What If Progressives Sit Out the Common Core Protests at NYC's Rockefeller Center Monday, 1/6?

There is a statewide Common Core protest against New York Governor and his Common Core policy, at Rockefeller Center, it is at WNBC-TV, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, Monday, January 6, 2014, 4 to 6 pm.
See the press release with media protest centers, by city, at the end of this blog.

Do we shy away from big box developer protests because there might be some wealthy NIMBYs in the crowd?
In the 1960s would we avoid participating in civil rights legislation advocacy because Republicans were often more reliable than Democrats (who were laden with the reactionary segregationist southern Dixiecrats) because Republicans represented big business?

We should participate in the protests because this is the opportunity to present, to the public and to the media, the progressive perspective on the Common Core States Standards.

If progressive education unionists and other education progressives do not speak, the public will not hear the progressive points:

Common Core represents the neoliberal corporatization of curriculum and high-stakes testing, as few other issues do; even CCSS architect David Coleman has cited the tests as inseparable from Common Core
Common Core's fundamental education crisis premise offers us the opportunity to raise the undiscussed very real issue of poverty that greatly determines educational outcomes --see here, here or chapter 10 of Diane Ravitch's instant classic, Reign of Error
Common Core represents the further disrespecting and deskilling of the education profession; see this latest beaut of pre-packaged scripted lessons
Common Core represents the displacement of funds for school staff and legitimate resources --creating great strains on district budgets-- by unneeded coaches and curricular guides for a hyped curriculum
Common Core deadens student interest and engagement; the developmentally inappropriate standards are already building a generation of students demoralized and demoralized from school; see here and these videos by a teacher union local president charging that the Core is child abuse and by this Long Island therapist and this PhD. child psychologist attesting to the deleterious execution of the Common Core
Common Core's chief New York State mouthpiece, John King, has no understanding for parents' concerns with the Common Core as evident in his recent letter resolutely standing by the Common Core, this much is even conceded to by the New York State United Teachers' spokesperson
Common Core does not have the support of rank and file teachers; it only has the support of Weingarten, Mulgrew who only think a bigger and better curriculum will resolve the problems of the Common Core.

And we reached this place undemocratically, as the Gates Foundation paid for this, and engineered the CCSS creation with unprecedented evasion of the democratic-republican process. Bill Gates' manipulation of the media and the government reflect the process described in the above cartoon. But what if the left refuses to defend democracy and education? How will the public hear our critique?

What if we never make these points, some people amenable to the last point might stray to the right instead of the left, because the left never spoke to their concerns of the corporate highjacking of democracy? Not everyone arrives, easily swingable to the left; they have to be drawn there.

So, in the face of all the protest, why are John King and Board of Regents Chancellor obstinate on the Common Core? Could they be on the take? Plenty of the shills, liberal or conservative, are on the take from the Gates Foundation, as Mercedes Schneider has documented, here on education organizations and unions, here on lobby organizations, here on school districts, here on universities and here on a range of foundations. So, should we not protest Monday? Our silence Monday might suggest acquiescence to Gov. Cuomo, Comm. King and Chanc. Tisch.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Re: Governor Cuomo Common Core Media Rally

Date: Monday January 6th, 2014
Time: 4:00PM - 6:00 PM
Location: Statewide locations (listed below)

Contact: Deborah Lang 631-331-8546 or Sara Wottowa at No Common Sense Education: www.nocommonsenseeducation.com

Details attached:https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dh5UUcnMMIFNO77kWcfKpflgkPuWOdHUH4__vgK3bFc/edit

AT VARIOUS LOCATIONS THROUGHOUT NEW YORK STATE - MONDAY JANUARY 6, 2014: Now that the holidays are behind us and our legislators are planning to return to Albany for the 2014 session next week, we’ve noticed media coverage of Common Core has quieted down significantly. Our mission is to ensure this quiet time is not misinterpreted as complacency. 

Governor Cuomo is scheduled to deliver his State of the State Address on January 8th. We need to apply statewide pressure on him to specifically address the failures of education reform in New York. Doing so would get this issue front and center in the media again.

Starting on Thursday, January 2, we begin the New York New Year Blitz on Governor Cuomo and the Legislature. We will call, fax, email, Tweet, and snail-mail Governor Cuomo and ask him why he has turned a deaf ear on our voices, why he refuses to acknowledge the failure of Common Core in New York State, and why he has not spoken one word about education reform in response to our testimonies and appearances at NYSED’s and Senator Flanagan’s hearings around the state. We will do the same to our legislators (Assembly and Senate) and remind them that we are still here, we are still not happy, and that they work for us! They need to ignore Senator Flanagan’s proposed legislation and do something that throws Common Core out of New York.

