Five liberal pundits repeat RW anti-teacher talking points

What's happening to education in this country is one of the biggest under-the-radar stories of the new century. It gets some attention, then it doesn't, and still the movement to totally transform public schools marches on.

I'd like to make several points here. The first is this — that many so-called "liberals" are on board with the corrupt "education reform" movement. You'd think they know'd better, but they seem to not.

(Wonder why? Me too. See the Takeaways below for some thoughts on that.)

Here's from Alternet, a great find by Sarah Jaffe (my emphasis and reparagraphing):

5 Liberal Pundits Repeating Right-Wing Teacher-Bashing Talking Points
Chicago's teacher strike is shaping up to be one of the most important labor actions in a generation. So why are people who consider themselves progressives siding with the bosses?

Chicago's teacher strike may turn out to be the most important one in a generation, as teachers stand up to a corporate-backed education reform regime that stresses testing and firing teachers as a form of “accountability” while continuing to refuse to invest real money in making educational opportunities equal for all students.

The so-called education reform movement wants high-stakes tests that students take yearly to be used to evaluate teachers and weed out the "bad" ones, and pushes money into charter schools that are privately owned and don't have union teachers.

Under the guise of "accountability" for teachers and schools, reformers put taxpayer dollars into the hands of private investors despite the charter schools' negligible results when it comes to actually improving education.

The movement has been particularly pernicious because it's crept inside the heart of the Democratic party and taken hold of politicians and commentators who profess to be on the side of working people, but end up bashing teachers' unions.

These are the "liberals" who've been fighting the teacher's strike. The article itself details their sins far more fully that what's below.

1. Nicholas Kristof. The New York Times' columnist is celebrated for his trips into Global South countries to report heartwrenching stories of women; he's lauded as an activist and a human rights advocate. But when it comes to women and workers fighting for their rights closer to home, he seems to have a big blind spot. ...

Kristof [argues] for “bottom-third” teachers not to have job protections, then [suggests] that we should listen to teachers for ideas on how to weed out that bottom third. ...

2. Joe Nocera. Nocera, also at the Times, tries to soften his critique of the teachers' strike by throwing them a bone midway through his column. ... But where you got your next sentence is completely unclear. “On the other hand, the status quo, which is what the Chicago teachers want, is clearly unacceptable.” ...

3. Dylan Matthews. Over at Wonkblog, founded and headed by liberal darling Ezra Klein, Dylan Matthews went two for two, first arguing that teachers' strikes hurt student achievement (measured, of course, by those magical test scores) and then churning out a charming little piece arguing over teachers' wages. ...

4. Matt Yglesias. Yglesias' contribution, at Slate, to the teachers' union-busting is one of the most unintentionally ironic things I've ever seen. Just a year and a couple of months out from the biggest labor uprising in decades over the rights of public employees, Yglesias is actually arguing that teachers' unions suck because they are public employees. ...

5. Jacob Weisberg. It might be easier to understand Yglesias' position on striking teachers when you look at his boss's tweets on the subject. Weisberg, editor-in-chief at Slate, is the most gleeful yet:

Rooting for Rahm to make the Chicago Teachers' Union sorry for this inexcusable strike. Students in class fewest hours of any big city.

It's disconcerting to see such clear desire for punishment of working people (by a multimillionaire politician whose best friends are on Wall Street no less). ...

Meet the perps, supposedly on our side.

Takeaways:

■ First, it's about the Benjamins (the money); in particular, the Benjamins collected as tax support for public education. School "reformers" want that money spent only on their kids. "Accountability" is just the cover story.

■ Second, left-support of breaking the CTU strike plays to what Chris Hayes calls "the meritocracy" and its interests. I call this the "liberal" version of the ultimately-race-based class war.

Said differently, high-dollar Republican voters don't want their kids in public schools with non-biblicals — so they home-school and create "Christian" academies.

High-dollar Democratic voters don't want their kids sullied and held back by inner-city types (of all types), so they create charter schools and places like the Chicago Lab School, where Rahm Emanuel sends his own kids.

Both groups want public school money diverted to their separatist school systems. Thus, both want "reform."

■ Third, ask yourself, where does that leave the public schools? More particularly, what then is their mission?

In a phrase, public schools become wage slave prep for those soon-to-be-nonexistent factory jobs.

Here's lawyer and Chicago school parent Matt Farmer making the case against this dual educational track. In Chicago, the perps are Penny Pritzker and Rahm Emanuel, both with ties to ... Barack Obama (h/t Sam Seder's Majority Report for the clip):



Your (unstolen) tax dollars at work. This is what Our Betters in Blue have in mind for you and your kids. (Our Betters in Red add those ugly identity issues to the mix, like vagina-control and religious orthodoxy.)

■ For a nice factual analysis, read this by our own Matt Browner Hamlin. Nails it. Keep his points in mind when listening to the so-called liberals who what to bust this strike.

■ Finally, do you wonder why Chicago's other unions haven't shut down the town in support? Could it be the twin devils of the modern union movement: (1) the testosterone divide and (2) co-option by Democratic leadership?

Worth considering. Either way, I agree with Ms. Jaffe's initial assessment. This is "one of the most important labor actions in a generation."

Which way will it go? Will you help if you can?

GP

To follow or send links: @Gaius_Publius
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Teachers are underpaid in Chicago and US overall

A lot of the contrived outrage around the Chicago Teachers Union strike is around the critics' false belief that the teachers are overpaid and greedy. You've probably heard that CTU teachers are paid an average of $70,000 and the union rejected a 16% pay raise.

Zaid Jilani has reported that according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average pay for a Chicago teacher is only $56,720. And about rejecting that big raise, in fact "The district offered a cost-of-living raise of 2 percent a year for four years, which the union said was unacceptable — especially after Mayor Rahm Emanuel last year canceled a previously negotiated 4 percent raise."

Jilani also reports that the teachers are fighting against generally bad conditions, including huge class size, crumbling schools with no libraries, no air conditioning, and limited access to the arts and music for students.

