Anita Hoge -- Abolishing Representative Government Through Education: Common Core, Choice, and Charter Schools, Part 2

ABOLISHING REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT THROUGH EDUCATION: COMON CORE, CHOICE & CHARTER SCHOOLS
PART 2 of 4

By Anita Hoge
January 13, 2014
NewsWithViews.com

More on the Chicago Schools Catastrophe

In May of 2008, Duncan organized a conference, “Free to Choose, Free to Succeed: The New Market in Public Education" in Chicago with the Renaissance Schools Fund, the financial wing of the Mayor Daley's Renaissance 2010 plan operating under the auspices of the Commercial Club. Many critics denounced the scheme saying that this plan was not designed to improve the quality of education but rather a plan for privatization, union-busting and the dismantling of democratically-elected local school boards. It was also described as part of a neighborhood gentrification scheme involving the privatization of public housing projects through financial business developments. Poor, Black and Latino families were forced from their neighborhood schools and their homes when schools were closed and the property was bought up for redevelopment. The most impoverished would be dislocated. [Tony Rezko, friend of Obama and Mayor Blagojevich, made a fortune from these developments along with many corporate investors, ed.] The public school privatization agenda involved Renaissance schools being run by subcontracted for-profit companies. There was a shift in school governance away from teachers and elected community school boards to appointed administrators and appointed councils made up of business leaders.

Cities across America are gearing up for more charter schools. Why? Is it betrayal, is it a plan, or is it both?

In “Obama's Betrayal of Public Education? Arne Duncan and the Corporate Model of Schooling,” December 17, 2008, Henry A. Giroux and Kenneth Saltman wrote:

It is difficult to understand how Barack Obama can reconcile his vision of change with Duncan's history of supporting a corporate vision for school reform and a penchant for extreme zero-tolerance polices - both of which are much closer to the retrograde policies hatched in conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institution, Fordham Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, than to the values of the many millions who voted for the democratic change he promised. As is well known, these think tanks share an agenda not for strengthening public schooling, but for dismantling it and replacing it with a private market in consumable educational services.

Duncan characterized the goal of Renaissance 2010 creating the new market in public education as a "movement for social justice." He invoked corporate investment terms to describe reforms explaining that the 100 new schools [charter] would leverage influence on the other 500 schools in Chicago. Redefining schools as stock investments he said, "I am not a manager of 600 schools. I'm a portfolio manager of 600 schools and I'm trying to improve the portfolio." He claimed that education can end poverty. He explained that having a sense of altruism is important, but that creating good workers is a prime goal of educational reform and that the business sector has to embrace public education. "We're trying to blur the lines between the public and the private," he said. He argued that a primary goal of educational reform is to get the private sector to play a huge role in school change in terms of both money and intellectual capital. He also attacked the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), positioning it as an obstacle to business-led reform. He also insisted that the CTU opposes charter schools (and, hence, change itself), despite the fact that the CTU runs ten such schools under Renaissance 2010. Despite the representation in the popular press of Duncan as conciliatory to the unions, his statements and those of others at the symposium belied a deep hostility to teachers unions and a desire to end them (all of the charters created under Ren2010 are deunionized)."

In March of 2013, Chicago parents, teachers, and citizens held a three-day march across the city to stop school closings, but 47 were shut down. Twelve thousand Chicago children are walking new, often longer, routes to school this fall—after Mayor Rahm Emanuel closed schools (almost all) in poor, Black and Latino neighborhoods. Given its high rate of gun violence, the city dealt with the disruption by expanding its “Safe Passage” program. Police and firefighters were on the job and the city ended up spending $16 million to hire low-wage temps to monitor children to and from school. The upshot? Emanuel hijacked neighborhood schools and later had to police his decision. But, what is being put in their place? Charter schools. It is easy to see that Emanuel, Duncan, and Obama do not really care about the children. It's the money to be made and the direct assault to control public schools.

A retired history teacher from Chicago had written this commentary on March 23,2013,

"It was a grim Thursday afternoon on March 21st as the news trickled out that 61 Chicago school buildings would be closed and that 54 school programs will be axed. The closings are heavily clustered in the poorest mostly African American and Latino neighborhoods, where decades of disinvestment and economic apartheid have taken a heavy toll on the residents. Many people have moved away from these communities, driven out by the lack of jobs, the meager resources given to the schools, the inadequate city services and the resulting crime and violence. Many believe that the forced exodus is part of a land grab for real estate interests who will move in to gentrify these areas.

