Human collateral in testing and firing campaigns against teachers

The collateral damage of job loss or Danielson/VAM-driven job stress

First off we have the stress, burnout and demoralization issues: the 2012 Met Life survey on the American Teacher showed teacher morale to be at its lowest in decades. This survey is cited in Burris at Strauss in Washington Post.  See Met Life study, Teacher job satisfaction continues to decline, page 45 and this earlier blogpost on plummeting teacher morale.

Beyond the general job stress, under corporate education "reform" we have the escalating stress in school districts as teachers cope with the increasingly burdensome conditions, first driven by the No Child Left Behind policies, and then by the Race to the Top policies, with their emphasis on Value Added Modeling teacher evaluation systems (metrics-driven analyses of teacher performance that take no consideration of social conditions, administrator irresponsibility, parental support or student initiative). Incredibly, there is little thorough public discussion of how the people establishing the evaluation protocols have limited or shady teaching credentials. Consider the case of Charlotte Danielson, the architect of the Danielson Frameworks, head of the Danielson Group. She has successfully masked where she taught, at what grades, and for how long. Has anyone asked why she has kept her credentials so secret? Note that these evaluation systems have been rolled out, even though some conscientious education professors and researchers, as in the case of Chicago last year, have questioned their validity and have asked for piloting before mass implementation.

Then we have the matter of greater acute concern to teachers, their families and the economy: Teachers will lose jobs. Those still retaining jobs will endure an ongoing hell, as they pass each day in trepidation that their lessons will be suspected for causing bad scores on high stakes tests (when in many cases these low test scores will happen even with the best of efforts --you can read elsewhere --here and here-- on the external social factors or the poor school administration factors that enable less than ideal school performance).

The profession will take on a menial reputation, impacting individuals, fraying families
It will become more evident that teaching is a menial job demanding pre-Progressive Era 14 hour shifts, whose humiliation and job security make teachers increasingly unattractive as potential partners. Word will soon leak out: teachers under the new conditions cannot "have a life."

Not making the headlines will be the job stress, the broken relationships as partners snap at partners, blow up at kids, make scenes at family gatherings, you can keep imagining the examples. Silently, out of the headlines, the partners and children in these families we compose a generation that has lost the opportunity for a decent, happy family life.

Teacher suicides

Mary Thorson, former Army Reserve; teacher who took her life

Additionally, we should consider that many terminated teachers will find themselves distraught, unsupported and with no options, particularly after experiencing on the job bullying, bullying sanctioned by media rhetoric and politicians' policies. Most tragically, there will be those without strong social supports and take their own lives. Already we have seen teachers commit suicide after harassment (Mary Thorson of suburban Chicago) and termination following shaming in publicly revealed metrics-driven comparison of teachers and their test rankings (Rigoberto Ruelas of Los Angeles).
On Mary Thorson, who took her life, on Thanksgiving, 2011, read this post and this post at Assailed Teacher. Filmmaker and former teacher Mary Richardson, contributing to the Socialist Worker, connected her plight to the larger societal scourge of bullying of teachers.

Rigoberto Ruelas, teacher who took his life

On Rigoberto Ruelas, who scored "average," then took his own life, read Christina Hoag's "Rigoberto Ruelas' Suicide Raises Questions About LA Times Teacher Rankings" at Huffington Post. Yet as his story got attention in the New York Times, "Teacher’s Death Exposes Tensions in Los Angeles," and NBC News, "LA teacher suicide sparks test score pushback: Union says the Los Angeles Times should remove teacher performance ratings from its website," stories such as Hoag's spoke of questions being raised about such stack ranking, sadly the momentum for reconsidering metrics-based evaluation faded from official public discourse.


The downward spiral from the Keynesian multiplier in reverse

We should consider the Keynesian multiplier and the sprawling impacts of a middle class income. Teachers are middle class. The better paid ones have some disposable income. They can take long distance trips with their families, they can pay for sports, camp, dance or music classes for their kids. The ancillary effects of teachers losing their jobs will be weakened local economies that rely on the discretionary spending of those formerly employed teachers, the restaurants, the barbers, hardware stores.

Note that in the industrial Midwest it is often cited that when an auto or auto parts plant closes it is estimated that thousands of jobs are lost beyond the factory gates. This is the Keynesian multiplier in reverse. Remove the economic growth trigger and you decelerate the economy. You can see this from Michigan to the Hudson Valley. The New York City metro region has been less susceptible to the down-turns that much of the rest of the nation, particularly those in which industry has been a large fraction. Yet, with the firings that the consecutive APPR "Ineffectives" there will be a slightly down-ward drag on the economy.

Much as the Vietnam War higher-ups spoke of burning down a village to save it, we have politicians from liberals like New York's Governor Andrew Cuomo (who has called for the "death penalty" for "failing" schools) to conservatives like Wisconsin's Scott Walker that speak of reducing state costs to save the economy. We should not fall for their Frank Luntz-type manipulation of language. "Slashing costs" means cutting jobs; reducing healthcare benefits, slashing pension benefits have very real costs. Lifestyle quality will get downgraded. We should note the aggregate (general, overall, taking all the parts together) economic decline that follows the very specific war on one part of the middle class.

