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Today's worst person in the world: Stephen Kafoury

Back in 2003, Steve Kafoury was instrumental in recruiting the successful slate of Portland School Board candidates who went on to hire Vicki Phillips as district superintendent --big mistake-- and to shut down several more neighborhood schools.

Today Kafoury, a former school board member himself, is in the Oregonian flacking for a chain of "virtual" charter high schools.  In the process he bashes the trickery of the lobbying efforts of the state's big teachers union, the Oregon Education Association. 

The OEA opposes charter schools generally, and online schools particularly.  For good reason.

Insight Schools, Inc. is a subsidiary of the Apollo Group, Inc.  Apollo (which runs the Phoenix University chain) is a private for-profit organization, and aren't charter schools, virtual or otherwise, supposed to be "public" schools?  This slippery connection between the public and private sector in education both troubles and puzzles me.  As it probably does the OEA.

Apparently Kafoury, who sat on a public school board, has no problem with the partial privatization of public education. 

But wait!  The world's BEST person also showed up on the letters page of the O this morning.  Her name is Kris Alman, a parent, retired doctor, and candidate for the Beaverton School Board (she favors higher corporate taxes to increase school funding.)

Here's what she wrote regarding charters:

...

"Charter schools in Oregon have a higher closure rate than the national average (20 percent versus 11 percent). Conversely, popular charters, which resort to lotteries, can disenfranchise children who live nearby and they burden all families with transportation requirements. To remedy these inequities, school boards and administrators should foster innovation and flexible learning environments in each neighborhood school."

Sounds like something I would write.  In fact, it sounds a lot like what I have already written. 

Yay Kris!  (If you live in Beaverton, vote Kris Alman for School Board.)

Fraud and merit pay

From EDDRA* correspondent Marc Barlow, who also saw the Bill Moyers interview with William Black:

"I was surprised by Black's comment that bonus structures create loyalty to fraudulent systems. 

 

"Of course, I immediately associated this to teacher merit pay and nclb's questionable assessment design and interpretation."

The implication of Barlow's remark is that NCLB's test-based school accountability "system" is a fraud. 

He's right.  Even more fraudulent is the drive to tie teacher pay to the performance of their students on a pair of tests.  Such an abuse --and blatant misuse-- of standardized testing is obvious to anyone who has either spent time as a classroom teacher or knows anything at all about testing and measurement.

Bottom line --NCLB must go!

*(Education Disinformation Detection and Reporting Agency listserv)

Fraud on Wall Street

You may have read Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz' NY Times op-ed piece (carried in today's O) on the futility and foolishness of the Obama/Geithner plan to "recapitalize" banks at the expense of taxpayers.  If so, you probably recall his dire assessment:

"What the Obama administration is doing is far worse than nationalization: it is ersatz capitalism, the privatizing of gains and the socializing of losses. It is a 'partnership' in which one partner robs the other. And such partnerships — with the private sector in control — have perverse incentives, worse even than the ones that got us into the mess."

Ersatz means artificial.  In other words, Obama and team are propping up a system of phony, or bogus, capitalism.

But it's worse than that.  William Black, the featured guest on Friday's Bill Moyers Journal* (where else?), said what happened on Wall Street to plunge the economy into crisis was the result of deliberate fraud by the banks and investment houses. 

That's fight --fraud.  Deliberate fraud:

BILL MOYERS: I was taken with your candor ... to hear you say that this crisis we're going through... is driven by fraud. What's your definition of fraud?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Fraud is deceit. ... And as a result, there's no more effective acid against trust than fraud, especially fraud by top elites, and that's what we have.

BILL MOYERS: In your book, you make it clear that calculated dishonesty by people in charge is at the heart of most large corporate failures and scandals, including, of course, the S&L, but is that true? Is that what you're saying here, that it was in the boardrooms and the CEO offices where this fraud began?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Absolutely.

Now you can dismiss Black as a paranoid crank.  Before you do, however, you'd be wise to read the entire transcript and Black's  compelling description of "liars loans" and the complicity of ratings agencies in convincing investors that they weren't being "swindled." As it turned out, they were.  Clearly.