So in the midst of a lot of conservative misinformation about Chicago's overpaid teachers, it's worth noting, as Dean Baker does, that until very recently, we'd been lead to believe that salaries of $250,000 or even up to a million dollars a year were considered working class.

Since the Chicago school teachers went out on strike Monday, many political figures have tried to convince the public that their $70,000 average annual pay [sic] is excessive. This is peculiar, since many of the same people had been arguing that the families earning over $250,000, who would be subject to higher tax rates under President Obama's tax proposal, are actually part of the struggling middle class. They now want to convince us that a household with two Chicago public school teachers, who together earn less than 60 percent of President Obama's cutoff, have more money than they should.

Baker also gets specific, noting that Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel made over $274,000 at an apparent no show job at Freddie Mac after he left the White House, while noted austerian Erskine Bowles made $335,000 at Morgan Stanley the year his investment bank had to be bailed out to prevent its failure.

While Chicago's teachers are obviously underpaid in comparison to Freddie Mac's Emanuel and Morgan Stanley's Bowles, a new report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development shows American teachers are also very underpaid compared to their peers in the developed world.

The average primary-school teacher in the United States earns about 67 percent of the salary of a average college-educated worker in the United States. The comparable figure is 82 percent across the overall O.E.C.D. For teachers in lower secondary school (roughly the years Americans would call middle school), the ratio in the United States is 69 percent, compared to 85 percent across the O.E.C.D. The average upper secondary teacher earns 72 percent of the salary for the average college-educated worker in the United States, compared to 90 percent for the overall O.E.C.D.

American teachers, by the way, spend a lot more time teaching than do their counterparts in most other developed countries

One would think that if we wanted the US to be competitive with other countries in the developed world, we would want to have the best teachers, paid competitively with other countries' teachers.

The experience for Chicago's school children is not a good one, given the poor conditions they are asked to attempt to learn in. The Chicago Teachers Union is on strike to try to get guarantees from the school system to address these concerns and to make sure teachers have pay worthy of the important job of securing the future generations of American leaders.

Compared to the destructive economic actions of highly paid individuals like Rahm Emanuel and Erskine Bowles, it hardly seems controversial for Chicago's teachers to be paid a fair wage, under a fair contract. Read the rest of this post...

Social justice in the classroom? That's crazy talk

It's no secret that American education is in crisis.

So you'd think people would welcome any creative way to give our kids a break, as budgets get squeezed, teachers are laid off, class sizes grow and critical thinking skills give way to rote learning by textbook and standardized test. In fact, creativity is actually flourishing against the odds.

In Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel has embraced the prestigious International Baccalaureate program in high schools as a way of expanding the educational horizons of the city's best and brightest. And rightly so: U.S. high schools offering the IB program often find themselves on lists of the best schools in the country.

Something else that's no secret, though, is that certain conservatives love a good culture war and rarely miss an opportunity to trumpet ignorance over learning -- on the basis, presumably, that being dumb as dirt is more authentically American than actually knowing anything.  And so, the Republican Party of Minnesota recently decided that it opposes any state or federal funding for IB. And in Idaho, the Coeur d’Alene School District has decided to pull the IB program altogether.

Why? A leading opponent, lawyer Duncan Koler, told the school board last week that the IB is full of “concepts that are politically charged, such as social justice, sustainability. These are code terms." Code for what? Social justice, that is some crazy talk.

What's really going on is a backlash against creativity in education. The International Baccalaureate, we are told, is some sinister UN-backed plot that promotes totalitarian concepts and seeks, in the words of one anti-IB activist, to “program our children’s minds with new loyalties.” Nicky Kram Rosen, the principal of PS 368 in Hamilton Heights in New York City who is putting Arabic on the curriculum next year, is -- according to one scathing local critic -- part of "a cesspool for panderers and anarchists with an international agenda".

The mindset here is so 2003, that miserable year when Arabs were all terrorists, the French -- originators of the Baccalaureate -- were surrender monkeys, and congressmen preferred freedom fries for their lunch. You could even say it's so 1856, when nativists and Know-Nothings fought against the immigrant melting pot in America's growing cities because they thought that foreigners had nothing to contribute but disease, corruption and suspect ideas. They were wrong then and they are wrong now.

The fact is, the IB program has won wide international recognition for its exacting standards and the breadth of knowledge and critical thinking it demands of its students. High-schoolers who participate are taught a second language -- really taught a second language. They are encouraged to engage in community service and develop understanding and respect for other cultures, not as an alternative to national identity, but as an essential part of life in the 21st century.

A recent University of Chicago study showed that students in the IB program were 40 percent more likely to go to college. Tell that to the New Hampshire legislature, which made a short-lived attempt earlier this year to introduce an anti-IB bill banning any public school curriculum "subject to the governance of a foreign body or organization". The bill passed the New Hampshire State House but died, thankfully, in the Senate.

To be against the International Baccalaureate is to be against learning itself, because that's the beginning and the end of what it offers. More than 1000 universities -- including the US Air Force Academy, the US Naval Academy, and institutions like Brown University, Columbia University, and Stanford University -- recognize the IB Diploma as a mark of academic excellence.

Last time I checked, these were pretty highly regarded national institutions. The Republican party, less so. Read the rest of this post...

Louisiana using pro-Klan books in public schools

And GOP Gov. Bobby Jindal is helping to facilitate the entire thing.  (I'm guessing someone just got dropped of the VP short list.)

Deanna Pan at MoJo quotes from a few of the books Louisiana is now using to educate children.