We can add administrators to the mix, as they get thrown out of jobs when schools close. Yet, we will see exceptions to the downsizing of administrators, as we see in frequent columns in Chaz's School Daze, there is a double standard for administrators, as they can be charged with highly unseemly conduct, yet often remain in their positions. Watch administrators in closed schools get rotated over to other schools while teachers take the hit for the bad test scores. While administrators get rotated, many teachers will lose their positions. Watch also for the veteran teachers be in line to take the hit, as school leaders will be eager to replace them with younger, cheaper teachers.

It is particularly easy to get replacement talent. The stagnant economy means that there are limited positions for recent college graduates. There will be eager graduates will and ready to replace the veteran teachers. This is particularly a problem in vibrant cultural magnet cities that attract college graduates around the surrounding region. In our region it is New York City; in the Midwest, it is Chicago; in southern California, Los Angeles and so on.

Therapy: a growth industry
The only people benefiting from the ratcheting up of pressure on teachers will be therapists who will see a boom in the number of clients, until their insurance runs out after termination, and the moving companies that will move families from big suburban homes to downscale apartments or back in with mom and day.

Political expediency of scapegoating and mass bullying
We also have the amoral politicians that do not see the harm in their social policies. Ignoring the social factors that can contribute to less than ideal student test scores, they will scream for the heads of "ineffective" teachers, gaining political capital from these teachers' scarlet I status. Pundits and legislators with no teacher experience demand impossible results from teachers and create evaluation schemes that are increasingly becoming apparent to teachers and even superintendents as inappropriate and untenable. Yet, teacher union leaders, long absent for the classroom, as New York City's United Federation of Teachers president Michael Mulgrew endorsed every governmental step that created the evaluation mess that is degrading teaching and stealing administrators from their traditional school leadership duties. See this video on Mulgrew's endorsement of the new evaluation scheme from its 2010 inception roots.

 
(photo from demonstration of the Cranston Teachers' Alliance)
Out of humane empathy, more of the public should speak out against what education policy makers are doing with teachers.

Think of pastor Martin Niemoller's First They Came piece. What profession might be next, to follow teachers, in a broad-reaching political attack campaign? Really, who has spoken up for us, besides Diane Ravitch?


To the contrary, we have Democratic federal education official and president that cheer the mass firing of teachers, as Arne Duncan and Barack Obama in the Central Falls High School, Rhode Island case.



And more recently, we see New Jersey Republican governor Chris Christie's becoming unhinged with anger at a teacher Melissa Tomlinson. His "I am tired of you people" outburst and the universal silence on this explosive public verbal abuse among politicians of either major political party, as well as the professional opinion shaping community, the pundits, speaks volumes to the social marginalization of teachers and the apparent legitimacy of the blanket targeting of teachers.

For the sake of the dignity of the profession, for the humanity of their families and their relationships, for the dignity of the national community, the scapegoating and the punishing policies must end.

Coleman, Gates, Gladwell, Rhee, Failures, But Bully Teachers Around

There is an interesting common thread: Titans of education policy or generalists of pop-philosophy gab, and yet when you poke back in their personal history, they were failures. An interesting dynamic is at play. The common thread: either wealthy parents (definitely upper class in the Gates case, and merely upper-middle class in the Rhee case) or university parents (the Coleman and Gladwell cases, a university president parent in Coleman's case, and a university professor in Gladwell's case.)

Bill Gates, Harvard College drop-out, devises operating system allowing personal computers to run software with easy start-up use by consumers, rips off essential features of Corel's WordPerfect word processor and Lotus' 1-2-3 spreadsheet, kills them off by monopolistic bundling, evades ant-trust prosecution (by the way, Joel Klein's Bill Clinton era prosecution of MS was too little --the emphasis on a web browser-- too late); and voila, as head of Microsoft, becomes one of the world's greatest millionaires. (For the short version read "Rise of Monopolies: Making of Microsoft"; for a more detailed account read Office Wars 3 - How Microsoft Got Its Office Monopoly and Office Wars 4 - Microsoft's Assault on Lotus and IBM.) Oh, by the way, he shoved his co-founding collaborator Paul Allen out of the way, as evident in this 60 Minutes interview; yes, Allen's living comfortably, but Gates shafted Allen out of billions in the process. So what does this college drop-out do during the 2000s and the 2010s? He bullies education policy, earlier with his initiative to break apart comprehensive high schools shedding them of nuisances such as arts, foreign language, or costly things such as guidance counselors or librarians; and lately by directing the Common Core States Standards Initiative, better named, Common Core Gates Standards Initiative, using his puppets from David Coleman, on over to Arne Duncan, down to your local superintendent and principal. Have you ever considered how all of the metrics to analyze student and teacher performance will run on Microsoft-run main-frame computers? Macs as mainframes? Don't make me laugh.

Next, we have Michelle Rhee. Failed with hallway management of young elementary students. So badly that she resorted to taping their mouths. Their lips bled; more recently, she has recounted the incident on stage with the applomb of a standup comic. And she touted her test score improvement, which after some sleuthing of a teacher, turned out to not be so illustrious.  This followed with her chancellorship of the Washington D.C. schools. Again she touted her metrics. Well, in too many instances far too many test scores got erased, which she knew more of than she let on to the media. Her career fall-out? --a rubber room? --a life of marginal survival after infamy? --Campbell Brown scolding on TV? No. Endless media fawning, overlooking her speeding sacking by the new D.C. mayor, a best-selling book and still endless media time as the head of her own teacher bashing empire StudentsFirst.

