Who in Chicago awarded lucrative school contracts to Rupert Murdoch?

From the Madfloridian at DemocraticUnderground: Who in Chicago awarded lucrative school contracts to Rupert Murdoch?

Posted by madfloridian in General Discussion

Mon Nov 19th 2012, 01:51 AM
Rupert Murdoch sees $500 billion profit waiting in US public education. Getting his share in Chicago and some in NYC.

There's a battle being waged in this country against our public school systems. It's not irate parents, it's a corporate battle.

These education "reformers" have the money to buy up politicians in both parties to get laws passed for their benefits. Public schools have little resources to fight back.

Hey, lobbyist, leave them kids alone! [October 28, 2012 Oneonta, NY Daily Star column]

There is no doubt that the performance of U.S. students against their international counterparts continues to disappoint. But since the reasons for this are so difficult to pin down, a parade of self-proclaimed experts and “reformers” has emerged in recent years, touting the urgency of their proposed solutions – never mind if they require redirecting streams of taxpayer dollars into the pockets of their friends.

News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch is among the more-recognizable faces of this movement, having purchased education technology firm Wireless Generation for $360 million in November 2010.

“When it comes to K-12 education,” Murdoch said at the time, “we see a $500 billion sector in the U.S. alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed by big breakthroughs that extend the reach of great teaching.”

Despite the scandals associated with his name and his News Corp company, Murdoch is getting a foothold in the "reforms" going on now. He and his Wireless Generation company are getting a huge profit from a contract with the Chicago school system.

Just like I always say, accountability is only for public school teachers....never for the very rich.

Looks like Rupert Murdoch will profit from "reform" of Chicago school system. [August 20, 2012, Daily Kos]

In case Chicago missed it, Rupert Murdoch is now profiting from the testing craziness hitting Chicago's public schools. He owns an outfit called "Wireless Generation" that is now a contractor with CPS. Anyone who doesn't already know that the administration of Chicago Public Schools, the nation's third largest school system, is in the hands of amateurs (or worse, outsiders who want to destroy public education and turn it over to the private sector at all costs), should be contacting any of the 241 principals of the so-called "Track E" schools which begin receiving their students on August 13, 2012.

Things have gotten so crazy in the 2012 world of edits, memos, Power Points, orders, reforms, re-reforms, and re-re-re-reforms from the administration of former Rochester school supt. Jean-Claude Brizard and former "Relationship Banker" Rahm Emanuel that it would take a team of a dozen investigative reporters on the ground school-by-school (with a backup team of another dozen researchers) to separate out the greed, mendacity, incompetence, and silliness that is being foisted on Chicago behind the smokescreen of the latest iteration of "School Reform." Meanwhile, the city's communities, teachers, principals, and children will be facing centrally planned chaos as the first full year of Rahm's version of "School Reform" kicks in non Monday August 13, 2012. The 241 Chicago "Track E" schools would make this sub-system one of the 20 largest school districts in the USA were it a separate system. But it would be one of only three (the other two are Detroit and New Orleans) currently ruled by a group of outside mercenaries dedicated to destroying public education.

Murdoch was going to get 27 million from the Race to the Top money in New York City, but State Controller Thomas DiNapoli rejected the contract.

"New York City ditched a $27 million education contract with News Corp subsidiary Wireless Generation, citing the ongoing investigations into the phone hacking allegations related to News Corp's now-defunct News Of The World tabloid.

State Controller Thomas DiNapoli rejected the Education Department's contract with the company, the New York Daily News reports, which would have paid $27 million to create software to track test scores. The funding would have come out of the state's $700 million "Race to the Top" education funds, but DiNapoli's office said that there were concerns about News Corp's "incomplete record" and about the ongoing scandal.

"In light of the significant ongoing investigations and continuing revelations with respect to News Corp., we are returning the contract with Wireless Generation unapproved," wrote DiNapoli's office of the decision.

Daily Kos has this added news, citing the New York Daily News from August 13, 2012, that New York State has snuck in Wireless Generation as a subcontractor for a New York City schools contract.

Nearly a year after the state Education Department’s failed attempt to award a no-bid, $27 million technology contract to Rupert Murdoch’s Wireless Generation company, the state announced a do-over Monday.

The contract with the News Corp. subsidiary overseen by former city schools chancellor Joel Klein was initially rejected last August by State Controller Thomas DiNapoli, who raised concerns over allegations of illegal phone-hacking by News corp newspapers in England.