Black has an impressive resume, not only as Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, but also as one deeply involved in the aftermath of the Savings and Loan scandal of the 1980's.  He served as chief litigator for the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, as counsel to the Office of Thrift Supervision, and as deputy director of the National Commission on Financial Institution Reform, Recovery and Enforcement.

He knows what he's talking about.

If that's not enough,  just read his book, The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One.

*(In my last post I was critical of PBS.  But public television redeems itself every Friday evening by airing Bill Moyers Journal.)

PBS sabotages single payer

While Howard Dean draws "a line in the sand" and asks the public to pressure Congress to include a Medicare-for-all option in health care reform legislation, PBS --the "Corporation" for Public Broadcasting-- used Frontline to suggest that for-profit private health insurance companies were fully capable of handling the demand for universal health care.

If that sounds fishy, well, it is.  T.R. Reid, the writer of the Frontline documentary, "Sick Around America", had argued the opposite --"don't let health insurance companies profit from selling basic health insurance."

Unfortunately, Reid's bottom line recommendation was edited out of the final product.  He refused therefore to appear on camera, and says he will not work for Frontline again.

" 'We disagreed, and we parted ways,' Reid says."

The Los Angeles Times called the show "hazy", saying that it offered "...little in the way of solutions, or even hope."  And Physicians for a National Health Program wrote a letter to Frontline decrying its failure to "address a single payer option." 

Now you know why. 

Just last week, Thom Hartmann voiced similar opinions to Reid, arguing let private for-profit insurance companies offer "boob jobs" and guaranteed "private rooms" in hospitals. Just don't allow them to profit from basic health care.

As the legislative debate over health care heats up, we'll have to wait to see what happens.  But with the insurance companies at the table, I fear it's unlikely that single payer will be given serious consideration. 

More pros and cons for charters and choice

As an advocate of public education,  I see little difference between the charter school option and school choice generally.  So for the purpose of this argument, I'll treat the two as synonymous.

For some parents, charter schools offer an alternative to what they view as the stifling orthodoxy of traditional public schools.  In districts that bow to the testing dictates of No Child Left Behind (like PPS), charters are refuges from excessive testing and the obsession with literacy and numeracy at the expense of a much broader curriculum that includes music and art and all the other areas of student learning that can't easily be assessed by a multiple choice test.

Some charters, then, --not all (like the Arthur Academies)-- are perceived as student centered.  And progressive.  That's a good thing.

Some say that charters are laboratories for innovation that can steer other public schools in the right pedagogical direction.  If true, that's also a good thing.  I have my doubts about the legitimacy of that claim, however, on two grounds.

First, to say that charters can influence what happens in traditional public schools makes no more sense to me than the notion that competition between schools results in better schools all around.  That's market ideology.  It doesn't work in the realm of education.

Secondly, as I wrote in a comment to the post on charters on PPS Equity, we already know what works to truly improve and reform K-12 education.  (Steve Rawley later noted that I "...took the piss out of that argument [labs for innovation], and I think he has a point… we already know what works; we just have to implement it.")

Here are some of the reasons why charters and choice fail the test of good public policy:

• They don't serve the common good.  They benefit some students --usually the more advantaged-- at the expense of others.

• Charters and choice concentrate good students with supportive parents in some schools, and leave others --the disadvantaged-- behind in less affluent schools.

• Despite the ruse of the "lottery", charters are selective primarily because they require a parent application.  That works to the benefit of motivated and informed parents.

• Charters can dismiss students who are behaviorally difficult.  (That may be more true nationally than in Portland.)

• Charters may be publicly funded, but they are otherwise private.  Charter school organizations are statutorily tax exempt 501(c)(3) corporations run by special interest groups, even though the groups consist --usually-- of "concerned" parents.

They are other "cons" to the charter school issue.  Suffice it for me now to conclude with a couple of quotes from Ockley Green parent, Rose, (a nom de web, I'm pretty sure, of a fairly well-known Portland writer.)  Rose has contributed much to the (again) record-breaking PPS Equity post, "Charters and PPS":

• "...you asked how charter applications are barriers to poorer families.