Then there's David Coleman. Smart and athletic enough to get a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford University. Yet, failed to get a teaching job. That's right. With all the schools in the U.S. available to pursue for a job, no teaching experience. Nobody would take a Yalie or an Oxford grad? Or maybe he wanted to teach only in Stuyvesant or a District 2 school (the Manhattan district that covers most of the borough's wealthiest sections). What does he do? Work his connections to leverage his way to write the national English standards, with typical elitism he shuts out open inquiry and discussion of the Common Core process. "Participants" are required to sign non-disclosure agreements, agreeing not to disclose any writing or discussion on the CCSS creation process. His pay-off? He sells his assessment baby the Grow Network for a cool $14 million (at least), gets picked by the College Board to be president, allowing him to continue to his plan to direct English education --all the while having no teaching experience or supervision training-- as he becomes positioned to rewrite the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) to fit his kooky Common Core concept, and get travels the media circuit telling the world what kids need to succeed. This from a man who could not get hired, who publicly has used profanity to ridicule students' personal expression.

Most recently we have Malcolm Gladwell. Smart, smart, smart. But unable to get into graduate school. So what does he do? First, fail then to break into the advertising field, a field suited to glib, but convincing writing. At last resort he works for a succession of two well-bankrolled right-wing news magazines (if they can be called such), American Spectator, and then Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church cult's Insight on the News. Today, he's attempting to shake up the education discussion by implicitly pedaling Michael Bloomberg's slash the teaching force dream, attempting to sell Brian Lehrer (WNYC radio) his idea that many teachers tell him that small classes in the mid-teens of headcounts hurt students, and that all that kids need is a great teacher (which is determined by tests I presume?), claims that are not supported by research.

(And of course, we could continue this further with the out-going mayor, Michael Bloomberg, who the New York Times reported was a middling student in middle school. For Horatio Alger fans, they can rest happy that his failure at Salomon Brothers led to the rosiest future afterward.)

What hypocrisy, people that failed at school or failed to keep or retain a teaching position, people with little personal experience with life outside of the privileged upper or upper-middle class bubble, declaring what can and should work with the working class. What a shameful irony in the latter two cases, Coleman and Gladwell, children of academics, yet actively disparaging the school teaching workforce. Shameful also is how the corporate media just parrot their aggressively ideological statements as though they were commandments from above, with no parallel time from actual experts in the field, let alone statements by people that will be affected by such policies.  The sad thread is that if you wish to bash those working in the teaching field you will get ample support, whether in a foundation position or in lucrative publishing contracts. Experience or talent not needed.

UPDATE: Quite appropriately, Huffington Post has run the piece, "These 11 Leaders Are Running Education But Have Never Taught."

The list is a quite instructive reminder of the people that are ill-equipped to dictate "best practices" to actual classroom teachers. Note also, how many of these people are "progressive" Democrats or "moderate" Republicans:

Arne Duncan
Bill Gates
David Coleman
Michael Bloomberg
Tom Harkin
Janet Napolitano
Kevin Johnson
Wendy Kopp
Rupert Murdoch
Cory Booker
Mark Zuckerberg

Cory Booker, Senate stand-in for Rhee / Update: Newark '12 contract came with strings attached to accountability to Facebook gift

Booker a danger to teacher, The  necessity of  progressives to oppose his senate bid - Coziness with Christie & hedge-funders - Lautenberg Family endorses opponent - Update: Newark teachers contract came with strings attached, 'Accountability' or Facebook gift is rescinded

Newark, New Jersey mayor Cory Booker is one of THE media darlings, constantly a Democrat that David Gregory calls onto his Meet the Press program, Sunday mornings on NBC. But his senate victory would be risky for teachers, for he would be able to propagate his Michelle Rhee-like perspective on how to "fix education." Moreover, as numerous writers have suggested, Booker is more of a show-boater, a grand-stander that has raked in speaking fees and has allowed the material status of Newarkers to stagnate or worsen.

CORY BOOKER AND CHRIS CHRISTIE 
The city and state executives (Newark mayor and N.J. governor) are close cousins in two fractured parties. Booker represents the increasingly dominant and aggressive financial sector-friendly business class wing of the party, to the detriment of the traditional economic liberals. Christie is aloof to the Tea Party, keeping the libertarian or paleo-conservative Brett Schundler and Steve Lonegan politicians at an arm's length.

Christie and Booker can be the dear friends that they are, but it becomes problematic when it gets wrapped up in Booker compromising liberal principles. Booker is too keen on coasting into the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate to assume the late Frank Lautenberg's seat. --So eager, that he raised millions just in the first quarter of this year. The whole matter of ego-centric Booker's senate candidacy is a good occasion for us to look at how negative Booker has been for public education and at how he has been a weak champion of economic-liberal causes in Newark and in New Jersey in general, and how a divergent figure he is from Lautenberg's liberal legacy.