1. Dinosaurs and humans lived side by side:

"Bible-believing Christians cannot accept any evolutionary interpretation. Dinosaurs and humans were definitely on the earth at the same time and may have even lived side by side within the past few thousand years."—Life Science, 3rd ed., Bob Jones University Press, 2007

2. Fire-breathing dragons may actually have existed (the Bible includes numerous references to dragons, thus the need to prove that they're real):

"[Is] it possible that a fire-breathing animal really existed? Today some scientists are saying yes. They have found large chambers in certain dinosaur skulls…The large skull chambers could have contained special chemical-producing glands. When the animal forced the chemicals out of its mouth or nose, these substances may have combined and produced fire and smoke."—Life Science, 3rd ed., Bob Jones University Press, 2007

3. Majority of slaves in the old south were treated well: "

A few slave holders were undeniably cruel. Examples of slaves beaten to death were not common, neither were they unknown. The majority of slave holders treated their slaves well."—United States History for Christian Schools, 2nd ed., Bob Jones University Press, 1991

4. The Ku Klux Klan was a force for good:

"[The Ku Klux] Klan in some areas of the country tried to be a means of reform, fighting the decline in morality and using the symbol of the cross. Klan targets were bootleggers, wife-beaters, and immoral movies. In some communities it achieved a certain respectability as it worked with politicians."—United States History for Christian Schools, 3rd ed., Bob Jones University Press, 2001

"Klan targets were bootleggers, wife-beaters, and immoral movies." Hmm... aren't we missing someone?

This is why I keep harping about the South's lingering racism and bigotry.  It's a real problem, and it's affecting real people's lives, still.  Especially when southern bigots run for national office and try to impose their hate on the rest of us.

The Klan was a force for good?  Seriously, Jindal? Read the rest of this post...

Texas GOP opposes critical thinking

Proudly ignorant?

One of our eagle-eyed readers emailed us to point out this unbelievable passage in the RPT 2012 platform, as adopted at their recent statewide conference.

"Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority."

What this really means is that the GOP is doubling down on learn-by-rote fact recitation – of the kind spearheaded by the worst of the pro-testing advocates, and locally by IDEA Public Schools, which has committed to the anti-analytical direct learning model (aka "press button A, B or C.")

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GOP hero Mitch Daniels and his ethics problem

The guy who sorted the books of Indiana by leasing the state highway for 75 years (leaving the state with no revenue for seven decades) has recently accepted the job as president of Purdue University in Indiana. It's an unusual move since he has no experience in such a role, though he admits that he spent his "life reading, admiring, and attempting to learn from those who do." Uh huh.

The bigger issue and the one that raises obvious ethical issues is that he was hired by a board of directors that he hired himself while governor of Indiana. Daniels will jump from a salary of $107,000 to a comfortable position that likely includes a house and car plus a salary in excess of $500,000. That's quite a jump for someone without any experience in academia.

He does have management experience though you have to question the motives of someone who has screwed the state out of road revenue for 75 years. One hates to think how a guy who was not kind to education will damage the university with the same mindset as when he was governor.

When questioned about the conflict of interest for the high paying job, Daniels could not even provide a complete answer. The revolving door of politics and business (and yes, universities are big business) never ends.

“Do you see,” a WLFI reporter asked, “or how would you address, the perception of some people that there may be a conflict because of the number of trustees that you appointed?”

Since elected as Indiana’s governor in 2005, Daniels has either appointed or re-appointed 100 percent of Purdue’s trustees – appointing eight himself and reappointing two others. This includes Tuesday’s reappointment of three Board members which extended a three-year term to the search committee chair, Michael Berghoff; though the decision of Daniels as president had already been made by then.

After a four-second pause, Daniels deflected the question.

“Well I’ll just leave that to the University. I don’t know what – “

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Student loan debt up 275% in last decade

This is not going to end well. Who benefits when students graduate so heavily in debt besides the banks? If the US economy is supposed to be carried by consumers, it's also going to suffer if consumers are bogged down with this kind of debt.

We should be hearing Congress barking about this debt problem but of course, they're so deeply owned by Big Finance that none of them have the courage to stand up for their voters. Campaign donors are much more important these days. CNNMoney:

Student loans have more than tripled over the past decade, according to new data from the Federal Reserve.

Student loan debt hit $904 billion in the first quarter of 2012, up from $241 billion a decade ago, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York quarterly household debt report. That's up 275% since the same period in 2003.

Students continued heaping on debt throughout the economic downturn, even as Americans cut back on other forms of credit, such as mortgages and credit cards.

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Police arrest hundreds during student protests in Quebec

The real crime here is that protests are no longer allowed. People take to the street when their voices are no longer heard so to shut down protests because the message is not appreciated. The local government has taken unprecedented and extreme actions that are counter to what anyone should expect from a Western democracy.

In the case of Quebec, the most conservative government in decades simply doesn't like the protest message so they're attempting to fine anyone who protests. The local government has nobody to blame but themselves for the growing student protests. Disagree, fine, but this is too much.

On May 18, Quebec’s legislative assembly, under the authority of the provincial premier, Jean Charest, passed a draconian law in a move to break the 15-week-long student strike. Bill 78, adopted last week, is an attack on Quebecers’ freedom of speech, association and assembly. Mr. Charest has refused to use the traditional means of mediation in a representative democracy, leading to even more polarization. His administration, one of the most right-wing governments Quebec has had in 40 years, now wants to shut down opposition.

The bill threatens to impose steep fines of 25,000 to 125,000 Canadian dollars against student associations and unions — which derive their financing from tuition fees — in a direct move to break the movement. For example, student associations will be found guilty if they do not stop their members from protesting within university and college grounds.

During a street demonstration, the organization that plans the protest will be penalized if individual protesters stray from the police-approved route or exceed the time limit imposed by authorities. Student associations and unions are also liable for any damage caused by a third party during a demonstration.

One Canadian reader complained (in a way that only a polite Canadian could complain, including a "thank you" at the end) that the protesting students represent a "culture of entitlement" though I don't see it that way at all. It doesn't matter what the cost of tuition used to be, an 80% increase is an 80% increase. Taxing poor students is a lousy way to behave by the political class. During my own college days, I watched my tuition double over a four year period and it wasn't pleasant.

