Reagan/Clinton started the defunding and dismantlement of our public K-12, Bush mandated No Child Left Behind setting student achievement goals but left it UNFUNDED-----knowing as Federal funding for public schools were being continually cut-----those NCLB achievement goals would not be met----THEY KNEW THIS AND DID THIS DELIBERATELY because now during Obama those Bush achievement goals are being used as the excuse for failed public schools ---failing students and global education corporations are now saying THEY ARE THE ANSWER. It's the same as defunding and allowing public buses to become so dysfunctional just to say WE NEED TO BRING THIS GLOBAL TRANSPORTATION CORPORATION in to do that service......SAME THING.
Now we have Race to the Top----another Bush era education privatization reform funded the first few years with more student achievement goals and VOILA-----now there is no funding but the goals are still there.
Republican voters were sold the policy of community charters, school choice, and Teach for America/VISTA as teachers as US cities like Baltimore pushed all teachers in city schools out saying they were BAD TEACHERS. Remember, it has always been the lack of funding and resources and education funding actually GETTING TO THE CLASSROOMS that has been the problem and this situation is GETTING FAR WORSE. So now, Baltimore has over 1/2 of teachers being Teach for America and VISTA and those employees are now sitting around discussing how they cannot do their jobs because there are NO FUNDING OR RESOURCES. Another set of people sitting around Wall Street Baltimore Development and a very, very, very neo-conservative Johns Hopkins' 'justice' non-profits---this time for education ----saying the same thing said last decade---two decades ago----and three decades ago since Reagan/Clinton.
WE KNOW IT IS NOT THE STUDENTS WHO CANNOT ACHIEVE----WE KNOW MOST TEACHERS ARE DOING THE BEST ANYONE CAN-----AND WE KNOW IT IS ALL ABOUT BAD EDUCATION POLICY AND THE SUCKING OF ALL CITY, STATE, AND FEDERAL FUNDING TO GLOBAL CORPORATIONS AND WALL STREET.
If all the corporate education non-profits are funded by these very institutions----they will never talk or take action to fix THE GORILLA IN THE ROOM!
This is what US NGOs overseas do in developing nations----they create corporate non-profits which get all the funding to install the policies they want----since the goals are not to help people but to maximize corporate profit, the policies they create simply advance corporate goals.
Baltimore has had so much history of corporate non-profits replacing their Baltimore City public agencies---in this case the Baltimore Department of Education----that now they have FOUNDATIONS CONTROLLING CORPORATE NON-PROFITS. Keep in mind, all citizens in Baltimore KNOW WHAT POLICIES ARE NEEDED IN OUR PUBLIC SCHOOLS----they remember when all structures were in public schools and were working for the children but they are being FORCED to advance what these global investment firms are funding.
Press Releases
Baltimore Foundations Help Non-Profits Develop Earned Income Ventures
February 9, 2004 Open Society Institute–Baltimore
Baltimore Foundations Help Non-Profits Develop Earned Income Ventures
BALTIMORE—A financial services center in West Baltimore and an upholstery business that prepares disadvantaged women for family-sustaining careers are two of the eight winning social ventures chosen to be part of the new Baltimore Community Wealth Collaborative.The Collaborative, a partnership between The Annie E. Casey Foundation (AECF), the Open Society Institute-Baltimore (OSI), the Goldseker Foundation, the Alvin and Fanny B. Thalheimer Foundation, the Aaron Straus and Lillie Straus Foundation, the Baltimore Community Foundation, the University of Baltimore and Community Wealth Ventures (CWV), will provide 10 months of focused technical support to help the businesses become financially viable. The goal is to help the for-profit social ventures earn revenue to help support their non-profit parent organizations.
"At a time when funding for organizations that are meeting critical needs in our community continues to tighten, this Collaborative is crucial," said Baltimore Mayor Martin O’Malley who has supported the concept from its inception. "It will not only strengthen the city’s non-profit community, but also create jobs and opportunity in our neighborhoods."
The winning ventures were announced at a press conference today. Representatives from the non-profits were on hand for the announcement.
"Our objective in advancing these nonprofit social enterprises is to foster greater sustainability among critical human services organizations in the Baltimore community, so they can weather difficult economic times and expand their non-profit services to meet new or growing needs," said Diana Morris, director of OSI-Baltimore.
Thirty-seven nonprofit organizations applied to be part of the Collaborative. The finalists were chosen after an extensive screening process, including site visits and personal interviews. Participants include: BioTechnical Institute of Maryland, Bon Secours of Maryland Foundation, Caroline Center, Chesapeake Center for Youth Development, Goodwill Industries of the Chesapeake, Parks & People Foundation, Patterson Park Community Development Corporation, and Vehicles for Change.
CWV will provide technical assistance and support for the businesses, including in-depth monthly seminars with peer non-profit leaders and experts in the fields of social enterprise and business development, as well as customized business consulting. CWV has chosen to partner with the University of Baltimore for the project. Both graduate graphic design students and M.B.A. candidates in the entrepreneurship program will provide research and management assistance to participating organizations. In addition, business executives from leading Baltimore-area corporations will serve as mentors.
"The Casey Foundation's history of working for positive outcomes for families plus our 10-year commitment to the Baltimore community inspired us to support this terrific initiative,” said Donna Stark, director of leadership development at AECF. "Financial sustainability is a crucial issue for nonprofits. This initiative provides the strategies, the tools and the peer networks to respond to the challenges they face."
The social ventures range from a used car business to the Hollywood Diner, which was a location site for the movie Diner and other films including Tin Men and Sleepless in Seattle. The diner, operated by the Chesapeake Center for Youth Development, trains at-risk youth for Baltimore’s growing hospitality industry. The technical assistance provided by Community Wealth Ventures will lead to a new business plan, and it will help generate additional revenue to support education, job training, and after-school programs for children.
The Bon Secours of Maryland Foundation applied for help expanding and improving its financial services center in West Baltimore, which is currently financed through grants. Located in a part of town that is often ignored by banks, the center—called Our Money Place—offers low-income residents an alternative to check cashing operations that charge high fees. Our Money Place is planning to use the technical assistance to expand its range of services and to reach out to middle-income neighborhood residents.
"We have found that our neighborhood is a strong market for financial services," said Kevin Jordan, associate director for economic and community development. "By providing a lower cost alternative to the current market options, we think we can help keep money in the community and also become self-sufficient as a business."
Another non-profit participant, the Caroline Center, plans to expand its fledgling upholstery training program into a business. Started in the fall of 2001 under the guidance of a retired master upholsterer, the program teaches upholstering skills to unemployed or underemployed women in Baltimore. The women may even earn while they learn as they receive a percentage of the fees for customer pieces. The Caroline Center will use the assistance from the collaborative to structure and launch a retail upholstery shop. Profits from the business will support the center’s overall mission of enabling more women in the community to gain employment skills and become self-sufficient.
A selection team comprising Community Wealth Ventures, local educators, and Baltimore business representatives chose the winning organizations because they are mission-focused, have business ventures under way or have done considerable research towards developing a business venture, have strong boards of directors, and are willing to take calculated risks to build their financial base.
"A focused effort like this will support nonprofit social enterprise leaders who are using community wealth to diversify their revenues and better support their missions," said CWV Chairman Bill Shore. "Our goal is to ensure the ongoing viability of these organizations that are doing so much good in Baltimore."
The Annie E. Casey Foundation is a private charitable organization dedicated to helping build better futures for disadvantaged children in the United States. It was established in 1948 by Jim Casey, one of the founders of United Parcel Service, and his siblings, who named the foundation in honor of their mother. The primary mission of the foundation is to foster public policies, human-service reforms, and community supports that more effectively meet the needs of today's vulnerable children and families. In pursuit of this goal, the foundation makes grants that help states, cities, and neighborhoods fashion more innovative, cost-effective responses to these needs. For more information, visit the foundation's website, www.aecf.org.
The Open Society Institute (OSI) is a private operating and grantmaking foundation that promotes the development of open society around the world. OSI's U.S. Programs seek to strengthen democracy in the United States by addressing barriers to opportunity and justice, broadening public discussion about such barriers, and assisting marginalized groups to participate equally in civil society and to make their voices heard. U.S. Programs challenge over-reliance on the market by advocating appropriate government responsibility for human needs and promoting public interest and service values in law, medicine, and the media. OSI's U.S. Programs support initiatives in a range of areas, including access to justice for low and moderate income people; independence of the judiciary; ending the death penalty; reducing gun violence and over-reliance on incarceration; drug policy reform; inner-city education and youth programs; fair treatment of immigrants; reproductive health and choice; campaign finance reform; and improved care of the dying. OSI is part of the network of foundations, created and funded by George Soros, active in more than 50 countries around the world.
The Goldseker Foundation was created in 1975 through the generosity and foresight of Morris Goldseker (1898-1973). The foundation supports nonprofit organizations helping communities and individuals in the Baltimore metropolitan area. Visit www.goldsekerfoundation.org for more information.
The Alvin and Fanny B. Thalheimer Foundation supports programs that improve the lives of individuals and families by expanding access to education and economic opportunity, promoting self-sufficiency, and supporting local responses to problems in order to strengthen communities and advance interfaith and intergroup understanding. Through its grantmaking programs, the foundation aims to remove structural and institutional impediments to human development and to have a positive lasting effect on people's lives. Visit www.blaufund.org/foundations/alvinandfanny_f.html for more information.
The Aaron & Lillie Straus Foundation’s mission is two-pronged. The foundation promotes and sustains a strong Jewish community both locally and worldwide, and secures better futures for vulnerable children by helping to build family and community supports which nurture their educational, social, economic, and physical well-being. In order to meet this mission, the foundation funds in three specific program areas: Jewish community services; families, children and youth; and capacity building of the non-profit sector. For more information about the foundation, visit its website at www.strausfoundation.org.
The Baltimore Community Foundation (BCF) helps all kinds of people to carry out their individual philanthropic plans, with the common goal of improving the quality of life in the Baltimore region, today and for generations to come. To donors, BCF offers a complete toolkit for charitable giving, expert assistance in learning more about the causes they care about, and the opportunity to join others with similar interests to learn and give together. To the community at large, BCF offers a permanent, growing source of grant monies, as well as a common meeting ground and leadership on important issues in our region. Visit www.bcf.org for more information about the Baltimore Community Fund.
The University of Baltimore (UB) is an upper-division, graduate and professional university. UB, the state’s career-minded university, is a member of the University System of Maryland and comprises the School of Law, the Yale Gordon College of Liberal Arts and the Merrick School of Business. Visit www.ubalt.edu for more information.
Community Wealth Ventures, a subsidiary of Share Our Strength, is a consulting firm that works to generate new resources for the social sector using business ventures and corporate partnerships. Community Wealth Ventures provides consulting services for a broad range of clients in the nonprofit, corporate, and foundation communities.
Visit www.communitywealth.com for more information.
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You see this was in 2004---during Bush era and O'Malley as then Mayor of Baltimore was installing all this mess. This was part of the CitiStat data collection where data was presented as if these bad policies were helping or good when in fact they were not. The local media would report the bad data supporting the bad education policy and then a few years later an outside auditing organization would reveal all the education data was skewed.
All of that revenue being sent in by these foundations are mostly revenue that was redirected from the city's services and misappropriated to make a few corporations very rich.
Of course when these foundations are connected to say a Bill Gates they will be promoting Gates and global education corporation policies like Race to the Top and Common Core. Baltimore has been captured to this structure unable to advance because it has both Bush/Hopkins Wall Street global corporate NEO-CONS and Clinton/Obama Wall Street global corporate neo-liberals controlling all pols and 'justice' non-profits including our education non-profits. Again, the grassroots citizens wanting real change are not the problem----it is the leadership that directs the conversations and priorities always making it seem it comes from the committees.
THIS IS WHAT HAS OUR US CITIES AND IT IS WHY US CITIES ARE EITHER VOTING HILLARY OR ELECTION FRAUD IS GEARED TOWARDS ADVANCING HILLARY AND WALL STREET GLOBAL MAYORS AND GOVERNORS. THIS IS OUR people's Democratic Party.
Bill Gates Supports GreatNonprofits in Series on Innovation
GreatNonprofits highlighted on Gates Notes
We’re thrilled to share that GreatNonprofits has been recognized for our work in collecting community feedback by Bill Gates, visionary Microsoft founder and leading philanthropist. In a special series on his Gates Notes blog, Bill and Melinda Gates showed praise for GreatNonprofits for its innovative work in transforming the way people give online:
“GreatNonprofits focuses on helping people make great giving decisions through socially sourced feedback and reviews. Increasing the amount and quality of information available to donors will ultimately make giving easier, more effective and rewarding.”
GreatNonprofits CEO Perla Ni also recently guest-penned a Gates Notes post, which we’ve included below. In her post, Ni stresses the importance of including the voices of nonprofit “clients” to help nonprofits, government agencies, and grantmakers alike to visualize on-the-ground impact of nonprofits and also learn ways in which programs can be improved.
Note: GreatNonprofits is supported in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, where Bill Gates is co-chair.
“How can donors and nonprofits measurably improve funding decisions, show program results and pave the way for improvements? One practical and cost-effective way is to empower people to participate by sharing their experiences and insights about nonprofits.
That’s why I invite you to check out GreatNonprofits.org, which offers donors crowd-sourced feedback. It also provides charitable organizations with tools to collect and aggregate community feedback – from clients served, legislators, volunteers, partner organizations, or donors.
To date, GreatNonprofits has collected feedback for more than 14,000 US and international organizations ranging from health, education, to public policy groups.
This is a new experience for the nonprofit sector, which has traditionally lacked real-time, on the ground, feedback. But it’s also the wave of the future – practical, cost-effective tools can provide guidance to grant makers and nonprofits in creating and recalibrating programs.
Whether we are donors, nonprofit executives or clients of a nonprofit, we should all be sharing feedback on which nonprofits are making a difference, how they are doing it, and how it can be improved.”
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Wrap-around services called community schools as I have said is the same public structure that used to be in all public K-12 only defunded and dismantled. Now global pols are bringing those services back as global corporate non-profits all subject to funding sources-----only a few schools get them others don't and then schools find themselves begging for continued funding until these non-profits disappear. This policy is PROGRESSIVE POSING----it looks to address the problem all US citizens know must happen to have healthy schools but global pols do not intend to keep them as they continue to advance killing public K-12 and moving all schools to global corporate campuses and their control. This has advance far in Baltimore as Johns Hopkins controls all education policy----using schools as development tools---and align all public schools to corporate campuses leaving parents in Baltimore no choices other than to go to those schools.
THIS IS A BILL GATES CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA K-12 EDUCATION PRIVATIZATION POLICY AND ANY GROUP OR POL PROMOTING IT WORKS FOR WALL STREET AND NOT CITIZENS.
Raise your hand if you know parents, students, teachers in each community public school knows what policies and funding is needed to make their schools successful----EVERYONE. If you follow these non-profits to their top funding source they are all connected to global investment firms and global education corporations simply moving into the US education market as global education businesses.
INVESTMENT SCHOOLS----MEANING FORGET FEDERAL EQUAL PROTECTION AND DISTRIBUTION OF FUNDING TO ALL SCHOOLS DEEMED 'PUBLIC'.
Remember, the problem with funding for our public schools is massive corporate fraud and government corruption------the complete disregard of collecting corporate taxes and subsidizing corporations----THAT IS THE PROBLEM WITH FUNDING. Any organization that partners in this is receiving their donations from those entities committing fraud.
Cleveland's Investment Schools: "Wraparound" services plans are a step closer after community meetings finish
The Cleveland school district's Lisa Baskin (in red) and the United Way's Juliana Cole (to the right) tell residents of the John Adams High School neighborhood about socioal service plans for the school Wednesday night in the school's library. (Patrick O'Donnell/The Plain Dealer)
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By Patrick O'Donnell, The Plain Dealer
on January 25, 2014 at 8:00 AM, updated January 25, 2014 at 12:04 PM
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The Cleveland schools and United Way have started work on providing better services to kids at 17 schools, including the district's 13 "Investment Schools," but the plans at each building are far from taking shape.