  "You have to think of this in terms of a parent without your resources. You clearly have a car, don’t work nights, have childcare, and speak English, and other abilities which make going to 4 mandatory meetings almost an entire year before your child might attend a given school a viable option.

  "Think about this process for a parent without those resources. There are many parents without cars, without computers, and with limited English." ...       

• "...school choice has stripped many schools of their wealthier students. Now Ockley is a largely poor minority school floating in a gentrifying neighborhood where most white parents send their kids Somewhere Else.

  "We don’t need to discuss how much this hurts a school and hurts the students left behind."

• "...I don’t see any way around the barriers imposed by school choice and charters. Someone will always be left out, and that someone will probably be brown, black or poor.

  "So the short answer is, we need to bite the bullet. We need to get rid of school choice."

What Rose says makes eminently good sense.  Let's bite the bullet on school choice.  And charters.

Charter Schools: The pros, the cons, the school board

At the Portland School Board meeting Monday evening, David Wynde pronounced that the test for any charter school application is whether the proposed school meets an obvious need. 

In the case of LEP, the charter high school under consideration, Wynde said the school was clearly serving students whose needs weren't being met by existing schools.  The school clearly passed the "need" test.

With all due respect to Director Wynde, isn't that more a commentary on the state of Portland's traditional high schools. especially the poorer schools like Jefferson, Roosevelt, Marshall and Madison, which have been so badly treated, reconfigured, mismanaged and "downsized" by top-down district mandates?  And isn't that the cause of public discontent with traditional schools?  Isn't that the impetus for the creation of alternatives like charter schools?

The small size of the Leadership and Entrepreneurship Charter High School --enrollment 217, about a third the size of Jefferson -- accounts for both its appeal and its ability to innovate, to remain flexible, and to stay student friendly.  Its tiny size also counters the notion that it meets the needs of the far greater number of students who are ill-served by traditional PPS high schools.

The eagerness of school board members to get LEP to fix its financial problems --it hasn't paid its  monthly PERS obligation since last July, for example-- so that the board could eventually re-grant its charter was palpable at Monday's meeting.  Ruth Adkins gushed that she hoped LEP would quickly get its financial troubles behind them so that it could "grow" to serve an even a greater number of students.

But there's the rub, isn't it?  As I wrote in a comment to PPS Equity,

"...if charters were to become as large and diverse as the typical neighborhood school, they would instantly lose their appeal to those –most, anyway– who seek an alternative to traditional public schools."

Charters as they now exist meet the needs of a relatively small number of students (and parents) who want out of traditonal programs.  But they do very little, by their very nature, for the vast majority of public school students.  In other words, they do little to promote the common good.  And isn't that the mission of a public school district?

As Steve Rawley, the eminence grise* of PPS Equity, said in a comment to the same post,

"...some charters might get some students access to the kind of pedagogy you passionately seek.

"I just don’t see how they advance the cause for all students."

*(By which I mean head honcho and resident genius.  Steve isn't old enough to have gray hair.  Not much, anyway.)

Netanyahu's ploy

From Uri Avnery in TiKkun:

"FROM THE beginnings of Zionism, its leaders have known that their vision necessitates a large measure of make-belief. It is impossible to take over a country inhabited by another people without disguising the aim, diverting attention, hiding the acts on the ground behind a screen of flowery words.
...
"BUT DECEIVING, like dancing the tango, takes two: one who deceives and one who wants to be deceived.

"Netanyahu believes that Obama will want to be deceived. Why would he want to quarrel with Israel, confront the mighty pro-Israel lobby and the US Congress, when he can settle for soothing words from Netanyahu? ...

"Is Obama ready to play, like most of his predecessors, the role of the deceived lover?"

As I've written before, what America does is more important than what the anti-peace Israeli government does.  So what will Obama do?

For those interested in the long term prospects for settled relations in the Muslim world, as we all should be, Avnery's piece is not only worth reading, it's a "must read."

