Fast Times At Covid Corporate High

It was hard to miss Saturday night's glitzy Graduate Together show broadcast in primetime over all the commercial TV and cable networks, and live-streamed on Facebook, Youtube and many other social media platforms.

 Its marquee attraction was former President Barack Obama, whose virtual commencement address to the nation's quarantined high school seniors was covered as a major political news event by the corporate media. (It followed a separate address, sponsored by JP Morgan Chase, to graduates of the nation's Historically Black Colleges.)

Obama's performance was augmented by song and dance routines and motivational speeches by students who had entered to win a spot in what might be called the Bootstraps Inspiration Sweepstakes. One girl gushed about her success being the result of a heroic mother working three jobs to pay her college tuition. The lesson this student learned was not that no parent should ever have to work three jobs, or that no student should ever be in onerous college debt, Her message was that it is incumbent upon the youth of America to "demand more" and show up to vote for politicians who will also pay proper verbal respect to hard-working parents like hers.

Although our disrespectful and disrespected current president was never mentioned by name, a distinct anti-Trump current ran right though the High School Musical program. The liberal politics of orchestrated diversity and slick entertainment and inspiring vignettes served to distract the audience from the true, underlying agenda and profit motive of the show.

A joint project of Hollywood's Entertainment Industry Foundation (ETF), the XQ Institute and the LeBron James Family Foundation,, the show's occult purpose was to gin up public enthusiasm for the complete oligarchic control of our public school systems. It was one giant infomercial for school privatization.

As the Jonas Brothers crooned, and activist Malala Yousafsai championed the rights of female students, a scrolling chyron at the bottom of the screen urged viewers to visit a "Rethinking High School" website. One click brought you to the XQ Foundation,  a think tank bankrolled by billionaire Apple heiress Laurene Powell Jobs and led by former Obama administration officials and investment bankers and hedge fund operators.

It's just another variation on the same old refrain from those smash capitalistic hit jobs on public education and teachers known as No Child Left Behind and Race To the Top. 

Following the neoliberal mantra of never letting a serious crisis go to waste, ETF CEO Nicole Sexton told Variety that Obama's participation in the infomercial was neither the surprise nor the altruistic rare treat that corporate media had been promoting it as:

 "We have a long-standing relationship with XQ Institute, which is a nonprofit organization dedicated to challenging traditional education platforms and ways of teaching. This period of time has taken that to a whole other level. But through XQ’s networks, there were a number of students and educators and families across the country who expressed sadness about the missed opportunity to experience the wonderful rites of passage tied to high school graduation. XQ came to us and said, “Let’s talk through what we could do with a telecast,” and we took that to our board.

 We have 11 board members, four of whom are executives for the four major networks. It was instantaneous. They all got so excited. There were a lot of people recognizing that there are going to be seniors who will miss these wonderful rites of passage and asking, “How do we fill that void in a way that really celebrates them?” So our networks at the national level had been exploring different ideas. And then when that opportunity came to them with a formidable partner like XQ, it was literally a no-brainer for them. Within an hour, they came back and said, “Yeah, we want to do this as a roadblock.” And within 24 hours, I had the date.

The CEO of the XQ Institute is Rosslyn Ali, former deputy Obama education secretary for civil rights. Its parent organization, the Emerson Collective, is managed by former Education Secretary Arne Duncan, author of Obama's punitive Race To the Top initiative, as well being Rosslyn Ali's current and former boss.

The XQ Institute uses the same obfuscatory vocabulary to hide its for-profit motives as other finance capital-backed school "reform" initiatives run by such billionaire luminaries as Bill and Melinda Gates and the Walton Family Foundations. 

As school privatization critic Diane Ravitch outlined several years ago in her book Reign of Error, common tropes are that public schools are failing, that mainly poor and minority children are "trapped" in these failing schools, that unionized teachers are not up to the challenge of training children for the "jobs of the future," that there exists a "skills gap" in the job marketplace that unionized teachers cannot bridge, and that if only we can bring some of the same good old market-based creative destruction (closures) to schools as private equity brings to business in order to "rescue" them, then all might be well. And be sure to use the word "choice" in every other sentence, as though you actually had one.

To further hide the gross profit motive of placing education of children into the hands of greedy and unqualified venture capitalists and oligarchs, education reform cultists also commonly and cynically frame their agenda as "the civil rights issue of our time." 