Public protests and picketing at local/regional television news stations across the state would put us front and center with a unified message to the Governor that this issue isn’t dead, and that Senator Flanagan’s report of his statewide hearings was an abysmal misrepresentation of the shortcomings, experiences, and objections presented by parents, educators, administrators, and early childhood development experts. On Monday January 6th beginning at 4 p.m. outside each TV news station listed below, we will make our voices heard. We will call on the media to get our message out. We will bring signs, placards, and bullhorns. We will apply as much pressure and generate as much noise as humanly possible. We will post this activity to every social media outlet and make it go viral. After the Governor’s Address on the 8th, we will get on the phones, we will get on our computers and we will flood every New York State Senator’s office (both locally and in Albany) with the message to get this fixed and not stop until it is. We will keep the heat turned up high until someone steps forward with a REAL common-sense solution to this mess. It is only the majority of people statewide that will show Senator Flanagan how wrong he has been about the Common Core and his interpretation of the message we have been sending. 

Governor Cuomo’s Contact Info
Governor Andrew Cuomo 
Office of the Governor
NY State Capitol Building
Albany, NY 12224
Phone: 518-474-8390
Fax: 518-474-1513
Email: Gov.Cuomo@chamber.state.ny.us
http://www.governor.ny.gov/
www.facebook.com/GovernorAndrewCuomo
www.twitter.com/NYGovCuomo @NYGovCuomo Use #StopCommonCore and #fixNYschools
NY State Senate: http://www.nysenate.gov/
NY State Assembly: http://assembly.state.ny.us/mem/

TV Station Rally Locations for January 6th:

Albany
WTEN (ABC Network)
341 Northern Blvd
Albany, New York 12204
518-433-4286

Binghamton
WIVT-TV (ABC Network)
203 Ingraham Hill Road
Binghamton, NY 13903
607-771-3434

Bronx & Brooklyn
News 12 Bronx/Brooklyn
930 Soundview Ave
Bronx, NY 10473
Phone:(718) 328-7504 

Buffalo 
WGRZ (NBC Network)
259 Delaware Avenue
Buffalo,NY 14202
716-849-2222

Elmira
WETN-TV (NBC Network)
101 East Water Street
Elmira,NY 14901
607-733-5518

Long Island (Nassau & Suffolk Counties)
News 12 Long Island
1 Media Crossways 
Woodbury, NY 11797 
516-393-1200
E-mail: LIDesk@News12.com 

Lower Hudson Valley
(Rockland & Orange Counties)
News 12 Lower Hudson Valley
235 West Nyack Road
West Nyack , NY 10994 
Phone: 845-624-8780
Fax: 845-735-1601 
E-mail: news12hv@news12.com

Manhattan
WNBC-TV
30 ROCKEFELLER PLAZA
NEW YORK,NY 10112
212-664-4444

Plattsburgh
WPTZ (NBC Network)
5 Television Drive
Plattsburgh, NY 12901
518-561-5555 

Rochester
WHEC-TV 10 (NBC Network)
191 East Avenue
Rochester,NY 14604
585-546-5670

Syracuse 
WSYR-TV (ABC Network)
5904 Bridge Street
East Syracuse,NY 13057
315-446-9999

Utica
WKTV (NBC Network)
5936 Smith Hill Rd
Utica,NY 13502
315-733-3477

Watertown
WWTI-TV (ABC Network)
1222 Arsenal Street
Watertown,NY 13601
315-785-8850

Westchester
News 12 Westchester
6 Executive Plaza
Yonkers, NY 10701 
(914)378-4800

State conservative groups plan US-wide assault on education, health and tax policies - Guardian report on State Policy Network

State conservative groups plan US-wide assault on education, health and tax

• State Policy Network co-ordinating plans across 34 US states
• Strategy to 'release residents from government dependency'
• Revelations come amid growing scrutiny of tax-exempt charities

• Read key excerpts from the SPN proposals
• Portland Press Herald: group's plan to eliminate taxes
• Texas Observer: the money behind the fight to wreck Medicaid

• Ed Pilkington in New York and Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
• theguardian.com, Thursday 5 December 2013 13.21 EST

Conservative groups across the US are planning a co-ordinated assault against public sector rights and services in the key areas of education, healthcare, income tax, workers' compensation and the environment,documents obtained by the Guardian reveal.

The strategy for the state-level organisations, which describe themselves as "free-market thinktanks", includes proposals from six different states for cuts in public sector pensions, campaigns to reduce the wages of government workers and eliminate income taxes, school voucher schemes to counter public education, opposition to Medicaid, and a campaign against regional efforts to combat greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change.

The policy goals are contained in a set of funding proposals obtained by the Guardian. The proposals were co-ordinated by the State Policy Network, an alliance of groups that act as incubators of conservative strategy at state level.