This week the district and United Way of Greater Cleveland had the last of 17 meetings to introduce the community to the agencies that will take the lead at each school. The series closed after meetings with College Now at John Adams High School, the Boys and Girls Clubs of Cleveland at Benesch elementary school and the Cleveland Play House at Jamison elementary.
Meanwhile, the agencies for nine of the 17 schools have picked their site coordinator -- the person who will work in each school full time to connect students and programs.
The other coordinators should be hired by the first week of February, said Juliana Cole, education programs associate for the United Way, and Lisa Baskin, head of the social service “wraparound” strategy for the district.
“We want to get someone in the school as soon as possible, but we want to get the right person,” Cole told 30 people at the John Adams meeting Wednesday night.
Baskin told family members just learning about the strategy that coordinators will try to find pre-school and after-school programs for students, tutoring programs and other social supports students and families need, taking that pressure off principals and teachers.
“Our teachers are going to be able to focus on teaching and education and the principals can focus on leadership of the building,” Baskin told the handful of residents at Benesch Thursday afternoon. Benesch is the new location for students previously at the closed Stokes elementary.
The district and United Way are starting this “wraparound” services program at 13 struggling schools that the district chose last spring as “Investment Schools” -- buildings to receive special attention to boost performance using money from the tax increase voters passed for the schools in 2012.
Four other schools -- H. Barbara Booker, Harvey Rice, East Technical High School and Marion Sterling -- will receive similar social supports but are not designated as Investment Schools.
All schools involved and the lead agencies working with them are listed below.
Cole and Baskin said the attendance at Benesch was low because of snow that afternoon. They said most meetings drew crowds similar to what was at John Adams. The largest was at R.G. Jones elementary, where 200 were in attendance because the school held it on a day with other events, including a presentation by the Efficacy Institute, which has brought a new approach to student motivation to that school this year.
At the community meetings, Baskin and Cole have asked residents to split into groups to identify what strengths they want the site coordinator to have, what assets -- organizations, facilities, experts -- the neighborhood has, what partnerships they want to see the district create and what they would ideally see from the school.
Answers to those questions at the Adams and Benesch meetings were mostly generalizations.
Parents wanted an outgoing, friendly, caring coordinator who understands the neighborhood and can relate to the children.
Individual discussion groups sometimes added a few specifics. At Benesch, one group asked for Girl Scout and Cub Scout meetings at the schools and other non-sport activities that could include serving children dinner.
One group at John Adams asked for someone to help families with children who are making the transition from eighth grade to high school.
Cole told residents not to expect too many changes over the first few months while site coordinators settle in. She said similar programs in other cities have generally led to increased attendance within a year.
The schools and agencies in the program are:
Alfred A. Benesch
Boys & Girls Clubs of Cleveland
Anton Grdina
Burton, Bell, Carr Development, Inc.
Case
Rainey Institute
Collinwood High School
OhioGuidestone
East Tech High School
Friendly Inn Settlement Corporation
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Boys & Girls Clubs of Cleveland
H. Barbara Booker
West Side Community House
Harvey Rice
The Centers for Families and Children
John Adams High School
College Now Greater Cleveland
Kenneth Clement Boys’ Leadership Academy
Case Western Reserve University (pending contract approval)
Lincoln West High School
Esperanza, Inc.
Luis Munoz Marin
Esperanza, Inc.
Marion Sterling
No lead agency named. Wraparound services supported through School Improvement Grant dollars.
Mound
University Settlement
Robert Jamison
Cleveland Play House
Robinson G. Jones
Bellaire-Puritas Development Corporation
Walton
Esperanza, Inc.
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'GLOBAL BOYS AND GIRLS CLUB'
If you know our once local Boys and Girls Club and YMCA are now global corporations working in a ONE WORLD way to install the same societal structures in the US as exist overseas in International Economic Zones----then you know these are not local, grassroots non--profits---they are Wall Street Baltimore Development global corporate non-profits and directors work for those corporate foundations and not for citizens in each community. That is why they come in a take over----citizens have no voice in what happens or how funding is used. So, instead of Maryland or Baltimore revenue coming to each public school for the parents, teachers, and students to decide how to spend it=====all government revenue is going to these global corporations. Baltimore has suffered greatly because of this and it is the most direct cause of Baltimore being a THIRD WORLD city in measures of all quality of life.
PLEASE STOP JOINING THESE WALL STREET BALTIMORE DEVELOPMENT 'JUSTICE' NON-PROFITS----BE YOUR OWN ACTIVIST BY EDUCATING AND SPEAKING WITH YOUR OWN VOICE.
Cities like Baltimore allowed these structures to take hold no doubt because of race and class issues----people thought this was only about the poor-----but as always happens it becomes about EVERYONE and now that once silent middle-class are falling into this system as the schools close getting fewer and more selective and VOILA-----all families in Baltimore not affluent are feeling completely dis-empowered.
GLOBAL BOYS AND GIRLS CLUB
Our work
57%
The Club Saved my Life
62%
Club helped me commit to my education
67%
The Club kept me out of trouble with the Law
85%
The Club taught me Right from Wrong
Education and Career Programs
Leading youth toward a better career path, these programs are armed with effective educational tools and efficient academic courses. Preparing the youth for the outside world, each of these programs is fortified with opportunities for career exploration and educational enhancement.
Character and Leadership Programs
Preparing youth to become a better citizen, responsible and caring, these programs catered specifically to inspire and motivate youth towards a sensible life path. Enhancing their leadership skills, decision-making, and planning, each of these programs is designed to develop and enhance their overall character.
View the list of programs implemented in Clubs across America.
The Arts Programs
Designed to develop youth’s creativitys and cultural awareness, these programs are endowed with knowledge and appreciation for visual arts, crafts, and creative writing. Heavily focused on the artistry and imagination, these courses have visionary tools geared towards creativity.
View the list of programs implemented in Clubs across America.
Health and Life Skills
Giving the utmost importance on health, these programs aim to develop and improve Youth’s welfare and nourishment. With training's designed to cultivate self-sufficiency and independence, each individual faces life struggles filled with optimism.
View the list of programs implemented in Clubs across America.
Sports, Fitness and Recreation
Aimed to develop Youth’s interpersonal skills and to provide a healthy lifestyle, these programs are equipped with interactive sports and engaging recreational activities.
View the list of programs implemented in Clubs across America.
Specialized Initiatives
Members from different Boys & Girls Clubs across the globe gather to coherently discuss each program and identify specific needs of each club.
View the list of programs implemented in Clubs across America.
EMPOWERING YOUTH ORGANIZATIONS AROUND THE WORLD!
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I like to share what the Republican base of voters pushing all this public schools as charters and school choice are saying because Clinton/Obama Wall Street global corporate neo-liberals are FAR-RIGHT----so this is the only voice in US politics today----the Democratic base of labor and justice has been killed by all these policies these few decades and now the Republican base are seeing they created a monster because----they have no voice or control either.
Right now across the nation citizens are being made to fill out question cards where a moderator decides whether that question will be heard or even to reword the question to create their own talking point. The panels presented are always people wanting the changes being sought by global corporate education groups. This gets worse as those citizens in cities made desperate for jobs are now being drawn into privatizing just to have a job or small business. ALL THAT IS DELIBERATE====knowing in just a few years they will be defunded or closed while national charter chains take over. One wonders if this charter chain is tied to Bloomberg's Alonzo who worked to advance Bloomberg's K-12 privatization in NYC and Baltimore.
If a charter is really simply working to advance better education policy it would not be closed and proprietary----it would want others to see what makes them successful. It is because most of these charters are tied to national private corporate charters with goals of Wall Street stock trade and franchises that they are acting as in this article below.
Whether our state and city Departments of Education or Wall Street global education non-profits----we are all being reduced to 2 minute of talk and/or index card input----PLEASE DO NOT ATTEND OR PARTICIPATE IN THESE KINDS OF MEETINGS---THEY ARE NOT HAVING A GENERAL DISCUSSION. Create your own community citizens' groups and allow all to talk openly and move against the REAL problems.
Parents Told They Can’t Record Board Meeting Tonight At Academia Antonia Alonso
Tonight, a Delaware charter school refused parents the ability to record their board meeting. A group of parents attended the Academia Antonia Alonso Board of Directors meeting to give public comment about what they felt was unfair termination of many teachers at the school. They wanted to record the meeting but were told they could not. Even though charter schools are technically corporations, they still have to abide by public meeting laws in Delaware. And in Delaware, all you have to do is advise someone you are recording a meeting. You do not need their consent.
Charter schools in Delaware are not unionized, therefore they can hire and fire at will without any protection whatsoever for the teachers. While one would hope charter administrators use a common sense approach in making these decisions, some charters have been known for running their schools like a dictatorship. Some charters have fired a teacher over something as small as questioning a policy. When this happens as often as it has at Academia Antonia Alonso this school year, sooner or later parents will begin to notice and question it themselves. What charter boards fail to understand is they wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for a parent’s ability to make a choice. What kind of message does that send when a parent is denied the simple freedom of recording a meeting when they don’t even need their consent?
House Bill 61, the school board recording bill, is awaiting a full vote by the Delaware Senate. It passed the Delaware House last year. Since then, many reports have come out about charter school fraud. The bill is a no-brainer! This is just another reason why this bill needs to pass. Denying a parent of a choice is never a smart thing to do, especially when it comes to education. For a parent to even attend a board meeting is a feat in itself. They should be happy they have parent engagement. I can only think of one reason a board wouldn’t want a public meeting to be heard. And it isn’t because they don’t want parents to hear a great meeting. They don’t want something getting out. While the school did allow the parents to give public comment at two minutes each, will their concerns be put in the board minutes for the meeting?
What makes this more interesting is the amount of parent input they had for their recent major modification that passed the Delaware State Board of Education last week. They had to solicit parents to comment on that publicly. But when the parent’s want to talk about something the school doesn’t want out there, they don’t want the public to hear that.
Academia Antonia Alonso currently resides in the Community Education Building in Wilmington. The State Board of Education approved their major modification request to move to one of the buildings owned by Odyssey Charter School at Barley Mill Plaza. The charter school has gone through three heads of school since they opened in August of 2014, in less than two years. They were placed on formal review before they even opened based on low enrollment. They got out of formal review with a probation and got their enrollment up to what their charter was approved for. In the 2014-2015 Charter School Performance Framework, the school met the standard for their financial framework but was labeled as does not meet standard for their organizational framework.
When our schools going to learn that if you try to silence parents in any way, sooner or later they will organize. Teachers in traditional school districts already have the capability to organize through their unions. Perhaps charter school teachers should as well to avoid these administrators who seem to think ruling with an iron fist is the right thing to do.
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What we are seeing in Baltimore today with our classrooms filling with Teach for America and immigrant teaching staff are Americans being brought from all over the country and world who not long after being in Baltimore's completely dysfunctional education system saying the same thing Baltimore's black public school teachers said these few decades of defunding and dismantling of our public school structures. They know they cannot effect change under these conditions and they know what underserved students need but they cannot do their jobs because there are no resources or funding....instead it is getting worse.
Remember, the goal of Teach for America and other private teaching corporations is only to break down the American public school structures including our public teacher's unions because they want to create a system of part-time education techs being adjuncts as has happened in our public universities. It has nothing to do with making things better---global pols are simply trying to break down all that is American---to install all that is Asian global neo-liberal education corporate structures found in International Economic Zones. Most Teach for America/VISTA can tell you exactly how many days they have been in the program seeking only to serve time and move on. Very few stay in teaching as the real educators having the passion for teaching are being pushed out.
As this article shows-----most of people brought to Baltimore have absolutely no connection with the culture of our communities so can simply respond in defense of their own safety----their own ability to perform as needed----one can guess the idea behind Baltimore bringing Teach for America is to bring NEW CITIZENS TO BALTIMORE----that may stay and take a different job once fulfilling that time commitment. All this fails when these NEW CITIZENS see how captured Baltimore's government and community structure is against citizens' voice and they mostly leave to other cities.
Below we see how Baltimore is being filled with all this Bill Gates and Wall Street Bloomberg education structure none of which is needed and all of which receives the Federal, state, and city funding for education that could go to our public school classrooms. It is all about moving the next global education corporation into Baltimore while making sure no real public education structures are rebuilt. Look to see a new Baltimore citizen leading just such a corporation and he won the Baltimore City Council race as a Democrat. Mr Cohen has no intention of fixing the public structure that eveyone knews in Baltimore will address the real problems---his goal is moving in an education corporation he may be invested in or want to sell to global corporations in a merger.
If our national public school structure was being funded maintaining the same equal protection, opportunity, and access as US Constitutional and Federal laws requires and this private system wanted to build---that would be fine---but this private system is using all our Federal, state, and local revenue to build what will be for-profit and personal gain----AND THAT IS NOT FREE MARKET---Who decides who gets this funding and why? It comes from a Baltimore Board of Estimates that takes the city's education revenue and awards it selectively in what most Baltimore citizens see as a corrupt system.
Teach for America: Creating Baltimore's next leaders
These Teach for America standouts are sticking around to drive change
Mar 21, 2014, 6:00am EDT Updated Mar 21, 2014, 9:56am EDT
Industries & Tags
Somewhere in a Baltimore classroom, a future CEO is trying to teach fractions to a bunch of fidgety third-graders.
Enlarge Zeke Cohen, founder and executive director at the Intersection, a nonprofit that prepares… more
Jaclyn Borowski
The figure standing at the blackboard is a teacher brought to Baltimore through the Teach for America program. She came here from a place like Eagle River, Alaska, or Northampton, Mass., hoping to get two or three years of teaching experience and then move on, maybe to a more traditional teaching job, or maybe
Name of Organization
Intersection Campaign For Kids Inc
In Care of Name
Zeke Cohen
Zeke Cohen, founder and executive director at the Intersection, a nonprofit that prepares… more
Jaclyn Borowski
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Of course Baltimore City Public Schools are crumbling, defunded, and dismantled creating the dysfunction because Wall Street Baltimore Development and a very, very neo-conservative Johns Hopkins redirected education funding for these few decades to itself growing globally while leaving the city to fall into third world levels of decay and poverty. Now, it has an School of Education ranked #2 globally because it has been able to install global campuses in nations around the world with all that Federal, state, and local funding that would have come to Baltimore City public schools. Trillions of dollars over 3 decades built this Hopkins global empire----so the answer to Baltimore's public school funding is having Hopkins GIVE TO OUR BALTIMORE CITY SCHOOLS BULK FUNDING OF BILLIONS OF DOLLARS ----just to rebuild each public school----see that it is well-funded and resourced so it can operate as it did before all those government funds were diverted. Any REAL education advocacy organization would make having corporations in Baltimore allowed a non-profit status when they are global corporations so these global corporations can pay property and income taxes as does all small businesses and individuals; they would be shouting to stop the massive corporate subsidy in Baltimore as that is our public school funding----and VOILA---BALTIMORE HAS ALL THE REVENUE IT NEEDS TO FULLY FUND OUR PUBLIC SCHOOLS.
You will notice that any Wall Street Baltimore Development and very, very, very global neo-conservative Johns Hopkins 'education justice' non-profit will NEVER PROMOTE THAT GORILLA IN THE ROOM and that is an organization that keeps our schools from success.
Remember, when corporations like US and World Report or this Carnegie Corporation ranks Hopkins or its executives as leaders or #2 globally----it is because they won global market share by expanding faster and getting people signed up---whether online or at a global campus. It has nothing to do with quality education or educating in public interest. Being a giant squid sucking all revenue out of a US city is how Carnegie Corp defines exceptionalism. It is exceptional----only 5% of people have that personality of DOING ANYTHING TO WIN....SHOW ME THE MONEY. It does not belong in our local, state, or national government. THESE ARE NOT PUBLIC SERVANTS.
Closing our public schools and privately funding what they call public schools-----simply Hopkins' charters tied to their campus
.'Expanding the university's commitment to Baltimore by spearheading the $1.8 billion East Baltimore Development Initiative, including building and operating the first new K-8 public school constructed in East Baltimore in more than two decades'
Again, every citizen in Baltimore is fast becoming attached to having to work for Hopkins---either as their global corporations tied to all Baltimore City agencies----or their global non-profits including education. Soon, all students will be tied to attending a Hopkins' based school program that will use that pre-school testing to vocationally track children into which Hopkins campus school a child will go. Extend this to global UnderArmour and that is the goal of these Clinton/Bush/Obama global education reforms.