After so many years of seeing Canada as our friendly neighbors who were more moderate than us, it's sad to see the country in this state. When you won't allow protests and insist on punishing those who voice their opinions, you've lost the plot. Please bring back the rational Canada that I used to know. Read the rest of this post...

Getting away with public endorsement of religion

John recently wrote about Ron Brown, an assistant football coach at the University of Nebraska who ruffled feathers recently when he testified against a non-discrimination ordinance which extended protections to gay and transgender people. And his reply to those who ask him if he's worried about losing his job? Bring it on:

To be fired for my faith would be a greater honor than to be fired because we didn't win enough games...I haven't lost any sleep over it.

But calls for Brown's resignation do not stem from his comments alone. Many who wish to see Brown go take issue him making his comments while acting as an agent of the University of Nebraska (which has a non-discrimination policy that includes protections for sexual orientation, gender and genetic information), not as an individual. From ESPN:

Brown -- in a decision he said he now regrets -- gave Memorial Stadium in Lincoln as his address of record...people could have inferred he was representing the university, not just himself, when he [testified].

Despite Brown's misuse of his public status, it appears that his job is, at least for now, safe:

Chancellor Harvey Perlman admonished Brown for giving the stadium address, but he said Brown's personal views do not reflect those of the university.

Ron Brown is only the most recent example of religious individuals working for public institutions claiming the right to endorse religious beliefs on behalf of the taxpayer. A few years ago, the issue was put in the spotlight just down the road from Kenyon College.

John Freshwater was an 8th grade science teacher at the local middle school in Mt. Vernon, Ohio. He was a local hero in the religious community for keeping a Bible on his desk and religious posters in his classroom, as well as making statements such as these in the classroom:

Science is wrong because the Bible states that homosexuality is a sin, and so anyone who is gay chooses to be gay and is therefore a sinner.

Freshwater was also reported to have told students to refer to the Bible for scientific research material and to have either ignored or intentionally mis-taught certain areas of the school's curriculum for years, particularly the section on evolution. But those actions were not deemed sufficient cause for his dismissal from the public school system. He was finally fired only after accidentally burning what appear to be crosses into the arms of two students with a tesla coil in a lab experiment.

Both Mr. Freshwater and Mr. Brown are entitled to their homophobic and anti-scientific beliefs as individuals. But when they leave their homes, churches and weekend communities to go to work they are no longer acting as individuals; they are acting as agents of the government they work for. For public institutions to allow their own employees to endorse religious beliefs - let alone bigoted ones - on the taxpayer's dime represents a dangerous and illegal encroachment of religious ideology that must be pushed back against.

Ron Brown violated the University of Nebraska's non-discrimination policy when he testified under his capacity as a representative of the school. It's shameful that he has yet to be held accountable for his actions. Read the rest of this post...

Wash Post's Kaplan for-profit college division was an ALEC member

Well, this is starting to get interesting. All the spotlight on ALEC is really paying off. This is not only a Washington Post story, it's a for-profit college industry story. (Our ALEC backgrounder is here.)

David Halperin at the amazing Republic Report (my emphasis and some reparagraphing):

Republic Report has learned that the Washington Post Company’s Kaplan for-profit college division, was, last year, a member of the controversial business advocacy group the American Legislative Exchange Council. Other major for-profit education companies also joined ALEC.

Republic Report has obtained a July 2011 document showing Kaplan Higher Education and other for-profits as members of ALEC’s Education Task Force. This morning, in an email message to Republic Report, Mark Harrad, Vice President of Communications at Kaplan, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Washington Post Company that includes Kaplan Higher Education, wrote, “A unit of Kaplan was a member of ALEC for a one year period, which ended in August 2011.”

Remember that ALEC's role in "education" is what drew the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to ALEC as well. Stripping down public education and feeding on the bones must be a major ALEC attraction. Here's Halperin on this:

For-profit colleges are the ultimate special interest. Many receive around 90 percent of their revenue from federal financial aid, more than $30 billion a year, and many charge students sky-high prices.

In recent years, it has been fully documented that a large number of these schools have high dropouts rates and dismal job placement, and many have been caught engaging in highly coercive and deceptive recruiting practices.

Yet when the bad actions of these predatory schools got publicly exposed, the schools simply used the enormous resources they’ve amassed to hire expensive lobbyists and consultants, and to make campaign contributions to politicians, in order to avoid accountability and keep taxpayer dollars pouring into their coffers.

We reported over a year ago on for-profit colleges — "For-profit colleges fight back against gov’t attempt to make them deliver education". A great many are simply vultures. Doubt me? Click and read.

Because ALEC specializes in enacting law at the state level, it makes a perfect place to end-around state investigation into their predatory business model:

Much of the action on for-profit colleges takes place at the federal level, where the money comes from, but states are increasingly taking an interest in protecting their residents from predatory practices – through accreditation of schools, investigations of fraud, and other oversight. So for-profit colleges have come to ALEC to seek influence at the state level.

The Republic Report article has more, including a list of major for-profit education players with ALEC ties.

ALEC is deeply involved in the "Stand and Fire" laws associated with the Trayvon Martin shooting, and the Washington Post Company's secret membership in ALEC raises many questions:

ALEC, which advanced model laws on Stand Your Ground, the provision that could influence the outcome of George Zimmerman’s criminal case for the killing of Trayvon Martin, and on Voter ID, which makes it harder for low-income people, people of color, young people, the elderly, and the disabled to vote.

Why did the Washington Post Company, whose CEO proclaimed that Kaplan was committed to aiding the disadvantaged, support through Kaplan an organization that was doing these things?

And why hasn’t the Post disclosed in its coverage of ALEC that its Kaplan division was recently an ALEC member?

Halperin has more; please do read the rest.

The public ALEC lists are fascinating (feel free to click). The non-public list, even more so. Excellent work.

