What was 300 years to a sure pathway to employment at strong wages in US has now been made into a criminal enterprise sacking and looting our US citizens' wealth and throwing them into deep poverty with large student loan debt and no pathway to a job.
All of this was the MASTER PLAN from REAGAN/CLINTON era 1980-90s by global banking 1% OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS to capture all public wealth and kill all pathways to employment. Today, our young adults and parents are being made to fear incurring higher education debt feeling the US system does not lead to employment and higher wages.
CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA global banking neo-liberalism these few decades brought these FAR-RIGHT WING EXTREME WEALTH EXTREME POVERTY policies while Clinton/Obama PRETENDED to be 'left' social progressives helping labor and justice 99% WE THE PEOPLE.
Obama and Clinton neo-liberals as well created a tiered-level of student debt forgiveness via sending our new college grads into NGOs also PRETENDING to be 'left' where our public university grads are captured far longer to these FREE LABOR APPRENTICESHIPS to pay student debt----instead of entering workforce with strong developed nation salaries.
The FAKE OUR REVOLUTION global banking players like Warren, Gabbard, Turner, Ellison, Sanders, Stein pretending to address these student loan debt problems are actually MOVING FORWARD the same K-CAREER APPRENTICESHIP pathways started during Clinton era.
The Incredible, Rage-Inducing Inside Story of America’s Student Debt Machine
Why is the nation’s flagship loan forgiveness program failing the people it’s supposed to help?
By Ryann Liebenthal; Photographs by Zach GrossSeptember/October 2018 Issue
When Leigh McIlvaine first learned that her student loan debt could be forgiven, she was thrilled. In 2008, at age 27, she’d earned a master’s degree in urban and regional planning from the University of Minnesota. She’d accrued just under $70,000 in debt, though she wasn’t too worried—that’s what it took to invest in her future. But graduating at the height of the recession, she found that the kind of decent-paying public-sector job she’d anticipated pursuing was suddenly closed off by budget and hiring freezes. She landed a gig at a nonprofit in Washington, DC, earning a $46,000 salary. Still, she was happy to live on that amount if it was the cost of doing the work she believed in.
At the time, she paid about $350 each month to stay in a decrepit house with several roommates, more than $100 for utilities, and $60 for her cellphone bill. On top of that, her loan bill averaged about $850 per month. “Rent was hard enough to come up with,” she recalled. Then one day while researching her options, she read about something called the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) plan. At the time, Congress had just come up with a couple of options for borrowers with federal loans. They could get on an income-based repayment plan and have their student loans expunged after 25 years. Or, for borrowers working public service jobs—as social workers, nurses, nonprofit employees—there was another possibility: They could have their debt forgiven after making 10 years’ worth of on-time payments.
The PSLF program, backed in the Senate by Ted Kennedy and signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2007, was the first of its kind, and when people talk about “student loan forgiveness,” they’re usually talking about PSLF. It was implemented to address low salaries in public service jobs, where costly degrees are the price of entry but wages often aren’t high enough to pay down debts. A Congressional Budget Office report last year found that public-sector workers with a professional degree or doctorate earn 24 percent less than they would in the private sector. In Massachusetts, a public defender in 2014 made just $40,000, only about $1,000 more than the court’s janitor. Meanwhile, 85 percent of public-interest attorneys in 2015 owed at least $50,000 in federal student loans, according to one study. More than half owed at least $100,000. According to a 2012 study, 65 percent of newly hired nonprofit workers had student debt, and 30 percent owed more than $50,000. In order to keep people working as public defenders, or rural doctors or human rights activists, something had to be done. PSLF was an attempt at a fix.
LEIGH McILVAINE: University of New Mexico (bachelor’s, 2006); University of Minnesota (master’s, 2008); $70,000 owed at graduation; $50,000 paid back so far; $410 paid per month, on average; 12 months of delayed forgiveness because of FedLoan errors; $70,000 still owed today
The program was by no means a handout. Successful PSLF participants, according to one estimate, pay back as much as 91 percent of their original loan amount, so enrollees primarily save on interest. The program’s appeal was that it offered a clear path for people who struggled to pay back loans, or struggled to envision how they would ever pay them off without abandoning public service jobs for higher-paid positions elsewhere. For McIlvaine, who dreamed of working to make cities more livable, PSLF was the only way she could imagine paying off her debt. When she sent in her first payment in the fall of 2009, she felt like she’d put herself on track to get to “a place where the debt would eventually be lifted.”
Several companies, including one called FedLoan Servicing, contracted with the Education Department to handle loan repayment, and until 2012, when the government assigned all PSLF accounts to FedLoan, borrowers had to keep track of their progress toward forgiveness. At the time she began paying into the program, McIlvaine wasn’t too perturbed that there was no official way to confirm her enrollment, no email or letter that said she had been “accepted.” She trusted the Education Department to run the program effectively and followed its parameters, taking care to send in the yearly tax forms that proved her eligibility and always submitting her payments on time.
Everything seemed fine for the first few years—McIlvaine initially made payments through an Education Department website, and then, as the department increasingly outsourced its loans, hers were transferred to a company called MOHELA. But once FedLoan took over, things quickly started to go awry. While FedLoan was sorting out the transfer, her loans were put into forbearance, an option usually reserved for people having difficulty making payments; during a forbearance, any progress toward forgiveness stalls, and loans balloon with interest. Then the company failed to put several of her loans on an income-based plan—so her payments briefly shot up, she says. And when McIlvaine submitted her tax information, she says FedLoan took months to process the paperwork—while she waited, the company again put her into what it called “administrative forbearance,” so none of the payments she made during this period counted either. (McIlvaine requested a forbearance at least once, after turning in late renewal paperwork.)
McIlvaine initially hoped these problems were just “hiccups,” but they kept piling up. And when she tried to figure out what was going on, she says, FedLoan’s call center “loan counselors” brushed the whole thing off as an inconsequential administrative oversight. Astonishingly, the cycle would repeat over the next four years.
Despite these frustrations, McIlvaine kept diligently sending in her checks. In January 2016, she took advantage of a new program introduced by President Barack Obama that helped lower her monthly bill, and when she did, her loans were again inexplicably put into forbearance. On top of that, four months later, as she was trying to save for her wedding, FedLoan sent her a bill for $1,600, more than $1,300 above her monthly payment amount. When she phoned the company in a panic, they told her the bill was an administrative glitch and said not to worry about it; they’d sort it out. Warily, she accepted—after all, there wasn’t much else she could do.
In August 2016, McIlvaine was offered a job at Mercy Corps, a nonprofit in Portland, Oregon, which came with a $10,000 raise and great benefits—the extra security she believed would allow her to start a family. But Mercy Corps required a credit check, and McIlvaine discovered that FedLoan had never actually dealt with that $1,600 bill, instead reporting it as 90 days past due and plunging her previously excellent credit score to an abysmal 550. When she called FedLoan in tears, she recalls, she was treated dismissively and told to “pay more attention” to her loans—and again the only option offered to her was to take an administrative forbearance while the company sorted out the issue. Ultimately she got the job, but only after she lodged a formal complaint with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the watchdog agency created during the Obama era, which prompted FedLoan to send her a letter in October 2016 claiming the company had fixed the issue and that her credit had been restored. “But in true FedLoan Servicing style,” she told me, “they only contacted two of the three credit bureaus.” It took several more months to fix her score with the third bureau, Equifax.