The documents contain 40 funding proposals from 34 states, providing a blueprint for the conservative agenda in 2014. In partnership with the Texas Observer and the Portland Press Herald in Maine, the Guardian is publishing SPN's summary of all the proposals to give readers and news outlets full and fair access to state-by-state conservative plans that could have significant impact throughout the US, and to allow the public to reach its own conclusions about whether these activities comply with the spirit of non-profit tax-exempt charities.

Details of the co-ordinated approach come amid growing federal scrutiny of the political activities of tax-exempt charities. Last week the Obama administration announced a new clampdown on those groups that violate tax rules by engaging in direct political campaigning.

Most of the "thinktanks" involved in the proposals gathered by the State Policy Network are constituted as 501(c)(3) charities that are exempt from tax by the Internal Revenue Service. Though the groups are not involved in election campaigns, they are subject to strict restrictions on the amount of lobbying they are allowed to perform. Several of the grant bids contained in the Guardian documents propose the launch of "media campaigns" aimed at changing state laws and policies, or refer to "advancing model legislation" and "candidate briefings", in ways that arguably cross the line into lobbying.

The documents also cast light on the nexus of funding arrangements behind radical rightwing campaigns. The State Policy Network (SPN) has members in each of the 50 states and an annual warchest of $83m drawn from major corporate donors that include the energy tycoons the Koch brothers, the tobacco company Philip Morris, food giant Kraft and the multinational drugs company GlaxoSmithKline.

SPN gathered the grant proposals from the 34 states on 29 July. Ranging in size from requests of $25,000 to $65,000, the plans were submitted for funding to the Searle Freedom Trust, a private foundation that in 2011 donated almost $15m to largely rightwing causes.

The trust, founded in 1998, draws on the family fortune of the late Dan Searle of the GD Searle & Company empire – now part of Pfizer – which created NutraSweet. The trust is a major donor to such mainstays of the American right and the Tea Parties as Americans for Prosperity, the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), the Heartland Institute and the State Policy Network itself.

SPN's link to Searle, the Guardian documents show, was Stephen Moore, an editorial writer with the Wall Street Journal. Moore, who advises Searle on its grant-giving activities, was asked by SPN to rank the proposals in two halves – a "top 20" and "bottom 20". It is not known how many of the 40 proposals were approved for funding, nor which may have been successful.

Moore told the Guardian that he is an unpaid adviser to the Searle Foundation, having been a lifetime family friend to Dan Searle. He said the grant decisions were made by Searle's sons and grandsons based upon the late businessman's "commitment to the advancement of free enterprise and individual rights".

The proposals in the grant bids contained in the Guardian documents go beyond a commitment to free enterprise, however. They include:

• "reforms" to public employee pensions raised by SPN thinktanks in Arizona, Colorado, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey and Pennsylvania;

• tax elimination or reduction schemes in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Maryland, Nebraska and New York;

• an education voucher system to promote private and home schooling in Florida;

• campaigns against worker and union rights in Delaware and Nevada;

• opposition to Medicaid in Georgia, North Carolina and Utah.

SPN's president, Tracie Sharp, told the Guardian that "as a pro-freedom network of thinktanks, we focus on issues like workplace freedom, education reform, and individual choice in healthcare: backbone issues of a free people and a free society."

In its grant bid, the Maine Heritage Policy Center asked for $35,000 to support a "research and demonstration project" that would "release residents from extreme government dependency". It would turn the state's poorest area into what the Portland Press Herald describes in its report from Washington County as "a gigantic tax-free zone".

Dubbed "FreeME", the initiative would eliminate state income tax and sale taxes from residents and businesses until the economic conditions in the county rise to the statewide average. The hole in the county's income from lost tax revenues – estimated at $35m a year by the think tank – would be filled through budget cuts.

Medicaid is the target of a grant proposal coming from the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), an influential thinktank funded largely by rightwing foundations and corporations including the energy tycoons the Koch brothers, tobacco company Altria and the telecoms giant Verizon. The Texas Observer has investigated the contents of the document and points out that in its request for $40,000 from Searle, TPPF claims credit for blocking Medicaid expansion in the state.

"[S]topping Medicaid expansion is just the first step," the proposal says, adding that the "missing piece to complete our message is an economic forecast" showing how block-granting Medicaid would "bring significant savings" to the state. That information would then be used to garner attention from the media.

The Observer describes TPPF as "one of the most influential state-level thinktanks in the nation". One of its former executives was Ted Cruz, now US senator for Texas, who today is the keynote speaker at the national conference in Washington of SPN's sister organisation, the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec).

Several hundred miles to the north east in Massachusetts, the Beacon Hill Institute requested $38,825 from Searle to weaken or roll back a five-year effort by states in the region to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The institute said it would carry out research into the economic impact of the cap-and-trade system operating in nine states known as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.