Ravitch continues:

"Their policies, they say, will make our children into 'global competitors.' They will protect our national security. They will make America strong again. The corporate reformers play to our anxieties, even rekindling dormant Cold War fears that we may be in for jeopardy as a nation of we don't buy what they are selling. The critics want the public to believe that our public schools are a clear and present danger to our society. Unless there is radical change, they say, our society will fall apart. Our economy will collapse. Our national security is in danger."

And these are the people who complain that Donald Trump is the guy who brought fascism to the country. How convenient. What a gift both Trump and the coronavirus pandemic are giving to the school privatization movement. 

Due to the pandemic, there's been been a slight change in plans and a tweak in the propaganda delivery. Since society has already failed and the economy has already collapsed right before our eyes, the new message to investors is that Remote Learning Is Fun and Profitable. 

All that America's education policy makers have to do is dream and imagine the possibilities. And the XQ Institute is here to help with its pharmacopoeia of hallucinatory drugs.

One of the first steps is to do away with democratically elected local school boards - or at least, to seed them with XQ-funded candidates. This is euphemized on their website as " empowering local communities." Their accompanying illustration is thus one of clenched fists rising in protest against traditional schools.

Speaking directly to local and state legislators and governors, XQ waves wads of money to legions of innovators in contests to redesign their local high schools to neoliberal expectations. A big part of freeing students from the schools they are trapped in is in getting them unpaid internships for the jobs of the future - or "Innovation Schools."

What could be more radical and innovative than never re-opening the shuttered schools at all in favor of remote learning and de facto serfdom - or opening them at vastly reduced physical capacity? Think of the real estate. Not for nothing are the boards of directors of reform organizations rife with property developers and real estate magnates. 

If you watched Saturday's graduation show and clicked on the incessant advertisement link to XQ, you were treated to an avalanche of reform Newspeak that would bury even George Orwell. The language is that turgid and uninformative. You will be led down endless alleys and mazes in search of the perfect Covid Academy merchandise and tips.

One such link is to an outfit called Envision Learning Partners. The essence of this experience begins a mission statement in ALL CAPS. Because, let's face it, by the time you find your way to this site via the long and windy road that XQ has provided for you via the gala star-studded TV graduation special, your eyes are already glazed over. An example of school reform Newspeak:

ENVISION LEARNING PARTNERS (ELP) EMPOWERS SCHOOL AND DISTRICT LEADERS TO BUILD A SUPPORTIVE CULTURE OF LEARNING BY DESIGNING SYSTEMS OF PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT THAT ENCOURAGE STUDENTS AND TEACHERS TO LEARN AND GROW TOGETHER. WE BELIEVE THIS APPROACH CONTRIBUTES TO GREATER EQUITY IN EDUCATION—MAKING SURE EVERY STUDENT HAS REAL CHOICES AND POWER OVER THEIR OWN FUTURE

In other words, Teach to the Test. Pandemic or no pandemic, keep rating teachers as failures if their students from poverty stricken neighborhoods don't score well. And with Zoom replacing the classroom, they are guaranteed not to do well. In the small print at the bottom of the page  Envision finally sees fit to divulge that it is a for-profit charter school conglomerate in the business of selling test-taking kits to teachers and school districts who must buy them if they are to succeed in the Education Marketplace. They need a lot of 'elp.

For as Barack Obama advised graduating seniors in the keynote address of Disaster Capitalism's gala graduation party:

Doing what feels good, what’s convenient, what’s easy — that’s how little kids think. Unfortunately, a lot of so-called grown-ups, including some with fancy titles and important jobs, still think that way — which is why things are so screwed up.... >When you need help, Michelle and I have made it the mission of our Foundation to give young people like you the skills and support to lead in your own communities, and to connect you with other young leaders around the country and around the globe.

He might as well have been speaking his empowering message into the un-monetized wind. Before Covid-19 struck, socialism was just as popular as capitalism among the young adults surveyed. People both young and old still have their brains and they still have their eyes to envision what myriad and deliberate screw-ups that the lords of unfettered capitalism truly are.

Here's the commencement address that should be broadcast far and wide. As Marxist economist Richard Wolff argues, what we need is not a glitzy graduation show or remote learning-by-oligarch. During this national lockdown, what we need is an education reform program that would pair millions of jobless but eminently skilled and qualified professionals from many fields with millions of quarantined students. The sessions would be one-on-one, the teachers would be paid by the government, and the students would not be indebted for life.

That's how reimagining and rethinking high school - or any school or functional democracy, for that matter - would ideally sound.

Plutocrats in Plunderland

Just as Hillary Clinton was professing her sudden and unexpected opposition to exclusionary charter schools, the think tank founded by her own campaign manager was very conveniently and coincidentally going on full school privatization overdrive offensive.