N.J. VOTERS HAVE A BETTER CHOICE
The widow of Frank Lautenberg and the couple's children have endorsed Congressman Frank Pallone for the August 13 special primary and October 16 general election. They have endorsed Pallone as continuing Lautenberg's liberal legacy. Along with the endorsement they slammed Booker as a "showhorse," implying that he's an empty suit. Pallone also comes with the endorsement of several mid-state politicians. He and the other Booker challengers, Rush Holt and Sheila Oliver are distinct from Booker, as each of them has a history of at least nine years as a legislator, an important consideration as the U.S. senate is a legislative body. Holt and Pallone in the Congress and Oliver in New Jersey's state assembly. (Oliver is currently speaker.) Josh Lautenberg wrote an email, sent out by the Pallone campaign Tuesday, "the person my father would've wanted to succeed him," Huffington Post reported earlier this week.
Booker served a mere four years in the Newark City Council. (The media-obsessed mayor announced his campaign intentions a mere five days after the senator's passing.) Has anyone spelt out how Booker has better leadership or issue position credentials than any of these candidates? No. Cory Booker is no Frank Lautenberg. As Jason Farago noted his myth-busting gem in June 11's UK "Guardian," "Cory Booker: the inexorable rise of Newark's neoliberal egomaniac", the senator was a venerable liberal, championing unions, the working class and progressive taxation. Booker, on the other hand, lives in a fantasy world in which there are no systemic problems or class interests, only inefficiencies to fixed by data-driven approaches. And don't wait for the fall for a progressive alternative. No Green Party candidate has come forward yet.

As a CNN blogger noted, there is little love between the Lautenberg family and Cory Booker, as the latter announced his intention to challenge Lautenberg in the 2014 primary.
The Lautenberg family endorsement statement read:

"Pallone knows that gimmicks and celebrity status won't get you very far in the real battles that Democrats face in the future," the statement read. "While it may not always attract glamorous headlines, Frank knows that to be effective you must put New Jersey and your principles first, not your own glory."

GRAND DEBT TO CHRISTIE
Booker's history with Christie and his grand debt: he alleged the Newark mayoral election irregularities allegations in his earlier unsuccessful race, and the appeal to then federal attorney Christie to investigate, and Christie cooperated.
The closeness leads to a problem for Booker's inherent obligation to be party stalwart for the Democratic challenger to Christie.
The apparently limited progressive credentials of Booker: stand-out positions of distinction from Christie and mainstream (as opposed to Tea Party) Republicans are his positions of yes on gay marriage and minimum wage. He should have spoken more aggressively in public on these issues, confronting his friend, governor Christie. But beyond this he has never distinguished himself as being on the progressive wing of the Democratic party on economic issues.
And being "tight with Christie" can be a problem. As Taylor noted, Christie's built his support with business by "hurling rhetorical grenades at labor unions whenever the opportunity presents itself." Failing to stand up his friend, Christie, to defend organized labor amidst these attacks, Booker hints at how little he would stand by organized labor once in Washington.
BLOGGERS ON HIS FOOD STAMPS STUNT
Bloggers have criticized his sampling of life on food stamps as exploitative. This comes in awkward taste, given his background of privilege (raised in a posh Bergen County suburb and his Stanford and Oxford college histories). Here's one critique of living on food stamps for a stint, calling it a shameless appriation of the poor. The Feminist Griote wrote:

The same way appropriating someone else’s culture, religion, or spiritual artifact isn’t okay, neither is appropriating their narrative. If you want to help the poor, Mr. Booker, do so by lobbying for them and championing their cause the same way you did when you were on Meet The Press defending Bain Capital and private equity firms. The dubious honor of the negro please award goes to Cory Booker for appropriating poverty!

The blogger at Colorlines called his time on food stamps a "potentially regrettable stunt."
Another blog gave a quote that suggested that he was concerned with how he'd look.

I should try it, because do you know how fabulous I’d look? I’d be so skinny. I mean, the camera adds ten pounds, it really does. I would be looking great.

Where were the speeches of empathy with the desperately poor after his food stamps stint? None.
These issues mirror his overall record in Newark: plenty of emphasis on glitzy development in downtown, but little effort to bring living wage jobs for working class Newarkers.
This mood was tapped into in Linn Washington, Jr.'s article, February 7, 2013, "Media Mayor Cory Booker Bombs in Home Town of Newark." in the "This Can't Be Happening" blog. He noted that Newark's current unemployment rate of 15 percent, much higher than the state average, is five points higher than when Booker entered the mayor's office in 2006. [The state's unemployment rate was last reported at 8.7 percent.] Carjackings remain remarkably high.
Washington cited a Newark Star-Ledger July 2012 report that in an 18 month period Booker spent one-fourth of his time out of town.

While Booker boosted Newark during many of those trips (some of them day-trips), he also boosted his personal bank account with speaking fees estimated between $250,000-to-$500,000, that article stated.

Thus, the New York Times reported on May 17, 2013, "Newark Mayor Discloses $1.3 Million in Speaking Fees" in the prior four and a half years.
Fittingly a New York Times article last December wrote, "A growing number of Newark residents say Cory A. Booker is a better marketer than mayor." The article, "Promise vs. Reality in Newark on Mayor’s Watch."