JHU President Ronald J. Daniels recognized for exceptional leadership by Carnegie Corp.
One of four recipients of biennial Academic Leadership Award, Daniels will use $500,000 grant to expand activities that make JHU more accessible to Baltimore public school students
Hub staff report / September 24, 2015 Posted in University News
President Ronald J. Daniels
Johns Hopkins University President Ronald J. Daniels is one of four university presidents chosen by the Carnegie Corporation of New York to receive its 2015 Academic Leadership Award, given biennially in recognition of exceptional leadership in higher education, the corporation announced today.
The award, established in 2005, is among the most prestigious in higher education. It honors individuals who, in addition to fulfilling their administrative and managerial roles with dedication and creativity, demonstrate vision and a commitment to excellence and equity in undergraduate education, the liberal arts, the development of major interdisciplinary programs, reform of K-12 education, international engagement, and the promotion of strong links between their institutions and their local communities.
In addition to Daniels, this year's recipients are Patricia A. McGuire of Trinity Washington University in Washington, D.C., Diana Natalicio of the University of Texas at El Paso, and C.L. Max Nikias of the University of Southern California.
The honor includes a $500,000 grant to each of the winners' institutions to be spent at the honorees' discretion to promote their academic priorities.
Daniels said he would use the money to expand activities that make Johns Hopkins University more accessible to students and graduates of Baltimore City Public Schools, including increased support for low-income students through the Baltimore Scholars program, partnerships with local K-8 schools, and new initiatives aimed at college and career preparation.
"I am deeply honored to be recognized among the esteemed recipients of this award," Daniels said. "It is exciting to have the innovative work by our faculty and staff and Johns Hopkins' commitment to Baltimore recognized by the Carnegie Corporation, a great champion of higher education."
Added Jeffrey H. Aronson, chair of the university's board of trustees: "This is a truly special moment for President Daniels and the entire Johns Hopkins community. The honor is testament to President Daniels' leadership, his innovative academic initiatives, and his commitment to deepening Johns Hopkins' engagement with Baltimore."
Since becoming JHU's president in 2009, Daniels has focused on three overarching themes—enhancing collaboration among the university's nine academic divisions and the Applied Physics Laboratory, increasing student access, and strengthening community engagement.
In honoring Daniels, the Carnegie Corp. cited a number of the university's efforts and accomplishments during his tenure, among them:
The Carnegie Corporation of New York was created by Andrew Carnegie in 1911 "to promote the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding." The Academic Leadership Award was established in recognition of Carnegie's belief that education and knowledge are fundamental tools for strengthening democracy and creating a more vibrant civil society.
Past winners of the award are: Henry S. Bienen, Northwestern University; Robert J. Birgeneau, University of California, Berkeley; Leon Botstein, Bard College; Richard Brodhead, Duke University; Nancy Cantor, Syracuse University; Jared L. Cohon, Carnegie Mellon University; Scott S. Cowen, Tulane University; Michael Crow, Arizona State University; Matthew Goldstein, The City University of New York; Amy Gutmann, University of Pennsylvania; John Hennessy, Stanford University; Freeman A. Hrabowski III, University of Maryland, Baltimore County; William E. Kirwan, University System of Maryland; Eduardo J. Padrón, Miami Dade College; Don M. Randel, University of Chicago; and Beverly Daniel Tatum, Spelman College.
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For those thinking our Federal Department of Labor or our National Labor Board is actually working for the American workers after a few decades of appointments by Clinton/Bush/Obama -----look at this decision. How better to bust teacher's unions than to allow an anti-teacher's union Teach for America BECOME UNION MEMBERS. This is the dynamic in states like Maryland where Maryland Assembly poses progressive by protecting Baltimore's teacher's unions by extending them to charters and allowing Teach for America to become part of the teachers' union----and it would be why AFT and Weingarten support Hillary----it is all about privatization and union-busting. Why is Baltimore's teacher's union silent and supporting all education privatization measures? Most of union members are not public teachers. Our Baltimore Teacher's union leader English is simply a figurehead as teachers shout she is not working for them....even the Teach for America teachers. We all know the next step in that progression will be teacher's unions disappear----along with their pensions. Meanwhile the new private teachers in Teach for America will simply rotate out of teaching as it is a temporary stint for most of them. Why are AFT in some states allowing this? They think they can create their own national charter chains and become part of the privatization sadly.
So, O'Malley touts he is protecting teachers' union as they install the union-busting policies in Baltimore to do the opposite. For citizens really thinking it is the teacher's unions causing all these classroom problems----think again at what defunding, dismantlement, and bad education polices to for anyone placed in our classrooms----unions did protect Equal Protection and opportunity and access in modern times.
Monday, Jan 13, 2014 12:33 PM EDT
Teach For America’s pro-corporate, union-busting agenda
How TFA uses its vast political influence to boost charter schools and drive down teacher pay (UPDATED)
Chad Sommer, EduShyster.com
This piece originally appeared on EduShyster.com.When I joined Teach For America in the spring of 2011 I had no idea that my belief in social and economic justice was about to be cynically exploited by the corporate class. As a former development manager for a nonprofit that serves low-income Chicago public school students, TFA’s claims that its corps members and alumni are helping lead an educational revolution in low-income communities across the country spoke to me. Naively seduced by TFA’s do-gooder marketing pitch, I charged ahead on a mission to close the academic “ achievement gap” that TFA blames on incompetent (read unionized) teachers.
Today, having completed the two-year program and seeing how it operates from the inside, I’m convinced that TFA now serves as a critical component of the all-out-effort by corporate elites to privatize one of the last remaining public institutions of our country: our public schools.
Adored By the Corporate Class
TFA and the privately managed, non-union charter schools that its corps members often staff are adored by the corporate class. Elites shower both TFA and charter schools with private contributions from their own tax-exempt foundations, as well as taxpayer dollars funneled by their courtiers in Washington and statehouses across the country. Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, The Walton Foundation (Walmart), The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, The Eli Broad Foundation, and a small army of billionaire hedge fund managers are just a few representatives of the corporate class that bankrolls TFA and the various networks of privately managed (but taxpayer funded) charter schools. Wendy Kopp, founder of TFA is even married to the president of KIPP, one of the country’s largest networks of charter schools.
In Chicago, where I participated in TFA, the organization maintains its own extremely close partnerships with privately managed charter schools. Their relationships are so close, in fact, that earlier this year, after the Chicago Public School system closed forty-nine traditional, unionized public schools, claiming the schools were “underutilized,” it was revealed that TFA was working behind the scenes with a number of privately-managed, non-union charter school operators to open fifty-two new charter schools in Chicago over the next five years.
The alliance between TFA and charter schools is cemented by an arrangement that few people know about outside of the organization. The teacher placement policy of TFA explicitly states in bold letters, “It is our policy that corps members accept the first position offered to them.” The effective result of this policy means that corps members have no bargaining position to negotiate wages or benefits, meaning that whatever offer a school makes, the corps member must accept it. TFA provides a rather benign explanation for this arrangement, claiming that it allows for the quick and efficient placement of hundreds of corps members into teaching positions in each market. However, in practice, this mandate is a lynchpin of the corporate class’ privatization plan for education.
The “First Placement” Policy
Each spring, local TFA offices in each market dedicate an entire team of staff to arranging interviews between corps members and hiring schools. The “first placement” policy means that TFA can guarantee charter schools a constant supply of new teachers each year who have no choice but to work for wages and benefits far below those negotiated by the local teachers union at traditional public schools in the same area. While a first year salary for a teacher at a traditional unionized school in Chicago is approximately $45,000, the starting salary at many of TFA’s partner charter schools is nearly 30 percent less at $32,000. And because teachers at charter schools are not protected by the due process policies the union has in place at traditional public schools, TFA corps members at charter schools can be fired at any time, for any reason.
A fellow TFA corps member in Chicago who worked at a charter school told me that she met with her principal each Friday to find out if she should bother coming back to work the following Monday. Another told me that his principal explicitly told him that she knew he would only be with her school for two years, so she was going to work him to death. And when he left after his TFA commitment, she would just replace him with a new TFA recruit. Churn and burn is the business model for these schools, and TFA provides a continuous supply of naively idealistic workers who have no choice but to accept their lot. Furthermore, this constant churn of teachers who possess zero or one year of experience can’t possibly be good for the academic or social-emotional development of students who often have little stability in their lives.
By driving down teacher salaries and weakening workplace protections, TFA has a corrosive effect on the teaching profession. But behind TFA’s role as a feeder system for charter schools is a hypocrisy that’s especially galling.
A Rigged Game
Corporate education reformers are constantly hailing “market-based solutions” as the remedy for poor academic performance among low-income students. TFA, charter schools and their corporate benefactors espouse the notion that if low-income students just had more choices in schools, the resulting competition would drive all schools to deliver a higher quality education. Students and parents must be free to vote with their feet and find alternatives; the Darwinian principal of survival of the fittest is what makes a “free market” so effective, claim its corporate proponents. And yet TFA’s rigging of the teacher hiring process in favor of charter school operators demonstrates a complete and utter contempt for local labor markets. When corps members aren’t allowed the freedom to turn down a job because the pay or benefits are inadequate, or because a charter school has a terrible reputation for abusing teachers, there is no “free market” at work.
TFA: An Inverted Labor Union?
Political philosopher Sheldon Wolin proposes in his book Democracy Incorporated that the United States has devolved into a unique, corporate-controlled state that he calls “Inverted Totalitarianism.” Considering the domineering corporate influence on TFA, I would suggest that TFA has become an inverted labor union. Traditional labor unions work to promote the interests of the working people who comprise them by collectively bargaining for higher wages, better benefits and improved working conditions. Through its partnerships with charter schools and its mandate that corps members take the first job they’re offered, TFA is lowering wages, reducing benefits and worsening the working conditions of teachers. It is increasingly clear that the mission of the corporate class is to destroy teachers unions and remake the teaching profession into a temporary, low paying job. The corporate class is getting all of the help it needs from Teach For America.
Update, 1/14/14: Becky O’Neill, of Teach For America Chicago, responds:
This week, recent alum Chad Sommer shared his critical thoughts on Teach For America’s approach to corps member hiring in the Chicago region. Because the piece touches on a number of important issues, we wanted to provide a few factual corrections and clarifications – along with our own reflections on some of the tough questions the piece brings to the fore.
Chad’s post focused on the financial implications of becoming a teacher – implications our corps members and alumni teachers confront when they first choose to join the corps and throughout their careers. As an organization, we are committed to doing as much as we can to ensure that teaching is a viable, financially sustainable option for an increasingly diverse, dedicated, effective teaching force. This reflects our belief that teachers who share the background of students have the potential for profound additional impact with those students.
In the Chicago region, 35% of our 2013 corps members received Pell Grants to make college possible and 25% were the first in their families to attend. Without a reasonable salary and benefits (along with support they receive from AmeriCorps for past, current and future education costs), we know that many of these individuals would be forced to direct their talents elsewhere.
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'Hannah Sadtler spent two years as a TFA corps member in New Orleans after Katrina.
Since this is a far-right wing education corporatization policy it hits the Republican states hardest as Jindal in Louisiana made one huge swath of national charter chain and Teach for America to kill all semblance of a K-12 public school system. As we see all over the nation with citizens brought into this privatized teaching format----ALMOST ALL HATE IT BECAUSE IT IS NOT EMPOWERING OR AIMED AT IMPROVING---and folks know this. So, we must end these corporate education policies not only because they do not bring quality to our community schools---but as a labor activist I know citizens being tied to this private teaching process are being exploited and abused in many cases.
It all ties in with bringing national charter chains replacing public schools under the guise of specializing in what underserved students need.
Most people joining TFA or working as VISTAS are not bad people---they are often just wanting to work....so it is the policy that is bad---not the citizens being moved into these positions.
Group forms in protest of Teach for America
23rd September 2013 ·
By Kari Harden
Contributing Writer
When Briana O’Neal returned home to New Orleans in 2006, she thought high school was going to get better.
She’d heard there were new schools with new exceedingly qualified teachers, and that they were going to have the opportunity to learn on a higher level than ever before. She couldn’t wait.
Displaced, O’Neal spent her 9th-grade year divided between a school in Baker, La., and Little Rock, Arkansas.
In Baker, it was horrible, she said. “They didn’t want us there. They treated us horrible.”
In Little Rock, things got even worse. O’Neal was one of three New Orleanians – and three African Americans, at her school. They didn’t want her there either.
But one day, she said, “I almost lost my life.”
It was Halloween, and she was on a bus with the two other Black kids. A group of white students wore KKK outfits as their costumes.
The bus driver pulled over, and the white students in KKK hoods students started beating the three kids from New Orleans.
“We ran for our lives,” O’Neal said. She said she was beaten with books, brass knuckles, and they cut off her hair. One boy was in a coma for six months, she said.
“The bus driver let them do it.”
So O’Neal moved back to New Orleans by herself, while her mother remained in Arkansas to work.
At 16, she was living in their home without electricity or running water. But she was eager to continue on a path toward college, and happy to be home.
She returned to Walter L. Cohen High School, where she had gone before the storm. But because the plan was to close Cohen, O’Neal said she ended up at John McDonogh High School.
“It was awful,” she said. By merging the two schools, O’Neal said they essentially merged an uptown gang with a downtown gang.
According to O’Neal, there were riots and fights at Cohen, and the classes were overcrowded with 40 or 50 kids to a room.
All her teachers at Cohen were from Teach for America, O’Neal said, many whom she said would frequently quit by the end of their first day.
“I’d never seen teachers so young,” she said. She said she doesn’t remember any of their names, there were so many that passed through. Some of the students were the same age as the teachers.
There were constant yelling matches between teachers and students, and the teachers’ solution was to call the security guards or police, she said. The National Guard also had a presence at the school at that time.
Editor’s note: Since the publication of this article, representatives from Teach for America have contested O’Neal’s recollection of the make up of teachers in the school. According to an email from Danielle Montoya, Regional Communications director: “In 2007-2008 we only had 4 TFA teachers, as part of an instructional staff of 35, teaching at Cohen. Two of those teachers taught the same subject, but in different grades so it isn’t possible that all of her teachers were from TFA or that there was a strong TFA influence at the school.”
O’Neal saw many kids get arrested. “They treated us like animals,” she said.
The teachers were insensitive to their culture as well as what they had just endured with Katrina, O’Neal said.
“They didn’t understand the full mental scope of what everyone had just been through. The classrooms were never in order. There was a lot of trauma.”
The teachers often pronounced names wrong, but they didn’t care about being corrected, she said.
They wanted “us to change our culture to fit their culture,” O’Neal said.
And they had no clue — or apparent sympathy, that many of the kids were living on their own, working, and taking care of siblings, she said. “Some days we didn’t eat.”
There was a 5 p.m., curfew, and O’Neal often had to walk from the school on Esplanade Avenue to her house in the Garden District to make it home on time.
“They didn’t put any of that in perspective,” she said. “We’re out here struggling and have been through all this, and they didn’t care.”
At John Mac, the first hour of every day was spent going through the security line. After the metal detector, every backpack and purse was searched. Every student was patted down, shoes removed, and hair checked for anything hidden.
Once in the building (they would be suspended if they were late, which was a constant problem because the buses were always late and public transportation hadn’t resumed), they were not allowed to leave the building.
“There was still mold from Katrina — and a horrible smell,” she said.
“The first semester we didn’t do any work,” O’Neal alleges, and the teachers only cared about collecting “data.” She said they wanted to know where she had gone to school in the past, and what grade level she was at. “They wanted to group us into different groups — the good kids, the bad kids, and the smart kids,” she said.
However, according to O’Neal, there was one question they failed to ask while collecting their data and that was if she had any special needs or disabilities. O’Neal is blind in one eye and has partial vision in the other. She has to have larger print in order to read, among other needs.
O’Neal said one boy who suffered from serious mental illness spent two years in the classroom with all the other kids.
During the middle of her second year, they finally got a counselor, she said.