BHI appeared to have already arrived at its conclusions in advance, admitting from the outset that the aim of the research was to arm opponents of cap-and-trade with data for their arguments, and to weaken or destroy the initiative. "Success will take the form of media recognition, dissemination to stakeholders, and legislative activity that will pare back or repeal RGGI," the funding proposal says.

The Beacon Hill Institute, technically an affiliate rather than a full member of the SPN, operates out of the economics department of Suffolk University in Boston. David Tuerck, its executive director, denied the group had engaged in lobbying. "There is never any lobbying," he told the Guardian. "Maybe I need to look up the definition again, but lobbying consists of buttonholing legislators and other policymakers to get a particular result on a particular issue, and we never do that."

But Suffolk University, which hosts the Beacon Hill Institute as a research arm of its economics department, sharply criticised the research proposal to the Searle Foundation. In a statement to the Guardian, the university said the grant bid had not been submitted to the university, as required, and that the university would never have approved the proposal. "The stated research goals, as written, were inconsistent with Suffolk University's mission."

Watchdogs that monitor the work of SPN and other conservative networks in the US said that the centralised coordination of state-level campaigns showed a significant attempt to build local activism into a nationwide movement. Lisa Graves, executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy, which issued a recent report on SPN, said that the local identity of the network's members belied a larger purpose. "They appear to be advocating purely local interests but what they are promoting is part of a larger national template to radically remake our government in a way that undermines public institutions and the rights of workers," she said.

The SPN said that its co-ordinating role was justified because local and state issues were increasingly impinging on national politics. "There's no mystery here," Sharp said. "The whole idea of a state policy network is that individual thinktanks can be in communication, share best practices and analysis, and combine their efforts when they see a benefit from doing so."

Some of the grant bids to Searle focus specifically on prominent local politicians the thinktanks hope to influence. The grant bid that emanated from New Jersey, from the Common Sense Institute (CISNJ), another tax-exempt "research and education organization", floats the idea of a campaign to support the efforts of the Republican governor Chris Christie in ending the ability of public employees to claim untaken sick days and vacation leave in their retirement packages.

"Governor Chris Christie has been waging a war to eliminate this practice; and CSINJ would like to provide ammunition," the proposal says. The thinktank plans to produce a "research study" which it would call "Busting the Boat Checks" – an allusion to the phrase Christie uses to denote the watercraft retirees are claimed to buy on the back of sick and holiday leave payments.

The institute conceives a "media campaign" with its aim being the "full elimination of unused sick and vacation leave payouts".

"We believe our study can be used to sway public sentiment further and be used as a brandisher for reform in Trenton," it says.

CSINJ's president, Jerry Cantrell, denied that the grant bid involved any element of lobbying, insisting instead that his group was providing a service that in the past might have been done by the decimated local media.

"CSINJ is an education organization focused on providing the public with facts and the truth. We don't represent any interest besides the folks who are burdened by this practice – the taxpayers," he said.

He said the proposal was focused on the "abusive practice of accumulating sick or vacation day payments over an entire career and using them as retirement bonus. We've seen too many instances of high level individuals working out the door with $500,000-$750,000 claiming to have never missed a day in 30 years of employment."

The proposal from the Illinois Policy Institute for a campaign to deal with Chicago's government worker pensions crisis by switching to 401(k)-style retirement plans similarly focuses on a politician – in this case Mayor Rahm Emanuel. The proposal says that "Mayor Emanuel has privately expressed the need for 401(k)-style changes to truly achieve reform."

The institute plans to "leverage the leadership potential of Mayor Emanuel … as the spark for wider pension changes in Illinois." It adds that "friendly legislators would be welcome to draft legislation modelled on our policy work and work in tandem with Mayor Emanuel to move it forward in the legislative process."

John Tillman, CEO of the Illinois Policy Institute, told the Guardian that Emanuel had been "an outspoken proponent of pension reform that includes moving to a 401(k)-style, defined contribution system." He saw no problem with the lobbying that the think tank undertakes.

"We are not allowed to do any campaigning or electioneering, and we don't. We are allowed to spend a significant percentage of our expenditures on lobbying and we are very proactive in lobbying for liberty-based policy, including the urgently needed pension reform. We report our activities accordingly."

Ed Reform is Vietnam War of Our Day; Resistance vs. King is Tet Offensive of Our Day

Common Core is a key weapon in the Vietnam War of today. It is the guns rather than butter issue of our day.

Which side is Bill de Blasio on? --Obama, Coleman, Cuomo's or the side of parents, students and teachers?

Even the New York Times took notice of the resistance against John King.