This time, Wireless Generation lost out to four other companies on a competitive bid for $50 million in technology contracts — though one of the companies will employ Wireless Generation as a subcontractor.

“They’ll get a small piece of a smaller pie than they would have received under last year’s proposed contract,” state Education Department spokesman Tom Dunn said.

The new contracts will help teachers, administrators and parents track student test scores and other data and will replace a costly system in use in city schools called Achievement Reporting and Innovation Systems, or ARIS, as soon as the end of 2013.

The writer at the Daily Kos closed, "They should not be getting any of the pie. Teachers are held accountable almost to the extreme, but those on the side of the "reformers" are not held to similar standards."

Chicago Sun-Times Publishes Scab's Guide to Schools - Teacher Recounts What's at Stake

LATEST, posted 12:52 PM, Sat. September 8, 2012, by Chicago Sun-Times: Talks resume as teachers strike deadline looms. At last night's news conference after eight hours of contract negotiations, Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis said that she was "very disappointed."

WMAQ (NBC) TV: "CTU Opens Strike Headquarters as Contract Talks Continue"

Est. 12:15 AM, Sun. September 9, 2012: The Chicago Tribune said that contracts are still not progressing, despite the entry of Chicago School Board president David Vitale, who helped usher in previous recent contracts. The Tribune also reported that Service Employees International Union janitors are required by law to work through a teachers' strike, but the SEIU local president says that janitors will wear red handkerchiefs out of solidarity with striking teachers.

The Chicago Sun-Times has published a guide to scabbing for "replacement workers" who will actual teachers at special "holding schools." (Many teachers have been calling "scab schools." CTU president Lewis has called the contingency plans "a train wreck" waiting to happen.)

Here are the highlights from the guide, via Mike Klonsky's blog. The subtext/translation follows the "CPS’s How To Guide for workers at strike contingency school" tips for the principals, assistant principals, office staff and whomever the Chicago Public Schools manages to scrounge up to staff 144 “Children First’’scab sites when the CTU officially goes on strike on Monday, September 10, 2012, less than 48 hours from now.

• “Wear a watch — your room may not have a functioning clock.’’
Poor school funding: "teachers' working conditions are our students learning conditions." Hellooo
• Dress comfortably as “many schools are NOT air-conditioned.’’
Ditto
• “You will need to bring your own breakfast and lunch. Please note that you cannot rely on access to refrigerators or microwaves.’’
No faculty cafeteria, or if there is, the staff could be CTU and out on strike
• “Keep personal items to a minimum.’’
Beware of theft
• Sessions for kids run from 8:30 to 12:30 but “you should arrive as early as possible” and be prepared to stay late.
Be prepared to babysit between 12:30 until 3:00 or so, or whenever the schoolday normally ends, and parents come pick up Johnny
• Bring 30 sharpened pencils, 30 pens and a personal pencil sharpener.
The students aren't prepared
• Bring “stickers or other small inexpensive incentive items.’’
Narrowing of curriculum has alienated the students; bribes supposedly overcome this
• Bring old magazines and newspapers, puzzles and games.
Real teaching won't happen when real teachers are away

Klonsky adds:
There's one other tip the guide could have included: Don't drink too much coffee or water before school and be prepared to hold it in because there won't be anyone to relieve you (pun intended).

I can't imagine these poor suits from Clark Street still favoring a longer school day after this experience. But maybe they will gain a little respect for teachers once this is over.

A panicky [Schools CEO Jean-Claude] Brizard sent Lewis a letter Friday, asking the union to voluntarily forgo picketing the 144 “Children First’’scab sites. He claims that he has “deep concerns’’ about forcing “impressionable” kids to “walk through a picket line with their parents.’’ He's also going to have to find a way to slip his forced-labor principals and A.P.s in through the back door to keep them from crossing picket lines. Remember, at some point they will have to go back and work with their teachers again and try to rebuild the trust that Rahm has shattered.

And then there's Klonsky's other post in which he reprinted one teacher's contribution to an eclectic Chicago blog about the meaning of teaching:

What's At Stake for Chicago Public Educators?"
By David Stieber

You have undoubtedly heard the news reports, radio attack ads, CPS representatives, the "CEO" of Chicago Public Schools, and the Mayor saying how teachers are walking out on the students if we strike. Parents, students, residents of this city, as a teacher let me tell you, comments like that rip teachers to our core. As cliché as it sounds teaching is a calling. It's not as if one day we just said, "I guess I'll just be a teacher." It takes skill and dedication to stand in front of 30 (sometimes more) young people in a classroom and truly care and be able to teach every one of them. It is not possible to just be mediocre when it comes to teaching students. A young person is the first to let you know if you aren't doing a good job at teaching the lesson, not getting graded work passed back quickly enough, heck, they will even let you know if you look bad that day.

