I'm a chemistry teacher at a low-income public high school, north of Boston. I campaigned and contributed furiously for Obama, but I'm not the "Teacher Unions" bogeyman. I'm a teacher. I've been posting comments on Edweek.org for about 18 months as chemtchr, trying to expose the for-profit edubusiness entrepreneurs who seem to have taken control of my school and my state.
In Massachusetts, these profiteers are backed by the right-wing Pioneer Institute, but I have found that they overlap everywhere with AIG billionaire Eli Broad's "public interest" foundation. Now it looks like the same people are about to change hats and ride in higher than ever on the Obama administration. Can we stop them?
I signed up on Kos, and am pulling myself together to blog about it. I want to share the links I have found, and give others an opportunity to come forward and link to other work I haven't found. Does anybody know any people currently leading this fight?
Hello. is there anybody out there?
Has Eli Broad Bought Arne Duncan?
Here is an unsettling link to a report of a recent interview in which Broad brags about his infiltration of the Obama Department of Education, and his control of the command structure of public schools through the placement of administrators:
http://gothamschools.org/...
This Flickr image of Arne Duncan encoule avec Broad was apparently taken at Broad's inauguration party for Obama.
Duncan and Broad
Another recent link I found is one bone-chilling piece by the other side, on the Huffington Post:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
For two years, I have been combing the internet looking for conscious analysis of the business-first takover of school management by powerful and largely invisible business marketing plans. Last year, I found this:
http://www.projectcensored.org/...
This really is a censored story, though. It hits a wall, and all the commentators you might expect to address the content are silent.
It led me to Mandevilla's Daily Kos diaries, which set out explicitly the problem I am encountering in my daily teaching experience:
"I offer a simple thesis: Several large corporations and their lobbyists have profited from Bush’s NCLB by tapping billions of dollars in standardized testing and in "supplemental education services" funds since its passage in 2001."
Mandevilla's magnificent diary
The supplemental education services Mandevilla mentions include millions of dollars of payments by my state Department of Education and my public school district to for-profit providers of shadowy and useless services like audits, staff training, management assistance, standards-driven programs of instruction, etc. The payments are not transparent, because the vendor of record is a non-profit front group which has private "partners" or "entrepreneurial centers" to whom the money is transferred. Their organizational diagrams look like a row of teats on a sow's belly.
I'm afraid, if we can't stop them, they are about to suck up all the education stimulus money.