Vietnam War	Education in NYS today
Containment; hawks stayed with this script; prevailed from McNamara to Nixon's years Mobilization and radicalization of millions of draft age youth happened. Yet, it took years of this to make presidents shift their stances on the war.	Fixed tautology: All should go to college, but education is in crisis, and teachers caused the crisis as they are the only ones to be held responsible. Metrics-driven reform is imperative for turning out the teachers. Students must be tested 'til they drop, to root out the teachers. No hope for leaders like NYS Education Commissioner John King or Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch to change their minds on Common Core. Expecting them to listen to the people is like expecting McNamara to turn into an absolute dove. Moreover, check for any flow of Gates Foundation money going their way.
Carpet-bombing	Speaker at 4:30 speaks, in the video Commissioner King Scorned in Port Chester, to how the Common Core mandates will scuttle programs such as music in order to meet those mandates. The above video, this video and this blogpost report that children are becoming ill and depressed from the Common Core.
Tet Offensive- set of Vietnamese rebel offensive caught the war leaders off guard.	The rolling protests will continue from Suffolk County to greater Buffalo. But tin-ear Tisch and King won't get it. As noted by other bloggers here, here, here the more the public protests, the more the Tisch and King sing the same reformy script. The more they ignore the people, the more the people will become enraged. The town halls and the mass PTA meetings across NYS will be the Tet Offensive of 2011-2014. What they (Tisch and King) worry? They're not directly accountable to voters. Besides, the Regents that appointed them to their posts are themselves in their own five year posts until 2015 (NYS Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver 2010 announcement of their appointments). What the Regents worry about either? Legislative appointment insulates them from popular opinion. Already one Regent outright wrote that they will not depose King, whom they appointed in 2011. It'll take a lot of popular rage to get the legislature to make sure that the halls of the Regents get rattled. Now, even the Times took notice on Nov. 18, alas coupling with quotes of a TNTP reformer's insinuating that the parents venting at Comm. King are racists.
After Tet Offensive, worn-down president Johnson threw in the towel.	When will sheriff Cuomo or reformer-in-chief Obama throw in the towel and hear the people? Unimaginable at this point. Definitely not 'til after 2014 elections. Watch for big Democratic losses as voters soundly reject these Common Core at the polls, taking out their rage on Democrats. Backlash against Obama over Affordable Care Act? You ain't seen nothin' yet.

When would Commissioner King ever make this concession? Could he ever make this concession?

The war against teachers, parents, students will rage on.

Tisch and King, listen up well. In the words of Bob Dylan:

What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters [the parents of New York State schoolchildren]
Are beyond your command

The people are speaking:

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon
For the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who
That it's namin'
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin'

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside
And it is ragin'
It'll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'

New Affront to Chicago Teachers, Other Workers: Obama Nominates Penny Pritzker Commerce Secretary

OBAMA NOMINATES CONTROVERSIAL BUSINESS FIGURE PRITZKER TO HEAD COMMERCE DEPARTMENT - OPPOSITION PETITION GATHERS OVER 3,200 SIGNATURES - CONTROVERSY NOW MOVES TO SENATE, WHICH MUST CONFIRM OR REJECT THE APPOINTMENT - MASS CHI. STUDENT WALK-OUTS OVER HIGH STAKES TESTS, TEACHER FIRINGS
President Barack Obama has made a number of moves that have been affronts to teachers and to working people.

His nomination of Penny Pritzker is one of his most brazen affronts to these groups. Of course, one can easily see a pay-back in all this: Pritzker was a key fund-raiser for his 2008 presidential campaign and a behind the scenes funds donations bundler in the 2012 election campaign.

She has drawn controversy in Chicago as the highest-profile member of the Chicago Board of Education overseeing the Chicago Public Schools (CPS), playing most loyal advocate for mayor Rahm Emanuel's "reform" program of closing schools, opening charter schools and fighting against the Chicago Teachers Union. Additionally, she's drawn criticism for her general labor stand --so much so, that progressives launched a petition on the CREDO site gained over 3,200 signatures.

Even by February anticipation of an Obama nomination of Pritzker was giving labor activists the willies, as the Huffington Post reported Februrary 8, 2013. But Obama went ahead, anyway.

Here is the text of the CREDO ACTION petition to Obama against his Pritzker appointment:

Penny Pritzker is an anti-worker business mogul who should not be appointed to head the Commerce Department. Why is this important?

Recent reports indicate that President Barack Obama has chosen Penny Pritzker as a finalist for an appointment to head the Department of Commerce. She is a long-time friend of the President as well as a billionaire, anti-worker business mogul from Chicago. The President received tremendous support during his re-election campaign from unions and working families and it is unacceptable for him to name an anti-worker businesswoman for this position.

As a member of the Hyatt Hotel chain board Penny Pritzker has refused to intercede on behalf of struggling workers. Last summer Chicago workers who organized a rally had the hotel's heat lamps turned on during a mid-summer heatwave. Housekeepers have had their workloads nearly double without proper compensation. All the while Penny has remained silent.

