. Yet unions are one of the few remaining entities with bankrolls large enough to mount even a modicum of resistance and contest the wealthy in the political arena. Hence, destroying unions outright, or at least their ability to make campaign donations, has become one of the main priorities of the ruling elite. (An example is the Payroll Deception initiative being proposed in California).

MAD Madness

Amassing a stockpile of nuclear weapons large enough to annihilate the world several times over was a cold war strategy that proponents argued would make us safer by deterring the Russians or Chinese from using their huge stockpiles against us. If you nuke me, I’ll nuke you and the planet will be destroyed—Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).

This arms race contributed to the demise of the Soviet Union by redirecting limited resources away from human needs and increasing their public’s disgust with their regime. However, according to many historians, it was the drawn out proxy war in Afghanistan between the U.S.-supported Mujahedeen and the Soviet-backed communist government that really blew their wad and brought down the U.S.S.R.

There has been an ongoing political arms race between wealthy individuals and the corporations versus unions and liberal nonprofits. It has always been an unequal race with the wealthy almost always outspending their opposition, often by a ratio of ten to one (or more). With the Citizens United ruling and the super spending by the Superpacs, this has only become more extreme and it threatens to do the same thing to the unions that military spending did to the Soviet Union.

It may not happen immediately. Unions will continue their copious spending in a desperate attempt to elect the lesser evils and block the most onerous legislation, all the while resisting strikes and other direct actions, discouraging their members from fighting back and continuing to give away more and more concessions to the bosses.

In the end, how different is this from withdrawing completely from political campaigns? In either case, the workers lose out. However, by withdrawing from the political game, unions at least retain their war chests, which can be used to organize and mobilize their members to directly pressure the politicians and the bosses, make their lives uncomfortable, cut into their profits, and make some real gains instead of always fighting just to make the losses less bad.