Financial Elite Set Their Sights on the Vast Wealth of the U.S. Public School System

In 2009-2010, the federal ($60.4 billion), state ($268.8 billion), and local ($260.1 billion) revenue contributions for public education totaled almost $600 billion. [National Education Association (NEA), Rankings of the States 2009 and Estimates of School Statistics 2010, December 2009]

The ruling elite created the housing bubble, which significantly increased property taxes (public schools are funded by these taxes). Using politically-backed teacher labor unions, the ruling elite then was able to raise wages, benefits and pensions for public school employees to levels 30% or more above others in the public sector (as well as those in the private sector; pay scales for public school employees are similar to the general pay scale for federal employees). The ruling elite's master plan has been to corporatize public education, with the ultimate goal of funneling the vast wealth of the U.S. public education system to themselves using the charter school movement.

As cash-strapped school districts lay off teachers and close campuses, publicly-funded charter schools are flourishing and altering the landscape of public education. Despite a painful economic downturn, the charter school movement is expanding rapidly across the country with support from the Obama administration, wealthy donors such as Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey, and the highly publicized documentary "Waiting for Superman." [Charter Schools Expand with Public, Private Money, Associated Press, January 21, 2011]

New Jersey Governor Christie Calls for Peer Teacher Evaluation

“When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.” - Benjamin Franklin

April 7, 2011

AP – New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie on Thursday called for public school teachers to be evaluated based equally on their classroom performance and student achievement and accused the state's largest teachers union of being a group of "bullies and thugs."

Christie laid out his proposal in a speech in New York sponsored by the Brookings Institute, a Washington think tank [Editor's Note: New World Order think tank]. A teachers union spokesman called the governor's plan an "educational disaster."

Since taking office last year, the Republican Christie has emerged as a popular figure among conservatives nationally for his willingness to confront public employee unions, including teachers, over their salaries and pensions. Several other governors have since followed suit, saying such benefits for public employees are unsustainable over time.

Christie kept up the anti-union drumbeat Thursday, referring to the New Jersey Education Association as a bunch of "bullies and thugs" who pressured the Democrat-controlled Legislature to resist reform.

"I don't know how they sleep at night," he said of the union.

Christie spoke broadly about the need to reform public education, saying seniority-based tenure should be abolished and that good teachers should be paid more than bad teachers.

He laid out new details of his plan for teacher evaluations, basing them equally on student achievement and teacher performance in the classroom. Every school district should design and implement its evaluation plan based on that framework, Christie said, with teachers and principals taking charge of drafting the plan and measuring one another's performance.

Christie said he had bypassed the union to meet privately with groups of teachers to seek input for his plan.

"I want to hear directly from teachers and want them to hear directly from me. There's not one teacher who doesn't understand we need to reform this system," Christie said.

He acknowledged the limitations of test scores on evaluations and said teachers had to be measured somewhat differently based on their subject areas.

"How do you test a music teacher? How do you test the art teacher? And don't you test the special ed teacher a little differently?" he said.

A teacher rated effective or highly effective for three consecutive years would receive tenure, Christie said. Teachers would lose tenure after two consecutive years of ineffective ratings. Christie's proposal also makes it quicker to get rid of underperforming teachers — cases would be resolved in 30 days.

NJEA spokesman Steve Baker called Christie's proposal "an educational disaster" for students.

"It would require a massive expansion of standardized testing in every grade level and every subject," Baker said.

Christie bolstered his case using oft-recited numbers, saying 104,000 children in New Jersey are trapped in 200 chronically failing schools. He says education spending has increased 343 percent since 1985 with aid to the state's 31 neediest districts nearly doubling as a percentage of the state budget. Yet, the gap in eighth-grade math between at-risk and not at-risk students hasn't changed significantly in 19 years.

Christie's appearance in New York was the latest in a string of national appearances, including interviews with network news anchors and a speech at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington in February.

He has been pressing for education reform throughout his tenure but has seen pushback from the union and many lawmakers. Many of the reforms he's proposing he would require legislative approval.

Christie has managed to rein in school superintendent salaries by changing the pay scale so only the heads of the biggest districts are paid more than the governor, who makes $175,000 a year. But, a bill establishing a pilot school voucher program paid for by businesses is stalled for now in the Assembly and Senate.

The administration is embroiled in a lawsuit over education cuts that Christie made in last year's budget. The Newark-based Education Law Center sued after Christie slashed state aid to education by about $1 billion last year. The current budget proposal restores $250 million in public education aid. The case is pending before the state Supreme Court.

School District Must Pay Millions in Back Pay to Foreign Teachers

Why is it that the foreign Gulen Movement, which manages over 150 Charter schools in the USA, continues to falsely obtain h1-b work visas for un qualified teachers from Turkey / Turkic speaking countries? They are claiming they cannot find math, science, computer and English teachers in the USA. These schools have recently been busted in Ohio for hiring foreigners via the Concept Schools. In fact, did you know that the Cosmos Foundation part of the Gulen Movement has immigrated more foreign teachers in than the largest school district in the USA (of course that would be LAUSD). That number for Cosmos Foundation alone is over 1,100 h1-b visas since 2001. - Gulen Charter Schools in the USA, gulencharterschoolsusa.blogspot, December 1, 2010

April 7, 2011

The Lookout - The Department of Labor says Maryland's Prince George's County school district owes $4.2 million in back wages to 1,000 foreign teachers, many of whom paid hefty recruiting fees in their home countries to be able to travel to the United States and land the jobs. The district also must pay a $1.7 million fine for breaking the law, the Labor Department says.