Listen to author Ryann Liebanthal talk about how debt forgiveness can go horribly wrong on this episode of the Mother Jones Podcast.
The Mother Jones Podcast
America's Rage-Inducing Student Debt Machine
00:00 / 22:16
If not for FedLoan’s errors and delays, McIlvaine estimates, her loans would be eligible for forgiveness as soon as 2020. But instead, in the nine years she’s been participating in PSLF, months of payments haven’t been counted toward her 10-year requirement, ultimately delaying the date of her forgiveness by at least a year. All the while, although she’s been making payments of between $300 and $450 a month, her total debt has not gone down. After nearly 100 payments, she still owes the entire amount she initially borrowed.
FedLoan declined to comment on McIlvaine’s tribulations. But as complaints to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and lawsuits against the Education Department and FedLoan pile up, she’s hardly alone. In 2017, the bureau issued a report excoriating FedLoan for mismanaging PSLF, misleading borrowers, and losing track of payments. The previous year, the American Bar Association had filed suit against the Education Department for reneging on its own rules about how the program was supposed to work and who was eligible for forgiveness. Then, in August 2017, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey sued FedLoan on behalf of the state’s borrowers, alleging it had overcharged them and bilked them out of payments. And just this January, a set of borrowers filed a class-action suit against the company for repeatedly putting them into needless forbearances that delayed their forgiveness.
A decade after McIlvaine and scores of others began paying into the program, many are only barely closer to their goal of being debt-free. And some are even more in debt than when they started.Now, the Trump administration has begun disassembling one of the only checks on companies like FedLoan, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, all while arguing that these companies are off-limits to state attorneys general like Healey—essentially trying to give them legal protection.
“We’ve seen an industry that’s really been given a pass by the DeVos administration,” Healey told me, referring to Trump’s education secretary. “That’s why you see Betsy DeVos clean house and bring into the Department of Ed lobbyists and executives from the for-profit schools industry, from the loan-servicing industry. They’re the ones who are attempting now to rewrite all the rules. And the rules and the policies of the department favor corporations and furthering the bottom line of executives at the expense of students.”
Meanwhile, in early June, Republican legislators were trying to find votes for a sweeping and massively unpopular higher-education bill called PROSPER that would get rid of many grant programs as well as loan subsidies and PSLF. Trump’s 2018 and 2019 budgets also proposed axing the PSLF program. Congress has so far rejected the idea, but if the efforts succeed they would remove what was a very small sliver of hope for a generation underwater.
October 2017 should have been a moment for celebration for those sunk by debt—it was the first time a cohort of PSLF participants, after 10 years of payments, could be forgiven. Yet of almost 900,000 people who have submitted at least one payment to the PSLF program and FedLoan since 2012, the Education Department expects fewer than 1,000 to be forgiven by the end of its fiscal year. The reasons for these astonishingly dismal statistics are myriad, but one fact is clear: A decade after McIlvaine and scores of others began paying into the program, many are only barely closer to their goal of being debt-free. And some are even more in debt than when they started.
Today, FedLoan services about a third of all federal student debt, and last year the company took home $195 million from the Education Department. But for years, there were reasons to doubt the company’s competency to administer such a large portion of the government’s loan portfolio.
To understand how FedLoan grew so powerful, you have to go back to the 1960s. At the time, about a quarter of high school students dropped out, while half of those who did graduate went on to college. To boost those numbers, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Higher Education Act in 1965. The bill came along at a moment when states were creating their own institutions to promote higher-education access, including the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency (PHEAA), which would eventually branch off and create FedLoan. It was a recipe that we still rely on today—the federal government provides loans to students across the country, and state governments and other agencies like PHEAA fill in the funding gaps. “When you look into the faces of your students and your children and your grandchildren,” Johnson said, “tell them that the leadership of your country believes it is the obligation of your nation to provide and permit and assist every child born in these borders to receive all the education that he can take.”
But Johnson’s student aid program immediately fell short of his lofty aims. Over the next four decades, it shifted from a model relying on tax dollars to provide a public good into a loan-centered system that viewed education as a “private responsibility and risk”—and student borrowers as sources of profit, says Deanne Loonin, an author and attorney at the Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School.
Johnson had wanted to create a national scholarship fund for students—like a universal GI Bill—but Congress told him it would be too expensive. So he struck a compromise with Republicans: He would supplement federal funds with loans doled out by private banks, which in turn would receive subsidies from the government, ensuring they would get their money back if a borrower skipped out on the debt. To shore up its insurance program, the feds partnered with dozens of nonprofits and state agencies, including PHEAA. The government would pay out 1 percent of each loan an agency managed. And if borrowers did stop paying, PHEAA and the other institutions would reimburse the lending bank and then act as collection agencies—pocketing collection fees to the tune of 16 cents on the dollar.
Meanwhile, as demand for higher education grew, so did college costs, while incomes didn’t keep pace. So in 1972, President Richard Nixon did two things: He expanded a federally funded grant program for low-income students, which became known as the Pell Grant, and he created an entity called Sallie Mae that used Treasury funds to buy up student loans from banks.
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The FAKE OUR REVOLUTION global banking players like Warren, Gabbard, Turner, Ellison, Sanders, Stein pretending to address these student loan debt problems are actually MOVING FORWARD the same K-CAREER APPRENTICESHIP pathways started during Clinton era.
Remember last week we discussed a 'failing landlord/tenet tax policy in UK-----that actually was successful since the goal was to kill real estate ownership for landlords------so too this education debt forgiveness was never meant to solve that indebtedness---it was designed to make it worse
'Why is the nation’s flagship loan forgiveness program failing the people it’s supposed to help'?
Our US university executives KNOW these education policy goals -----they say WE DON'T CARE because we work for global corporations and not US public education. Below we see where the process of US Federal student loans PELL GRANTS which worked for decades providing easily paid student loans at low cost----NIXON creating that global banking 1% SALLIE MAE ----that filled this process with criminality and fraud. SALLIE MAE is to education student loans what FREDDIE MAC is to FHA housing loans. Global banking pols subprimed these student loans as they did the subprime housing loans.
'He expanded a federally funded grant program for low-income students, which became known as the Pell Grant, and he created an entity called Sallie Mae'
THE REAL LEFT SOCIAL PROGRESSIVE ISSUE ON US STUDENT LOAN FRAUD AND CORRUPTION BY GLOBAL BANKING 1% OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS IS TO END THE PRIVATIZATION OF THESE FEDERAL LOANS---ABOLISH FREDDIE MAC AND SALLIE MAE CONNECTION OF FUNDING TO GLOBAL WALL STREET.
Below we see our good friend BENEDICT ARNOLD-----we discussed his use of fraudulent billions to install DEEP, DEEP, REALLY DEEP STATE here in Baltimore MD----and here we see him using those same fraudulent gains KILLING PUBLIC SCHOOLS with THE CITY FUND.