Teachers just can't punch in, start thinking about kids then punch out and stop. Teachers are always trying to improve our lesson plans, grade, figure out ways to reach the students who are withdrawn, quiet, confrontational or disrupting class. We just can't shut our students out of our lives when the bell rings.

Unless you are a teacher you have no idea the pain, frustration and intrinsic anger we feel when some paid radio ad claims, that "teachers are walking out on students." Some days after teaching, I honestly wish I could walk out on my students and never come back. But no matter how frustrating our day may have been, it is the kids that always bring us back. Teachers spend our lunch periods, before and after school helping, coaching, and listening to our students.

After days of teaching, we spend nights in grad school, trying to make ourselves better teachers. We raise children and think about how we want our own child to be like __(insert name here)__ who we taught a few years back.

There is nothing about our careers, our schools, and our students that we take lightly.

So please understand, teachers are trying to teach you that our careers and professions are under attack. Please understand we are trying to teach you about how your child's education is under attack.

You may find this dramatic, but education is at a crossroads in our country and our neighborhood, our city is right at the intersection of these crossroads. There is an attempt to make schooling privatized, charter-ized, and more inequitable than it already is. There is an attempt to get rid of experienced teachers who have built relationships with families, who truly know how to teach and replace them with less expensive, inexperienced teachers who likely will only be at the school for two years.

There is an attempt to teach through testing, to make your child so bored in school from over-standardized testing that students aren't excited for school anymore. There is an attempt to further cut librarians, counselors, nurses, PE, World Language, Art and now classroom teachers, in order to "save" money. A budget is a political document, not a financial one, it's about priorities. Some priorities obviously need to be re-evaluated.

Teachers in no way shape or form want to strike, we want to be working with and educating your children. The CTU, which represents and is elected by 26,000 educators across this city has had over 50 negotiation meetings with CPS since November 2011. In all of that time "CEO" Brizard has attended zero of those meetings, which means there was no one from CPS at the bargaining table with any educational experience.

So I ask, how do you bargain on what is best for students with people who have never taught students?

At stake is way more than pay. At stake for us is doing what is right for our community, our city, and yes our students, because as teachers it is always about the kids.

David Stieber is a CPS teacher, and is currently completing a Masters degree in Urban Education Policy Studies.

BREAKING: Chicago Teachers Union Strike to Come: To File 10-Day Notice

BREAKING NEWS: Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) to file 10-day strike notice.
This will potentially set the strike to begin on the second week of school, occupying a difficult part on the news cycle, coming right on the heels of the Democratic National Convention, scheduled for the first week in September.

Chicago Teachers Union to file 10-day strike notice
BY ROSALIND ROSSI Education Reporter rrossi@suntimes.com August 29, 2012 10:10AM

Updated: August 29, 2012 1:03PM

The Chicago Teachers Union plans to file a 10-day notice of intent to strike Wednesday, thrusting teachers closer to a walkout that could start as early as the second week of school, sources told the Chicago Sun-Times.

Another step before a strike could disrupt classes in the nation’s third-largest school system would be the setting of a strike date by the union’s House of Delegates, a topic the body is likely to take up at its meeting on Thursday.

Delegates could set an exact date or give union leaders some leeway.

The union plans a news conference later Wednesday.

The planned filing Wednesday of a 10-day notice of intent to strike comes after CTU President Karen Lewis said late Tuesday that the two sides remain “very far apart” and have only recently resolved small issues, such as “ privacy for nursing mothers and workplace bullying.’’

“We are literally talking about crossing Ts and dotting Is,’’ Lewis said.

Any notice — which allows a strike anytime after 10 days — also would follow contentions by Lewis that an 11th-hour deal for a longer school day has been done “haphazardly” and “ridiculously” — an accusation that took some Chicago school officials by surprise. Under the interim agreement, kids still got the longer day promised by Mayor Rahm Emanuel, but teachers’ work day was not substantially lengthened.

Chicago schools chief Jean-Claude Brizard said Wednesday that if union leaders choose to file notice to strike, “We’ll be ready.”