Clintonite John Podesta's Center for American Progress, already exposed as a corporate front group by Senator Elizabeth Warren, has gathered together the usual suspects -- private equity vultures, Silicon Valley moguls, neoliberal politicians, charter school advocates, billionaire philanthropists and lobbyists -- under a telltale hashtag called TeachStrong. (the immediate supposition that teachers are inherently weak and in dire need of improvement should be your first clue about their true agenda!)

I got the email announcing #TeachStrong on Tuesday, which appropriately enough was also the 150th anniversary of the publication of "Alice In Wonderland". So get ready for a tortured trip down a neoliberal rabbit hole:

It's time to elevate and modernize the teaching profession. (began CAP's email.)

Our students are falling behind internationally. In an effort to catch up, we are asking more from our teachers than ever before. Yet we continue to provide them with inadequate preparation, training, and pay.To address this gap, the Center for American Progress and 40 partner organizations are launching the TeachStrong campaign. It is a movement to change the national education policy conversation and make modernizing and elevating the teaching profession the most pressing and significant education policy priority for our nation. As a part of the campaign’s launch, TeachStrong held an event today with Governor Jack Markell (D) of Delaware and Governor Terry Branstad (R) of Iowa, where they discussed the need for a bipartisan effort to act.

"Modernization" is the neoliberal buzzword for privatization. And whenever they crow about "bipartisan" you can almost feel the tentacles of Wall Street grasping you around your throat. And whenever they brag about their "diverse" groups joining together for a project, you can rest assured that even cursory searches of their funding and leadership will reveal astroturf groups within political parties within marketing divisions within corporations.

 Governor Markell, (D-Oligarchy) for example, was one of the original members of Bill and Hillary Clinton's Democratic Leadership Council, a/k/a the party's conservative Big Business wing. Before entering politics and most recently becoming an education concern troll, he held managerial positions at First Chicago Corporation, McKinsey, Comcast and the Nextel Corporation. As governor, one of his first accomplishments was the legalization of sports betting. In December 2013, following a lengthy investigation,  a special prosecutor found that Markell had violated campaign finance law in 2008 by advising high-rollers how to sidestep donation limits. However, since the very brief statute of limitations had expired, and the prosecutor graciously allowed that ignorance of the law is an excuse when it comes to the misdeeds of VIPs like Markell, no criminal charges were ever pressed against him. 

Markell is just the type of principled, qualified cat we need to help kids learn and to "elevate" teachers and improve their skills, don't you think?

 

My Reality Is Just Different Than Yours

But back to #TeachStrong and its diverse group of partners with the Brave New World goal of "building a better teacher." 

Trust me: this gets curiouser and curiouser, the further down the rabbit hole you plummet, and the harder you try to dig your way back out of the muddy morass. 

But take a peek behind the curtain anyway...

... and you can find the entire Fab Forty on the #TeachStrong webpage. To discern the funding and the people behind each partner, simply Google each of them individually, and then look for the fine print under "Our Board" or "Our Advisers" or "Our Directors" or "Our Team." Much to your surprise, you will discover that many of the "diverse partners" making up #TeachStrong are actually subsidiaries or downright clones of themselves! Here's a sampling of the subterfuge:

"Alliance For Excellent Education": led by former West Virginia Gov. Bob Wise, a lobbyist for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's Common Core testing-for-profit program. His alliance is a front group for something called Digital Learning Day, which sells educational software to public schools. From that, he has developed "Project 24," which in turned spawned "Future Ready Schools," which gets taxpayer funding from Obama's Department of Education. Besides being a recent recipient of the "Bammy Award," he also serves on the Barbara Bush Family Literacy Board. Like a bipartisan circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel.....

Anyway, Wise gets assistance at his Alliance from Daniel H. Leeds, who also  happens to sit on the board of the Center for American Progress! It's a small world after all. Leeds is the president of Fulcrum Investments, a private equity firm with a stake in charter schools and educational software.

"America Achieves": Another charter school front group, listing its funders as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Will and Flora Hewlett Foundation among other philanthrocapitalists. Its executive director, Jon Schnur, served on Barack Obama's transition team and as an advisor to Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who is soon leaving public service to spend more time with his money family.

"Digital Promise": This front group is at least upfront about admitting that teachers and students are not its top priorities. According to the website: "Building relationships with developers and entrepreneurs is core to Digital Promise’s work. The Corporate Partner Program aims to create mutually beneficial relationships between our corporate partners, our staff, and our network. We engage with corporate partners as thought leaders, co-designers, and problem solvers alongside our education leaders and researchers."