She stood by as her family's hotel chain received a companywide letter from OSHA that warned them of hazards facing housekeepers on the job.

Ms. Pritzker serves on the Chicago Public School's Board of Education. In her role she attempted to bust the union with her fellow board members by closing public schools and opening charter schools, mostly operated by the well-connected, that do not recognize the local union. She has stated that students merely need enough skills in reading, mathematics, and science to be productive members of the workforce. Forget the arts, gym, music, etc.

Her time in public service epitomizes the 1% versus 99%. As one of the wealthiest people in the country she wants our children to become members of the workforce instead of creative, engaged, and well-rounded citizens of the country that she seeks to serve as Commerce Secretary.

Mr. President, we are worth more than a Penny.

Sign my petition urging President Obama to not appoint an anti worker businesswoman as the next Commerce Secretary of the United States.

Here's what some of the press has been saying about Obama's nomination of Pritzker:
The Chicago Tribune wrote a piece lauding Obama for the appointment. However it noted some trouble absent from many of the recent accounts on Pritzker's business history. In addition to the controversies regarding her management stance and her posture towards Chicago students and teachers, she has been involved in banks that got involved in sub-prime mortgages, a role for which she has received kid gloves treatment for her wrong-doing.

During the early 1990s, she chaired Superior Bank, a suburban Chicago lender her family co-owned that later collapsed amid accounting irregularities and subprime loans gone bad. Federal regulators seized it in 2001.

The Pritzkers and their co-owners settled with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. for $460 million, without admitting liability. The FDIC also let the family share in part of a recovery the government obtained from the bank's auditor, Ernst & Young. Neither the federal insurance fund nor some depositors were ever made whole.

It was an unusual deal, and Pritzker no doubt will be asked about it.

Recent national press reports have only obliquely addressed Pritzker's contentious role as head of the Chicago Public Schools Board.

The union fought back against Pritzker and the Board's plans this winter with a satire scary bed-time story, “Stand Up to the Fat Cats,” and a coloring book, the Sun-Times reported December 12, 2012.

With good reason, Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis welcomed her departure from the Board. See this interview, published March 14, 2013, by the Chicago Mag, "Karen Lewis Says Good Riddance to Penny Pritzker."

In recent weeks (in Pritzker's absence, as she has moved on from the Board) Chicago students have been staging mass walk-outs (April 24) against standardized tests and Friday, May 2 against teacher firings. Jacob Chamberlain at Common Dreams noted the various controversies she has stirred.

President Barack Obama nominated another corporate billionaire to his cabinet on Thursday, announcing hotel heiress Penny Pritzker—also longtime Obama supporter and "heavyweight" fundraiser— as his pick to be Secretary of Commerce.

U.S. President Barack Obama announces Penny Pritzker, right, as his nominee for Secretary of Commerce (Reuters) As the Chicago Tribune reports:

Pritzker's nomination could prove controversial. She is on the board of Chicago-based Hyatt Hotels Corp., which was founded by her wealthy family and has had rocky relations with labor unions, and she could face questions about the failure of a bank partly owned by her family.

With a personal fortune estimated at $1.85 billion, Pritzker, 54, is listed by Forbes magazine among the 300 wealthiest Americans.

Ahead of her nomination, a petition organized by CREDO Action urged Obama not to nominate Pritzker, calling her "an anti-worker business mogul who should not be appointed to head the Commerce Department."

The Chicago Tribune adds:

Pritzker also could draw fire from labor leaders. Hyatt has long battled Unite Here in Los Angeles, Chicago and elsewhere. And Pritzker, who served on the Chicago Board of Education until she resigned in March, has been harshly criticized by the Chicago Teachers Union. When she stepped down, a union official said she "has a long and storied history as an anti-labor and anti-worker kind of boss. [...] She could also face scrutiny over the collapse of Superior Bank, which was co-owned by her family. The bank, based in Hinsdale, Ill., was involved in subprime mortgage lending, and its failure in 2001 stirred charges of fraud and mismanagement.

The Tribune reports that Pritzker stepped down from the Chicago Board of Education in March just "days before Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced he had targeted 53 elementary schools and a high school program to close, affecting an estimated 30,000 students."

Such a move allowed Pritzker to avoid "a politically unpopular vote" and "further protests" from angry community members and unionized teachers who loudly objected to the closing.

"We know Penny Pritzker has a long and storied history as an anti-labor and anti-worker kind of boss," Kristine Mayle, financial secretary of the Chicago Teachers Union, told the Tribune in March. "Her policies adversely affect working families. She has worked to close schools and destabilize neighborhoods, and we hope she does a better job in her new position, if she gets it."