'Billionaire Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings, has joined with billionaire former Enron executive, John Arnold, to launch an aggressive destroy public education (DPE) initiative. They claim to have invested $100 million each to start The City Fund'.
Thomas Ultican: The Destroy Public Education Movement Creates a New Vehicle
By dianeravitch
August 21, 2018 //
Retired physics and math teacher Tom Ultican continues his investigation of the Destroy Public Education movement with this post about a new organization determined to extinguish public education by privatization.
He begins:
'Billionaire Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings, has joined with billionaire former Enron executive, John Arnold, to launch an aggressive destroy public education (DPE) initiative. They claim to have invested $100 million each to start The City Fund'.
Neerav Kingsland declares he is the Fund’s Managing Partner and says the fund will help cities across America institute proven school reform successes such as increasing “the number of public schools that are governed by non-profit organizations.”
Ending local control of public schools through democratic means is a priority for DPE forces. In 2017, EdSource reported on Hastings campaign against democracy; writing, “His latest salvo against school boards that many regard as a bedrock of American democracy came last week in a speech he made to the annual conference of The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools in Washington D.C., attended by about 4,500 enthusiastic charter school advocates, teachers and administrators.”
When announcing the new fund, Kingsland listed fourteen founding members of The City Fund. There is little professional classroom teaching experience or training within the group. Chris Barbic was a Teach for America (TFA) teacher in Houston, Texas for two years. Similarly, Kevin Huffman was also a TFA teacher in Houston for three years. The only other member that may have some education experience is Kevin Shafer. His background is obscure.
The operating structure of the new fund is modeled after a law firm. Six of the fourteen founding members are lawyers: Gary Borden; David Harris; Kevin Huffman; Neerav Kingsland; Jessica Pena and Kameelah Shaheed-Diallo.
Ready to Pilfer Community Schools and End School Boards
In a 2012 published debate about school reform, Kingsland justified his call for ending democratic control of public education writing,
“I believe that true autonomy can only be achieved by government relinquishing its power of school operation. I believe that well regulated charter and voucher markets – that provide educators with public funds to operate their own schools – will outperform all other vehicles of autonomy in the long-run. In short, autonomy must be real autonomy: government operated schools that allow “site level decision making” feels more Orwellian than empowering – if we believe educators should run schools, let’s let them run schools.”
This is a belief in “the invisible hand” of markets making superior judgements and private businesses always outperforming government administration. There may be some truth here, but it is certainly not an ironclad law.
Please open the post to read the rest of this shocking story of arrogance and contempt for democracy, as well as many links.
If we lived in a society that took democracy seriously, the perpetrators of the City Fund would be ridiculed as agents of plutocracy.
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You betcha! Benedict Arnold and his global 1% OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS KNIGHTS OF MALTA meets TRIBE OF JUDAH installing more MOVING FORWARD sacking and looting far-right wing policies
'Ready to Pilfer Community Schools and End School Boards'
THE CITY FUND-------is a far-right wing global banking 1% with goals of indeed sacking and looting all future funds designated for our public K-12 under the guise of helping PUBLIC SCHOOLS.
Below we see our same Baltimore City Council-----led by the same City Council President Jack Young and Baltimore City Mayor PUGH championed by global banking Baltimore Development FAKE ALT RIGHT ALT LEFT social progressive groups ------installing BENEDICT ARNOLD'S THE CITY FUND pretending it is about assuring funding for our local public schools. Remember, these same global banking 5% freemason/Greek player pols did the same for AFFORDABLE HOUSING----they are creating TRUSTS to replace what used to be Federal and State funding for low-income housing and public schools tied to FEDERAL equal opportunity and access civil rights. When we allow our city/state revenues to be tied to TRUSTS-----our 99% WE THE PEOPLE lose all control of where these funds go----those appointed to TRUST BOARDS will always be global banking players.
Here we see just one of global banking Baltimore Development FAKE social progressive groups PRETENDING this TRUST----which is the same as ARNOLD'S CITY FUND-----is good for our 99% Baltimore citizens.
This # FUND THE TRUST working for global 1% is BENEDICT ARNOLD'S -----'THE CITY TRUST'.
'These are referred to as the “Sundry Trusts,” each maintained separately and administered according to the terms of the benefactor'.
None of the low-income and poor citizens in this photo understand they are supporting FAR-RIGHT WING GLOBAL BANKING 1% policies with goals of killing 99% of Baltimore citizens black, white, and brown---in both HOUSING AND EDUCATION.
#FundTheTrust!
From the launch of our 20/20 Campaign in January 2016, through the collection of 18,000 signatures that summer to put Question J on the ballot in November and passing with an overwhelming 83% of the vote... every phone call, petition signature, door knocked, community meeting has led us to this moment. Earlier this month, we reached an historic agreement with Baltimore's leadership to put 20 million dollars a year towards creating affordable housing and development without displacement in our city: $20 Million every year to #FundTheTrust!
The Fund The Trust Act will be heard by Councilwoman Middleton's Taxation and Finance Committee on Thursday, September 27th- join us at 10 AM to rally outside of City Hall and at 11 for the hearing! After all our sacrifice to create the AHTF, to influence our City's Budget, and to engage communities around the need to address blight without displacing low-income residents, passing the Fund The Trust Act will be a a decisive step towards a more equitable, accountable, participatory, universal, and transparent city- one that recognizes the power of the people.
OH, REALLY?????????????????
***In advance of the hearing, please call Council President Young to thank him for his hard work and leadership to get us to this moment! His office number is 410-396-4804.***
THU, SEP 27 AT 10 AM
Fund The Trust Rally & Hearing!
Baltimore City Hall · Baltimore
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Both UNITED WORKERS and BUILD are far-right wing global banking 5% freemason/Greek player NGOs working for Baltimore Development to sell policies that kill our 99% of WE THE BALTIMORE CITIZENS.
THE CITY TRUST discussed in our education posts today is the same as what are called EDUCATION TRUSTS----HOUSING TRUSTS------LAND BANK TRUSTS all of which have goals of taking every control and accountability from our local 99% of citizens and hand all that power to global banking 1%. It is another policy that kills our LOCAL, STATE, AND FEDERAL SOVEREIGNTY.
All these FAKE 'LEFT' GROUPS ARE TIED TO FREEMASON/GREEKS WITH CITIZENS WANTING TO CLIMB TO THAT 5% PLAYER. KNOW WHAT? THAT 5% PLAYER GROUP ARE GOING UNDER THE BUS. WHY NOT FIGHT TO BE AMERICAN CITIZENS INSTEAD?
This is how the FAR-RIGHT WING in US was able to undermine 300 years of American democrat government, civil rights and liberties----which go back centuries more to I AM MAN----AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT.
These are global banking national NGOS pushing policy talking points with goals of killing our 99% WE THE PEOPLE while these groups PRETEND these polices HELP THE POOR. When our US 99% WE THE PEOPLE and our new to US immigrant citizens join THESE political movements---they are killing their futures----not protesting and marching for GORILLA-IN-THE-ROOM 99% WE THE PEOPLE policies----advancing MOVING FORWARD ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE FOR ONLY THE GLOBAL 1%.