COZY WITH BUSINESS, FROM EDUCATION PRIVATIZERS TO HEALTH INDUSTRY TO FINANCIAL INDUSTRY TO MEDIA TO REAL ESTATE
Further, this is an election year at the gubernatorial level in New Jersey. Booker has given a weak effort into supporting state senator Barbara Buono, Christie's Democratic challenger to the governor's office. Indeed, as Farago notes, it is public knowledge that there is good will between Booker and economic conservatives of Democratic and Republican stripes: George Will spoke favorably of him in a column. Michelle Rhee, disgraced former chancellor of D.C. schools is one that Booker calls "a friend of mine." Akin to Rhee's test score scandals, news broke last fall that three Newark charter school officials breached test security. Philadelphia publisher George Norcross III, a business and political bully, a figure of William Randolph Hearst/Citizen Kane proportions and major Democratic Party fund-raiser that Philly mag called "The Man Who Destroyed Democracy," is a Booker fan. Farago wrote of Booker's corporate-beholden politics made-over in post-ideological garb and added:

That helped him win the support this weekend of the most powerful man in New Jersey: George Norcross III, the feared political boss and owner of the Philadelphia Inquirer, who said he liked Booker because he was "a Democrat that's fiscally conservative yet socially progressive."

Norcross' heavy investments in the health industry are troubling. Salon's Taylor described him as "the notorious and influential insurance and hospital magnate who runs South Jersey Democratic politics and is easily the most feared power broker in the state." If Booker is beholden to him, how can he take on the health care crisis? This is the same power figure that Christie is afraid to take on:

[Norcross is] the owner of several local news organizations, he was caught on tape making what appeared to be illegal threats in 2005, with the state attorney general widely criticized for not developing a case against him. The incriminating information would later be passed on to Christie, who also declined to prosecute, blaming the attorney general for allegedly mishandling the case. Politically, Norcross is also known for guiding his allies in the Legislature to help Christie push through his major legislative agenda, including a controversial pension overhaul.

(Norcross had been caught on tape, discussing his influence with Jim McGreevey and Jon Corzine. This is the case that Christie sloughed off as mishandled by the A.G.; Christie Republican rival Doug Forrester said of the Norcross case, "This reeks of Watergate-like corruption.") Dick Codey (Democrat), the interim governor between McGreevey and Christie, said of Norcross (Democratic funder, remember),

[“It’s very upsetting to think in the year 2013 you have a private citizen with more influence in state government than anybody except the governor,” but Norcross does. “He’s almost a co-governor.”

The Times has noted Booker's coziness with Christie as a liability. Booker’s Opponents May Use His Friendship With Christie Against Him.
Perhaps Christie's controversial moving the Senatorial election earlier than the general election was intended to aid Booker: with a snap election there would be less time for the opposition research to do damage to Booker's substanceless Emperor's New Clothes candidacy.

EARLY RIGHT WING TIES, PARALLELING HIS RECENT NEO-LIBERAL EDUCATION AND FINANCE POLICIES
Back in 2000 Cory Booker gave a speech at the economic libertarian Manhattan Institute, which the foundation published as "School Choice and Government Reform: Pillars of an Urban Renaissance." In the speech he declared his support for charter schools and public funds for religious and private schools (vouchers). As the Wall Street Journal reported in 2007, "In 1999 he helped found E3, a prominent education-reform group in New Jersey that pushes for charter schools and vouchers for inner-city communities." WSJ's glowing portrait of Booker was reprinted by E3, which stands for "Excellent Education for Everyone."
And so this kind of thinking has continued on his career as Newark mayor. He has clearly aligned himself with the dominant neo-liberal pro-corporate faction of the Democrats, now firmly in control of the Democratic Party. He privatized the sanitation department and attempted to do the same with the water department.
Mayor Booker also secured support for a teachers' 3-year contract that would include merit-based bonuses.
The local education reform handlers saluted the school system for this change.
Booker, with this merit based contract, curiously has the backing of Newark Teachers Union president Joseph Del Grasso, who just survived a challenge by a nine vote margin from a new democratic-minded dissident caucus, the Newark Education Workers (NEW) Caucus; yet the new caucus won a majority of 18 of 29 seats (Samantha Winslow at Labor Notes). Even Booker supporters are drawing parallels between Booker and mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago. (Speaking hostile Democratic executives, I discuss the anti-teacher parallels of Emanuel and Andrew Cuomo in yesterday's post on Chicago's mass layoffs and their larger ramifications.) Like Emanuel, Booker claimed that the path to "reform" was to get mayoral control of the school board. He clearly stated his opposition to educational democracy: “Elected school boards often hit the lowest common denominator . . . they are not the way to get courageous, driven change.” He flew to Seattle to hob-knob with the charter school chain, KIPP. Back in 2007 he bemoaned that without mayoral control it would be hard to get charter foundations or the Broad Foundation into Newark. (2007 WSJ article in E3.)

New York City's United Federation of Teachers website ran this accurate caption below the above picture, characterizing mayor Booker's teacher-bashing 2011 'Morning Joe' (MSNBC) appearance: Former Florida governor Jeb Bush (second from right) and Newark Mayor Cory Booker (far right) scapegoat teachers' unions on the MSNBC "Morning Joe" show on Sept 27. Check it out soon, in case the UFT pulls this embarrassing (to its Democratic Party owners, whoops, I mean partners) from its archive of "OCTOBER 13, 2011 NEW YORK TEACHER ISSUE."
See this March 2013 'Mother Jones' article on Booker's secretiveness around accounting issues related to Facebook Founder's $100 million donation to Newark public schools. Farago demolished the Facebook myth succinctly, "The [Facebook] cash didn't go into the Newark school system; it's controlled by a non-governmental fund, with Booker on the board, and has been so unaccountable that the ACLU had to sue the city to learn what was going on."
The Daily Kos blog reported that Booker appeared with Governors Christie and Bobby Jindal (Louisiana) at a two-day Alliance for School Choice conference advocating school privatization/school choice. (Read on Louisiana's union-free school environment in recent years.) The Newark Star-Ledger reported,

The two day conference is hosted by the Alliance for School Choice and is sponsored by the American Legislative Exchange council or ALEC, a right leaning think tank that drafts legislation, as well as the Walton Family foundation and Excellent Education for Everyone.