Quote of the day

"...as long as legitimate criticism of Israel is blocked by accusations of anti-Semitism, it is the responsibility of Jews committed to universal justice to speak up."

                                        --Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb,  Jewish Voice for Peace

More on the perils of Zionism

From a letter to Jimmy Carter written by a "Jew born in Palestine in 1941":

"As numerous Zionist leaders have openly expressed, they consider assimilation of Jews, such as mixed marriages, as the main threat to Judaism, comparable to the Holocaust: Both significantly reduce the number of Jews. To [equate] the love felt by a person of Jewish descent to another person of gentile descent with mass murder testifies to the pathologic nature of Zionist thinking. It also underlines the hysterical approach of Zionists to the phenomenon of assimilation."

                                                                        --Elias Davidsson
On the OpEdNews website, the voluble --and outspoken-- Stephen Lendman calls Zionism indefensible:

"Zionist ideology is extremist, undemocratic, and hateful. It claims Jewish supremacy, specialness, and uniqueness - God's 'chosen people.' It harms Jews and non-Jews alike."

Zionism by definition is "undemocratic".  I also fully agree that Zionism ultimately harms Jews.  Unless the Israelis want to remain in a perpetual state of war, they must eventually abandon the Zionist "ideal".

In a thoughtful article written for Tikkun, Joel Kovel asks a series of questions about the fruit of Zionism:

"What, then, is the real character of the Israeli state and the Zionism of which it is the fruit? What are we to call a project which, though it boasts of being a 'democracy,' reserves 92% of its land for Jewish people? Where one who converts to Judaism or has a Jewish great-grandmother is automatically given full rights to the land while those others whose families merely happened to have lived there for centuries are at best second-class and landless?"

He answers with another question:

"Is there any word for this except racism, institutionalized at the most fundamental level of the state?"

Of course, this post is all about the inevitability of a one state solution in Israel/Palestine, the only obstacles to which are entrenched Zionism and the continuing support of the United States for a two-state solution, which has no chance of acceptance by Palestinians given the current conditions in the West Bank. 

As the 2004 Olga Document puts it:

"Whoever has eyes to see and ears to hear knows that the choice is between another 'hundred years of conflict' ending in annihilation, and a partnership among all the inhabitants of this land. Only such a partnership is capable of turning us, the Jews of Israel, from foreigners in their country to its real inhabitants."

Peruse these articles for a better understanding of the one state solution.

Zionists, take note!

My proposal for a one state solution to the endless conflict in Israel/Palestine has been dismissed as a "pipe dream". 

Given the current state of affairs in Israel, I say that a two state peace agreement, the stance taken by former President Jimmy Carter and by President Obama, is an even greater pipe dream, a delusional fantasy of those obligated to mouth platitudes about peace in Palestine.

An op-ed piece by Ben Ehrenreich in the LA Times (and published last Sunday in the Oregonian) lends credence to notion of "a single, secular binational state in which Jews and Arabs have equal political rights."  In the piece, Ehrenreich argues bluntly --and quite persuasively-- that

"Israeli policies have rendered the once apparently inevitable two-state solution less and less feasible."

In short, Ehrenreich maintains that the "Zionist ideal of a racial state is keeping Israelis and Palestinians from living in peace."

I agree. 

Ehrenreich offers historical context for his position, saying that Zionism is not "merely  outdated".  Even after the creation of Israel "anti-Zionism was not a particularly heretical position."  Before 1948, the Brit Shalom movement argued for a binational state.  One of its adherents, Martin Buber, went so far as to argue that the "establishment of a Jewish state... would mean 'premeditated national suicide.' "

With the ascendance of the right in Israel under Netanyahu and Lieberman, and with the inexorable march of Jewish settlements across the Palestinian West Bank, the prospects for a two state peace agreement seem remote.  So perhaps it's time for American peaceniks to take a serious look at the "pipe dream" of a one state solution.

Ehrenreich concludes:

"Establishing a secular, pluralist, democratic government in Israel and Palestine would of course mean the abandonment of the Zionist dream. It might also mean the only salvation for the Jewish ideals of justice that date back to Jeremiah."