Our MissionOur Mission Statement:
The Baltimore Educational Scholarship Trust, in partnership with our nineteen independent member schools, recruits and supports through the admissions process academically ambitious, African American students with financial need from the Baltimore area. Once students are enrolled, B.E.S.T. positions them for success through academic preparation, character and leadership development and support programs.
United Workers
August 13 at 1:03 PM · Last Friday's historic announcement of city leadership committing to $20 million annually to the affordable housing trust fund was an example of a grassroots movement doing things in a new way - mass participation, transparency and accountability to movement goals #endpoverty #fundthetrust Development without Displacement
BUILD
June 29 ·
One more time, June 6 action, clear video. Thank you Kingdom Life Church!
The Kingdom Life Church
June 29 ·
Al-Rahmah Educational Trust
ASET is an independent 501(3)(c) non-profit organization that was setup to support the future financial needs of Al-Rahmah School & Nursery through the creation of a healthy and sustainable endowment fund.
With all the above outsourcing of 'EDUCATION FUNDING' in Baltimore we KNOW 99% of Baltimore citizens have the WORST PUBLIC SCHOOL system in America. All of what was Federal K-12 school funding was misappropriated to these kinds of freemasonry groups and missing in action just as happens to our state education funding all tied to TRUST FUNDS.
None of the FAKE DEMOCRATIC candidates will FIX this education robbery----they are the same global banking 5% players as GOV HOGAN. MARYLAND has a long history of sending Federal and state funding to TRUSTS where all is used as PAY-TO-PLAY.
Sean Johnson
Feb 16
After Diverting $1.4 Billion from the Education Trust Fund, Hogan Backs Plan to Fix the Fund
MSEA’s Up the Street
Chart showing how Gov. Hogan has used the Education Trust Fund shell game to shift $1.4 billion away from education during his time in office. Source: Department of Legislative Services
THIS WEEK IN ANNAPOLIS
Gov. Hogan Backs Fix the Fund, Announces His Own Bill
On Wednesday, Gov. Hogan backed the legislature- and educator-led campaign to Fix the Fund — albeit by introducing his own bill. According to his press conference remarks, his version would merely make it mandatory by law for the governor’s budget proposal to use the Education Trust Fund revenue to increase education funding. His bill aims to avoid the far stronger lockbox that would be created by taking this step by way of a constitutional amendment; leaving the funds susceptible to the same shell game we have seen for years since a governor could “pick the lock” of Hogan’s version of the lockbox whenever they wanted to via the Budget Reconciliation and Financing Act. Finally, his proposal would also send a small portion of the revenue to school construction dollars, leaving less to fill the $2.9 billion annual underfunding gap for operating expenses like educator salaries and staffing increases.While the governor stole headlines by claiming credit for the idea, he also inadvertently conceded that his own budgets have amounted to a $1.4 billion broken promise. After all, that’s how much more funding would have gone to schools during his time in office had he not raided the Education Trust Fund to plug holes in other parts of his budget proposals.
MSEA released a statement in response, saying in part, “There’s some real hypocrisy in proposing legislation to make you do something you’ve refused to do on your own.” We then called on Gov. Hogan to send the legislature an additional budget — called a supplemental budget — with the $364 million he took away from the Education Trust Fund in his current budget proposal.
Kirwan Preliminary Report Released
The long-awaited Kirwan Commission Preliminary Report was released yesterday following a press conference by legislative leaders and the Commission’s chair, Dr. Brit Kirwan. The report paints a bleak picture of the state of Maryland education based on consultant findings that the average public school is underfunded by $2 million every year.
The Commission wants to address this underfunding by focusing on policy strategies like providing universal access to pre-kindergarten programs, expanding Career and Technical Education (CTE), utilizing the community school model in communities of concentrated poverty, raising teacher salaries, reducing teacher workload, and hiring more mental health professionals.
THESE ARE ALL FAR-RIGHT WING GLOBAL BANKING 1% EDUCATION POLICY GOALS----NOTHING 'LEFT SOCIAL PROGRESSIVE' HAPPENING.
Legislative leaders are advancing some small recommendations from the Commission this session in one omnibus bill (HB1415/SB1092). Sponsored by House Speaker Michael Busch (D-Anne Arundel-District 30A) and Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller, Jr. (D-Calvert, Charles & Prince George’s-District 27), ideas included in the bill include:
· Establish a Career and Technical Education group, composed of individuals with expertise in CTE programs and the needs of the business community to develop rigorous CTE pathways leading to industry-certified credentials.
· Expand the current program of early childhood education by increasing the funding for prekindergarten expansion grants.
· Require MSDE, in collaboration with stakeholders, to develop a comprehensive recruitment program aimed at the top 25% of graduates from high schools (in each school system) to encourage them to consider teaching as a profession.
· Expand and fully fund the Maryland Teaching Fellows Scholarship to provide tuition remission for teachers in return for a commitment to teach in high-needs schools.
· Establish a grant program for jurisdictions or schools with high concentrations of poverty to provide additional academic instruction through after-school and summer programs.
MSEA is planning a march in Annapolis on March 19 called The March to Fix the Fund -- which will focus on asking members of the General Assembly to put a constitutional amendment on the 2018 ballot to ensure casino gaming revenue goes towards increasing education funding. Please RSVP at this link and widely distribute the form to members and community partners.
MSEA KNOWS WE MUST GET RID OF EDUCATION TRUST FUND TO FIX PUBLIC SCHOOL FUNDING.
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What BENEDICT ARNOLD'S -----THE CITY TRUST targeting education and schools will do if allowed to MOVE FORWARD is replace the local corruption and criminality of PAY-TO-PLAY FAKE NGOs allowed to pretend to have their own TRUSTS for housing and education------with what will be a GLOBAL BANKING 1% CITY TRUST. As we see all these CITY TRUST funds are geared to funding only K-career schools that perform well on STOCK MARKET----GREAT SCHOOLS RATING CORPORATIONS. Of course those RATINGS are CORRUPT towards schools pretending to be 'public' -----making sure the RATINGS and the STOCK MARKET gains go only to those K-career corporate schools tied to global corporate campuses as here in Baltimore all K-career schools are being tied to city center global hedge fund corporation JOHNS HOPKINS.
So, it is a given that JOHNS HOPKINS' corporate K-career schools once our US PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM ----will be RATED HIGH----will earn great profits----and the CITY TRUST created by JACK YOUNG AND BALTIMORE CITY HALL will only fund those global corporate campus schools.
Below we see national media using THINK TANK talking points still calling THIRD WAY CLINTON NEO-LIBERALISM-----LEFT CENTER.
“Our model is probably different from the model of the [Trump] administration, and it’s not the same model of, if you would, a traditional school district,” said Henderson Lewis Jr., the head of the district that oversees New Orleans charters, in a recent interview. “We’re somewhere in the middle, which I see as a third way.”
Henderson Lewis Jr., the head of the district that oversees New Orleans charters AND TRUMP----same team global banking 5% players.
This is what OBAMA era education reforms did to our FEDERAL K-12 funding system AND our Federal STUDENT LOAN system----killed all that equal opportunity and access and is now handing all those hundreds of billions of dollars to these CITY/STATE TRUSTS.