And it wasn’t until the middle of her 11th-grade year she said that the teachers started presenting anything resembling an academic lesson. “We didn’t have any books until the end of 2007,” she said.
In the middle of the 2007-2008 school year, O’Neal said they started giving out worksheets. While the kids worked, the teachers spent a majority of the class time talking and texting on their personal phones, she said.
O’Neal alleges that none of her teachers were qualified to teach in their assigned subject .
O’Neal started out in the “good kids” group. That was until she and fellow students started organizing, and trying to bring light to some of their needs — books, qualified teachers, services for kids with special needs, and lunches that weren’t served frozen. Then she moved to the “bad kids” group.
That’s when she got angry. Many of her peers had been angry all along, she said. But she wasn’t always a fighter. It was at John Mac she got into her first fight. And it wasn’t her last.
“I was already angry because of Katrina,” she said. “We were mad about being lied to. We missed our teachers. We missed our schools.”
O’Neal directed her anger into the group formed by about 80 students from a handful of public and private schools — Fyre Youth Squad.
The teachers took the organizing as an effort to get them fired.
That wasn’t their goal, O’Neal said. “We wanted to make our schools better.”
The kids in the organization were suspended, she said. After that they were told they could stay at school, but they wouldn’t pass.
The student group held press conferences, wrote petitions, held assemblies, and travelled to Baton Rouge to take their concerns to the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education.
Things changed, she said. They got more books, and eventually more (three) certified teachers. The school began allowing the community and parents — previously shut out — to get more involved.
“We got a lot of things on our list,” she said. But not everything — like lunches that weren’t served frozen.
Now 23, O’Neal left John Mac after that second year and got her GED. She was the only one voluntarily in the GED class and not wearing an ankle-monitoring bracelet, she said. It was stressful, but it was better than John Mac — and she could get the resources she needed at home to deal with her eyesight problems.
“None of the schools offered the help I needed — I was already doing it on my own,” she said.
She is working full time now, and still hopes to go to college.
What happened to O’Neal in her 10th, 11th, and 12th grade years is not a unique experience for high school-aged kids in New Orleans following the storm.
And those lost years—years crucial to her future—illustrate the heart of a growing nationwide movement speaking out against Teach for America.
In July, a group was formally organized — largely born out of the New Orleans experience—called “Resistance to Teach for America.”
Once they started communicating their concerns and connecting with others, groups started popping up all over the country — in California, Philadelphia, Chicago, New York, and Washington D.C.
The groups are made up of community activists, parents, students, veteran teachers, and TFA alumni.
Hannah Sadtler spent two years as a TFA corps member in New Orleans after Katrina.
She said the experience was both dehumanizing to her, and to her students. Sadlter said she was unprepared to deal with the level of trauma her kids were going through, and she herself became traumatized by the boot camp like mentality she was required to enforce.
Sadlter said that there was far more emphasis from her superiors on uniform violations than lesson plans.
Sadlter was also shocked to learn about the mass firing of teachers. “I believed what they [TFA] told me at the time — that there was a shortage of qualified and dedicated teachers, and that TFA was a response to the shortage.”
After she left TFA, Sadlter knew she needed to better understand the context of education reform in New Orleans. She connected with community members and veteran teachers, and started the New Teachers Roundtable, a discussion group to give support and share experiences.
She is also involved in the Resistance movement.
“After Katrina, if at any time, it was that moment that kids needed to be surrounded by, and supported by, things that were familiar,” said Kristen Lynn Buras, Director of the Urban South Grassroots Research Collective and Assistant Professor of Educational Policy Educational Policy Studies at Georgia State University.
Instead, about 4,500 teachers were fired without due process. A judge ruled in favor of the teachers in the wrongful termination lawsuit, but a verdict is still pending. The ruling was based, in part, on findings by the court that “documents misrepresentations of school and teacher performance prior to Katrina and local and state government entities misspending (not spending) funds from FEMA to retain teachers. Orleans Parish public schools were the only schools in the Gulf region affected by hurricanes Katrina and Rita to not use the funds secured from the federal government for this requested and required purpose,” said Jim Randels, vice-president of the United Teachers of New Orleans.
While TFA proclaims a mission of social justice, they were standing by to accept millions in taxpayer dollars to “enter a contract with a district that unlawfully fired all of its teachers,” Buras said. “None of this is accidental. It’s part of a larger plan to privatize public schools,”
In Naomi Klein’s 2007 book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Klein draws numerous parallels between the companies subcontracted to do work in Iraq and companies working in New Orleans immediately after Hurricane Katrina.
Klein writes: “Washington could have easily made it a condition of every Katrina contract that companies hire local people at decent wages to help them put their lives back together. Instead, the residents of the Gulf Coast, like the people of Iraq, were expected to watch as contractors created an economic boom based on easy taxpayer money and relaxed regulations.”
Buras identifies TFA as a union-busting mechanism, and a redirecting of resources from one group of people (black veteran teachers) to another (TFA employees).
Klein writes: “Not so long ago, disasters were periods of social leveling, rare moments when atomized communities put divisions aside and pulled together. Increasingly, however, disasters are the opposite: they provide windows into a cruel and ruthlessly divide future in which money and race buy survival.”
Buras also points to the language used as providing the justification for the firings.
The public officials blamed and demonized the veteran teachers for the state of education in the city, she said. They defined the problem as the veteran teachers, she said, and “That definition of the problem opened the space for TFA to enter.”
But you have to go back much further than that, she said. At least 100 years.
“That fails to account for a longer history.”
That history, Buras said, is one of disinvestment by the state into the public schools. Many of those fired teachers spent decades fighting for equitable resources, she said. “They are scapegoating that same group of teachers for problems those teachers spent their lives fighting against.”
A judge ruled in favor of the wrongful termination lawsuit filed on behalf of the teachers, but a verdict has yet to be released.
Buras also notes the impact of the firings on a significant segment of the black middle class — and a critical professional pathway out of poverty.
In an email interview Jim Randels described the changed relationship between the union and TFA.
“Pre-Katrina, Teach for America as an organization was clearly a partner in public education in New Orleans with all teachers. Veteran teachers frequently mentored TFA teachers and included them in community and even family events,” Randels wrote. “In the last eight years TFA has set up a much more distant relationship with veteran teachers. TFA’s role since Katrina has shifted from being a collaborative partner with all teachers in education to a much more complex and in some cases contradictory role. TFA has in many ways become much more independent and separate from veteran teachers and much more exclusively aligned with schools run by organizations and school leaders concerned with replacing rather than working with those of us who have taught for years in the challenging and invigorating conditions of public education in New Orleans.”
Kira Orange Jones, a TFA alum, executive director of Teach For America Greater New Orleans Louisiana Delta and member of BESE, only describes a positive post-Katrina impact. In an email interview, she wrote: “As a greater New Orleans team, first, and most importantly, we contribute diverse, effective teachers to schools that serve low-income children. . . As part of our continuous improvement plan, Teach For America regularly conducts surveys of the principals of schools where corps members teach. Similar to previous surveys, the 2013 survey asked principals about their satisfaction with the performance of the corps members in the school and to provide ratings of corps members’ teaching skills and their impact on students’ academic achievement. The survey also inquired about each principal’s experience with Teach For America program staff. Additionally, it asked principals to anticipate future hiring needs and why they would or would not continue to hire Teach For America corps members. Of over 60 school principals surveyed in the region, 98 percent were satisfied with the corps members in their schools.”
Orange Jones did not respond to a question asking if the students’ needs — especially those suffering Post Traumatic Stress Disorder following Katrina — were met by the influx of TFA teachers.
O’Neal recalls her pre-Katrina school years in New Orleans as very happy ones. The teachers, mostly her grandmother’s age, knew her whole family, she said. Her classmates were also her neighbors. There was tutoring before and after school, and in middle school the kids were taken on trips to visit colleges. “I was always learning something,” she said. And she had a specialized plan and extra help for her vision challenges.
But Sadtler and Buras have noted that it isn’t only the kids being exploited and hurt for the gain of the TFA recruits — the teachers are being exploited for the gain of the larger TFA management structure.
The charter schools, which set their own rules with a proven (by state audits) lack of accountability and oversight by the governing Recovery School District, make inordinate demands, requiring the teachers work 12 to 15 hours days and preventing them from having any life outside the school.
While many of young teachers may have a genuine commitment to raising achievement, they are unprepared to teach, put into unfair situations, and are emotionally distressed and overwhelmed, Buras said.
The voices against TFA are growing.
In July, Chicago veteran teacher Katie Osgood wrote an open letter to the 2013 class of TFA recruits. Osgood calls on them to quit. “Do not partner with the very people trying to destroy public education for their own personal gain,” Osgood writes, following a lengthy outline of where the money comes from, where it goes, and the political interests.
“Teach for America likely enticed you into the program with the call for ending education inequality,” Osgood writes. “That is a beautiful and noble mission. I applaud you on being moved by the chance to help children, of being a part of creating equality in our schools, of ending poverty once and for all. However, the actual practice of Teach for America does the exact opposite of its noble mission. TFA claims to fight to end educational inequality and yet ends up exacerbating one of the greatest inequalities in education today: that low-income children of color are much more likely to be given inexperienced, uncertified teachers. TFA’s five weeks of Institute are simply not enough time to prepare anyone, no matter how dedicated or intelligent, to have the skills necessary to help our neediest children. This fall, on that first day of school, you will be alone with kids who need so much more. You will represent one more inequality in our education system denying kids from low-income backgrounds equitable educational opportunities.”
In a July interview with the Washington Post, former TFA manager Wendy Heller Chovnick describes the progression of her disillusionment.
“When I saw where the money was really going, which was to a lot of national teams, national staff members, and national infrastructure, that was not providing much support to our region and was definitely not translating into improved educational outcomes for students, my opinion of the organization fell drastically,” Chovnick said. She also described frustration with the organization’s unwillingness to listen to, and active campaign against, any criticism. “Unfortunately, the organization seemed to care more about public perception of what the organization was doing than about what the organization was actually doing to improve education for low-income students throughout the United States.”
For O’Neal, she’ll never get back those years. Hard-working and resourceful, she will likely find a way to go to college — no thanks to the high school education provided to her by the RSD — the district tasked with “saving” New Orleans public schools.
An intelligent young woman with a kind heart, she may one day forgive the forces that used her and her peers to experiment in privatizing education and using the least-qualified teachers to guide the kids with the greatest needs.
But she won’t forget the trauma. And she won’t forget the lesson learned that even when threatened with suspensions and failing grades, speaking out about injustice was the right thing to do. And it made a difference.
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So, O'Malley touts he is protecting teachers' union as they install the union-busting policies in Baltimore to do the opposite. For citizens really thinking it is the teacher's unions causing all these classroom problems----think again at what defunding, dismantlement, and bad education polices to for anyone placed in our classrooms----unions did protect Equal Protection and opportunity and access in modern times.
Nothing makes a Clinton/Bush/Obama K-12 education privatizer more anxious than a Teach for America staff calling for teacher's unions to protect them! YES, UNION MEMBERS CAN VOTE FOR NEW LEADERSHIP FOLKS!
For those thinking our Federal Department of Labor or our National Labor Board is actually working for the American workers after a few decades of appointments by Clinton/Bush/Obama -----look at this decision. How better to bust teacher's unions than to allow an anti-teacher's union Teach for America BECOME UNION MEMBERS. This is the dynamic in states like Maryland where Maryland Assembly poses progressive by protecting Baltimore's teacher's unions by extending them to charters and allowing Teach for America to become part of the teachers' union----and it would be why AFT and Weingarten support Hillary----it is all about privatization and union-busting. Why is Baltimore's teacher's union silent and supporting all education privatization measures? Most of union members are not public teachers. Our Baltimore Teacher's union leader English is simply a figurehead as teachers shout she is not working for them....even the Teach for America teachers. We all know the next step in that progression will be teacher's unions disappear----along with their pensions. Meanwhile the new private teachers in Teach for America will simply rotate out of teaching as it is a temporary stint for most of them. Why are AFT in some states allowing this? They think they can create their own national charter chains and become part of the privatization sadly.
'‘Teach for America’ Teachers Can Join the Union
August 07, 2015 / Patrick Sheehan '
In a good sign for teacher union drives around the country, a Labor Board hearing officer opted to include Teach for America teachers in the union vote at a Detroit charter school chain. Charter teachers in other cities sent messages of solidarity. Photo: Michigan Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff (AFT).
A National Labor Relations Board hearing officer has ruled that Teach for America teachers should be included in the union at a Detroit charter school chain.
Teachers at University Prep charter schools voted May 14 on whether to unionize. UPrep relies on TFA teachers to fill about 10 percent of its classrooms, a figure that’s similar to urban charter schools in other cities.
But when some TFA teachers emerged as leaders in the union drive, Detroit 90/90, the company that manages UPrep, challenged their right to vote.
In a June hearing, the company argued that TFA teachers’ minimum two-year commitment to the school made us “temporary service workers” rather than “professional employees”—more like long-term substitutes than permanent teachers.
“It was such an obvious attempt to divide and conquer,” said Alex Moore, a Teach for America teacher and unabashed union supporter. “[The company] loved us when we were cheap, docile workers, but when we spoke up and organized, they wanted to sweep us under the rug.”
The hearing officer found on July 31 that TFA teachers are indeed professional employees—and thus have the right to be part of the teachers’ bargaining unit.
The ruling noted that TFA teachers share the same job responsibilities, evaluations, and contracts as other teachers in the district. Our minimum two-year commitment is irrelevant, given that the employer offers only one-year commitments to all its teachers.
The decision doesn’t formally set a legal precedent for other schools. Still, it’s a good sign for union drives across the country. Charter teachers are organizing in such cities as Philadelphia and Los Angeles—often in schools with sizable TFA contingents.
PRECARIOUS TEACHING
UPrep is the largest charter school district in Michigan. It consists of seven schools, 200 teachers, and more than 3,000 students. Teachers there began organizing in spring 2014.
Charter schools, which have grown rapidly in Detroit, are publicly funded, privately managed, and largely non-union.
Like charter school teachers across the country, UPrep teachers work under at-will contracts—meaning they can be fired at any time, without explanation—that are renewed every year. So they don’t know until June whether or not they’ll have a job in August.
This perpetual uncertainty, along with stolen wages and a lack of support from administrators, led teachers to reach out to American Federation of Teachers (AFT) organizers in Michigan.
“It’s hard to imagine a career for yourself in a school district when you could be fired at any time at the whim of an administrator,” said Jasmine Singleton, who taught first grade at UPrep during the campaign. “We need some stability in our work as educators, so we can focus on the children.”
UPREP FIGHT CONTINUES
Unfortunately, the union lost the election at UPrep by a few votes. Since long-term substitute teachers’ ballots were found ineligible, the TFA ballots wouldn’t have been enough to sway the outcome of this election, so they weren’t counted.
However, the NLRB is still considering a litany of unfair labor practice charges filed against Detroit 90/90 that could invalidate the election and result in a new one being scheduled.
The company ran an aggressive and well-funded anti-union campaign, beginning even before the teachers filed for election. It hired union-busting consultants, held captive-audience meetings, intimidated teachers, and ultimately threatened that if teachers voted to unionize, it wouldn’t renew its management contract—which would force UPrep schools either to find a new management company or to shutter.
(The threat is credible. In April, another Michigan charter management company announced it would stop managing University Yes Academy after teachers filed for a union election. Nonetheless, on May 6, teachers there voted 27-18 to join the AFT.)
In one of the seven UPrep school buildings, on Election Day, an administrator disabled the entrance key-cards for all teachers to prevent them from voting.
After the election, the company retaliated by giving poor evaluations to campaign leaders. Some did not have their contracts renewed to teach next year.
“The attempt to strip TFA teachers of their voice was just another attack in a longstanding corporate effort to break down teachers’ collective bargaining rights,” said Nate Walker, a K-12 policy analyst and organizer with the Michigan AFT, working on the UPrep campaign.
“This ruling drew a line in the sand that will strengthen all teachers—in charter and public schools alike—as they continue to advocate for their students and for high-quality education.”
Now we have Race to the Top----another Bush era education privatization reform funded the first few years with more student achievement goals and VOILA-----now there is no funding but the goals are still there.