On the South and West Sides of the city, where the closings are hitting hardest, poverty is a policy, not an accident. The Chicago financial elite, which could provide jobs and rational investment, has chosen displacement over renewal, ethnic cleansing over neighborhood stabilization. As the Mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel is the public face of this prairie plutocracy."

Obama's “Race to the Top,” a $4.35 billion federal competitive grant program through the Recovery Act, mandated that states tie high stakes to test scores. In a bid for money, cash-strapped and reform-frenzied states rewrote their education laws, dropping caps on charter schools in order to permit students from struggling neighborhood schools to have a “choice” to transfer out of them. It also tied teacher job security to student test scores. States were rewarded for promising to reproduce the same plan Duncan implemented in Chicago. As a result, charter schools are mainstream. As of now the ratio is 1 to 20—one charter student for every 20 public school students in the United States.

New York Data-Mining

The mayor of New York changed the face of the American public school system. On August 1, 2006, New York Mayor Bloomberg took control of the public school system and power was transferred to city hall. Bloomberg took over 1200 schools and eliminated the city's 32 elected community school boards. Education officials closed 164 public schools around the city since 2002 over the objections of parents and teachers who wanted the schools fixed. A non-elected council called Panel for Education Policy [PEP] has the authority to make decisions with 13 seats, 8 selected by the Mayor, the other five appointed from the community. The city launched a "fair student-funding" formula, called weighted funding to provide additional resources to districts with high poverty and special-needs students. Bloomberg created a change in representative government. It's a move to deactivate the voice of elected representatives, teachers, and parents.

When the documentary called Waiting for Superman was released featuring Michelle Rhee, past controversial Chancellor from Washington D.C., parents, citizens, and teachers from New York issued a rebuttal to the film called the Inconvenient Truth About Waiting for Superman which tells the real truth about the takeover of public schools by charters. It exposes the forcing of students to leave the neighborhood, and how teachers are frustrated with the high stakes tests which evaluating them based on the results on how well students perform on tests. Inconvenient Truth highlights, with film clips of actual real-life experiences, how public school parents, students, neighborhoods and educators are being impacted and harmed by so-called reforms. Please watch this excellent one-hour video to get an understanding of the impact of the transfer of power. (See my notes at the end of this article regarding two issues that I disagree with that may actually perpetuate the adverse agenda that they are intending to stop.]

Data is a must for the business model to function. There is a New York update to the controversy over FERPA (Family Education Rights in Privacy Act), regarding allowing data-mining with personally identifiable information, a cloud based repository for data. Parents have filed a lawsuit against Commissioner King, the New York Department of Education, and the New York Board of Regents for violating student privacy by releasing personal student information to the InBloom corporation. Note the intrusive personal data on children that would be shared with outside vendors, thus violating a child’s right to privacy:

InBloom Inc., established by a $100 million dollar grant from the Gates Foundation, was designed as a multi-state data store, to collect and format personal student data and make it available to vendors to help them data mine, develop and market their software learning products…. The information to be shared with inBloom and other vendors will include the names of all public and charter school students, their addresses, phone numbers, emails, grades, test scores, race and economic status, disability and health diagnoses, their attendance and suspension records, and any services they receive. (Source)

This lawsuit is great news, but there is a need for a federal investigation to expose how Obama "unlocked" data, thus allowing data trafficking with third party vendors like inBloom across the United States. The re-disclosure of data means data is collected from the local level on students by the state information systems, and a written agreement is drawn up with a third party contractor to re-disclose the data.

Data collection is the foundation for the Common Core business model to function as a national market where children are a commodity. Since data was "unlocked" by Obama in January, 2012, FERPA (Family Education Rights in Privacy Act) regulations were changed allowing personally identifiable information [PII] from school records to be given to third party contractors. The definition for " school official" was changed to allow any outside vendor or contractor to use PII for research to design curriculum, software, digital curriculum, and "user interaction information" collected by learning software systems to research teaching and interventions of individual students.

If a Private School Takes Federal Money They Must Take the Test

Washington D.C. is the first city to experience federal choice money for private and religious schools originally called DC-OSP (Opportunity Scholarship Program, 2003, D.C. School Choice Incentive Act) the first federally-funded, private school voucher program in the country run by the D.C. mayor. Reauthorized, HR 471 is now called called SOAR (Scholarships For Opportunity and Results), sponsored by Republican John Boehner. The bill authorizes a 20-20-20 plan—$20 million for private vouchers, $20 million for Charter schools, $20 million for public schools in DC for analysis.