Here is PENCE INDIANA doing the same to education funding using a different TRUST name
'The groups and schools that the Indianapolis-based Mind Trust — whose logo is at the center — have supported. (The Mind Trust)'
A ‘portfolio’ of schools?
How a nationwide effort to disrupt urban school districts is gaining traction
By Matt Barnum - December 6, 2017
Several years ago, Indianapolis Public Schools looked like a lot of urban school districts. The vast majority of students attended traditional public schools, though enrollment was dwindling, and the district had an adversarial relationship with its small but growing number of charter schools.
That’s no longer true. The district is actively turning over schools to charter operators, and it’s rolling out a common enrollment system for district and charter schools that could make it easier for charters to grow. Nearly half of the district’s students now attend charters or district schools with charter-like freedoms.
It’s a remarkable shift that many in Indianapolis credit to — or blame on -- the Mind Trust, a well-funded local nonprofit with a clear vision for improving education in Indianapolis.
Since its founding in 2006, the organization has called for dramatic changes to schools; recruited outside advocacy, teacher training, and charter groups; and spent millions to help launch new charter and district schools. The Mind Trust’s vision has also won support from the school board — which was elected with the financial backing of Stand for Children, an advocacy group recruited by the Mind Trust.
“They’re more influential than the IPS school board and the IPS superintendent,” said MaryAnn Schlegel Ruegger, an Indianapolis public schools advocate who has been critical of the Mind Trust’s role.
Now, a Mind Trust–style organization may be coming to a city near you.
A growing number of philanthropists, advocates, and policymakers say the way to improve schools is to upend the traditional school district. Usually pointing to the same cities as models — Indianapolis, along with Denver, New Orleans, and Washington D.C. — they want to see more charter schools and more district schools run like charter schools.
In their idealized vision, families are free to choose schools outside their neighborhood using an enrollment system encompassing all schools. The district gives up most of its traditional role setting policy for schools and instead becomes the body holding all kinds of schools accountable by closing ones that don’t succeed.
Together, those ideas make up what’s known as the “portfolio model” for managing schools, and its advocates are making a significant mark on a number of American school districts. Their sights are set on even more.
From Atlanta to Cincinnati to Oakland, a loosely connected network of nonprofit groups is working to reshape the way their school districts function. Their national scope has gone mostly unexamined, even as their influence is arguably far more likely to affect schools in the average American city than a Betsy DeVos-inspired voucher program.
Over time, something close to a playbook has emerged from their work. It’s not an exact sequence, and people within the same camp have different opinions about exactly what it should entail.
This is a look at how we got here, a few of the essential steps to reshaping a traditional school district, and what happens next.
A model emerges:
Dozens of cities and millions in support
To understand the growing movement, a good place to start is with Ethan Gray and his organization, Education Cities.
The group started as a project of the Mind Trust, which hired Gray to create a network of peer groups across the country. Gray says his views were deeply influenced by the Mind Trust’s founder and leader David Harris, who helped him “understand how all the different pieces fit together when you’re trying to catalyze major change at the city level.”
Ethan Gray, head of Education Cities.
“Give us the freedom from overly prescriptive regulation and micromanagement, and in turn we will promise to help kids achieve on assessments at a certain level and create a strong school culture,” said Gray, who believes the traditional district model has fallen short, pointing to low test scores and vast achievement gaps.
Those ideas came originally from the academic world, specifically the University of Washington, where a professor named Paul Hill founded the Center on Reinventing Public Education in 1993. There, Hill pushed the idea that the key to improving schools was to rethink school boards.
Instead of operating all schools, boards should oversee them, focusing on which ones do best and worst, he argued. “Like investors with diversified portfolios of stocks and bonds, school boards would closely manage their community’s portfolio of educational service offerings, divesting less productive schools and adding more promising ones,” Hill wrote more than a decade ago.
The stock-market imagery was not a stroke of marketing genius when it came to winning allies in public education, and some advocates still bristle at the term “portfolio.”
“Diane Ravitch and the teachers unions now call us ‘corporate reformers’ and the phrase ‘portfolio model’ plays right into their hands,” said David Osborne, the author of a recent book that rebrands the approach as the “21st century schools” model.
Some charter critics accuse the portfolio model of being a plan to turn all schools into charters, as essentially happened in New Orleans, one of the models for the movement. Osborne argues that districts shouldn’t run schools, instead leaving that to outside groups. Gray insists it can work with district schools, and already is in Denver and Indianapolis.
But even as portfolio advocates differ on some specifics, they are united by broad beliefs, and brought together by unifying hubs. CRPE, the think tank now led by Robin Lake, regularly gathers districts interested in the portfolio model, and Education Cities, which has helped start some of the nonprofit groups, convenes them and offers advice and consulting.
Their work spans the country. Education Cities now counts 32 separate member organizations in 25 cities. So while Gray’s group itself is moderately sized, with around a $2 million budget and a dozen staff members, the ecosystem of independent local groups being built around its ideas is much larger in scope.
Member groups exist in three cities often promoted as models: in Indianapolis, it’s the Mind Trust. In New Orleans, it’s New Schools for New Orleans. Denver — a district with a self-described portfolio-management team — has two local philanthropies in the Education Cities network, and a new organization recently opened there that Gray says he helped advise.
Potentially representing the next wave of the movement, other member groups operate in cities like Kansas City, Philadelphia, and Oakland, which have not generally embraced the portfolio model.
Those organizations, which Gray calls “quarterbacks,” distribute money to get the portfolio approach off the ground in their cities — supporting schools seen as successful (often both charter and district schools), pushing for policies like common enrollment, and recruiting national education groups like Teach for America, Relay Graduate School of Education, TNTP, and Stand For Children.
Exactly how much money has flowed to support the portfolio model across the country is unclear. But prominent philanthropies, including some that have also spent millions in recent years funding charter schools nationwide, are investing heavily.
Education Cities is supported by a number of them, including the Dell and Walton foundations, as is CRPE. (Walton also supports Chalkbeat. Read more about our funding here.)
Many of the member groups are headed by former charter leaders and receive money from those national foundations, who see their investments as creating proof points that could become models for other cities. The Mind Trust, for instance, says it has raised $77 million since its inception in 2006, the bulk of which cames from local donors and a third from national groups.
The philanthropy that has most clearly embraced the portfolio model is the Arnold Foundation, whose K-12 education work is now led by Neerav Kingsland, the former head of New Schools for New Orleans. The Arnold Foundation has awarded a nearly $2 million grant to Education Cities and millions more to a handful of local quarterback groups, including the Mind Trust.
“If The Mind Trust can help to produce … gains in Indianapolis, the city can serve as a model for other communities across the nation,” John Arnold said in a video explaining his foundation’s investments.
But Education Cities operates on the principle that good ideas alone won’t reshape districts.
“We’re skeptical that systems themselves will actually go through some sort of self-driven transformation,” Gray says.
That’s where the nonprofit “quarterbacks” and their allies come in. They have varying perspectives and priorities, and there isn’t a set sequence of actions that they all take. But for simplicity’s sake, here are three common pieces of their strategy.
Strategy #1: Apply outside pressure.
Rather than waiting for districts to improve their schools, the groups pressure them to change course by directly supporting schools they see as effective and by creating new schools altogether.