Well, if you can engage with Thought Leaders, who needs any damned teachers? And their corporate sponsors are a Who's Who of the Oligarchy. The ubiquitous Bill and Melinda Gates, Hewlett Packard, McGraw-Hill, Apple, Amazon, Discovery and Microsoft to name just a few. Ka-ching! 

And the Board of Directors is to die for. Among them is one Gilman Louie, described on Digital Promise's website as "the founder and former CEO of In-Q-Tel, a strategic venture fund created to help enhance national security by connecting the Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. intelligence community with venture-backed entrepreneurial companies. (my bold.) Previously Mr. Louie built a career as a pioneer in the interactive entertainment industry, with accomplishments that include the design and development of the Falcon F-16 flight simulator as well as being the person who licensed Tetris, the world’s most popular computer game, from its developers in the Soviet Union. During that career, Mr. Louie founded and ran a publicly traded company called Spectrum HoloByte which ultimately was acquired by Hasbro Corporation, where he served as chief creative officer. He has served on a number of boards of directors, including Wizards of the Coast, Netwitness, Ribbit, Zephyr Technologies, the National Venture Capital Association, the CIA Officers Memorial Fund and currently chairs the Mandarin Institute and the Federation of American Scientists."

Just the kind of intelligence expert we need to spy on entertain advertise to teach our kids, and to elevate our teachers to the highest heights of servitude, huh?

"Emerson Collective": Founded by Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of Apple founder and jobs off-shorer Steve Jobs, this "partner" of the CAP anti-teacher offensive is obviously in no great need of outside funding. As a result, watch for a Brave New World Jobs Elementary coming soon to a neighborhood near you. Students will concentrate not on the Three R's, but on "personalization" and "syncing." Needless to say, this involves lots and lots of very pricey educational software, to be installed in both homes and classrooms. Mrs. Jobs explains:

"We've developed a set of algorithms that choreograph the movement of students between learning stations (that include both live and digital instruction), identify the skills and concepts each student is ready to learn as well as which of their classmates need the same skills. As a result, students spend more time on skills they are ready to learn, understand their personal learning goals, and are accountable for their own learning. Learn more about our most recent results here.

Are we all mad here, or do you think that Laurene Jobs and Gilman Louie would make an excellent team? Ka-ching on steroids!

"Hope Street Group":  Just when I thought I'd finally reached rock bottom of the rabbit hole with Laurene Jobs' Orwellian vision, there is this hilariously named education reform front group. Actually, you should probably abandon hope once you've entered this domain, which prominently features the mugshot of outgoing Education Sec. Arne Duncan. It seems to have little or nothing to do with actual teaching, what with its core message that education must be viewed as "an economic opportunity," along with health and jobs, small j, to be oxymoronically aligned with "market forces for social good." (the accepted definition of Clintonian third way politics, or neoliberalism.)

 The Board of Directors is a star-studded cast of plutocratic characters from private equity, the tech industry, vulture capitalism and the predatory health insurance cartel. 

Hope Street is definitely Arne Duncan's baby (or at least one of them), now that he is retiring from "public service". Triple-triple-triple Ka-ching!

"Third Way": If it's American Progress, and there is money to be made from the commonwealth, you cannot possibly leave out Wall Street billionaire and Clinton pal Pete Peterson. Now that his austerity for the masses initiative is in temporary hibernation due to campaign politics, he might as well glom onto public education to get his outsized share, right? This guy actually wants Congress to reauthorize George Bush's No Child Left Behind scam, and the Clintons' think tank is welcoming him with open arms, just as Bill and Hill welcomed him with open arms to their family foundation, and even lent out daughter Chelsea in calling for cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

The aforementioned astroturf organizations are just a tiny slice of the Center for Progress's #TeachStrong initiative. To be fair, there do seem to be a few legitimate teachers' groups interspersed among the lot for appearance's sake, not least of them Randi Weingarten's American Federation of Teachers, which mysteriously endorsed Hillary Clinton without even bothering to take a vote from actual members.

 "... if you drink much from a bottle marked 'poison,' it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later." -- Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland.

She Saw Something, She Said Something, She Got Her Walking Papers

The titans of finance are always looking for new ways to make a quick buck off the suffering and sweat of regular people. They've destroyed the housing market, they've destroyed jobs, they've obliterated trillions of dollars in household wealth since the debacle of 2008. Now they're in Stage Two, which consists of sifting through the national ruins and salvaging the collateral damage. And lo and behold! There's some mighty distressed human capital and bargain basement real estate out there, ripe for the corporate picking. It's called the American public school system.