(The Kock brothers' Koch Industries reportedly fund the American Legislative Exchange Council.) Bloggers Perdido Street School and Big Education Ape have also reported recently on Booker's ties to hedge-funders. Glen Ford at Black Agenda Report has given other quite informative links on Booker's financial sector and education privatizer personalities and institutions. Ford cites a hedge-funder Whitney Tilson (co-founder of Democrats for Education Reform) saying of Booker, "He'll be our second [black president]." Does Tilson mean financiers' president or America's president?
Aside from local issues of education and construction, there are these other issues that put Booker outside of the progressive consensus: his advocacy for a "middle ground" on gun control and his adamant attack on the Obama campaign, staunchly defending Bain Capital and private equity. Here's a video clip from that appearance on his chum Gregory's Meet the Press.

PLAYING LIBERAL GAME, FREE OF ECONOMIC LIBERAL COMMITMENTS
Matt Taylor at Salon:

“Cory’s definitely no Democrat but he plays the liberal game,” says Ronald Rice, the longtime Newark state senator whom Booker defeated in 2006. “His whole life is Wall Street and Silicon Valley. We picked that up when he first came here. He was always a part of the privatization movement.”

“We just had the worst financial decline in my lifetime, and there were really, really bad actors involved in it,” Taylor quoted him. But the Salon writer pointed out: "You’ll notice Booker didn’t include 'banks' on that list."

BOOKER'S HEDGE FUND CASH COWS
No wonder Congressman Pallone cited this as evidence that Booker is “too close to Wall Street.” Further evidence comes from Republic Report, which chronicles how cash in politics corrupts democracy, which detailed numerous rich relationships between Booker and his hedge-fund billionaire and other Wall Street friends ["Celebrity cash fueling Cory Booker's Senate dreams"], "Cory Booker's Political Career Guided by Top Wall St Donors to Romney's Super PAC," May 21, 2012.
Hedge-funder Lee Ainslie, who gave $100,000 to Mitt Romney's presidential bid, maxed out his donation to Booker. ("Booker’s Wall Street Fundraising Past – and Obama’s")

[Tiger Management LLC’s Julian] Robertson, the prominent Booker campaign supporter who helped finance a Newark Charter program on behalf of Booker, is a close ally to Mitt Romney.

Notable donors donating the maximum $10,400 to the Booker campaign: Michael Bloomberg, Ivanka Trump, Mark Zuckerberg.

Other donors giving the maximum $10,400 include Maria Cuomo Cole, the daughter of New York’s former governor and sister of the current governor; Wal-Mart billionaire Christy Walton and writer/producer Jeffrey Abrams.
Venture capitalist and Netscape founder Marc Andreessen and his wife, Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, gave $10,400 each.

Christy Walton, the Texan wife of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton is another billionaire who gave $10,400. ("Cory Booker Cashing In On National Name Recognition," the Howell Patch.) According to that site and this one, Hollywood titans and the major soccer commissioner are among the millionaires dumping acres of cash into Booker's campaign bag. Note that these were part of $4.6 million in donations between April and June, mainly prior to Sen. Lautenberg's passing, and during a period when Booker planned to challenge Lautenberg from the right in 2014. Buzzfeed's Ruby Cramer report that Trump will hold a fundraiser on Jul 24 at her Park Avenue residence. The site also reports that the businesswoman and her husband, Jared Kushner, real estate holding company co-owner and 'New York Observer' owner, together gave more than $41,000 to Booker's senatorial campaign in the first quarter of 2013. The two real estate hiers' suggested donation for Wednesday's party is $5,200 per attendee.
Cramer earlier reported in Buzzfeed, in "The Plan To Take Down Cory Booker: “America’s favorite mayor” may be favored to win the New Jersey Senate race, but his opponents are working overtime to stop his momentum" noted Booker's controversial education stances and how this relates to the support he has received campaign contributions over the years from donors the financial sector.

Rival candidates could also seize on Booker’s strained relationship with state teachers unions, as well as his support for charter schools, which are championed by the same hedge fund and Wall Street communities that have financed Booker for years.
“That’s what makes us least comfortable,” said Steve Phillips, a progressive fundraiser whose political action committee has vowed to raise $1 to $2 million for Booker. “I understand the complexities of trying to do something for lower-income kids in a political bureaucracy, but if I could wave my magic wand, I wouldn’t want him as close to the hedge fund folks as he is.”