The Mind Trust, for instance, partners with Indianapolis Public Schools to help select, fund, and launch new innovation schools. Those schools are run by outside operators, not unionized, and free from district rules around things like teacher pay or length of the school day, though they are officially counted as district schools.
The Philadelphia Schools Partnership, an Education Cities group, funded the opening of five new schools (four charters and one district-run) last school year. Great Public Schools Now, a Los Angeles-based group, pledged nearly $4 million to expand five district schools and has helped pay for a charter school’s new building.
In other cases, that means inviting charter operators to include the local market in their expansion plans, like when the Mind Trust tried to bring the Rocketship charter school network to Indianapolis, though ultimately no Rocketship schools opened there.
The idea is that with new, high-quality schools attracting local students, school districts may have to close their lowest-performing schools to stay solvent — a process some see as a feature, not a bug.
Myrna Castrejón, the head of Great Public Schools Now, at a town hall event. (GPSN)“To the extent that our expansion creates the urgent need for [district] realignment and closures, I think we would be very supportive of that,” said Myrna Castrejón, the head of Great Public Schools Now.
“We believe strongly [that] schools shouldn’t have an automatic right to taxpayer resources in the absence of effectiveness,” said Mark Gleason, the head of the Philadelphia School Partnership.
Advocates for the idea of opening new schools and closing others based on performance often point to New Orleans, where the school district was dismantled after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and has been almost completely replaced by charter schools. Charters there are largely free to operate as their leaders see fit, but their student performance is monitored, and a number have been closed for low test scores.
Test scores have improved dramatically across New Orleans in the years since, though some of those gains appear to have faded recently. Research found a substantial chunk of the improvements came from closing or replacing existing schools.
But the success of school closures or takeovers is far from guaranteed.
Students’ new schools are not necessarily better; for instance, the Achievement School District in Tennessee, which had charter operators take over district schools and has been praised as a leader in implementing the portfolio model, did not improve test scores.
Districts also don’t always close schools quickly, resulting in students and resources being spread thin across all schools. And when they do shutter schools, communities often resist, worrying about the loss of a local institution.
“I’m concerned about the number and burden of closures on particular communities,” said Terrenda White, a professor at the University of Colorado who has questioned the success of Denver’s school reforms. “That means more risk for displacement of kids and teachers.”
Strategy #2: Push for one-stop school enrollment.
Another piece of the portfolio playbook is supporting enrollment systems that allow families to easily choose among district and charter schools.
Adding new schools and new choices can make things harder on parents, who must navigate several enrollment processes to make a choice and get assigned to a school. Common enrollment systems create a single place to navigate it all — while also ensuring that all parents are exposed to new schools, and making it especially clear to district leaders which schools are attracting the fewest students.
“In addition to efficiency for families, unified enrollment helps the system make better decisions about which schools to replicate, recruit, incubate, scale, and maximize and, perhaps, where to locate them,” according to an Education Cities report.
Denver, New Orleans, and Washington D.C. all have common enrollment systems, and Indianapolis just adopted one. In Denver, the use of a streamlined system did in fact increase enrollment in charters among low-income students and English-language learners, though in New Orleans parents said it was actually harder to navigate initially.
"We believe strongly schools shouldn’t have an automatic right to taxpayer resources in the absence of effectiveness."Mark Gleason, Philadelphia School Partnership
In places where this system doesn’t exist, Education Cities groups are often pushing for it.
The Philadelphia Schools Partnership created a detailed plan to unify enrollment in the city’s district, charter and private schools, though the idea hasn’t taken off. Oakland-based Educate78 also spearheaded an ultimately unsuccessful effort to create a common system for district and charter schools with a $300,000 grant. The head of SchoolSmartKC, a Kansas City group, has testified before the state legislature in favor of a unified system, though the district’s superintendent says he’s skeptical.
While charter critics see the approach as a veiled effort to expand charters, centralized systems like this have also drawn another surprising adversary: more conservative supporters of school choice.
These free-market charter supporters fear that a single entity — a portfolio manager — with the power to manage enrollment and choose which schools to open and close would actually limit choice, put too much focus on test scores, and risk allowing unions to wrest control of the entire apparatus.
In fact, in 2016 it was Betsy DeVos, now the U.S. Secretary of Education, who was the key opponent of a plan to create a commission to act like a portfolio manager in Detroit, an effort spearheaded by an Education Cities member group in the city.
Strategy #3: Create a very different power structure.
Outside groups like the Education Cities quarterbacks can only do so much to implement this vision.
To see it brought to life requires the buy-in of the school board, mayor, or state — whoever runs the schools. That’s why the portfolio approach has gained particular traction in districts where states have taken over the schools, including New Orleans, Newark, and Lawrence, Massachusetts.
The groups and schools that the Indianapolis-based Mind Trust — whose logo is at the center — have supported. (The Mind Trust)
In other instances, supporters of charter schools have pushed change in school districts by working to fill local school boards with people sympathetic to the portfolio model.
Indianapolis is a case in point. The Mind Trust recruited Stand For Children, an advocacy organization that supports political candidates. In the 2012 election, Stand-endorsed candidates shifted control of the school board.
The organization doesn’t have to disclose how much it spent to support school board members in the city, but Stand for Children’s annual report says that in 2012, it “help[ed] elect two new members to the Indianapolis Public Schools board, which [led] to the exit of an ineffective superintendent.” The report also claims credit for school board victories in 2014 and 2016.
The capture of the school board cleared the way for many subsequent changes, including the hiring of a superintendent Lewis Ferebee who has supported a portfolio vision of the school district.
“If you look at Indianapolis, there’s no way to implement the vision without democratically controlled support,” Gray said.
School boards favorable to a portfolio-aligned vision have also been elected in Denver and more recently in Los Angeles, with financial backing from wealthy advocates of charter schools. Those charter school supporters have matched and sometimes exceeded spending by unions in a number of school board races previously dominated by teachers groups.
The portfolio model undercuts the unions and associations that represent teachers in other ways. The biggest is by reducing the number of schools whose teachers belong to the union, diminishing the union’s membership — and thus its power and its money.
The degree to which this is true depends on the political climate: in Indianapolis, innovation network schools are not under the district’s collective bargaining agreement, and thus lose certain job protections. Denver’s innovation schools can waive certain parts of the union contract, though teachers can still choose to join the union.
But most charter schools are not unionized. In New Orleans, soon after Hurricane Katrina teachers in the existing district were unilaterally fired, gutting the United Teachers of New Orleans, which has since organized at a handful of charters.
To some advocates, the reduction in union strength is integral to the model. They see an entrenched bureaucracy, maintained by “adult interests” — usually code for teachers unions — as the problem, and the portfolio vision as the solution.
“More than any other single reform this model breaks the political stranglehold interest groups have over elected school boards,” writes Osborne in his book “Reinventing America’s Schools.” (Osborne recently compared teachers unions’ opposition to charter school expansion in Massachusetts to George Wallace’s promotion of mandated school segregation.) Osborne’s work has been funded by prominent philanthropic supporters of charter schools and the portfolio model: the Arnold, Broad, and Walton foundations.