GP

(To follow on Twitter or to send links: @Gaius_Publius)
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House Tea-partyers want to let student loan payments double

Greg Sargent at the Post:

Is the battle over student loans shaping up as a rerun of the payroll tax cut fight, which by all accounts badly damaged the GOP? Consider the parallels. Just as in the payroll tax cut battle, there’s a looming deadline: On July 1st, interest rates on federally funded student loans is set to double. Barack Obama and Democrats, confident that the politics are on their side, are signaling that they intend to remain on offense on the issue.

Meanwhile, House conservatives — just as during the payroll battle — are beginning to signal that they oppose the extension, period, full stop. Check out this quote from GOP Rep. Todd Akin, who is running in a GOP primary for the right to take on Dem Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri.

Akin said the government should be out of the student loan market altogether. “America has got the equivalent of the stage three cancer of socialism because the federal government is tampering in all kinds of stuff it has no business tampering in,” he said.

You know who else wanted kids to go to college? Hitler.

Kidding. But only just.

This is sadly typical of the radical fringe running today's Republican party.  Every thing they don't like is socialism (which, to their simple minds means, of course, Soviet communism).  And everything they do like is Reaganism (even if Reagan, but today's GOP standards, would be a socialist). Read the rest of this post...

Gates Foundation drops ALEC (but why was Bill Gates funding it?)

The good news is that, thanks to a campaign run by Color of Change and Progressive Change Campaign Committee, companies are startng to drop their membership in ALEC, the Hard Right coordinating organization for pushing pre-written bad laws out into the states.

A perfect example of an ALEC-authored law is "Stand and Fire" (aka "Stand Your Ground"), the law that got Trayvon Martin killed in Florida. The Arizona "Imprison the Browns for Profit" law a year or two back is another.

Both were ALEC-written, both at the urging of the industries they would benefit. In the first case, the beneficiary was small-arms manufacturers (fronted by the NRA). In the second case, the beneficiary was a major for-profit prison corp named CCA.

To fully "get" the ALEC operation, read our backgrounder. ALEC is "command-and-control" for the right-wing war in the states.

Here's a list of companies that were ALEC-affiliated until recently. Notice Coca-Cola, Intuit, and Kraft Foods on the corporate board. Pepsi, Coke's competitor, is on the corp-support list.

No longer. Those four have or will cancel their ALEC memberships (meaning, their funding of ALEC operations).

That was as of April 6. On April 9 we learn that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will also cancel their ALEC funding, after their current funding runs out (my emphasis and some reparagraphing throughout):

Following Kraft, Pepsi, Coca-Cola, and Intuit, another influential sponsor of ALEC has withdrawn its support from the right-wing corporate front group. ... Progressive Change Campaign Committee and Color of Change, among others, had targeted the Gates Foundation for giving more than $375,000 to ALEC over the past two years.

Well that's nice (sorta — their grant still has 17 months to go).

But wait ... the Gates Foundation was funding ALEC? Why? Aren't they half-way between that wonderful Steve Jobs (blessings be upon him) and that even more wonderful Warren Buffett (likewise)?

In a word, No. There's a right-wing war to destroy public education, and the Gates Foundation is in the thick of it. Again, ALEC writes the laws that bought-off state legislators get passed. With that in mind, here's the Gates spokesman explaining their involvement:

“We have made a single grant, narrowly and specifically focused on providing information to ALEC-affiliated state legislators on teacher effectiveness and school finance,” said Chris Williams, the spokesman[.]

And here's the same thing unpackaged:

The stated purpose of the Gates Foundation grant to ALEC is “to educate and engage its membership on more efficient state budget approaches to drive greater student outcomes, as well as educate them on beneficial ways to recruit, retain, evaluate and compensate effective teaching based upon merit and achievement.”

On the face of it, this pales in comparison to ALEC’s other education work, which promotes large-scale voucher and privatization schemes that would destroy, not improve, the public education system.

Interestingly, Lee Fang recently reported in The Nation on the various ways that the Gates Foundation and ALEC are working – independently – to promote for-profit distance learning.

These programs typically undermine public schools while benefiting technology and software companies, including Microsoft. The educational value of such programs is also highly contested.

"Efficient state budgets," "greater student outcomes" and "merit-based teacher evaluation" — sounds like "starve the beast," "teach to the test" and "no more teacher's unions" to me.

But maybe Gates just wanted to give Microsoft a piece of that education-destroying "online learning" business:

If the national movement to “reform” public education through vouchers, charters and privatization has a laboratory, it is Florida. It was one of the first states to undertake a program of “virtual schools”—charters operated online, with teachers instructing students over the Internet—as well as one of the first to use vouchers to channel taxpayer money to charter schools run by for-profits. ...

Patricia Levesque, a top adviser to former Governor Jeb Bush, spoke to fellow reformers at a retreat in October 2010. Levesque noted that reform efforts had failed because the opposition had time to organize. Next year, Levesque advised, reformers should “spread” the unions thin “by playing offense” with decoy legislation. ...

Levesque wasn’t delivering her hardball advice to her lobbying clients. She was giving it to a group of education philanthropists at a conference sponsored by notable charities like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation. Indeed, Levesque serves at the helm of two education charities, the Foundation for Excellence in Education, a national organization, and the Foundation for Florida’s Future, a state-specific nonprofit, both of which are chaired by Jeb Bush. ...

“We think that’s so important because every student, regardless of what they do after high school, they’ll be learning online,” said Tom Vander Ark, a prominent online education advocate, on a recently distributed video urging the adoption of online course requirements. Vander Ark, a former executive director of education at the influential Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, now lobbies all over the country for the online course requirement. Like Moe, he keeps one foot in the philanthropic world and another in business.

Hard to tell. Maybe it's just his love of money, that Mr. Gates, or maybe he's got a right-wing soul as well. We don't know for sure, but he's definitely running with the right-wing heavies.

UPDATE: The comment thread to this post is excellent! It's not long, and very well informed. I can personally verify how Microsoft does business, and always has. Thanks, all!