Republican voters were sold the policy of community charters, school choice, and Teach for America/VISTA as teachers as US cities like Baltimore pushed all teachers in city schools out saying they were BAD TEACHERS. Remember, it has always been the lack of funding and resources and education funding actually GETTING TO THE CLASSROOMS that has been the problem and this situation is GETTING FAR WORSE. So now, Baltimore has over 1/2 of teachers being Teach for America and VISTA and those employees are now sitting around discussing how they cannot do their jobs because there are NO FUNDING OR RESOURCES. Another set of people sitting around Wall Street Baltimore Development and a very, very, very neo-conservative Johns Hopkins' 'justice' non-profits---this time for education ----saying the same thing said last decade---two decades ago----and three decades ago since Reagan/Clinton.
WE KNOW IT IS NOT THE STUDENTS WHO CANNOT ACHIEVE----WE KNOW MOST TEACHERS ARE DOING THE BEST ANYONE CAN-----AND WE KNOW IT IS ALL ABOUT BAD EDUCATION POLICY AND THE SUCKING OF ALL CITY, STATE, AND FEDERAL FUNDING TO GLOBAL CORPORATIONS AND WALL STREET.
If all the corporate education non-profits are funded by these very institutions----they will never talk or take action to fix THE GORILLA IN THE ROOM!
This is what US NGOs overseas do in developing nations----they create corporate non-profits which get all the funding to install the policies they want----since the goals are not to help people but to maximize corporate profit, the policies they create simply advance corporate goals.
Baltimore has had so much history of corporate non-profits replacing their Baltimore City public agencies---in this case the Baltimore Department of Education----that now they have FOUNDATIONS CONTROLLING CORPORATE NON-PROFITS. Keep in mind, all citizens in Baltimore KNOW WHAT POLICIES ARE NEEDED IN OUR PUBLIC SCHOOLS----they remember when all structures were in public schools and were working for the children but they are being FORCED to advance what these global investment firms are funding.
Press Releases
Baltimore Foundations Help Non-Profits Develop Earned Income Ventures
February 9, 2004 Open Society Institute–Baltimore
Baltimore Foundations Help Non-Profits Develop Earned Income Ventures
BALTIMORE—A financial services center in West Baltimore and an upholstery business that prepares disadvantaged women for family-sustaining careers are two of the eight winning social ventures chosen to be part of the new Baltimore Community Wealth Collaborative.The Collaborative, a partnership between The Annie E. Casey Foundation (AECF), the Open Society Institute-Baltimore (OSI), the Goldseker Foundation, the Alvin and Fanny B. Thalheimer Foundation, the Aaron Straus and Lillie Straus Foundation, the Baltimore Community Foundation, the University of Baltimore and Community Wealth Ventures (CWV), will provide 10 months of focused technical support to help the businesses become financially viable. The goal is to help the for-profit social ventures earn revenue to help support their non-profit parent organizations.
"At a time when funding for organizations that are meeting critical needs in our community continues to tighten, this Collaborative is crucial," said Baltimore Mayor Martin O’Malley who has supported the concept from its inception. "It will not only strengthen the city’s non-profit community, but also create jobs and opportunity in our neighborhoods."
The winning ventures were announced at a press conference today. Representatives from the non-profits were on hand for the announcement.
"Our objective in advancing these nonprofit social enterprises is to foster greater sustainability among critical human services organizations in the Baltimore community, so they can weather difficult economic times and expand their non-profit services to meet new or growing needs," said Diana Morris, director of OSI-Baltimore.
Thirty-seven nonprofit organizations applied to be part of the Collaborative. The finalists were chosen after an extensive screening process, including site visits and personal interviews. Participants include: BioTechnical Institute of Maryland, Bon Secours of Maryland Foundation, Caroline Center, Chesapeake Center for Youth Development, Goodwill Industries of the Chesapeake, Parks & People Foundation, Patterson Park Community Development Corporation, and Vehicles for Change.
CWV will provide technical assistance and support for the businesses, including in-depth monthly seminars with peer non-profit leaders and experts in the fields of social enterprise and business development, as well as customized business consulting. CWV has chosen to partner with the University of Baltimore for the project. Both graduate graphic design students and M.B.A. candidates in the entrepreneurship program will provide research and management assistance to participating organizations. In addition, business executives from leading Baltimore-area corporations will serve as mentors.
"The Casey Foundation's history of working for positive outcomes for families plus our 10-year commitment to the Baltimore community inspired us to support this terrific initiative,” said Donna Stark, director of leadership development at AECF. "Financial sustainability is a crucial issue for nonprofits. This initiative provides the strategies, the tools and the peer networks to respond to the challenges they face."
The social ventures range from a used car business to the Hollywood Diner, which was a location site for the movie Diner and other films including Tin Men and Sleepless in Seattle. The diner, operated by the Chesapeake Center for Youth Development, trains at-risk youth for Baltimore’s growing hospitality industry. The technical assistance provided by Community Wealth Ventures will lead to a new business plan, and it will help generate additional revenue to support education, job training, and after-school programs for children.
The Bon Secours of Maryland Foundation applied for help expanding and improving its financial services center in West Baltimore, which is currently financed through grants. Located in a part of town that is often ignored by banks, the center—called Our Money Place—offers low-income residents an alternative to check cashing operations that charge high fees. Our Money Place is planning to use the technical assistance to expand its range of services and to reach out to middle-income neighborhood residents.
"We have found that our neighborhood is a strong market for financial services," said Kevin Jordan, associate director for economic and community development. "By providing a lower cost alternative to the current market options, we think we can help keep money in the community and also become self-sufficient as a business."
Another non-profit participant, the Caroline Center, plans to expand its fledgling upholstery training program into a business. Started in the fall of 2001 under the guidance of a retired master upholsterer, the program teaches upholstering skills to unemployed or underemployed women in Baltimore. The women may even earn while they learn as they receive a percentage of the fees for customer pieces. The Caroline Center will use the assistance from the collaborative to structure and launch a retail upholstery shop. Profits from the business will support the center’s overall mission of enabling more women in the community to gain employment skills and become self-sufficient.
A selection team comprising Community Wealth Ventures, local educators, and Baltimore business representatives chose the winning organizations because they are mission-focused, have business ventures under way or have done considerable research towards developing a business venture, have strong boards of directors, and are willing to take calculated risks to build their financial base.
"A focused effort like this will support nonprofit social enterprise leaders who are using community wealth to diversify their revenues and better support their missions," said CWV Chairman Bill Shore. "Our goal is to ensure the ongoing viability of these organizations that are doing so much good in Baltimore."
The Annie E. Casey Foundation is a private charitable organization dedicated to helping build better futures for disadvantaged children in the United States. It was established in 1948 by Jim Casey, one of the founders of United Parcel Service, and his siblings, who named the foundation in honor of their mother. The primary mission of the foundation is to foster public policies, human-service reforms, and community supports that more effectively meet the needs of today's vulnerable children and families. In pursuit of this goal, the foundation makes grants that help states, cities, and neighborhoods fashion more innovative, cost-effective responses to these needs. For more information, visit the foundation's website, www.aecf.org.
The Open Society Institute (OSI) is a private operating and grantmaking foundation that promotes the development of open society around the world. OSI's U.S. Programs seek to strengthen democracy in the United States by addressing barriers to opportunity and justice, broadening public discussion about such barriers, and assisting marginalized groups to participate equally in civil society and to make their voices heard. U.S. Programs challenge over-reliance on the market by advocating appropriate government responsibility for human needs and promoting public interest and service values in law, medicine, and the media. OSI's U.S. Programs support initiatives in a range of areas, including access to justice for low and moderate income people; independence of the judiciary; ending the death penalty; reducing gun violence and over-reliance on incarceration; drug policy reform; inner-city education and youth programs; fair treatment of immigrants; reproductive health and choice; campaign finance reform; and improved care of the dying. OSI is part of the network of foundations, created and funded by George Soros, active in more than 50 countries around the world.
The Goldseker Foundation was created in 1975 through the generosity and foresight of Morris Goldseker (1898-1973). The foundation supports nonprofit organizations helping communities and individuals in the Baltimore metropolitan area. Visit www.goldsekerfoundation.org for more information.
The Alvin and Fanny B. Thalheimer Foundation supports programs that improve the lives of individuals and families by expanding access to education and economic opportunity, promoting self-sufficiency, and supporting local responses to problems in order to strengthen communities and advance interfaith and intergroup understanding. Through its grantmaking programs, the foundation aims to remove structural and institutional impediments to human development and to have a positive lasting effect on people's lives. Visit www.blaufund.org/foundations/alvinandfanny_f.html for more information.
The Aaron & Lillie Straus Foundation’s mission is two-pronged. The foundation promotes and sustains a strong Jewish community both locally and worldwide, and secures better futures for vulnerable children by helping to build family and community supports which nurture their educational, social, economic, and physical well-being. In order to meet this mission, the foundation funds in three specific program areas: Jewish community services; families, children and youth; and capacity building of the non-profit sector. For more information about the foundation, visit its website at www.strausfoundation.org.
The Baltimore Community Foundation (BCF) helps all kinds of people to carry out their individual philanthropic plans, with the common goal of improving the quality of life in the Baltimore region, today and for generations to come. To donors, BCF offers a complete toolkit for charitable giving, expert assistance in learning more about the causes they care about, and the opportunity to join others with similar interests to learn and give together. To the community at large, BCF offers a permanent, growing source of grant monies, as well as a common meeting ground and leadership on important issues in our region. Visit www.bcf.org for more information about the Baltimore Community Fund.
The University of Baltimore (UB) is an upper-division, graduate and professional university. UB, the state’s career-minded university, is a member of the University System of Maryland and comprises the School of Law, the Yale Gordon College of Liberal Arts and the Merrick School of Business. Visit www.ubalt.edu for more information.
Community Wealth Ventures, a subsidiary of Share Our Strength, is a consulting firm that works to generate new resources for the social sector using business ventures and corporate partnerships. Community Wealth Ventures provides consulting services for a broad range of clients in the nonprofit, corporate, and foundation communities.
Visit www.communitywealth.com for more information.
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You see this was in 2004---during Bush era and O'Malley as then Mayor of Baltimore was installing all this mess. This was part of the CitiStat data collection where data was presented as if these bad policies were helping or good when in fact they were not. The local media would report the bad data supporting the bad education policy and then a few years later an outside auditing organization would reveal all the education data was skewed.
All of that revenue being sent in by these foundations are mostly revenue that was redirected from the city's services and misappropriated to make a few corporations very rich.
Of course when these foundations are connected to say a Bill Gates they will be promoting Gates and global education corporation policies like Race to the Top and Common Core. Baltimore has been captured to this structure unable to advance because it has both Bush/Hopkins Wall Street global corporate NEO-CONS and Clinton/Obama Wall Street global corporate neo-liberals controlling all pols and 'justice' non-profits including our education non-profits. Again, the grassroots citizens wanting real change are not the problem----it is the leadership that directs the conversations and priorities always making it seem it comes from the committees.
THIS IS WHAT HAS OUR US CITIES AND IT IS WHY US CITIES ARE EITHER VOTING HILLARY OR ELECTION FRAUD IS GEARED TOWARDS ADVANCING HILLARY AND WALL STREET GLOBAL MAYORS AND GOVERNORS. THIS IS OUR people's Democratic Party.
Bill Gates Supports GreatNonprofits in Series on Innovation
GreatNonprofits highlighted on Gates Notes
We’re thrilled to share that GreatNonprofits has been recognized for our work in collecting community feedback by Bill Gates, visionary Microsoft founder and leading philanthropist. In a special series on his Gates Notes blog, Bill and Melinda Gates showed praise for GreatNonprofits for its innovative work in transforming the way people give online:
“GreatNonprofits focuses on helping people make great giving decisions through socially sourced feedback and reviews. Increasing the amount and quality of information available to donors will ultimately make giving easier, more effective and rewarding.”
GreatNonprofits CEO Perla Ni also recently guest-penned a Gates Notes post, which we’ve included below. In her post, Ni stresses the importance of including the voices of nonprofit “clients” to help nonprofits, government agencies, and grantmakers alike to visualize on-the-ground impact of nonprofits and also learn ways in which programs can be improved.
Note: GreatNonprofits is supported in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, where Bill Gates is co-chair.
“How can donors and nonprofits measurably improve funding decisions, show program results and pave the way for improvements? One practical and cost-effective way is to empower people to participate by sharing their experiences and insights about nonprofits.
That’s why I invite you to check out GreatNonprofits.org, which offers donors crowd-sourced feedback. It also provides charitable organizations with tools to collect and aggregate community feedback – from clients served, legislators, volunteers, partner organizations, or donors.
To date, GreatNonprofits has collected feedback for more than 14,000 US and international organizations ranging from health, education, to public policy groups.
This is a new experience for the nonprofit sector, which has traditionally lacked real-time, on the ground, feedback. But it’s also the wave of the future – practical, cost-effective tools can provide guidance to grant makers and nonprofits in creating and recalibrating programs.
Whether we are donors, nonprofit executives or clients of a nonprofit, we should all be sharing feedback on which nonprofits are making a difference, how they are doing it, and how it can be improved.”
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Wrap-around services called community schools as I have said is the same public structure that used to be in all public K-12 only defunded and dismantled. Now global pols are bringing those services back as global corporate non-profits all subject to funding sources-----only a few schools get them others don't and then schools find themselves begging for continued funding until these non-profits disappear. This policy is PROGRESSIVE POSING----it looks to address the problem all US citizens know must happen to have healthy schools but global pols do not intend to keep them as they continue to advance killing public K-12 and moving all schools to global corporate campuses and their control. This has advance far in Baltimore as Johns Hopkins controls all education policy----using schools as development tools---and align all public schools to corporate campuses leaving parents in Baltimore no choices other than to go to those schools.
THIS IS A BILL GATES CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA K-12 EDUCATION PRIVATIZATION POLICY AND ANY GROUP OR POL PROMOTING IT WORKS FOR WALL STREET AND NOT CITIZENS.
Raise your hand if you know parents, students, teachers in each community public school knows what policies and funding is needed to make their schools successful----EVERYONE. If you follow these non-profits to their top funding source they are all connected to global investment firms and global education corporations simply moving into the US education market as global education businesses.
INVESTMENT SCHOOLS----MEANING FORGET FEDERAL EQUAL PROTECTION AND DISTRIBUTION OF FUNDING TO ALL SCHOOLS DEEMED 'PUBLIC'.
Remember, the problem with funding for our public schools is massive corporate fraud and government corruption------the complete disregard of collecting corporate taxes and subsidizing corporations----THAT IS THE PROBLEM WITH FUNDING. Any organization that partners in this is receiving their donations from those entities committing fraud.
Cleveland's Investment Schools: "Wraparound" services plans are a step closer after community meetings finish
The Cleveland school district's Lisa Baskin (in red) and the United Way's Juliana Cole (to the right) tell residents of the John Adams High School neighborhood about socioal service plans for the school Wednesday night in the school's library. (Patrick O'Donnell/The Plain Dealer)
By Patrick O'Donnell, The Plain Dealer
on January 25, 2014 at 8:00 AM, updated January 25, 2014 at 12:04 PM
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The Cleveland schools and United Way have started work on providing better services to kids at 17 schools, including the district's 13 "Investment Schools," but the plans at each building are far from taking shape.
This week the district and United Way of Greater Cleveland had the last of 17 meetings to introduce the community to the agencies that will take the lead at each school. The series closed after meetings with College Now at John Adams High School, the Boys and Girls Clubs of Cleveland at Benesch elementary school and the Cleveland Play House at Jamison elementary.
Meanwhile, the agencies for nine of the 17 schools have picked their site coordinator -- the person who will work in each school full time to connect students and programs.
The other coordinators should be hired by the first week of February, said Juliana Cole, education programs associate for the United Way, and Lisa Baskin, head of the social service “wraparound” strategy for the district.
“We want to get someone in the school as soon as possible, but we want to get the right person,” Cole told 30 people at the John Adams meeting Wednesday night.
Baskin told family members just learning about the strategy that coordinators will try to find pre-school and after-school programs for students, tutoring programs and other social supports students and families need, taking that pressure off principals and teachers.