In the wealthiest country in the world, where nearly a quarter of all children are still deemed officially poor, the circling vultures are smelling the desperation and voraciously grabbing what they can, while they can. They're stealthy, they're sneaky, and they are counting on us not noticing or caring.

But thanks in large part to the Chicago teachers' strike, those of us who weren't paying enough attention are now getting a much-needed crash course in the war against public education. We've already heard more than we can stomach about Mayor Rahm Emanuel's quest to gut his city's public schools and transform them into charters in order to enrich his wealthy cronies. His divide-and-conquer crusade, pitting parents against unionized teachers, is not working. As of this writing, a settlement was reportedly near -- and the teachers are the ones with the smiles on their faces.

But that's just one battle, and the war still rages. Among the casualties is Barbara Madeloni, the director of Secondary Teacher Education at UMass, Amherst. Because she and her students balked at being used as guinea pigs in a multinational corporation's experimental teacher certification program, her contract has not been renewed for the next academic year. The fact that her college happens to be located in one of the most politically progressive areas of the country does not bode well. It is only because Dr. Madeloni is protected by a union that her employer couldn't fire her outright.

The professor and her students decided to opt out of participation in Pearson's Teacher Performance Field Test, which evaluates candidates based solely on a brief videotape and canned essay questions designed to discourage creative thinking. It lets a bunch of corporate suits sitting in expensive office space thousands of miles away make a ton of money by paying retired/laid-off teachers $75 a pop to decide the fate of an aspiring educator they've never even met.

 After the New York Times ran a story about her protest last spring, Barbara Madeloni suddenly found herself out of a job. The corporate overlords and their accomplices in state government and higher public education were apparently not well-pleased that, in her words, she "saw something and said something."

My conviction that I had to resist and speak out has been growing with my increasing awareness of the danger we are in. I see what is happening in K-12 schools, the profound distortions of teaching and learning, the abuse that is testing and its impact on teachers, students, parents and administrators. I sit in meetings with people who have the power and protections to speak out and stop what is happening, and I listen as they make a choice to side with those in power, determine through a twisted rationality that ‘we need standards’ and ‘there has to be accountability’ and ‘our practices need to be data driven’ all while closing their eyes and ears to the evident human misery these measures are creating. My courage comes from my outrage and my fear. My fear for the future of the greater good is much stronger than my fear for losing my job. I also gain courage from the Education Radio Collective, whose members support me, inspire me and give me a place of safety. As well, the national connections in educator activism, both online and at Occupy DOE have helped me to know that I am part of something bigger, that I am not alone. In some ways, however, it doesn’t feel like courage. It just feels absolutely necessary.

(Did I mention that Barbara Madeloni is also a Sardonicky reader/commenter?)

Alan Singer of Hofstra University has written a chilling overview of the Pearson conglomerate for The Huffington Post. Among other tidbits, we learn that Seif al-Islam, son of late Libyan dictator Muanmar Gaddafi, has a major financial stake in the company. The ill-gotten gains of one of the worst human rights abusers in modern history are helping subsidize an epidemic of what amounts to institutionalized child abuse. Because, let's be blunt: the "creative destruction" of public education, Rahm-style, Pearson-style, is indeed a form of child abuse. As the old public service TV commercial said, "A mind is a terrible thing to waste." And the global financial cartel is laying waste to entire generations of young minds, all in the quest of the Almighty Dollar.

Why else do you suppose Rahm sends all three of his own children to a private school where they refuse to teach to the test, and where they have three libraries and seven art teachers to serve a student population of 1,700?

The underserved public school students of Chicago and other financially strapped cities, on the other hand, often don't even have a library. The elites can thereby pivot and blame the teachers for low reading scores! And when brave people like Barbara Madeloni speak out against the injustice, they're thrown to the curb. But they can never be silenced.

"The Chicago teachers know exactly what is up and who they are fighting" Dr. Madeloni emailed me yesterday. "And if they didn't, Obama's man Rahm told them so: these are Obama's Race to the Top policies that he using to try to strong arm the unions, make a land grab with schools closings, and complete the privatization of the public schools. This is a terribly important struggle and we need to be with them all of the way."

There's a petition up at Change.Org asking that UMass renew Dr. Madeloni's contract. You can sign it here.



Postering at UMass.... "I have the most amazing students," says Dr. Madeloni