And investigative reporter Dennis Bernstein says that Pritzker's nomination is additionally controversial becuase of her involvment in a sub-prime mortgage scandal and the collapse of Superior Bank in Chicago in 2001.

According to Bernstein:

Penny Pritzker played fast and loose with the American Dream. Her pioneering sub-prime operations, out of Superior Bank in Chicago, specifically targeted poor and working class people of color across the country. She ended up crashing Superior for a billion dollar cost to tax payers, and creating a personal tragedy for the 1,400 people who lost their savings when the bank failed. Pritzker, whose family controls Hyatt Regency Hotels, is in the top one percent of the one percent. Her extreme wealth and privilege has not only made her virtually untouchable by law enforcement, but will now allow her to cleanse her sordid sub-prime banking record by becoming the first woman Secretary of Commerce.

During the official nomination ceremony, Obama said of Pritzker, "She knows from experience that no government program alone can take the place of a great entrepreneur."

But as blogger DS Wright suggests at FireDogLake, wouldn't a better Commerce Secretary be someone who was not "at odds with labor unions" or one without "problems complying with bank regulations".

Pritzker's nomination now awaits a confirmation process in the Senate.

Liberal and progressive Democratic senators now must show their integrity and oppose Pritzker's appointment.

UPDATE on Frontline, Michelle Rhee: Highlights Cheating Scandal / Rhee critique goes mainstream?: Esquire skewers her record / Henwood weighs in

Tune in to Frontline on the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) tonight, January 8, 2013. Click here to find your local affiliate and broadcast time.

Michelle Rhee, former teacher, former Washington, D.C. schools chancellor, and tireless self-promoter of her brand of education reform, more properly called deform, will be the subject of a Frontline inquiry tonight.

"Standardized testing is a crack cocaine of education": CRITIQUE OF RHEE GOES MAINSTREAM?
The critique of Michelle Rhee and her record, which has been given a free pass by major newspapers and broadcast television, now has a stinging critique by Charles P. Pierce in Esquire, January 7, 2013, with gems like the crack coke parallel (with a link to Michael Winerip's writing in the New York Times on the follies of Tennessee's reach for the Race to the Top), and casting the education privatizer "movement" is "shot through root and branch with patent-medicine remedies pitched by for-profit grifters and hustlers."

One problem with the education "reform" industry is not merely that it generally looks at "education" as though it were a commodity, like soybeans, and that the problems with how we educate a great many children of our fellow citizens can be solved if we just refine the delivery systems for the product. In other words, most education "reform" proponents treat "education" as though it exists in a vacuum unaffected by the factors — like, say, joblessness and poverty — in the real world outside the classroom. (How many prominent school "reformers" have stepped up and said anything about the increasingly effective campaign by the NRA to arm public school teachers? Thought so.) Thus do we come to the second problem with the education "reform" movement — it is shot through root and branch with patent-medicine remedies pitched by for-profit grifters and hustlers.

They have their own genre of richly financed propaganda, like 2010's Waiting for Superman and this year's Won't Back Down. There are an awful lot of hedge-fund gunslingers involved in the movement toward charter schools, a phenomenon about which, to his eternal credit, Bob Somerby — who actually has taught in the public schools — has been banging his tin drum at The Daily Howler for some time now. (It should also be said that Somerby's knee does not jerk. He readily gives some reform programs, and even some of Rhee's work, the props he thinks they deserve.) Some of the hustlers, alas, have the ear of this administration, and one of those people is Michelle Rhee.

Rhee's entire (and very lucrative) career as a proponent of educational "reform" is based on her time as chancellor of the public schools in Washington, D.C. Between 2007 and 2010, she did everything that sends a thrill up the leg of the "reform" community. She bashed teachers, scapegoated principals, and shined up her own armor for public consumption every chance she got. She also instituted a system of standardized testing by which Michelle Rhee would be able to judge the awesome awesomeness of Michelle Rhee.

Standardized testing is a crack cocaine of education. It is rife with problems. It is also a multimillion industry without which might not exist, among other things, The Washington Post. A reliance on standardized testing as a metric for progress is generally a reliable "tell" that "reform" has ended and that the grift has begun. A reliance on standardized testing as a metric for progress — and, it should be said, as a Procrustean scoreboard to judge whether a teacher, an administrator, or a school system are doing their jobs properly — almost guarantees that some finagling with the numbers will take place. It is a sub rosa way to install a corporate model on public education and, since the corporate model for everything in this country right now is a moral and ethical quagmire, it encourages cheating on a massive scale. Hence, the very real possibility that the empire built by Michelle Rhee, tough-talking "reformer," may be built upon a wilderness of crib sheets.

Tomorrow night, the PBS investigative program Frontline will broadcast a show about Rhee's tenure in Washington, and it will seriously confront the notion that an insistence on standardized testing may have resulted in a scandalous level of cheating in the city's school system, as well as a deeply rooted attempt to cover it up.