To boot, Booker has another opportunity to keep up his connections with his finance sector pals. He sits as the only elected official on the Board of Advisors of Democrats for Education Reform (DFER). The rest are wealthy one-percenters, or as Diane Ravitch says, “the billionaire boys club.” DFER is the group run by Joe Williams, who said that said that charter schools should use public funds to do lobbying work:

“I think charter schools should be paying advocacy organizations for their advocacy work out of their per pupil dollars. If you think of running a school as running a business, any sound business is going to allocate right off the bat a certain percentage of their funding towards lobbying, advocacy work.”

Taylor summed this up well, Booker packages a sales pitch of "progressivism that centers on financial capitalism and charity instead of social rights. Or as one Democratic operative who has worked in New Jersey put it, 'He’s a good politician for the Obama Democratic Party.'"

So, the Booker record and relationships are in clear sight. It is only now up to the real progressives, the economic liberals in the race --and their supporters-- to seize on these issues on the campaign hustings. UPDATE:
John Mooney in NJ Spotlight reported, June 25, "TEACHER CONTRACT DEAL IN NEWARK CAME WITH STRINGS ATTACHED: Facebook founder’s group required accountability, reserved right to take back money."

Note how there's a Facebook created educational policy foundation -- Shades of Stand for Children of Chicago (dubbed Stand on Children by activists)?

When Newark’s landmark teacher contract was agreed upon this winter, a key factor in pulling off the deal was that a big chunk of retroactive salaries would be paid with $31 million out of the $100 million gift made to the city’s schools by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Now, documents released by the district show the trade-offs and conditions the school district chose to accept in its agreement with the Zuckerberg-funded Foundation for Newark’s Future.
According to a copy of the December 2012 grant agreement obtained by the Education Law Center through an Open Public Records Act request, the district and FNF agreed that the district would have to account for how the money was spent well into the future.

[Ed.: the Education Law Center was founded in 1993 to pursue the Campaign for Fiscal Equity case in New York City.]

In one of the more notable provisions, FNF also reserved the right to “suspend payments” if current school-district leadership was replaced by individuals FNF didn’t support. The provision specifically named positions now held by Superintendent Cami Anderson, state Education Commissioner Chris Cerf and Paymon Rouhanifard, the district’s chief strategy officer.
“FNF reserves the right to suspend payments under this agreement or any other grant until it, in its sole discretion, is satisfied that the successor of any key personnel has comparable quality and commitment and is likely to be effective,” read the document released.
Given the bulk of the retroactive payments have already been disbursed, how much this provision will play is uncertain. The first disbursement of 90 percent of the $31 million has been paid, officials said.
The agreement also only briefly mentions the additional $18 million that FNF agreed to provide for the more notable piece of the new labor contract -- the state’s first large-scale performance bonuses for teachers.
But the leverage built into the agreement has nonetheless sparked complaints by some critical of the school district’s management under the Christie administration -- and Anderson, in particular. Some of them say it’s another example of a private group influencing public policy.
Antoinette Baskerville-Richardson, chair of the district’s advisory board, which has seeking to regain local control of the district, said the board was never apprised of the agreement and that she saw it only after the ELC’s OPRA request.
“I found a number of things questionable and in some cases extremely disturbing,” she said yesterday. “This gives an unprecedented amount of leverage to an independent organization. That’s the most egregious thing to me.”
Baskerville-Richardson was also critical of provisions that had Anderson making more regular reports to the foundation than to the local board. “It seems unethical to me that this group has information when the local board doesn’t,” she said.
David Sciarra, executive director of the ELC, the Newark-based advocacy group, added: “This is another example of a foundation seeking to promote preferred education reforms by giving money to state and local education agencies, without any public disclosure.
“These secret transactions erode public confidence in our public schools and the state education department,” he wrote in an email. “We need new laws to rein in this practice.”
Efforts to reach Anderson and officers of the foundation were unsuccessful yesterday. The agreement was crafted under FNF’s former executive director Greg Taylor, who left the post this spring.

Read the rest of the story, TEACHER CONTRACT DEAL IN NEWARK CAME WITH STRINGS ATTACHED and visit the site for more links (namely, Zuckerberg's Foundation for Newark's Future, FNF's Grant agreement with Newark State-opearted School district). Note how Newark citizens lost control of their educational process to the state, yet a private individual from outside New Jersey is able to dictate policy terms upon the city.

Also, see JerseyJazzman blog for an important post on how the Newark Teachers Union is sabotaging itself with its support for the "Teachers Village" project, "How the Newark Teachers Union Shot Itself In the Foot." UPDATE #2: Lois Weiner and some other New Jersey editors get to the core of teaching issues in this op-ed better than do brothers-at-heart Christie or Booker:

When teachers reach kids whose families are drowning in social and economic problems, we are like emergency room doctors. There’s no either/or here. We need to recruit, educate, and support good teachers AND tackle the social crises outside school walls that are undercut learning.

Sparks at UFT DA Over New Evaluations -- Danielson in the News -- the Truth Behind the Efficacy of High-Stakes Tests

Sparks flew last month at the United Federation of Teachers Delegate Assembly over the issue of teacher evaluations. Bryant High School (Queens) Chapter Leader Sam Lazarus called for voting against a resolution endorsing the use of Charlotte Danielson's Framework for Learning, arguing that the application of Danielson at his school has meant that nearly two-thirds of the teachers evaluated under the new system were rated sub-standard, setting them up for termination under 3020-a proceedings. And from the pattern of which teachers have been stuffed into the Absent Teacher Reserve ("ATR") --older, experienced, and expensive teachers, we can imagine which teachers will tend to be found ineffective. (So, Voila!, with accommodating to Governor Mario Cuomo's call for tougher teacher evaluation systems, the older-teacher elimination goals behind Mayor Michael Bloomberg's objective of ending Last In First Out --or LIFO-- would be accomplished.) For more on the DA see Ed Notes and ICEUFT Blog.