Some worry about the role of philanthropy, big-money donors, and state takeovers as undermining local, democratic control.
"We’re skeptical that systems themselves will actually go through some sort of self-driven transformation."Ethan Gray, Education Cities“As elected school board members, once our term is up, we come back up for consideration,” said Jennifer Wolfsie, a school board member in Kansas City. “If the constituents I serve are not happy they have the opportunity … to vote me out,” she said. “In philanthropy, there isn’t that process.”
Huriya Jabbar, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin who has studied New Orleans schools post-Katrina, acknowledges the large test-score gains in the city as a result of the reforms. But, she said, that came with a cost: community buy-in, in the wake of the mass dismissal of New Orleans’ largely black teaching force and the state takeover of most of the city schools.
“Even advocates of the reforms have acknowledged that the one thing they got wrong was community,” Jabbar said. “And I think of that as quite a big thing.”
The future: The portfolio idea in the DeVos era
Exactly how far these groups will be able to push their school districts toward a new way of running its schools is unclear. Few places are like Indianapolis or Denver, with strong political support for the model — and New Orleans’ hurricane-induced changes make it entirely unique.
New quarterback-style groups have continued to emerge, including ones recently formed in Atlanta, Denver, Kansas City, and Memphis. But other Education Cities members have faced setbacks.
In Nashville, the group Project Renaissance recently scaled back its operations, and despite heavy involvement from Stand for Children, charter skeptics maintained control of the school board in elections last year. A Detroit group also recently closed down, though the Skillman Foundation there remains an Education Cities member.
One place where there is no Education Cities group: New York City, which under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg was held up as a model by portfolio advocates like Paul Hill. That approach was substantially altered by Bloomberg’s replacement, Bill de Blasio, who has been cool to charters, slowed school closures, and reduced principals’ autonomy.
These setbacks underscore the challenges portfolio advocates will face in advancing their vision. Even its supporters disagree on a number of points — how clear their case is for a nationwide expansion, what strategies to pursue, and whether the model can work for district-run schools.
Meanwhile, the effort comes in a perilous time for charter school supporters, as nationwide support has dropped and they have become linked to an unpopular president and education secretary.
But for left-of-center charter backers, the portfolio approach presents an opportunity to position their brand of school choice as distinct from DeVos and other conservatives, who emphasize private school vouchers and want few limits on parent choice.
“Our model is probably different from the model of the [Trump] administration, and it’s not the same model of, if you would, a traditional school district,” said Henderson Lewis Jr., the head of the district that oversees New Orleans charters, in a recent interview. “We’re somewhere in the middle, which I see as a third way.”
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'Ethan Gray, head of Education Cities'.
Here in Baltimore our Baltimore City Hall and Baltimore Development Corporation ---Greater Baltimore Committee, and global hedge fund corporation JOHNS HOPKINS are already MOVING FORWARD the killing of AMERICAN PUBLIC K-UNIVERSITY with this THE CITY FUND policy bringing out all those far-right wing 5% freemason/Greek player global banking non-profits to PRETEND all this is good for the poor.
The REAL LEFT SOCIAL PROGRESSIVE education policy stance is killing all these NGOs tied to far-right wing and rebuild our US Federal public school funding system tied to US CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS----tied to US BILL OF RIGHTS-----tied to several decades of FEDERAL COURT PRECEDENCE.
How hard is it to get all these global banking NGOs out of our US city government? It is as EASY PEASY as getting rid of all global banking 5% player pols black, white, and brown. All our US public education structure is still in place----the system has simply been corrupted by CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA.
Destroy Public Education, Version 2.0: The City Fund
August 29, 2018 by Thomas Ultican
Credit: Pixabay
By Thomas Ultican / Tultican
Billionaire Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings, has joined with billionaire former Enron executive, John Arnold, to launch an aggressive destroy public education (DPE) initiative. They claim to have invested $100 million each to start The City Fund. Neerav Kingsland declares he is the Fund’s Managing Partner and says the fund will help cities across America institute proven school reform successes such as increasing “the number of public schools that are governed by non-profit organizations.”
Ending local control of public schools through democratic means is a priority for DPE forces. In 2017, EdSource reported on Hastings campaign against democracy; writing, “His latest salvo against school boards that many regard as a bedrock of American democracy came last week in a speech he made to the annual conference of The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools in Washington D.C., attended by about 4,500 enthusiastic charter school advocates, teachers and administrators.”
When announcing the new fund, Kingsland listed fourteen founding members of The City Fund. There is little professional classroom teaching experience or training within the group. Chris Barbic was a Teach for America (TFA) teacher in Houston, Texas for two years. Similarly, Kevin Huffman was also a TFA teacher in Houston for three years. The only other member that may have some education experience is Kevin Shafer. His background is obscure.
The operating structure of the new fund is modeled after a law firm. Six of the fourteen founding members are lawyers: Gary Borden; David Harris; Kevin Huffman; Neerav Kingsland; Jessica Pena and Kameelah Shaheed-Diallo.
Ready to Pilfer Community Schools and End School Boards
In a 2012 published debate about school reform, Kingsland justified his call for ending democratic control of public education writing,
“I believe that true autonomy can only be achieved by government relinquishing its power of school operation. I believe that well regulated charter and voucher markets – that provide educators with public funds to operate their own schools – will outperform all other vehicles of autonomy in the long-run. In short, autonomy must be real autonomy: government operated schools that allow “site level decision making” feels more Orwellian than empowering – if we believe educators should run schools, let’s let them run schools.”
This is a belief in “the invisible hand” of markets making superior judgments and private businesses always outperforming government administration. There may be some truth here, but it is certainly not an ironclad law.
The City Fund has distinct roots stretching back to early 2016.
On April 4 that year, Kingsland announced on his blog, Relinquishment, “Very excited about this update: Ken Bubp and Chris Barbic are joining the combined efforts of the Laura and John Arnold Foundation and Hastings Fund.”
In January of 2016, Philanthropy News Digest reported, “Netflix founder and CEO Reed Hastings has announced that he has created a $100 million fund at the (SVCF) that will be focused on education.”
The Silicon Valley Community Foundation is a donor-directed fund, so Hastings’s fund is dark money with no way of tracking where its tax-free spending is directed. The SVCF 2016 tax form shows Neerav Kingsland earning $253,846 as a Managing Director of the Hastings fund. He was also simultaneously serving as Senior Education Fellow at the Arnold Foundation and was on the board at the California Charter Schools Association.
The SVCF was founded in 2006 and has grown to be one of the largest non-profit charities in America. The tax form cited above shows a total income in 2016 of $4.4 billion and end of year assets of $7.2 billion while making grants totaling to $1.9 billion.
A March 2018 article in Chalkbeat reported,
“Eleven years after founding a nonprofit that has dramatically reshaped Indianapolis schools, David Harris is stepping down to help launch an as yet unexplained national education group.”
“The national group is in the early stages of development, said Harris, who declined to provide more details about his co-founders or their plans. A release from The Mind Trust said the new organization aims to ‘help cities around the country build the right conditions for education change.’”