GP

To follow on Twitter or send links: @Gaius_Publius
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Are loan repayment caps and forgiveness programs fueling even higher tuitions?

A reader wrote in an interesting analysis of the student loan situation and currentl legislation that caps and forgives loan repayment, and how the legislation may simply be enticing students to spend more, and schools to charge more, since in the end the government picks up the tab:

One important thing entirely overlooked by the current coverage of the growing student loan debt, including on your blog and the Fed Reserve’s ridiculous whitepaper, is how the College Cost Reduction and Access Act of 2008 plays into this debacle for graduate and professional schools.

The Act gives students the option to enter into an “Income-Based Repayment” (IBR) schedule; it is very different from the income contingent repayment schedule you may be familiar with. IBR allows students to cap their repayments at 10 or 15% of discretionary income. After a set amount of time, the balance of the loans is forgiven. The set amount of time is 120 months for students working in the public interest, and 240 or 300 months for students working in other jobs. After a certain level of indebtedness, this Act removes any incentive for students to choose options that would decrease their total indebtedness level.

My example, see below, illustrates this from the public interest perspective but it remains true for those working at small firms. If a student graduates from a school with $150,000 debt load, the interest alone is accumulating at around $11,000 a year. In the long run, most of the law school graduates will end up having their loans forgiven under IBR instead of repaying the total amount.

For example, take a student who is interested in working for a state government after graduation. The student is accepted at both Duke, with a $20,000 a year scholarship, or Columbia without a scholarship. Consider that the total costs for a student is nearly identical at both schools – Columbia lists its annual cost at $77,000, and Duke lists at $72,000. Here are the outcomes if the student went to either school:

• Duke would leave the student $156,000 in debt, after the scholarship is taken into account.

If the student took the job I now have in state government, the student would start off paying ten percent of their annual salary, or $285 a month or $3,420 a yr. After 10 years, the student’s balance would be forgiven.*

• Columbia would leave the student $231,000 in debt, significantly more than Duke, because there's no scholarship. But it doesn't matter if Columbia costs more, the student will still only pay 10% of their salary per year after they graduate.

If the student took the job I now have with state government, the student would start off paying $285 a month or $3,420 a yr. After 10 years, the student’s balance would be forgiven.*

Notice how payments are the same? More examples of the math can be found in Professor Schrag’s article on this. Look at pages 13, 14, and 16 of the PDF (pages 39, 40, and 41 of the article). IBR removes any incentive for students, even those interested in government service, to control costs.

In fact, knowing what I now know, going to Columbia Law School would be preferable because it has a Loan Repayment Assistance Program (LRAP) that would cover my monthly costs. Duke has one as well, but its covered jobs are not as extensive. Enhanced LRAP like programs encourages students to go to the more expensive schools because they tend to have better LARP programs.

No one realizes how quickly law school tuition is exploding; just look at the average indebtedness level of graduates from law schools that are somewhat less known: John Marshall in Chicago is $165,178, Univ. San Francisco is $137,234, and Stetson is $133,082.

Obviously, I am using this loan forgiveness plan. But I can't help but see it as funneling massive amounts of federal money to public and private universities, giving them no incentive to cut costs.

I was paying $650 a month to service my student loans all the way back in 1990. That's how much I was paying to rent my studio apartment at the time, $650 a month. I was only making $33,000 a year working for the government (unlike my private sector classmates who made two and three times that amount). I'd have loved to have been paying $275 a month instead of $650, and those last five years - $39,000 worth of payments - would have been written off? Damn. Read the rest of this post...

Is student loans the next debt crisis?

Wash Post:

The amount of student loan debt has skyrocketed in recent years to a total of $867 billion last year — or more than the $704 billion in outstanding U.S. credit card debt, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Of the 37 million borrowers who have outstanding student loan balances as of third-quarter 2011, 14.4 percent have at least one past-due student loan account.

I've often wondered how much money is sucked out of the economy in the form of future student loan payments that would otherwise go towards buying a house, for example. How much do people forgo in future spending that goes towards loan repayment instead? I know I held off on buying my first place for a long time because of my $60,000 in graduate school/law loans - I was paying the equivalent of a month's rent per month on my loans after I graduated - and even once they were paid off I felt like I was starting at zero in terms of saving for my downpayment. And to what degree are we channeling people towards higher paying jobs that they might not want, simply to be able to pay off their debt burden (and skewing their happiness in addition to perhaps steering people away from more creative, or more public service oriented, careers)?

I've just always been curious as to the economic impact, and social impact, of the high cost of education in this country. Read the rest of this post...

Krugman on whether the rich really need the rest of us

Paul Krugman has a nice column on Republican attitudes on education, contrasting "social conservative" Santorum's approach with "economic conservative" Romney's. I'll let you go read; it's excellent.

But I want to point out the following (my emphasis):

But what about people like Mr. Romney? Don’t they have a stake in America’s future economic success, which is endangered by the crusade against education? Maybe not as much as you think.

After all, over the past 30 years, there has been a stunning disconnect between huge income gains at the top and the struggles of ordinary workers. You can make the case that the self-interest of America’s elite is best served by making sure that this disconnect continues, which means keeping taxes on high incomes low at all costs, never mind the consequences in terms of poor infrastructure and an undertrained work force. ...

So whenever you hear Republicans say that they are the party of traditional values, bear in mind that they have actually made a radical break with America’s tradition of valuing education. And they have made this break because they believe that what you don’t know can’t hurt them.

I've asked many times — Do the rich really need the rest of us?

So which is it? Have the super-rich decided they don't need America any more? Or are they just so in love with Supply Side Jesus that they don't know they're burning the house down with them inside?

In other words, when this country becomes a faltering second-world economy with a useful first-world military, have the super-rich prepared their financial escape? Do the rich really need the rest of us?