The two sidea have been talking since November about a new contract. Teachers’ old contract expired in June.

Chicago School Board members last week OKed spending up to $25 million to keep students occupied, sheltered and fed in the event of a strike, an authorization that would be triggered upon notice of an intent to strike.

Asked whether a 10-day notice would put added pressure to resolve teacher contract talks that have lingered since November, Brizard said, “We’ve been very serious about negotiations” but a 10-day notice would “put pressure” on kids and parents.

Brizard spoke after meeting with principals at year-round schools, which started classes earlier this month. The principals raved about the extra time and recess that have come with the longer school day.

Several said the possibility of a strike hasn’t disrupted instruction so far.

“No one’s come to me and said they are down,” said Brunson Principal Carol Wilson. “I don’t see it impacting the instructional day.”

BY ROSALIND ROSSI Education Reporter rrossi@suntimes.com August 29, 2012

WTTW 11 Video: CTU Pres. Karen Lewis & CPS CEO Brizard Talk About Teacher Contract Negotiations on Chicago Tonight

President Karen GJ Lewis and CPS CEO Brizard talk about contract negotiations on Chicago Tonight [VIDEO]

Slick Broad Foundation Roped in Andy Stern -Scoop From Ravitch

The Broad Foundation. One of those philanthropy foundations that are determining education policy, instead of people determining public education policy.

Eli Broad and his billionaires buddies Bill Gates and the Waltons can be very good with coloring education deform policies with "liberal" or "civil rights" language.

So it is no surprise that Broad's foundation chose blue dog Democratic congressman Harold Ford (TN) or Andy Stern, former president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), to shore up the liberal credentials.

But WHY did Andy Stern have to join the Broad Foundation, an organization so antithetical to education workers' interests? He could have turned it down. By signing up he gives the impression that organized labor is fine with collaborating with a foundation that drives the education deform or stand-on-children abuse of school policy, teachers and children.

We're not surprised by Joel Klein, Jean Claude Brizard, Michelle Rhee, Margaret Spellings, Wendy Kopp and Mortimer Zuckerman.

But why couldn't Stern practice some labor solidarity and keep more than a 10 foot pole's distance from the noxious company of the Broad Foundation?

Read more about the unhappy details at "Does the Public Have a Right to Know about Broad Academy?" by Diane Ravitz:

We have visited the travails of the Huntsville, Alabama, schools before.

This is where a Broad-trained superintendent decided that recalcitrant kids should be sent off to live in a teepee until they learned to behave.

Then we learned that he bought 22,000 laptops for the district.

And this district laid off 150 experienced teachers to save money, but has given a contract to Teach for America to bring in rookie teachers.

Now we hear from a parent about life for his child in the Huntsville schools, where change is a fact of life. .

A Broad-trained superintendent in North Carolina left Michelle Rhee’s team and was hired by a Tea Party majority of the local school board in Wake County, North Carolina that wanted to eliminate the district’s successful desegregation policy, even if it meant resegregation of the schools. That board was ousted last fall. The superintendent has stayed on, and the choice plan now in effect seems likely to undo years of work to avoid resegregation. The schools of Wake County were lauded (before the Tea Party takeover) as a model of desegregation by Gerald Grant in his excellent book, Hope and Despair in the American City: Why There Are No Bad Schools in Raleigh.

Chris Cerf in New Jersey was trained by Broad. So was Deborah Gist in Rhode Island, John White in Louisiana, J.C. Brizard in Chicago, and John Covington in Michigan. when Philadelphia picked a new superintendent recently, the two finalists were both Broadies. And there are many more. Read about them here.

Now that the Broad Foundation “trains” so many new superintendents, doesn’t the public have a right to know what the Broad Academy is teaching its students?

The Broad Superintendents Academy is not certified, has no state approvals, is not subject to any outside monitoring, yet it “trains” people who then take leadership roles in urban districts and in state education departments. Many were never educators.

What were they taught? What principles and values were inculcated? On what research are their lessons based? How valid is the research to which they are exposed?

Inquiring minds want to know.

If the public has a right to information about teacher performance, doesn’t the public have a right to know who is training public school superintendents and what they are taught and how valid is the information and research they are given and whether they were exposed to different points of view?