Much of the description of The City Fund sounds like the activities of the national DPE organization, Education Cities. At the end of July, the Education Cities website disclosed,
“Today, we are announcing that Education Cities is undergoing an evolution that we think will better support local education leaders.
“Several staff from Education Cities – including our Founder and CEO, Ethan Gray – are partnering with colleagues from the philanthropic, non-profit, district, charter, and state sectors to create a new non-profit organization called The City Fund.”
The City Fund has not shared a web-address, but they have clearly started work. Four of the announced members have updated their LinkedIn profiles indicating they started working for The City Fund in either June or July.
The City Fund’s central agenda is promoting the portfolio model of school reform. Schools scoring in the bottom 5 percent on standardized testing are to be closed and reopened as charter schools or Innovation schools. In either case, the local community loses their right to hold elected leaders accountable, because the schools are removed from the school boards portfolio.
Even Jay P. Greene of the University of Arkansas wrote an open letter to John Arnold warning about what a bad idea the portfolio model is. He began, “The Arnold Foundation invests heavily in another initiative that promotes rigorous science for medical and policy decision-making, yet they do not seem to apply that same standard of proof to their own education strategy.’
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We will end this week's discussion of education public policy by returning to a topic often discussed----TEACH FOR AMERICA as that global banking 1% privatized teaching corporation which is literally forcing our public school teachers to join them as they get forced to retire or are fired by our local SCHOOL BOARDS-----under FALSE pretenses.
What is sad for our American 99% WE THE PEOPLE is watching our citizens simply fighting to have a job-------being pushed into the national media as the face of support for these EDUCATION REFORMS----made to look like WINNERS when they are tied to THE CITY TRUSTS and GREAT SCHOOLS RATING CORPORATIONS for corporate K-career schools on STOCK MARKET.
Folks, we are MOVING FORWARD to an end of US FED/US WALL STREET as ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE creates ONE CENTRAL BANK with only private stock options open to only the global 1%. No one is WINNING in future income supporting all these EDUCATION TRUSTS ---HOUSING TRUSTS-----LAND BANK TRUSTS.
'When announcing the new fund, Kingsland listed fourteen founding members of The City Fund. There is little professional classroom teaching experience or training within the group. Chris Barbic was a Teach for America (TFA) teacher in Houston, Texas for two years'.
We do not see HAPPY CAMPERS in our TEACH FOR AMERICA CORPORATE education employees.
We do not see HAPPY CAMPERS in our TEACH FOR AMERICA CORPORATE education employees. Of course our global banking 5% player international labor leaders simply see organizing TEACH FOR AMERICA as the solution---soon those same 5% labor players will be organizing ROBOTS and AI----well, not really.
If 350 million US citizens black, white, and brown and our new to US immigrant citizens do not support this----work to STOP MOVING FORWARD we can indeed FIX BALTIMORE by building a REAL public K-university.
This is to where all our US STEM college grads were forced to work----not in their careers but pushing BAD EDUCATION POLICIES
'Teach for America, a program which places high-achieving college graduates as teachers in low-income schools around the country',
US CITIES AS FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES------are those CITY TRUSTS.
Teach For America under heavy fire from educators and former members
Critics allege that the program destabilizes schools and communities and questioned its role in privatization of education
Teach for America, a program which places high-achieving college graduates as teachers in low-income schools around the country, is coming under heavy criticism by educators who allege its training for teachers is insufficient and that it destabilizes schools and communities.
About 100 of those critics assembled in Chicago last weekend at the Free Minds Free People education conference to discuss "organizing resistance against Teach for America", which is one of the most well-known efforts to improve the nation's flagging educational system. Its educators represent less than 1% of teachers in the US.
TFA alumni, parents, community activists and veteran teachers gathered to discuss concerns over the role the program plays in the privatization of education. Their criticisms fall in line with those mounted against the program in the past: that the seven-week training program is insufficient, that it destabilizes schools with short-term teachers, and that it disenfranchises communities. In 2009, USA Today reported on concerns that the program's teachers were displacing older educators.
"In the end, I felt the way I was teaching brought me and my students and their communities pain, and that's why I'm part of this movement now," said Hannah Price, a TFA alumna and current teacher who attended the meeting in Chicago. "It doesn't have to be like that."
"We certainly have areas of improvements are looking to be better, but based on what we hear from the principals that employ our teachers and the results we see in organizations where our alumni play leadership roles, we have had a positive impact, and that has to be part of the discussion," said TFA spokesman Steve Mancini.
Problems in New Orleans
TFA participants, usually recent college graduates who have majored in subjects other than teaching, must pass a test before they are are placed in schools in low-income communities for a two-year commitment. They undergo seven weeks of training before the school year begins, and continue to receive coaching from veteran teachers, a TFA coach and an alumni network throughout their commitment.
Price began her two-year commitment in New Orleans in 2010 and said she felt unprepared to teach. She said she was distressed by things including an expectation that she should keep her students silent in the hallways, at lunch and in reading periods.
"It felt so unnatural, but I didn't have the experience or language to process how detrimental that was to students," Price said.
Price was on the verge of quitting until she started using resources outside TFA to augment her teaching and help her connect with the local community. Price still works as a teacher in New Orleans, and she credits veteran teacher Stephanie Anders for providing her with the support to continue with the program.
The two met at the New Teachers' Roundtable, a group that encourages new teachers to think critically about the New Orleans public school system. Anders, now a doctoral student at the University of New Orleans, said that before joining the group: "I had kind of thought of the TFA people as bad guys."
Anders is a traditionally trained teacher, with multiple professional certifications and extensive experience as an instructional coach for teachers. Yet she has been unable to find a full-time teaching position in New Orleans and she feels TFA's permeation of the New Orleans school system has played a role in that. This year, approximately 375 New Orleans teachers are members of TFA, up from 85 a few years ago.
Louisiana state officials laid off more than 7,000 employees and took over 102 of 117 city schools after Hurricane Katrina left the city's population scattered in 2005. When it was time to rehire teachers, the government overlooked the fired employees, who have since won a $1.5bn class action lawsuit which the school system is appealing. At the same time, Teach for America's New Orleans program thrived, creating tension in the city's educational community.
Mancini, the TFA spokesman, said those hiring decisions were made by school principals, not the program.
"Teach for America, for over 20 years, has brought smart, caring and dedicated people into education and work in low-income communities," Mancini said. "Over 80% of our alumni are either working in schools or in education or in low-income communities."
ISN'T THAT A COINCIDENCE----FOR 20 YEARS OF CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA OUR US COLLEGE GRADS HAVE NOT BEEN ABLE TO FIND JOBS IN THEIR DEGREE FIELDS----THEY ARE BEING PUSHED TO TEACH FOR AMERICA.
The organization has long used data to defend criticisms, though many feel the reports are skewed and a fair study comparing a TFA teacher to a traditionally trained teacher doesn't yet exist.
TFA's co-chief executives recently completed a "listening tour" during which they received feedback from members, community members and alumni who provided "a wide range of opinions", said Mancini.
"Teach for America is not the only program who has teachers who struggle in their first year – teachers in traditional programs struggle," said Mancini. "The question should be how do we help first year teachers improve and grow, how do they become constant learners in the classroom. We're constantly thinking about the feedback to give those teachers to get better."