I'm not alone. Over at Digby's joint, David Atkins wonders much the same thing (emphasis added):

The underinvestment in public education is very intentional. Thanks largely to Grover Norquist and his buddies, it now costs more to attend a public university in California than it does to attend Harvard. The elites don't really need that many skilled workers in America. They need some, but not that many. A lot of the needed skilled workers can come from overseas immigration. The vast bulk of the American population is much more useful to them as desperate, unskilled labor.

I don't think they think we're needed. As the Brazilian and Indian and Chinese (etc.) consumer class comes online, consumers in America (our only value to them) can be retired. At that point, we're very Old World, serving the new.

I hope hope hope I'm wrong. But if I'm not, welcome to the backside of history, my fellow Americans. Brought to you by the very very rich and the politicians who serve them.

If it's any consolation, the Brits who emerged from the Great War and saw a new American world, they preceded you. The Romans of the fourth century weren't as lucky — they didn't speak Goth.

GP

(To follow on Twitter: @Gaius_Publius) Read the rest of this post...

Quick hits — Is MIT as compromised as other right-wing-funded colleges and universities?

This is a quick hit, something I found while researching something else.

I've been wondering for a while how compromised, how corrupted American colleges and universities are by the injection of corporate money into high-dollar education budgets.

For example, many have noted the special terms around the endowment of a chair at FSU by the Koch Bros (they get to pick the professors), and in that context I wrote this:

[I]t's not just Florida State's economics department they've bought. The Koch Brothers own a lot of university econ departments. From those departments come economists, and among those economists are political appointees.

So, let's start with universities owned by the Koch Brothers. [Joan] McCarter points us to this story from ThinkProgress about the Koch Brothers take-over of universities[.]

That ThinkProgress article quoted at the link lists these Koch-corrupted institutions:

    Florida State University
    George Mason University (Mercatus Center)
    Clemson University
    West Virginia University
    Brown University
    Troy University
    Utah State University
    and dozens of others

Et tu, MIT? In researching a different article, I found this snippet:

And so the Heartland Institute's International Conference on Climate Change is over for another year. While we lament this loss, let us pause for a short moment on a concluding statement by one of its star speakers.

Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology at MIT's department of earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences, told his attendant fans (watch the video above) that he believes climate sceptics, such as himself, should "stop accepting the term 'sceptic'".

His reasoning? Because it affords too much legitimacy to the implausible theory of global warming[.]

The Heartland Institute is a big-money funder of global warming denialism (as we'll learn later, they have an $8 million denialist "daddy" in their pocket). Dr. Lindzen is one of their "star speakers." Note in the third paragraph what he says.

Now look at who he is — the Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology at MIT, specifically the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. (Yes, that does say "sciences.")

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has mainstream cred, purchased in part from PBS — you hear that name all the time in the credits to PBS prime-time shows.

(If you didnt'know, that's what PBS is to guys like the Koch Foundation, a place to rinse clean in the blood of faux-neutrality. And PBS charges appropriately for that service — something to consider during those endless "it's the viewers that we really love" pledge breaks.)

MIT also has mainstream cred. Is global-warming denialism rinsing its hands there too? Or is the situation at MIT even worse? After all, the Alfred P. Sloan chair at MIT is acting like a paid operative of climate denialism, with the university laundering his Sloan-funded denialist paycheck.

Think he has that chair by accident? Or does MIT charge appropriately for this service as well? (Last I heard, amenities like, say, Grecian marble chess clubs don't build themselves these days.)

As I said above — Et tu, MIT? The jury's not yet in, but in my book you just went from "known good" to prove it, along with your now-co-equal, the estimable Florida State. Nice move.

GP Read the rest of this post...

University presidents react to Obama’s cost control plan

President Obama is not wrong to demand cost control and efficiency at universities, but the university presidents are also not wrong when they say the problem is more than that.

When I went to Ohio State back in the 1980's, I recall my tuition increasing from $400 per quarter up to nearly $800 per quarter or at least somewhere in that range. It was possible to work (I worked 2-3 jobs and 40 hours per week) and pay for school and books, but that seems to be a lot more difficult to do today. When I look at the cost of college today, wow, it's beyond belief. Schools that always struck me as good, but not great, easily cost $25,000 or more. Even in-state tuition for state schools is high.

The university presidents are right to talk about the budget issues that are out of their control, but really, there's also something wrong about the money many university presidents are receiving. It's an important job, but the pay is mind boggling, and the superstar pay for them is just as ridiculous as the superstar pay for athletes or movie stars. The difference is, the mission of the universities is not the same. It's a complicated problem and if we want to have a competition country, education has to be a lot more affordable than it is today.

The President's pitch may be a bit of election-year political theater, but he's right to get the discussion started.

The reality, said Illinois State's Al Bowman, is that simple changes cannot easily overcome deficits at many public schools. He said he was happy to hear Obama, in a speech Friday at the University of Michigan, urge state-level support of public universities. But, Bowman said, given the decreases in state aid, tying federal support to tuition prices is a product of fuzzy math. Illinois has lowered public support for higher education by about one-third over the past decade when adjusted for inflation. Illinois State, with 21,000 students, has raised tuition almost 47 percent since 2007, from $6,150 a year for an in-state undergraduate student to $9,030. "Most people, including the president, assume if universities were simply more efficient they would be able to operate with much smaller state subsidies, and I believe there are certainly efficiency gains that can be realized," Bowman said. "But they pale in comparison to the loss in state support."

What do you think? If you went to college "then" could you afford to go now?

NOTE FROM JOHN: I left grad and law school with $60,000 in loans over twenty years ago. My monthly payment on my debt was equal to my rent. I had friends who went to private undergrad, and they owed more like $120,000. Twenty years ago. What people have to pay now for an education is obscene. I've often wondered what the economic cost is of education debt. How much money does it suck out of the economy, and what's the spin off effect? I know for me, I put off buying my first place until I was in my mid 40s because I didn't finish paying off my schooling until then (that, and do-gooder jobs in this town don't pay as much as law jobs). I'm curious about the aggregate effect of such debt on the economy over a period of decades. Read the rest of this post...