“Our teachers are going to be able to focus on teaching and education and the principals can focus on leadership of the building,” Baskin told the handful of residents at Benesch Thursday afternoon. Benesch is the new location for students previously at the closed Stokes elementary.
The district and United Way are starting this “wraparound” services program at 13 struggling schools that the district chose last spring as “Investment Schools” -- buildings to receive special attention to boost performance using money from the tax increase voters passed for the schools in 2012.
Four other schools -- H. Barbara Booker, Harvey Rice, East Technical High School and Marion Sterling -- will receive similar social supports but are not designated as Investment Schools.
All schools involved and the lead agencies working with them are listed below.
Cole and Baskin said the attendance at Benesch was low because of snow that afternoon. They said most meetings drew crowds similar to what was at John Adams. The largest was at R.G. Jones elementary, where 200 were in attendance because the school held it on a day with other events, including a presentation by the Efficacy Institute, which has brought a new approach to student motivation to that school this year.
At the community meetings, Baskin and Cole have asked residents to split into groups to identify what strengths they want the site coordinator to have, what assets -- organizations, facilities, experts -- the neighborhood has, what partnerships they want to see the district create and what they would ideally see from the school.
Answers to those questions at the Adams and Benesch meetings were mostly generalizations.
Parents wanted an outgoing, friendly, caring coordinator who understands the neighborhood and can relate to the children.
Individual discussion groups sometimes added a few specifics. At Benesch, one group asked for Girl Scout and Cub Scout meetings at the schools and other non-sport activities that could include serving children dinner.
One group at John Adams asked for someone to help families with children who are making the transition from eighth grade to high school.
Cole told residents not to expect too many changes over the first few months while site coordinators settle in. She said similar programs in other cities have generally led to increased attendance within a year.
The schools and agencies in the program are:
Alfred A. Benesch
Boys & Girls Clubs of Cleveland
Anton Grdina
Burton, Bell, Carr Development, Inc.
Case
Rainey Institute
Collinwood High School
OhioGuidestone
East Tech High School
Friendly Inn Settlement Corporation
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Boys & Girls Clubs of Cleveland
H. Barbara Booker
West Side Community House
Harvey Rice
The Centers for Families and Children
John Adams High School
College Now Greater Cleveland
Kenneth Clement Boys’ Leadership Academy
Case Western Reserve University (pending contract approval)
Lincoln West High School
Esperanza, Inc.
Luis Munoz Marin
Esperanza, Inc.
Marion Sterling
No lead agency named. Wraparound services supported through School Improvement Grant dollars.
Mound
University Settlement
Robert Jamison
Cleveland Play House
Robinson G. Jones
Bellaire-Puritas Development Corporation
Walton
Esperanza, Inc.
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'GLOBAL BOYS AND GIRLS CLUB'
If you know our once local Boys and Girls Club and YMCA are now global corporations working in a ONE WORLD way to install the same societal structures in the US as exist overseas in International Economic Zones----then you know these are not local, grassroots non--profits---they are Wall Street Baltimore Development global corporate non-profits and directors work for those corporate foundations and not for citizens in each community. That is why they come in a take over----citizens have no voice in what happens or how funding is used. So, instead of Maryland or Baltimore revenue coming to each public school for the parents, teachers, and students to decide how to spend it=====all government revenue is going to these global corporations. Baltimore has suffered greatly because of this and it is the most direct cause of Baltimore being a THIRD WORLD city in measures of all quality of life.
PLEASE STOP JOINING THESE WALL STREET BALTIMORE DEVELOPMENT 'JUSTICE' NON-PROFITS----BE YOUR OWN ACTIVIST BY EDUCATING AND SPEAKING WITH YOUR OWN VOICE.
Cities like Baltimore allowed these structures to take hold no doubt because of race and class issues----people thought this was only about the poor-----but as always happens it becomes about EVERYONE and now that once silent middle-class are falling into this system as the schools close getting fewer and more selective and VOILA-----all families in Baltimore not affluent are feeling completely dis-empowered.
GLOBAL BOYS AND GIRLS CLUB
Our work
57%
The Club Saved my Life
62%
Club helped me commit to my education
67%
The Club kept me out of trouble with the Law
85%
The Club taught me Right from Wrong
Education and Career Programs
Leading youth toward a better career path, these programs are armed with effective educational tools and efficient academic courses. Preparing the youth for the outside world, each of these programs is fortified with opportunities for career exploration and educational enhancement.
Character and Leadership Programs
Preparing youth to become a better citizen, responsible and caring, these programs catered specifically to inspire and motivate youth towards a sensible life path. Enhancing their leadership skills, decision-making, and planning, each of these programs is designed to develop and enhance their overall character.
View the list of programs implemented in Clubs across America.
The Arts Programs
Designed to develop youth’s creativitys and cultural awareness, these programs are endowed with knowledge and appreciation for visual arts, crafts, and creative writing. Heavily focused on the artistry and imagination, these courses have visionary tools geared towards creativity.
View the list of programs implemented in Clubs across America.
Health and Life Skills
Giving the utmost importance on health, these programs aim to develop and improve Youth’s welfare and nourishment. With training's designed to cultivate self-sufficiency and independence, each individual faces life struggles filled with optimism.
View the list of programs implemented in Clubs across America.
Sports, Fitness and Recreation
Aimed to develop Youth’s interpersonal skills and to provide a healthy lifestyle, these programs are equipped with interactive sports and engaging recreational activities.
View the list of programs implemented in Clubs across America.
Specialized Initiatives
Members from different Boys & Girls Clubs across the globe gather to coherently discuss each program and identify specific needs of each club.
View the list of programs implemented in Clubs across America.
EMPOWERING YOUTH ORGANIZATIONS AROUND THE WORLD!
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I like to share what the Republican base of voters pushing all this public schools as charters and school choice are saying because Clinton/Obama Wall Street global corporate neo-liberals are FAR-RIGHT----so this is the only voice in US politics today----the Democratic base of labor and justice has been killed by all these policies these few decades and now the Republican base are seeing they created a monster because----they have no voice or control either.
Right now across the nation citizens are being made to fill out question cards where a moderator decides whether that question will be heard or even to reword the question to create their own talking point. The panels presented are always people wanting the changes being sought by global corporate education groups. This gets worse as those citizens in cities made desperate for jobs are now being drawn into privatizing just to have a job or small business. ALL THAT IS DELIBERATE====knowing in just a few years they will be defunded or closed while national charter chains take over. One wonders if this charter chain is tied to Bloomberg's Alonzo who worked to advance Bloomberg's K-12 privatization in NYC and Baltimore.
If a charter is really simply working to advance better education policy it would not be closed and proprietary----it would want others to see what makes them successful. It is because most of these charters are tied to national private corporate charters with goals of Wall Street stock trade and franchises that they are acting as in this article below.
Whether our state and city Departments of Education or Wall Street global education non-profits----we are all being reduced to 2 minute of talk and/or index card input----PLEASE DO NOT ATTEND OR PARTICIPATE IN THESE KINDS OF MEETINGS---THEY ARE NOT HAVING A GENERAL DISCUSSION. Create your own community citizens' groups and allow all to talk openly and move against the REAL problems.
Parents Told They Can’t Record Board Meeting Tonight At Academia Antonia Alonso
Tonight, a Delaware charter school refused parents the ability to record their board meeting. A group of parents attended the Academia Antonia Alonso Board of Directors meeting to give public comment about what they felt was unfair termination of many teachers at the school. They wanted to record the meeting but were told they could not. Even though charter schools are technically corporations, they still have to abide by public meeting laws in Delaware. And in Delaware, all you have to do is advise someone you are recording a meeting. You do not need their consent.
Charter schools in Delaware are not unionized, therefore they can hire and fire at will without any protection whatsoever for the teachers. While one would hope charter administrators use a common sense approach in making these decisions, some charters have been known for running their schools like a dictatorship. Some charters have fired a teacher over something as small as questioning a policy. When this happens as often as it has at Academia Antonia Alonso this school year, sooner or later parents will begin to notice and question it themselves. What charter boards fail to understand is they wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for a parent’s ability to make a choice. What kind of message does that send when a parent is denied the simple freedom of recording a meeting when they don’t even need their consent?
House Bill 61, the school board recording bill, is awaiting a full vote by the Delaware Senate. It passed the Delaware House last year. Since then, many reports have come out about charter school fraud. The bill is a no-brainer! This is just another reason why this bill needs to pass. Denying a parent of a choice is never a smart thing to do, especially when it comes to education. For a parent to even attend a board meeting is a feat in itself. They should be happy they have parent engagement. I can only think of one reason a board wouldn’t want a public meeting to be heard. And it isn’t because they don’t want parents to hear a great meeting. They don’t want something getting out. While the school did allow the parents to give public comment at two minutes each, will their concerns be put in the board minutes for the meeting?
What makes this more interesting is the amount of parent input they had for their recent major modification that passed the Delaware State Board of Education last week. They had to solicit parents to comment on that publicly. But when the parent’s want to talk about something the school doesn’t want out there, they don’t want the public to hear that.
Academia Antonia Alonso currently resides in the Community Education Building in Wilmington. The State Board of Education approved their major modification request to move to one of the buildings owned by Odyssey Charter School at Barley Mill Plaza. The charter school has gone through three heads of school since they opened in August of 2014, in less than two years. They were placed on formal review before they even opened based on low enrollment. They got out of formal review with a probation and got their enrollment up to what their charter was approved for. In the 2014-2015 Charter School Performance Framework, the school met the standard for their financial framework but was labeled as does not meet standard for their organizational framework.
When our schools going to learn that if you try to silence parents in any way, sooner or later they will organize. Teachers in traditional school districts already have the capability to organize through their unions. Perhaps charter school teachers should as well to avoid these administrators who seem to think ruling with an iron fist is the right thing to do.
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What we are seeing in Baltimore today with our classrooms filling with Teach for America and immigrant teaching staff are Americans being brought from all over the country and world who not long after being in Baltimore's completely dysfunctional education system saying the same thing Baltimore's black public school teachers said these few decades of defunding and dismantling of our public school structures. They know they cannot effect change under these conditions and they know what underserved students need but they cannot do their jobs because there are no resources or funding....instead it is getting worse.
Remember, the goal of Teach for America and other private teaching corporations is only to break down the American public school structures including our public teacher's unions because they want to create a system of part-time education techs being adjuncts as has happened in our public universities. It has nothing to do with making things better---global pols are simply trying to break down all that is American---to install all that is Asian global neo-liberal education corporate structures found in International Economic Zones. Most Teach for America/VISTA can tell you exactly how many days they have been in the program seeking only to serve time and move on. Very few stay in teaching as the real educators having the passion for teaching are being pushed out.
As this article shows-----most of people brought to Baltimore have absolutely no connection with the culture of our communities so can simply respond in defense of their own safety----their own ability to perform as needed----one can guess the idea behind Baltimore bringing Teach for America is to bring NEW CITIZENS TO BALTIMORE----that may stay and take a different job once fulfilling that time commitment. All this fails when these NEW CITIZENS see how captured Baltimore's government and community structure is against citizens' voice and they mostly leave to other cities.
Below we see how Baltimore is being filled with all this Bill Gates and Wall Street Bloomberg education structure none of which is needed and all of which receives the Federal, state, and city funding for education that could go to our public school classrooms. It is all about moving the next global education corporation into Baltimore while making sure no real public education structures are rebuilt. Look to see a new Baltimore citizen leading just such a corporation and he won the Baltimore City Council race as a Democrat. Mr Cohen has no intention of fixing the public structure that eveyone knews in Baltimore will address the real problems---his goal is moving in an education corporation he may be invested in or want to sell to global corporations in a merger.
If our national public school structure was being funded maintaining the same equal protection, opportunity, and access as US Constitutional and Federal laws requires and this private system wanted to build---that would be fine---but this private system is using all our Federal, state, and local revenue to build what will be for-profit and personal gain----AND THAT IS NOT FREE MARKET---Who decides who gets this funding and why? It comes from a Baltimore Board of Estimates that takes the city's education revenue and awards it selectively in what most Baltimore citizens see as a corrupt system.
Teach for America: Creating Baltimore's next leaders
These Teach for America standouts are sticking around to drive change
Mar 21, 2014, 6:00am EDT Updated Mar 21, 2014, 9:56am EDT
Industries & Tags
Somewhere in a Baltimore classroom, a future CEO is trying to teach fractions to a bunch of fidgety third-graders.
Enlarge Zeke Cohen, founder and executive director at the Intersection, a nonprofit that prepares… more
Jaclyn Borowski
The figure standing at the blackboard is a teacher brought to Baltimore through the Teach for America program. She came here from a place like Eagle River, Alaska, or Northampton, Mass., hoping to get two or three years of teaching experience and then move on, maybe to a more traditional teaching job, or maybe
Name of Organization
Intersection Campaign For Kids Inc
In Care of Name
Zeke Cohen
Zeke Cohen, founder and executive director at the Intersection, a nonprofit that prepares… more
Jaclyn Borowski
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Of course Baltimore City Public Schools are crumbling, defunded, and dismantled creating the dysfunction because Wall Street Baltimore Development and a very, very neo-conservative Johns Hopkins redirected education funding for these few decades to itself growing globally while leaving the city to fall into third world levels of decay and poverty. Now, it has an School of Education ranked #2 globally because it has been able to install global campuses in nations around the world with all that Federal, state, and local funding that would have come to Baltimore City public schools. Trillions of dollars over 3 decades built this Hopkins global empire----so the answer to Baltimore's public school funding is having Hopkins GIVE TO OUR BALTIMORE CITY SCHOOLS BULK FUNDING OF BILLIONS OF DOLLARS ----just to rebuild each public school----see that it is well-funded and resourced so it can operate as it did before all those government funds were diverted. Any REAL education advocacy organization would make having corporations in Baltimore allowed a non-profit status when they are global corporations so these global corporations can pay property and income taxes as does all small businesses and individuals; they would be shouting to stop the massive corporate subsidy in Baltimore as that is our public school funding----and VOILA---BALTIMORE HAS ALL THE REVENUE IT NEEDS TO FULLY FUND OUR PUBLIC SCHOOLS.
You will notice that any Wall Street Baltimore Development and very, very, very global neo-conservative Johns Hopkins 'education justice' non-profit will NEVER PROMOTE THAT GORILLA IN THE ROOM and that is an organization that keeps our schools from success.
Remember, when corporations like US and World Report or this Carnegie Corporation ranks Hopkins or its executives as leaders or #2 globally----it is because they won global market share by expanding faster and getting people signed up---whether online or at a global campus. It has nothing to do with quality education or educating in public interest. Being a giant squid sucking all revenue out of a US city is how Carnegie Corp defines exceptionalism. It is exceptional----only 5% of people have that personality of DOING ANYTHING TO WIN....SHOW ME THE MONEY. It does not belong in our local, state, or national government. THESE ARE NOT PUBLIC SERVANTS.
Closing our public schools and privately funding what they call public schools-----simply Hopkins' charters tied to their campus
.'Expanding the university's commitment to Baltimore by spearheading the $1.8 billion East Baltimore Development Initiative, including building and operating the first new K-8 public school constructed in East Baltimore in more than two decades'
Again, every citizen in Baltimore is fast becoming attached to having to work for Hopkins---either as their global corporations tied to all Baltimore City agencies----or their global non-profits including education. Soon, all students will be tied to attending a Hopkins' based school program that will use that pre-school testing to vocationally track children into which Hopkins campus school a child will go. Extend this to global UnderArmour and that is the goal of these Clinton/Bush/Obama global education reforms.
JHU President Ronald J. Daniels recognized for exceptional leadership by Carnegie Corp.
One of four recipients of biennial Academic Leadership Award, Daniels will use $500,000 grant to expand activities that make JHU more accessible to Baltimore public school students
Hub staff report / September 24, 2015 Posted in University News
President Ronald J. Daniels
Johns Hopkins University President Ronald J. Daniels is one of four university presidents chosen by the Carnegie Corporation of New York to receive its 2015 Academic Leadership Award, given biennially in recognition of exceptional leadership in higher education, the corporation announced today.