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This legislation lays out specifically that if a private school takes federal money, there are requirements that would mandate certain reporting requirements from private schools participating in the DC-OSP. It would also require such schools to administer a national norm-reference standardized test in reading and math. Take the money—take the test. But, what is the scenario when this so-called choice "follows the child”? If a religious private school doesn't accept the grant voucher agenda, will it be forced to accept a "choice child" when the federal ESEA is passed? Yes. The school will be forced under federal discrimination laws to accept the “choice child.” Once the private religious school accepts the Title I “choice child,” the child must take the test. But notice: if the private school is not teaching Common Core, the children will likely fail the test, and the school will fail. What government funds, government controls. Follow the money trail. For part three click below.

Click here for part -----> 1, 2, 3, 4,

Source Material for this article included:

1- Mayor Action Guide,
2- National Governor's Association Push for Charter School Expansion,
3- Investing in Education,
4- Bridgeport, Conn Board files suit to keep elected positions, and this
5- Arne Duncan on " white suburban moms.
6- Michelle Rhee Controversy with test erasures,
7- DC Public Schools Flagged For Erasures,
8- Chicago Mayor Daley's Renaisance 2010,
9- Chicago spends $17 million On Safe Passage,
10- Chicago Safe Passage Routes-Unsafe,
11- Chicago School Closings,
12- New York Parents Lawsuit, and this, and this
13- The Village Voice, Eva Moskowitz, the Invasion of Charter Schools,
14- Credit Enhancement for Charter Facilities,
15- Charter School Gravy Train,
16- Capital Roundtable For Profit Education Conference-Private Equity Investing in For-Profit Education Companies ENCORE ROUNDTABLE, January, 2013, and July 25,2013,
17- Charter Schools Pose Greatest Credit Challenge,
18- Troubled US Local Gov't,
19- New York, Goldman Sachs Partners with LISC and Charter Schools:
20- “Goldman to lend $25M for charter schools,
21- Minnesota- State Charter Schools Out of Control:
22- Charter Schools Fail Bondholders Get Bailout.
23- Detroit named Ground Zero by Duncan:
24- Chicago Reform that Duncan Left Behind:
25- Chicago Charter Schools Equitable Funding:
26- Chicago and Philadelphia Closing Schools and Funding Charters:
27- Obama's Betrayal of Public Education.
28- The Inconvenient Truth About 'Waiting a for Superman'-rebuttal video against charters.
29- PARCC Grant Document-LESSONS LEARNED page 22.
30- Documents used in this article are used for research and educational purposes. Fair Use in Copyrighted Materials for Educational and Research Materials Section 107 of Title 17 of the US Code.

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Anita B. Hoge, lecturer, educational researcher, parent.

In 1990 a federal investigation was completed against the Pennsylvania Department of Education, after filing a federal complaint against the Educational Quality Assessment, EQA, & the US Department of Education's National Assessment of Educational Progress, NAEP, under the Protection of Pupils Rights Amendment. Forced the Pennsylvania EQA to be withdrawn. Forced the US Department of Education to do their job to investigate the psychological testing of children without informed written parental consent. NAEP was never investigated because the Department said I didn't have standing, although documents had proven that NAEP did experimental research & used different states to pilot their agenda by embedding their test questions into the Pennsylvania EQA as well as other state tests.

Subject & main researcher for the book, Educating for the New World Order. My story is told about an incredible journey into the devious & deceptive operations of our government to change the values, attitudes & beliefs of American children to accept a new world order. The first to document the expansive data collection operation of our government establishing micro-records on individual people in the United States. Experimentation, illegal testing, & data collection is exposed.

Lectured all over the Unites States in the 90's about illegal & controversial testing, curriculum, & collection of data by our government. Arranged & lectured town hall meetings all across the state of Pennsylvania to withdraw affective student learning outcomes to stop Outcome Based Education. In January of 1992, parents in Pennsylvania won the battle against OBE when the Independent Regulatory Review Board had requested that the State Board of Education remove all outcomes which dealt with attitudes, habits, traits, feelings, values, & opinions which are difficult & subjective to measure & that the remaining outcomes be defined & coordinated with academic requirements that can be measured. The battle continues.

E-Mail: hogieshack@comcast.net

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The combination of all four points above puts this scenario together. It demonstrates that this is the plan for the destruction of our country. The following stories tell the tale.