Former Obama Press Secretary Leading PR Drive Against K-12 Teacher Tenure

Robert Gibbs
(Image: politico.com)

One of the Obama presidency's curiosities is its hostility to K-12 teachers unions. Key administration figures, including Education Secretary (and 44's basketball bud) Arne Duncan, have expressed their opposition to teacher tenure. The anti-tenure mob asserts that tenure encourages ineffective teachers to remain on the job, while implicitly denying better instructors an opportunity to practice their trade. Powerful forces from all political spectra have embraced part or all of this perspective.

A recent addition to this unseemly alliance is an enterprise created by former Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs and former BO campaign spokesperson Ben Labolt. According to a Politico story, the pair's Insight Agency "will lead a national public relations drive to support a series of lawsuits aimed at challenging tenure, seniority and other job protections that teachers unions have protected ferociously. LaBold and another former Obama aide, Jon Jones -- the first digital strategist of the 2008 campaign -- will take the lead in the public relations initiative."

While the movement to dismantle the existing K-12 instructional force gathers momentum, one wonders what bright future these champions of meritocracy envision. Looming large in many of these brave new worlds is data accumulation and analysis. The nearly religious belief in data's "truth" masks data's considerable flaws as an educational tool. Meanwhile, what of the teachers themselves?  Media stories, think-tank white papers, and political speeches rarely bother to present the thoughts and feelings of tenured teachers. There's little that's fair and balanced from the right or from the left on the tenure issue. Minds have been made up in the anti-tenure kangaroo court. Human sacrifice, in the form of the dismissal of an entire professional class, appears to be demanded.

Replacing a generation of experienced instructors will be cannon fodder from organizations such as Teach for America, whose sixteen-hour work days virtually guarantee its well-intended adherents will promptly drop out of the teaching biz. That phenomenon, coincidentally, pushes salaries down and effectively keeps curricular direction and performance appraisal in the hands of "management" rather than trained, seasoned professional instructors.

Cultural Revolution
(Image: bbc.co.uk)

Many years ago, I taught English to adult Chinese immigrants. I listened to stories about the Cultural Revolution, whose incidents included forcing teachers to parade through their town while wearing humiliating signs. The tagging of an entire generation of American K-12 teachers as deadbeats, deserving of the punishment of tenure elimination, is not far away from the mass insanity China experienced a half-century ago.

Be careful what you wish for.

Alleged DC Charter School Scam: Who Says There's No Money in Education?

The mantra about how "there's no money in education" keeps encountering inconvenient details which question the chant's veracity. Elements of the for-profit world, which has eyed the taxpayer funded education funding as so many chickens to be plucked, has entered the K-12 school arena. Its alliances with politicians, "committed" millionaires, and dim media reporting (The Today Show, come on down) offer formidable clout, especially against a fragmented collection of interested parties, such as local interest groups like the characteristic school district PTO.

According to a report in The Washington Post, attorneys for the District of Columbia Office of the Attorney General have filed new allegations against a local charter school enterprise. The filing claims corporate officers of Options Charter Public School (OCPS) "diverted more than $3 million from the Northeast Washington school for at-risk teens to companies they founded." The brief noted a parade of self-dealing including a school bus "ridership bonus" of $100,000.

J.C. Hayward
(Image: wusa9.com)

The accused apparently owned a firm called Exceptional Education Services (EES), which effectively served as a shell company designed as a collection device for skimmed funds. One key player in the OCPS/EES scheme was J.C. Hayward, a very visible DC television personality who happened to be board chair and part-owner of EES. The TV talking head's attorney has claimed his client had no knowledge of any illegal activity. That's a curious claim for someone deeply connected to DC's power structure and is presumably worldly wise.

LAUSD students using iPads
(Image: ktla.com)

The larger issue in this story goes beyond a cautionary tale of local corruption. The K-12 education "reformers" have made a case that strong CEO-style business management and teacher "accountability" would lead to improved K-12 education. All of this would be accomplished through increased online content, data-driven teaching and supervision, and relentless testing. The goal of redirecting the flow of public funds to private gain goes unstated. Meanwhile, the imperative to make technology and its products a key educational tool has gone forward without any serious vetting.The stampede into gadget purchases has led to some troubling situations, such as the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) purchasing hundreds of thousands of iPads at consumer market rates. At the same time, LAUSD did not buy keyboards for the devices. Oops...that would be "an extra expense," which the school district had to add on after the fact. Software? Well, various programs were sold as a three-year lease, after which LAUSD would have nothing to show for its rental costs.


Where was the strong CEO management in the LA and DC episodes? How did these initiatives advance the cause of K-12 education "reform"? Where was the senior management accountability? Where was the "community input" reformers are so keen to advance as one of their positive developments?

Image: mainepressherald.com

Bottom line: who says there is no money in K-12 education? The record suggests there's plenty of gold in the K-12 hills, and it's being mined now. The fact that the gold is taxpayer money, largely committed without genuine transparency or community participation is kept largely quiet. (Cory Booker and Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg's money to the Newark, New Jersey schools comes to mind as Exhibit A. It took a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain any useful information about this situation.) The understanding of the profit motive in the K-12 world could illuminate inconvenient details, the knowledge of which would interfere with profitable revenue streams that could continue for a generation. Now, who would want that situation brought to light?