Florida policymakers trying to privatize entire state public school system

You read it right; "vulture capitalism" coming to a public school system near you.

This is from Eileen Roy, a member of the Alachua County (Florida) School Board and published in the Gainesville Sun (my emphasis):

Make no mistake, there is a determined, coordinated effort to dismantle public schools. June Girard’s Jan. 2 Speaking Out (“For Profit Virtual Schools A Bad Deal for Kids”) is right on target in exposing the machinations to privatize public education. The plan is to allow venture capitalists to step in with for-profit virtual schools, cut the costs of traditional public schools, and make bundles of cash ... education on the cheap at the expense of children’s education.

Who cares that these virtual schools may have a poor or non-existent track record, or that virtual school teachers often have hundreds of students each? While “attending” virtual school, many students have no adult supervision. Profit, not educational excellence, is the motive.

The Florida Legislature in the past two sessions has passed a flurry of bills to distract educators and parents by requiring every student to take and pass a college prep curriculum to graduate high school, eliminating teacher tenure, requiring end-of-course exams for every subject taught (without providing funding), and requiring every student to take at least one virtual school class to graduate. ... The writing is on the wall.

I came by that article via this one, whose writer adds:

Roy provides another example which explains why Jacksonville Sen. Steve Wise proposed a bill last session to end school board member salaries. It was a cynical ploy to eliminate opponents and weaken local control.

It is from school boards where Florida’s republican privateers are getting their most significant opposition. Roy’s not alone. Flagler’s Colleen Conklin has taken the legislature to task for unfunded mandates and their general failure to fund. Orange county board member Daryl Flynn wrote last month that “the school choice movement may be leading us to unaccountable forms of corporate-run models for educating students.” Another Orange county school board member, Bill Sublette, accused Charter USA of attempting to “stockpile charters.” The state’s association of school boards is calling for an end to unfunded mandates and to provide proper funding. ...

How alone are the privatization crowd? Maybe they realize it. It sure explains why legislative efforts are often stealth or seek to impose phony, artificial choice triggers.

A couple of notes:

■ This is an editorial, not a news article. In fairness though, Gov. Rick Scott is fully capable of this kind of pro-corporate radical plan; and the writer is a school board member, not just a citizen.

■ The article referenced in the second sentence of the first quote — “For Profit Virtual Schools A Bad Deal for Kids” — is a good read also. Please click through; it's not long.

■ Radically restructuring government and society by taking maximum advantage of power has a strong Hungary ring to it. These Republican governors — if you think about it — may be writing the template for the next Republican president.

(Don't be foolish enough to dismiss that. The governor is the president of a state, and Republicans love power like a drug.)

■ Watch for these "Parent Triggers" — cynically branded as "Parent Empowerment" bills. It's the backdoor way to get parents to pull the trigger that hands over their schools:

The “Parent Trigger” is a common ploy that has been attempted around the country. This legislation cynically uses parents and their love for their children as a tool to pull the “trigger” and hand their neighborhood school over to a private entity with no true guarantee of gaining anything better for the children. The net result is that schools are taken away from the jurisdiction of duly elected district officials and the physical property of the school is seized and handed over to a for-profit management company.

"Parent Empowerment" — perfectly Orwellian, and a perfect example of the 180 Tell. It's exactly 180° opposite to what it claims to be.

■ This has all the earmarks of an ALEC operation. Read through the two Florida articles and note how many of the enabling details are similar to the Missouri proposal linked here.

(For the newly born or just awakened, ALEC is the national Republican–corporate law-writing shop that creates almost all of these radical state proposals. This link will get you started — our baseline ALEC post. For more, the google is your friend, for now at least.)

Huge props to progressive Florida activist Susan Smith and education activist Rita Solnet for the catch. Activism pays, folks. This is not a done deal. (This is also why you want to get on school boards. It's very local, and these are your children after all.)

GP Read the rest of this post...

Santorum upset that Obama wants an educated America

Wow, he's just flailing at this point. Who doesn't want to encourage education for the population?

Rick Santorum called President Barack Obama's education goals an agenda of "hubris" on Saturday, saying he is "outraged" that the president thinks "every child in America should go to college." "The hubris of this president to think that he knows what's best for you [...] This is the kind of snobbery that we see from those that think they know how to run our lives," the former Pennsylvania senator said in a forum at St. Anselm's New Hampshire Institute of Politics.

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Berkeley offers 'middle class' tuition program

It's good news that UC Berkeley has joined a few other schools in capping tuition to actual family income. but we need a lot more schools to do this. We also need universities to be a lot more affordable. It's hard to overlook the steep increases in tuition at the same time student loans ballooned, not to mention the steep increase in salaries for university executives. When I went to college I worked at least 40 yours per week across 2 or 3 jobs, but I don't know if that would work for students today. It sickens me to see university presidents making seven figures when tuition has increased so substantially.

Many of the big university endowment funds have taken a beating in the last few years, much like the retirement plans of Americans. Even with those losses, the numbers are staggering and it's time for Congress to start investigating these programs and possibly taxing them if the universities don't want to use that money for students. For too many universities, the money gets caught up in their ego and they are more concerned about growing that number than actually helping students.

Bloomberg:

The University of California, Berkeley, is offering a new financial-aid program to help families whose gross annual income is $80,000 to $140,000 amid tuition increases and state funding cuts.

The contribution those families make toward the annual cost -- including tuition, fees and expenses, room, board and books - - would be capped at 15 percent of their earnings, according to a statement today.

Berkeley, one of the most selective public universities in the U.S., joined some of the wealthiest private colleges, including Harvard University and Amherst College, in enhancing financial-aid plans for middle-income families. Williams College and Dartmouth College in 2010 scaled back their “no-loan” programs as their endowment values fell. Berkeley said its plan is a response to the state’s high cost of living, the challenges faced by families in the income range and rising tuitions.

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