2011 seems to be a good year for Danielson: a great number of news reports dated in 2011 on implementation or purchasing of her (and Teachscape's, a collaborating entity) systems.
An interesting pattern is that the names of school systems that are recently publicized as using Teachscape are urban school systems that are facing budgetary crises, actual or threatened teacher layoffs, yet millions of dollars are available to spend on the deploying (the industry's word) Teachscape video evaluation system.
Danielson's evaluation methods have moved beyond her pilot approach introduced in 1996 to walkthroughs for use in a new edition of the "Teachscape" video analysis system.

A report appearing to be a press release indicates that Teachscape software (Teachscape Reflect 360-Degree Video Analysis System) using Charlotte Danielson's Framework for Learning is already being used in New York City schools:
"NYC Schools Deploy New Teacher Observation Tools"
and
http://www.epicos.com/Portal/Main/Home/Pages/ItemDetails.aspx?wIaopCxX2Y8G8sI4fMM9Br3kag3WiwlBeSBdwKJPYazi9V6KSm%2Bk/A%3D%3D

Overwhelmingly the NJ locations where the Danielson system is being introduced are urban districts.

*And like many new developments, there is a money trail: links to familiar foundation and institution names, from Teachscape's own PR press release: Teachscape's partners include Kogeto, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Stanford University, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Charlotte Danielson to help shape its vision, its products, and its strategies. --http://www.epicos.com/Portal/Main/Home/Pages/ItemDetails.aspx?wIaopCxX2Y8G8sI4fMM9Br3kag3WiwlBeSBdwKJPYazi9V6KSm%2Bk/A%3D%3D

(And for a take from a different angle: a satiric animation video but making serious statements about the interlinking of investors, foundation philanthropy and money for video evaluation software in the face of limited funds for classroom essentials: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpmQZ5MXs8c&feature=results_video&playnext=1&list=PL12864A4208592D9E)

WHAT STUDIES REALLY SHOW ABOUT THE EFFICACY OF INCENTIVE PROGRAMS IN CHANGING STUDENT TEST SCORES:
As writer Valerie Strauss said at "the Washington Post" in "Report: Test-based incentives don’t produce real student achievement:"

Incentive programs for schools, teachers and students aimed at raising standardized test scores are largely unproductive in generating increased student achievement, according to a new report researched by an expert panel of the National Research Council.

The report [by Michael Hout and Stuart W. Elliott, "Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education"] said that standardized tests commonly used in schools to measure student performance — including high school exit exams and tests in various grades mandated by former president Bush’s No Child Left Behind law — “fall short of providing a complete measure of desired educational outcomes in many ways,” according to a summary of the lengthy document.

The report, together with a number of other studies [summarized by Diane Ravitch] released in the past year, effectively serve as a warning to policymakers in states that are moving to implement laws, with support from the Obama administration, to make teacher and principal evaluation largely dependent on increases in students’ standardized test scores.

The practice doesn’t bring about the kind of student achievement policymakers say is necessary for the United States to compete with the highest-performing countries, according to the 17-member Committee on Incentives and Test-Based Accountability convened by the National Research Council, which is the research arm of the National Academies (including the National Academy of Sciences, the National Council of Engineering and the National Academy of Medicine).

The panelists — who include experts in assessment, education law and the sciences — examined over the past decade 15 incentive programs, which are designed to link rewards or sanctions for schools, students and teachers to students’ test results. The programs studied included high-school exit exams and those that give teachers incentives (such as bonus pay) for improved test scores.

The panel studied the effects of incentives, not by tracking changes in scores on high-stakes tests connected to incentive programs, but by looking at the results of “low-stakes” tests, such as the well-regarded National Assessment of Educational Progress, which aren’t linked to the incentives and are taken by the same cohorts of students.

The researchers concluded that the effects of incentive programs tend to be “small and . . . effectively zero for a number” of such programs.

Gains that were detected were concentrated in elementary grade mathematics and “are small in comparison with the improvement the nation hopes to achieve,” according to the summary.

The researchers concluded not only that incentive programs have not raised student achievement in the United States to the level achieved in the highest-performing countries but also that incentives/sanctions can give a false view of exactly how well students are doing. (The U.S. reform movement doesn’t follow the same principles that have been adopted by the other countries policymakers often cite. You can read an analysis of that by educator Linda Darling-Hammond here.)

Strauss closed by critiquing the efficacy of "value-added" evaluations because they ignore the effects of factors of social ills (outside the school) upon student learning:

Other studies in the past year have also cast doubt on the effectiveness and reliability of the value-added method of teacher/principal evaluation, which takes student test scores and puts them into a formula that is supposed to factor out other influences and determine the “value” a teacher has brought to a student’s learning.

The method often ignores outside-school factors that can influence how a child does on a test, including lack of sleep, hunger and illness, but even formulas that are said to take these into account are not especially reliable, some experts have said.