The award, established in 2005, is among the most prestigious in higher education. It honors individuals who, in addition to fulfilling their administrative and managerial roles with dedication and creativity, demonstrate vision and a commitment to excellence and equity in undergraduate education, the liberal arts, the development of major interdisciplinary programs, reform of K-12 education, international engagement, and the promotion of strong links between their institutions and their local communities.
In addition to Daniels, this year's recipients are Patricia A. McGuire of Trinity Washington University in Washington, D.C., Diana Natalicio of the University of Texas at El Paso, and C.L. Max Nikias of the University of Southern California.
The honor includes a $500,000 grant to each of the winners' institutions to be spent at the honorees' discretion to promote their academic priorities.
Daniels said he would use the money to expand activities that make Johns Hopkins University more accessible to students and graduates of Baltimore City Public Schools, including increased support for low-income students through the Baltimore Scholars program, partnerships with local K-8 schools, and new initiatives aimed at college and career preparation.
"I am deeply honored to be recognized among the esteemed recipients of this award," Daniels said. "It is exciting to have the innovative work by our faculty and staff and Johns Hopkins' commitment to Baltimore recognized by the Carnegie Corporation, a great champion of higher education."
Added Jeffrey H. Aronson, chair of the university's board of trustees: "This is a truly special moment for President Daniels and the entire Johns Hopkins community. The honor is testament to President Daniels' leadership, his innovative academic initiatives, and his commitment to deepening Johns Hopkins' engagement with Baltimore."
Since becoming JHU's president in 2009, Daniels has focused on three overarching themes—enhancing collaboration among the university's nine academic divisions and the Applied Physics Laboratory, increasing student access, and strengthening community engagement.
In honoring Daniels, the Carnegie Corp. cited a number of the university's efforts and accomplishments during his tenure, among them:
- Increasing undergraduate grant aid by nearly 40%; expanding the enrollment of minorities from 12% to 23% of the entering class; and broadening the "JUMP" program to support underrepresented students pursuing careers in health-related fields.
- Launching a series of multidisciplinary initiatives to address fundamental societal problems, including the 21st Century Cities Initiative, the Science of Learning Institute, the Global Health Institute, and the Individualized Health Initiative; creating 50 interdisciplinary Bloomberg Distinguished Professorships to link university divisions; supporting innovations and entrepreneurship programs in undergraduate science and Ph.D. education; and increasing the university's activities in translating pure research findings into solutions for everyday problems.
- Expanding the university's commitment to Baltimore by spearheading the $1.8 billion East Baltimore Development Initiative, including building and operating the first new K-8 public school constructed in East Baltimore in more than two decades; and leading a community partnership initiative among 10 neighborhoods near the university's Homewood campus that is focused on educational opportunity and economic growth.
The Carnegie Corporation of New York was created by Andrew Carnegie in 1911 "to promote the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding." The Academic Leadership Award was established in recognition of Carnegie's belief that education and knowledge are fundamental tools for strengthening democracy and creating a more vibrant civil society.
Past winners of the award are: Henry S. Bienen, Northwestern University; Robert J. Birgeneau, University of California, Berkeley; Leon Botstein, Bard College; Richard Brodhead, Duke University; Nancy Cantor, Syracuse University; Jared L. Cohon, Carnegie Mellon University; Scott S. Cowen, Tulane University; Michael Crow, Arizona State University; Matthew Goldstein, The City University of New York; Amy Gutmann, University of Pennsylvania; John Hennessy, Stanford University; Freeman A. Hrabowski III, University of Maryland, Baltimore County; William E. Kirwan, University System of Maryland; Eduardo J. Padrón, Miami Dade College; Don M. Randel, University of Chicago; and Beverly Daniel Tatum, Spelman College.
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For those thinking our Federal Department of Labor or our National Labor Board is actually working for the American workers after a few decades of appointments by Clinton/Bush/Obama -----look at this decision. How better to bust teacher's unions than to allow an anti-teacher's union Teach for America BECOME UNION MEMBERS. This is the dynamic in states like Maryland where Maryland Assembly poses progressive by protecting Baltimore's teacher's unions by extending them to charters and allowing Teach for America to become part of the teachers' union----and it would be why AFT and Weingarten support Hillary----it is all about privatization and union-busting. Why is Baltimore's teacher's union silent and supporting all education privatization measures? Most of union members are not public teachers. Our Baltimore Teacher's union leader English is simply a figurehead as teachers shout she is not working for them....even the Teach for America teachers. We all know the next step in that progression will be teacher's unions disappear----along with their pensions. Meanwhile the new private teachers in Teach for America will simply rotate out of teaching as it is a temporary stint for most of them. Why are AFT in some states allowing this? They think they can create their own national charter chains and become part of the privatization sadly.
So, O'Malley touts he is protecting teachers' union as they install the union-busting policies in Baltimore to do the opposite. For citizens really thinking it is the teacher's unions causing all these classroom problems----think again at what defunding, dismantlement, and bad education polices to for anyone placed in our classrooms----unions did protect Equal Protection and opportunity and access in modern times.
Monday, Jan 13, 2014 12:33 PM EDT
Teach For America’s pro-corporate, union-busting agenda
How TFA uses its vast political influence to boost charter schools and drive down teacher pay (UPDATED)
Chad Sommer, EduShyster.com
This piece originally appeared on EduShyster.com.When I joined Teach For America in the spring of 2011 I had no idea that my belief in social and economic justice was about to be cynically exploited by the corporate class. As a former development manager for a nonprofit that serves low-income Chicago public school students, TFA’s claims that its corps members and alumni are helping lead an educational revolution in low-income communities across the country spoke to me. Naively seduced by TFA’s do-gooder marketing pitch, I charged ahead on a mission to close the academic “ achievement gap” that TFA blames on incompetent (read unionized) teachers.
Today, having completed the two-year program and seeing how it operates from the inside, I’m convinced that TFA now serves as a critical component of the all-out-effort by corporate elites to privatize one of the last remaining public institutions of our country: our public schools.
Adored By the Corporate Class
TFA and the privately managed, non-union charter schools that its corps members often staff are adored by the corporate class. Elites shower both TFA and charter schools with private contributions from their own tax-exempt foundations, as well as taxpayer dollars funneled by their courtiers in Washington and statehouses across the country. Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, The Walton Foundation (Walmart), The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, The Eli Broad Foundation, and a small army of billionaire hedge fund managers are just a few representatives of the corporate class that bankrolls TFA and the various networks of privately managed (but taxpayer funded) charter schools. Wendy Kopp, founder of TFA is even married to the president of KIPP, one of the country’s largest networks of charter schools.
In Chicago, where I participated in TFA, the organization maintains its own extremely close partnerships with privately managed charter schools. Their relationships are so close, in fact, that earlier this year, after the Chicago Public School system closed forty-nine traditional, unionized public schools, claiming the schools were “underutilized,” it was revealed that TFA was working behind the scenes with a number of privately-managed, non-union charter school operators to open fifty-two new charter schools in Chicago over the next five years.
The alliance between TFA and charter schools is cemented by an arrangement that few people know about outside of the organization. The teacher placement policy of TFA explicitly states in bold letters, “It is our policy that corps members accept the first position offered to them.” The effective result of this policy means that corps members have no bargaining position to negotiate wages or benefits, meaning that whatever offer a school makes, the corps member must accept it. TFA provides a rather benign explanation for this arrangement, claiming that it allows for the quick and efficient placement of hundreds of corps members into teaching positions in each market. However, in practice, this mandate is a lynchpin of the corporate class’ privatization plan for education.
The “First Placement” Policy
Each spring, local TFA offices in each market dedicate an entire team of staff to arranging interviews between corps members and hiring schools. The “first placement” policy means that TFA can guarantee charter schools a constant supply of new teachers each year who have no choice but to work for wages and benefits far below those negotiated by the local teachers union at traditional public schools in the same area. While a first year salary for a teacher at a traditional unionized school in Chicago is approximately $45,000, the starting salary at many of TFA’s partner charter schools is nearly 30 percent less at $32,000. And because teachers at charter schools are not protected by the due process policies the union has in place at traditional public schools, TFA corps members at charter schools can be fired at any time, for any reason.
A fellow TFA corps member in Chicago who worked at a charter school told me that she met with her principal each Friday to find out if she should bother coming back to work the following Monday. Another told me that his principal explicitly told him that she knew he would only be with her school for two years, so she was going to work him to death. And when he left after his TFA commitment, she would just replace him with a new TFA recruit. Churn and burn is the business model for these schools, and TFA provides a continuous supply of naively idealistic workers who have no choice but to accept their lot. Furthermore, this constant churn of teachers who possess zero or one year of experience can’t possibly be good for the academic or social-emotional development of students who often have little stability in their lives.
By driving down teacher salaries and weakening workplace protections, TFA has a corrosive effect on the teaching profession. But behind TFA’s role as a feeder system for charter schools is a hypocrisy that’s especially galling.
A Rigged Game
Corporate education reformers are constantly hailing “market-based solutions” as the remedy for poor academic performance among low-income students. TFA, charter schools and their corporate benefactors espouse the notion that if low-income students just had more choices in schools, the resulting competition would drive all schools to deliver a higher quality education. Students and parents must be free to vote with their feet and find alternatives; the Darwinian principal of survival of the fittest is what makes a “free market” so effective, claim its corporate proponents. And yet TFA’s rigging of the teacher hiring process in favor of charter school operators demonstrates a complete and utter contempt for local labor markets. When corps members aren’t allowed the freedom to turn down a job because the pay or benefits are inadequate, or because a charter school has a terrible reputation for abusing teachers, there is no “free market” at work.
TFA: An Inverted Labor Union?
Political philosopher Sheldon Wolin proposes in his book Democracy Incorporated that the United States has devolved into a unique, corporate-controlled state that he calls “Inverted Totalitarianism.” Considering the domineering corporate influence on TFA, I would suggest that TFA has become an inverted labor union. Traditional labor unions work to promote the interests of the working people who comprise them by collectively bargaining for higher wages, better benefits and improved working conditions. Through its partnerships with charter schools and its mandate that corps members take the first job they’re offered, TFA is lowering wages, reducing benefits and worsening the working conditions of teachers. It is increasingly clear that the mission of the corporate class is to destroy teachers unions and remake the teaching profession into a temporary, low paying job. The corporate class is getting all of the help it needs from Teach For America.
Update, 1/14/14: Becky O’Neill, of Teach For America Chicago, responds:
This week, recent alum Chad Sommer shared his critical thoughts on Teach For America’s approach to corps member hiring in the Chicago region. Because the piece touches on a number of important issues, we wanted to provide a few factual corrections and clarifications – along with our own reflections on some of the tough questions the piece brings to the fore.
Chad’s post focused on the financial implications of becoming a teacher – implications our corps members and alumni teachers confront when they first choose to join the corps and throughout their careers. As an organization, we are committed to doing as much as we can to ensure that teaching is a viable, financially sustainable option for an increasingly diverse, dedicated, effective teaching force. This reflects our belief that teachers who share the background of students have the potential for profound additional impact with those students.
In the Chicago region, 35% of our 2013 corps members received Pell Grants to make college possible and 25% were the first in their families to attend. Without a reasonable salary and benefits (along with support they receive from AmeriCorps for past, current and future education costs), we know that many of these individuals would be forced to direct their talents elsewhere.
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'Hannah Sadtler spent two years as a TFA corps member in New Orleans after Katrina.
Since this is a far-right wing education corporatization policy it hits the Republican states hardest as Jindal in Louisiana made one huge swath of national charter chain and Teach for America to kill all semblance of a K-12 public school system. As we see all over the nation with citizens brought into this privatized teaching format----ALMOST ALL HATE IT BECAUSE IT IS NOT EMPOWERING OR AIMED AT IMPROVING---and folks know this. So, we must end these corporate education policies not only because they do not bring quality to our community schools---but as a labor activist I know citizens being tied to this private teaching process are being exploited and abused in many cases.
It all ties in with bringing national charter chains replacing public schools under the guise of specializing in what underserved students need.
Most people joining TFA or working as VISTAS are not bad people---they are often just wanting to work....so it is the policy that is bad---not the citizens being moved into these positions.
Group forms in protest of Teach for America
23rd September 2013 ·
By Kari Harden
Contributing Writer
When Briana O’Neal returned home to New Orleans in 2006, she thought high school was going to get better.
She’d heard there were new schools with new exceedingly qualified teachers, and that they were going to have the opportunity to learn on a higher level than ever before. She couldn’t wait.
Displaced, O’Neal spent her 9th-grade year divided between a school in Baker, La., and Little Rock, Arkansas.
In Baker, it was horrible, she said. “They didn’t want us there. They treated us horrible.”
In Little Rock, things got even worse. O’Neal was one of three New Orleanians – and three African Americans, at her school. They didn’t want her there either.
But one day, she said, “I almost lost my life.”
It was Halloween, and she was on a bus with the two other Black kids. A group of white students wore KKK outfits as their costumes.
The bus driver pulled over, and the white students in KKK hoods students started beating the three kids from New Orleans.
“We ran for our lives,” O’Neal said. She said she was beaten with books, brass knuckles, and they cut off her hair. One boy was in a coma for six months, she said.
“The bus driver let them do it.”
So O’Neal moved back to New Orleans by herself, while her mother remained in Arkansas to work.
At 16, she was living in their home without electricity or running water. But she was eager to continue on a path toward college, and happy to be home.
She returned to Walter L. Cohen High School, where she had gone before the storm. But because the plan was to close Cohen, O’Neal said she ended up at John McDonogh High School.
“It was awful,” she said. By merging the two schools, O’Neal said they essentially merged an uptown gang with a downtown gang.
According to O’Neal, there were riots and fights at Cohen, and the classes were overcrowded with 40 or 50 kids to a room.
All her teachers at Cohen were from Teach for America, O’Neal said, many whom she said would frequently quit by the end of their first day.
“I’d never seen teachers so young,” she said. She said she doesn’t remember any of their names, there were so many that passed through. Some of the students were the same age as the teachers.
There were constant yelling matches between teachers and students, and the teachers’ solution was to call the security guards or police, she said. The National Guard also had a presence at the school at that time.
Editor’s note: Since the publication of this article, representatives from Teach for America have contested O’Neal’s recollection of the make up of teachers in the school. According to an email from Danielle Montoya, Regional Communications director: “In 2007-2008 we only had 4 TFA teachers, as part of an instructional staff of 35, teaching at Cohen. Two of those teachers taught the same subject, but in different grades so it isn’t possible that all of her teachers were from TFA or that there was a strong TFA influence at the school.”
O’Neal saw many kids get arrested. “They treated us like animals,” she said.
The teachers were insensitive to their culture as well as what they had just endured with Katrina, O’Neal said.
“They didn’t understand the full mental scope of what everyone had just been through. The classrooms were never in order. There was a lot of trauma.”
The teachers often pronounced names wrong, but they didn’t care about being corrected, she said.
They wanted “us to change our culture to fit their culture,” O’Neal said.
And they had no clue — or apparent sympathy, that many of the kids were living on their own, working, and taking care of siblings, she said. “Some days we didn’t eat.”
There was a 5 p.m., curfew, and O’Neal often had to walk from the school on Esplanade Avenue to her house in the Garden District to make it home on time.
“They didn’t put any of that in perspective,” she said. “We’re out here struggling and have been through all this, and they didn’t care.”
At John Mac, the first hour of every day was spent going through the security line. After the metal detector, every backpack and purse was searched. Every student was patted down, shoes removed, and hair checked for anything hidden.
Once in the building (they would be suspended if they were late, which was a constant problem because the buses were always late and public transportation hadn’t resumed), they were not allowed to leave the building.
“There was still mold from Katrina — and a horrible smell,” she said.
“The first semester we didn’t do any work,” O’Neal alleges, and the teachers only cared about collecting “data.” She said they wanted to know where she had gone to school in the past, and what grade level she was at. “They wanted to group us into different groups — the good kids, the bad kids, and the smart kids,” she said.
However, according to O’Neal, there was one question they failed to ask while collecting their data and that was if she had any special needs or disabilities. O’Neal is blind in one eye and has partial vision in the other. She has to have larger print in order to read, among other needs.
O’Neal said one boy who suffered from serious mental illness spent two years in the classroom with all the other kids.