Illinois Drops Last K-12 Writing Test

The state of Illinois has dropped its last required K-12 writing exam. According to a story in the LA Times that was originally filed by a Chicago Tribune reporter, Illinois public school students no longer have to write anything on a final exam. Insufficient money to conduct and grade the exams was cited as motivating the Illinois decision.

The Land of Lincoln is not the only state to cut back on inconvenient, "expensive" testing. The Times article cites recent decisions in Oregon and Missouri in which written tests were either scaled back or completely eliminated. Remarkably, an effective, essential means of evaluating a student's articulative ability has been cast aside. Testing is now completely in the throes of test manufacturers, compliant education administrators, and others who assert data analysis provides a sufficient window into an individual's "performance." That self-interest may impact this current educational dogma just doesn't enter the dialogue.

Incredibly, the development of clear written expression is disappearing from American public schools. Replacing skillful writing is constant, data-driven assessment, in which children are treated as if they are in K-12 education's equivalent of an intensive care ward. While young students will be "test ready" from a too-early age, they will be barely prepared to articulate any ideas they might have. That this phenomenon is happening in a state with a proud intellectual heritage, a land that spawned John Dewey, Jane Addams, Richard Wright, and Abraham Lincoln himself, is a very dispiriting sign of the times.

Light Shined on Financial Dark Sides of Private and For-Profit Schools

The growth and current state of private and for-profit schools deserves a look under the hood.

Today's Washington Post takes the high road by reporting on itself. For those unaware, the Washington Post, Inc., associated with the august newspaper, in fact is a hybrid enterprise in which its educational arm makes most of the firm's money. Lately, the school side of WP, Inc., through its Kaplan brand, has come under scrutiny for its enrollment tactics. They are in many ways the education world's equivalent of subprime mortgage marketing, as the long Post story makes clear. From Kaplan's perspective, an essential component to its business model was the nearly guaranteed, low-risk funding to which their student pigeons had access. The revenue stream's key driver was Title IV of the Higher Education Act, a federal program designed to aid financially challenged students make their way through the arrogantly expensive world of higher education. One could reasonably characterize Title IV funds as a gift that kept giving to the for-profits such as Kaplan.

The for-profits' cousin, the K-12 private schools, also needs more light cast on its management philosophy and practice. This is a burgeoning market attracting private equity investors, as a recent New York Times story on private school demand in Manhattan south of 96th Street noted. "Executive" compensation is an especially sharp thorn in this tale, as is middle-class aspirational agida.

Meanwhile, the private schools' most recent black eye occurred in southern California. The LA Times reported today on allegations that the director of a private Santa Monica high school "misused" approximately $1 million in school funds. The institution has recently declared bankruptcy and is trying to work with its existing students in what sounds like makeshift facilities. One item of note was the school director's $300K annual salary. For a small, one-school enterprise, that's a hefty reward for services rendered. To put this in some perspective, New Jersey governor Chris Christie demanded public school superintendents who manage districts including thousands of students and multiple schools cap their pay at either $175K or $225K, depending on an individual district's size. Meanwhile, Christie has notably not commented on the pay scales of charter school administrators, some of whom reputedly receive compensation packages rivaling or surpassing those of public school superintendents.

The three articles reveal an educational world where ethical corruption and shameless gaming of the fiscal system is covered in a phony, feel-good veneer. Underlying the drive for this false "progress" is what one Kaplan employee precisely characterized as "FUD" -- fear, uncertainty, doubt. Kaplan and the Santa Monica school are hardly the only two institutions where FUD hovers like a vampire's shadow. The charter school "reform" movement leverages FUD against the perceived (and sometimes quite real) failures of public schools. At times, religious zeal finds a home with FUD tactics in efforts to create charter schools where voucher payments essentially encourage the development of taxpayer subsidized religious education. However, the charter schools generally don't like to talk about compensation packages for its "management" team. They would rather tout its "dedicated," and generally underpaid instructional staff, most of whom are doomed to burnout and employment churn. That tactic happens to be a tried-and-true way to keep salaries down and control high.

The world of higher education at "reputable" four-year colleges and universities isn't much better. In some ways, they are laboratories for corruption, through their shameless leveraging of cheap teaching assistants, an embrace of an irrelevant, profoundly misguided tenure system, and outrageous tuition and fee demands that routinely, dramatically exceed the cost of inflation every year, year after year. Essentially, when students now reach the Promised Land of higher education, the promise is entirely on the students to pay for the privilege or obtain federally guaranteed funding. Keep in mind the NCAA just generated for higher ed an enormous payday from the Final Four men's basketball tournament and its "unpaid" student athletes. Top coaches now expect multi-million dollar contracts and perks. Does the collegiate world, given these scenarios, strike one as "clean"?

Meanwhile, the drumbeat continues for education "reform," except where it is most needed, and least wanted, by those who play education's darker, inside game. With a handful of exceptions, it's all about the money. Mark Zuckerberg, when he made his showy demonstration of faith in education by contributing unvalued Facebook stock to Newark's school "reform" movement, grasped this concept. He knew what money could buy, and so did his media and "reform" backers. He looked under the hood and understood what the purchase was really all about. Then, and only then, did the face of Facebook give funds to the 'hood.