Read the rest of the article: Rhee Finances - Esquire

The Washington Post, January 5, also did a review of Frontline's documentary on Rhee.

NYC Public School Parents blog has pointed out several points that have gained growing attention in recent years:

· How she most likely greatly exaggerated her own record as a teacher. · Evidence of widespread cheating in DC schools when she ran them, and her failure to investigate these allegations properly -- a special focus of a Frontline program due to air tonight;

· The voluminous research pointing out that evaluating teachers on the basis of test scores through value-added models, as she pushed for in DC and now in her state report cards, is unstable, unreliable and unfair. (See the most recent analysis from a group of statistical experts, concluding that “We cannot at this time encourage anyone to use VAM in a high stakes endeavor.”) The way she inflated the number of supporters of StudentsFirst, counting as members anyone who signed deceptively-phrased online petitions, calling for unobjectionable policies like paying good teachers more or stopping bullying in schools.

· How she fired more than more than 5 percent of the teachers in DC, though at least some of these teachers may need to be reinstated because she did this improperly.
· How the teacher evaluation system she relied upon, called IMPACT, was altered after she left by her successor to diminish its reliance on test scores, dropping that component from 50 to 35 percent.
· How a recent report from the organization she used to run, TNTP, though predictably positive in its spin, revealed that the IMPACT teacher evaluation system was one of the top reasons that even “top performing” teachers plan to leave DC schools. The report also cast further doubt on the system, saying that there may be a “flaw in the design or implementation of IMPACT [that] makes it easier for teachers working in low-need schools to earn top ratings.”
· The documented predilection of StudentsFirst to fund right-wing Republican candidates, despite claims of bipartisanship.
· Most recently, Rhee made a tone-deaf statement on the mass shootings in Newtown CT, calling such children “our most valuable assets”.
· Finally, her refusal to oppose a bill in Michigan that would allow concealed weapons in schools, until the legislation had already been vetoed by the Governor.

Ever self-righteous, she has taken to turning her guns upon state governments and their education policies. Refreshingly, California's deputy superintendent of education calls her branding of him "a badge of honor."

California got an "F" for refusing to sign onto the provisions of "Race to the Top", including test-based evaluations of teachers; Richard Zeiger, the state's deputy superintendent, called the state's failing grade a “badge of honor.”

Go to NYC Public School Parents for more of its Report Card for Michelle Rhee and StudentsFirst.

DOUG HENWOOD'S TAKE ON MICHELLE RHEE: CONTRASTS HER REPORT CARD WITH NAEP RESULTS: More bogosity from Michelle Rhee

StudentsFirst, the school “reform” outfit led by the notorious Michelle Rhee, is out with a state-by-state Report Card on the nation’s schools. Grades were awarded on the basis of states’ conformity to the standard reform agenda—ease of creating charter schools, ease of firing teachers, ease of hiring teachers who aren’t certified in the traditional fashion, and testing testing testing. In the past, there’s never been any evidence that this agenda actually improves educational outcomes—and this report is no exception. Despite Rhee’s love of testing, there’s no mention of how states that do well under her criteria do on standardized tests compared to those that score poorly. That’s no surprise, really, since states that get high grades from StudentsFirst do worse on tests than those that score poorly.

Rhee’s group gave letter grades to each state, along with a GPA that allowed them to be ranked from 1 to 51. (DC counts as a state here.) No state got a grade higher than a B-, and only two states made that grade. Eleven states got an F. Tough! But do these grades mean anything?

To evaluate the StudentsFirst grades, I got 8th grade reading and math scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, aka NAEP, the Nation’s Report Card. Testing can be a debased pursuit when it’s used to measure individual schools and teachers (sample sizes are just too small, and there’s too much statistical noise from year to year to base anything on), but the NAEP is as good as they come for measuring broad trends.

Here are the results. StudentsFirst has Louisiana at #1 in its rankings—but the state ranks 49th in reading and 47th in math. North Dakota, which StudentsFirst ranks 51st, comes in at #14 in reading scores and #7 in math. Massachusetts, which ranks #1 in both reading and math scores (and which is also the most unionized state for teachers in the country), comes in at #14 on the Rhee scale.

Looking more rigorously at the results, the correlation coefficient on the rankings in the StudentsFirst report card with state rankings on reading scores is -0.20. (The correlation coefficient is a measure of the similarity of two sets of numbers, ranging from -1.0, completely dissimilar, to +1.0, perfect similarity.) That’s not a large number, but the negative sign means that the correlation is in the wrong direction: the higher the StudentsFirst score, the lower the NAEP reading score. The correlation on math is even worse, -0.25.

More bogosity from Michelle RheeClick to Henwood's site for the remainder of the article including his link to the spreadsheet in question.