During the middle of her second year, they finally got a counselor, she said.
And it wasn’t until the middle of her 11th-grade year she said that the teachers started presenting anything resembling an academic lesson. “We didn’t have any books until the end of 2007,” she said.
In the middle of the 2007-2008 school year, O’Neal said they started giving out worksheets. While the kids worked, the teachers spent a majority of the class time talking and texting on their personal phones, she said.
O’Neal alleges that none of her teachers were qualified to teach in their assigned subject .
O’Neal started out in the “good kids” group. That was until she and fellow students started organizing, and trying to bring light to some of their needs — books, qualified teachers, services for kids with special needs, and lunches that weren’t served frozen. Then she moved to the “bad kids” group.
That’s when she got angry. Many of her peers had been angry all along, she said. But she wasn’t always a fighter. It was at John Mac she got into her first fight. And it wasn’t her last.
“I was already angry because of Katrina,” she said. “We were mad about being lied to. We missed our teachers. We missed our schools.”
O’Neal directed her anger into the group formed by about 80 students from a handful of public and private schools — Fyre Youth Squad.
The teachers took the organizing as an effort to get them fired.
That wasn’t their goal, O’Neal said. “We wanted to make our schools better.”
The kids in the organization were suspended, she said. After that they were told they could stay at school, but they wouldn’t pass.
The student group held press conferences, wrote petitions, held assemblies, and travelled to Baton Rouge to take their concerns to the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education.
Things changed, she said. They got more books, and eventually more (three) certified teachers. The school began allowing the community and parents — previously shut out — to get more involved.
“We got a lot of things on our list,” she said. But not everything — like lunches that weren’t served frozen.
Now 23, O’Neal left John Mac after that second year and got her GED. She was the only one voluntarily in the GED class and not wearing an ankle-monitoring bracelet, she said. It was stressful, but it was better than John Mac — and she could get the resources she needed at home to deal with her eyesight problems.
“None of the schools offered the help I needed — I was already doing it on my own,” she said.
She is working full time now, and still hopes to go to college.
What happened to O’Neal in her 10th, 11th, and 12th grade years is not a unique experience for high school-aged kids in New Orleans following the storm.
And those lost years—years crucial to her future—illustrate the heart of a growing nationwide movement speaking out against Teach for America.
In July, a group was formally organized — largely born out of the New Orleans experience—called “Resistance to Teach for America.”
Once they started communicating their concerns and connecting with others, groups started popping up all over the country — in California, Philadelphia, Chicago, New York, and Washington D.C.
The groups are made up of community activists, parents, students, veteran teachers, and TFA alumni.
Hannah Sadtler spent two years as a TFA corps member in New Orleans after Katrina.
She said the experience was both dehumanizing to her, and to her students. Sadlter said she was unprepared to deal with the level of trauma her kids were going through, and she herself became traumatized by the boot camp like mentality she was required to enforce.
Sadlter said that there was far more emphasis from her superiors on uniform violations than lesson plans.
Sadlter was also shocked to learn about the mass firing of teachers. “I believed what they [TFA] told me at the time — that there was a shortage of qualified and dedicated teachers, and that TFA was a response to the shortage.”
After she left TFA, Sadlter knew she needed to better understand the context of education reform in New Orleans. She connected with community members and veteran teachers, and started the New Teachers Roundtable, a discussion group to give support and share experiences.
She is also involved in the Resistance movement.
“After Katrina, if at any time, it was that moment that kids needed to be surrounded by, and supported by, things that were familiar,” said Kristen Lynn Buras, Director of the Urban South Grassroots Research Collective and Assistant Professor of Educational Policy Educational Policy Studies at Georgia State University.
Instead, about 4,500 teachers were fired without due process. A judge ruled in favor of the teachers in the wrongful termination lawsuit, but a verdict is still pending. The ruling was based, in part, on findings by the court that “documents misrepresentations of school and teacher performance prior to Katrina and local and state government entities misspending (not spending) funds from FEMA to retain teachers. Orleans Parish public schools were the only schools in the Gulf region affected by hurricanes Katrina and Rita to not use the funds secured from the federal government for this requested and required purpose,” said Jim Randels, vice-president of the United Teachers of New Orleans.
While TFA proclaims a mission of social justice, they were standing by to accept millions in taxpayer dollars to “enter a contract with a district that unlawfully fired all of its teachers,” Buras said. “None of this is accidental. It’s part of a larger plan to privatize public schools,”
In Naomi Klein’s 2007 book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Klein draws numerous parallels between the companies subcontracted to do work in Iraq and companies working in New Orleans immediately after Hurricane Katrina.
Klein writes: “Washington could have easily made it a condition of every Katrina contract that companies hire local people at decent wages to help them put their lives back together. Instead, the residents of the Gulf Coast, like the people of Iraq, were expected to watch as contractors created an economic boom based on easy taxpayer money and relaxed regulations.”
Buras identifies TFA as a union-busting mechanism, and a redirecting of resources from one group of people (black veteran teachers) to another (TFA employees).
Klein writes: “Not so long ago, disasters were periods of social leveling, rare moments when atomized communities put divisions aside and pulled together. Increasingly, however, disasters are the opposite: they provide windows into a cruel and ruthlessly divide future in which money and race buy survival.”
Buras also points to the language used as providing the justification for the firings.
The public officials blamed and demonized the veteran teachers for the state of education in the city, she said. They defined the problem as the veteran teachers, she said, and “That definition of the problem opened the space for TFA to enter.”
But you have to go back much further than that, she said. At least 100 years.
“That fails to account for a longer history.”
That history, Buras said, is one of disinvestment by the state into the public schools. Many of those fired teachers spent decades fighting for equitable resources, she said. “They are scapegoating that same group of teachers for problems those teachers spent their lives fighting against.”
A judge ruled in favor of the wrongful termination lawsuit filed on behalf of the teachers, but a verdict has yet to be released.
Buras also notes the impact of the firings on a significant segment of the black middle class — and a critical professional pathway out of poverty.
In an email interview Jim Randels described the changed relationship between the union and TFA.
“Pre-Katrina, Teach for America as an organization was clearly a partner in public education in New Orleans with all teachers. Veteran teachers frequently mentored TFA teachers and included them in community and even family events,” Randels wrote. “In the last eight years TFA has set up a much more distant relationship with veteran teachers. TFA’s role since Katrina has shifted from being a collaborative partner with all teachers in education to a much more complex and in some cases contradictory role. TFA has in many ways become much more independent and separate from veteran teachers and much more exclusively aligned with schools run by organizations and school leaders concerned with replacing rather than working with those of us who have taught for years in the challenging and invigorating conditions of public education in New Orleans.”
Kira Orange Jones, a TFA alum, executive director of Teach For America Greater New Orleans Louisiana Delta and member of BESE, only describes a positive post-Katrina impact. In an email interview, she wrote: “As a greater New Orleans team, first, and most importantly, we contribute diverse, effective teachers to schools that serve low-income children. . . As part of our continuous improvement plan, Teach For America regularly conducts surveys of the principals of schools where corps members teach. Similar to previous surveys, the 2013 survey asked principals about their satisfaction with the performance of the corps members in the school and to provide ratings of corps members’ teaching skills and their impact on students’ academic achievement. The survey also inquired about each principal’s experience with Teach For America program staff. Additionally, it asked principals to anticipate future hiring needs and why they would or would not continue to hire Teach For America corps members. Of over 60 school principals surveyed in the region, 98 percent were satisfied with the corps members in their schools.”
Orange Jones did not respond to a question asking if the students’ needs — especially those suffering Post Traumatic Stress Disorder following Katrina — were met by the influx of TFA teachers.
O’Neal recalls her pre-Katrina school years in New Orleans as very happy ones. The teachers, mostly her grandmother’s age, knew her whole family, she said. Her classmates were also her neighbors. There was tutoring before and after school, and in middle school the kids were taken on trips to visit colleges. “I was always learning something,” she said. And she had a specialized plan and extra help for her vision challenges.
But Sadtler and Buras have noted that it isn’t only the kids being exploited and hurt for the gain of the TFA recruits — the teachers are being exploited for the gain of the larger TFA management structure.
The charter schools, which set their own rules with a proven (by state audits) lack of accountability and oversight by the governing Recovery School District, make inordinate demands, requiring the teachers work 12 to 15 hours days and preventing them from having any life outside the school.
While many of young teachers may have a genuine commitment to raising achievement, they are unprepared to teach, put into unfair situations, and are emotionally distressed and overwhelmed, Buras said.
The voices against TFA are growing.
In July, Chicago veteran teacher Katie Osgood wrote an open letter to the 2013 class of TFA recruits. Osgood calls on them to quit. “Do not partner with the very people trying to destroy public education for their own personal gain,” Osgood writes, following a lengthy outline of where the money comes from, where it goes, and the political interests.
“Teach for America likely enticed you into the program with the call for ending education inequality,” Osgood writes. “That is a beautiful and noble mission. I applaud you on being moved by the chance to help children, of being a part of creating equality in our schools, of ending poverty once and for all. However, the actual practice of Teach for America does the exact opposite of its noble mission. TFA claims to fight to end educational inequality and yet ends up exacerbating one of the greatest inequalities in education today: that low-income children of color are much more likely to be given inexperienced, uncertified teachers. TFA’s five weeks of Institute are simply not enough time to prepare anyone, no matter how dedicated or intelligent, to have the skills necessary to help our neediest children. This fall, on that first day of school, you will be alone with kids who need so much more. You will represent one more inequality in our education system denying kids from low-income backgrounds equitable educational opportunities.”
In a July interview with the Washington Post, former TFA manager Wendy Heller Chovnick describes the progression of her disillusionment.
“When I saw where the money was really going, which was to a lot of national teams, national staff members, and national infrastructure, that was not providing much support to our region and was definitely not translating into improved educational outcomes for students, my opinion of the organization fell drastically,” Chovnick said. She also described frustration with the organization’s unwillingness to listen to, and active campaign against, any criticism. “Unfortunately, the organization seemed to care more about public perception of what the organization was doing than about what the organization was actually doing to improve education for low-income students throughout the United States.”
For O’Neal, she’ll never get back those years. Hard-working and resourceful, she will likely find a way to go to college — no thanks to the high school education provided to her by the RSD — the district tasked with “saving” New Orleans public schools.
An intelligent young woman with a kind heart, she may one day forgive the forces that used her and her peers to experiment in privatizing education and using the least-qualified teachers to guide the kids with the greatest needs.
But she won’t forget the trauma. And she won’t forget the lesson learned that even when threatened with suspensions and failing grades, speaking out about injustice was the right thing to do. And it made a difference.
__________________________________________
So, O'Malley touts he is protecting teachers' union as they install the union-busting policies in Baltimore to do the opposite. For citizens really thinking it is the teacher's unions causing all these classroom problems----think again at what defunding, dismantlement, and bad education polices to for anyone placed in our classrooms----unions did protect Equal Protection and opportunity and access in modern times.
Nothing makes a Clinton/Bush/Obama K-12 education privatizer more anxious than a Teach for America staff calling for teacher's unions to protect them! YES, UNION MEMBERS CAN VOTE FOR NEW LEADERSHIP FOLKS!
For those thinking our Federal Department of Labor or our National Labor Board is actually working for the American workers after a few decades of appointments by Clinton/Bush/Obama -----look at this decision. How better to bust teacher's unions than to allow an anti-teacher's union Teach for America BECOME UNION MEMBERS. This is the dynamic in states like Maryland where Maryland Assembly poses progressive by protecting Baltimore's teacher's unions by extending them to charters and allowing Teach for America to become part of the teachers' union----and it would be why AFT and Weingarten support Hillary----it is all about privatization and union-busting. Why is Baltimore's teacher's union silent and supporting all education privatization measures? Most of union members are not public teachers. Our Baltimore Teacher's union leader English is simply a figurehead as teachers shout she is not working for them....even the Teach for America teachers. We all know the next step in that progression will be teacher's unions disappear----along with their pensions. Meanwhile the new private teachers in Teach for America will simply rotate out of teaching as it is a temporary stint for most of them. Why are AFT in some states allowing this? They think they can create their own national charter chains and become part of the privatization sadly.
'‘Teach for America’ Teachers Can Join the Union
August 07, 2015 / Patrick Sheehan '
In a good sign for teacher union drives around the country, a Labor Board hearing officer opted to include Teach for America teachers in the union vote at a Detroit charter school chain. Charter teachers in other cities sent messages of solidarity. Photo: Michigan Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff (AFT).
A National Labor Relations Board hearing officer has ruled that Teach for America teachers should be included in the union at a Detroit charter school chain.
Teachers at University Prep charter schools voted May 14 on whether to unionize. UPrep relies on TFA teachers to fill about 10 percent of its classrooms, a figure that’s similar to urban charter schools in other cities.
But when some TFA teachers emerged as leaders in the union drive, Detroit 90/90, the company that manages UPrep, challenged their right to vote.
In a June hearing, the company argued that TFA teachers’ minimum two-year commitment to the school made us “temporary service workers” rather than “professional employees”—more like long-term substitutes than permanent teachers.
“It was such an obvious attempt to divide and conquer,” said Alex Moore, a Teach for America teacher and unabashed union supporter. “[The company] loved us when we were cheap, docile workers, but when we spoke up and organized, they wanted to sweep us under the rug.”
The hearing officer found on July 31 that TFA teachers are indeed professional employees—and thus have the right to be part of the teachers’ bargaining unit.
The ruling noted that TFA teachers share the same job responsibilities, evaluations, and contracts as other teachers in the district. Our minimum two-year commitment is irrelevant, given that the employer offers only one-year commitments to all its teachers.
The decision doesn’t formally set a legal precedent for other schools. Still, it’s a good sign for union drives across the country. Charter teachers are organizing in such cities as Philadelphia and Los Angeles—often in schools with sizable TFA contingents.
PRECARIOUS TEACHING
UPrep is the largest charter school district in Michigan. It consists of seven schools, 200 teachers, and more than 3,000 students. Teachers there began organizing in spring 2014.
Charter schools, which have grown rapidly in Detroit, are publicly funded, privately managed, and largely non-union.
Like charter school teachers across the country, UPrep teachers work under at-will contracts—meaning they can be fired at any time, without explanation—that are renewed every year. So they don’t know until June whether or not they’ll have a job in August.
This perpetual uncertainty, along with stolen wages and a lack of support from administrators, led teachers to reach out to American Federation of Teachers (AFT) organizers in Michigan.
“It’s hard to imagine a career for yourself in a school district when you could be fired at any time at the whim of an administrator,” said Jasmine Singleton, who taught first grade at UPrep during the campaign. “We need some stability in our work as educators, so we can focus on the children.”
UPREP FIGHT CONTINUES
Unfortunately, the union lost the election at UPrep by a few votes. Since long-term substitute teachers’ ballots were found ineligible, the TFA ballots wouldn’t have been enough to sway the outcome of this election, so they weren’t counted.
However, the NLRB is still considering a litany of unfair labor practice charges filed against Detroit 90/90 that could invalidate the election and result in a new one being scheduled.
The company ran an aggressive and well-funded anti-union campaign, beginning even before the teachers filed for election. It hired union-busting consultants, held captive-audience meetings, intimidated teachers, and ultimately threatened that if teachers voted to unionize, it wouldn’t renew its management contract—which would force UPrep schools either to find a new management company or to shutter.
(The threat is credible. In April, another Michigan charter management company announced it would stop managing University Yes Academy after teachers filed for a union election. Nonetheless, on May 6, teachers there voted 27-18 to join the AFT.)
In one of the seven UPrep school buildings, on Election Day, an administrator disabled the entrance key-cards for all teachers to prevent them from voting.
After the election, the company retaliated by giving poor evaluations to campaign leaders. Some did not have their contracts renewed to teach next year.
“The attempt to strip TFA teachers of their voice was just another attack in a longstanding corporate effort to break down teachers’ collective bargaining rights,” said Nate Walker, a K-12 policy analyst and organizer with the Michigan AFT, working on the UPrep campaign.
“This ruling drew a line in the sand that will strengthen all teachers—in charter and public schools alike—as they continue to advocate for their students and for high-quality education.”
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