The law says the school district cannot employ workers with H1-B temporary visas if they pay the foreign teachers less than they do American ones. The recruiting and immigration legal fees paid by the teachers--most of whom are from the Philippines--reduces their total compensation to less than American teachers' and thus breaks the law, the Department found. The county said they won't renew the visas for "non-critical" teachers because of budget cuts this year, according to the Manila Bulletin.

The determination may spook other school districts that hire a large proportion of foreign teachers. Many rural districts, or schools in other areas that have trouble recruiting for whatever reason, rely on workers with H1-B visas for staffing. The Baltimore Sun reports that the city schools' 500 Filipino teachers also paid their own recruiting fees to get their jobs, so the district may become a target. The Department of Labor declined to tell the paper whether it was investigating Baltimore or any other districts, but said it's finished looking into 20 educational institutions for H1-B violations since 2005.

Labor Department spokeswoman Elizabeth Alexander tells The Lookout that the $4.2 million is the biggest back wage determination of those investigations. She says "the rules are clear" about visa compliance, and that Prince George's County school district knew or should have known about a $500 "fraud protection" fee about 700 of the foreign teachers paid. The other fees the district didn't know about, but still must pay for, she said.

Brent Todd, a spokesman for Bertie County Schools in rural North Carolina, tells The Lookout that none of his district's H1-B teachers had filed a complaint about paying recruiting fees at home to get their jobs in the U.S.

"They've been able to really become a good part of our county as far as offering art and music and drama and all sorts of things, cultural-type things to our county," Todd said of the foreign teachers, most of whom are also from the Philippines. "We have not had any issues that I'm aware of with the visas or anything like that. Everything has gone really smoothly for us."

According to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services statistics, Bertie County's schools had 69 approved H1-B applications in 2009, putting it just under Baltimore's district, which was granted 187 visas. (Los Angeles, Houston, and Prince George's County followed with the third, fourth, and fifth most approved visas for a school district in 2009.)

Todd said it's hard to convince young American teachers to settle down in his rural district of 4,500 students.

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Do K-12 Online Courses Cut Corners?

A few of the schools that we funded achieved something amazing. They replaced schools with low expectations and low results with ones that have high expectations and high results. These schools are not selective in whom they admit, and they are overwhelmingly serving kids in poor areas, most of whose parents did not go to college... Almost all of these schools are charter schools that have significantly longer school days than other schools. In the United States, advances in online learning and new ways to help teachers improve will make a great education more accessible than ever. - Bill Gates' 2009 and 2010 Annual Letters

April 6, 2011

The Lookout - The New York Times' Trip Gabriel has weighed in on the debate about the increase in mandatory online classes in the nation's public school system.

The Lookout wrote in January that there's no evidence that online-only courses are comparable to face-to-face instruction for K-12 students, even as superintendents in Idaho and Tennessee push to make them mandatory for high school students. Teachers' union officials argue the classes--which a million public school students took in 2008--are about cutting costs, not improving education.

Gabriel's article focuses on online courses in the Memphis school district, where he watches a student copy-and-paste from Wikipedia to answer a question in his online-only English 3 course, which he had failed in a teacher-led classroom. Gabriel writes that online makeup courses for students who failed in brick-and-mortar classes are the fastest growing segment of online learning. Critics, Gabriel writes, think high schools may be shuffling kids into these less-rigorous online makeup classes to boost their graduation rates:

But even some proponents of online classes are dubious about makeup courses, also known as credit recovery — or, derisively, click-click credits — which high schools, especially those in high-poverty districts, use to increase graduation rates and avoid federal sanctions.

"I think many people see online courses as being a way of being able to remove a pain point, and that is, how are they going to increase their graduation rate?" said Liz Pape, president of the Virtual High School Global Consortium.

If credit recovery were working, she said, the need for remedial classes in college would be declining — but the opposite is true.

Connie Radtke, the head of the nonprofit Wisconsin E-School Network, told The Lookout in January that the quality of online courses varies widely, depending on who is designing and leading them. The online courses designed by her company, for example, mandate low teacher-student ratios and encourage online interaction between the two over skype and phone calls. They provide opportunities for students to learn at their own pace, or take classes they otherwise wouldn't be able to access.

Some for-profit virtual course companies, however, are cutting corners, she says.

"As soon as you get above a 30-to-1 student teacher ratio, they're not using as high quality a curriculum, they're not making opportunities for students to interact with another. We know they're cutting corners. We know there's at least one if not a couple of for-profit organizations that do operate in the state that have much higher student teacher-ratios. That's not something we endorse," she said.

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