By the way, the Broad Foundation just added new members to its board of directors. Here is the new lineup:

Officers:

The Honorable Joel I. Klein, Chair
CEO, Educational Division and Executive Vice President, Office of the Chairman, News Corporation Former Chancellor, New York City Department of Education

Barry Munitz, Vice Chair
Trustee Professor, California State University, Los Angeles

Dan Katzir, Secretary/Treasurer
Senior Advisor, The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation

Members:

Richard Barth
Chief Executive Officer, KIPP Foundation

Becca Bracy Knight
Executive Director, The Broad Center for the Management of School Systems

Jean-Claude Brizard
Chief Executive Officer, Chicago Public Schools

Harold Ford Jr.
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley Former U.S. Congressman, Tennessee

Louis Gerstner, Jr.
Retired Chairman and CEO, IBM Corporation

Wendy Kopp
Chief Executive Officer and Founder, Teach For America

Paul Pastorek
Chief Administrative Officer, Chief Counsel and Corporate Secretary, EADS North America Former Superintendent of Education, State of Louisiana

Michelle Rhee
Founder and CEO, StudentsFirst Former Chancellor, District of Columbia Public Schools

Margaret Spellings
President and Chief Executive Officer, Margaret Spellings and Company Former U.S. Secretary of Education

Andrew L. Stern
Former President, Service Employees International Union Ronald O. Perelman Senior Fellow, Richard Paul Richman Center for Business, Law and Public Policy, Columbia University

Lawrence H. Summers
Charles W. Eliot University Professor, Harvard University President Emeritus, Harvard University

Kenneth Zeff
Chief Operating Officer, Green Dot Public Schools

Mortimer Zuckerman
Chairman and Editor-in-Chief, U.S. News & World Report Publisher, New York Daily News

Click over to the Ravitch story for the 23 comments.

CTU UP; Emanuel Feeling Heat; Brizard MIA

How a mobilization and a few weeks make a world of difference.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has been in an aggressive mode for the past few weeks, ramming through a school day extension, unpopular with both parents and teachers. His aggressive stance has set up a strike possibility. Mike Klonsky blog reports "CTU and community protests force more Rahm concessions."

Schools CEO [sic] Jean-Claude Brizard "can't go anywhere these days without being greeted by community protests, even backing out of a scheduled meeting . . . for 'security reasons,'" writes Klonsky.

With national elections drawing near and a threatened teachers strike only 30 days away, Rahm is feeling pressure from inside his own camp to reach an agreement with the CTU. The Civic Federation is attacking his proposed school budget from one side while pro-union protests hit it from the other. CEO Brizard can't go anywhere these days without being greeted by community protests, even backing out of a scheduled meeting at UIC last week which was cancelled for "security reasons."

The school board was scheduled to pass it's $5.2 billion 2012-13 operating budget which would have locked in a meager, strike-inciting 2% raise for teachers right in the middle of heated contract negotiation and on the heels of the fact-finders report recommending a much higher pay raise. But, this morning, faced with the threat of massive protests at Wednesday's board meeting, the board announced that the budget vote would be postponed until after an agreement was reached with the union."

We are going to wait until August to allow for contract negotiations to continue because our budget outcomes will have to reflect those decisions,” schools spokeswoman Becky Carroll said.

Jackson Potter of the Chicago Teachers Union called the delay a good-faith effort by the district in ongoing negotiations. “It’s common sense as far as I’m concerned,” he said. “This is an opportunity to stand away from the precipice and talk about what are the ways in which we can get our schools back on track by investing in them."

The decision to delay the budget vote drew an angry response from the city's charter school crowd which stood to gain millions of dollars at the expense of city schools if the budget was passed on Wednesday.

At a rally Monday, leaders from some of the city's most prominent charter networks, including the United Neighborhood Organization, Noble and Chicago International Charter Schools, attacked union teachers for demanding a double-digit raise and called on the board to deliver on the $76 million allocated to them in the proposed budget. UNO's executive director, Juan Rangel, taking a page from The Sopranos, threatened,

"I know how this game gets played, and we're not going to allow the CTU to negotiate charters out."

But later today, the board announced even more concessions:

Instead of requiring teachers to work a 20 percent longer day, the Chicago Public Schools have agreed to hire more teachers to handle “enrichment programs” that include art and music. Teachers will continue to work the same hours they do now. Additional time in the classroom — adding up to a 7-hour day in elementary schools and 7.5 hours-a-day, four-days-a-week in high school — will be handled by the new hires.

Whether or not these announced concessions by Rahm's team are just a ploy or will be enough to avert a strike, community pressure for such concessions are certainly having an impact. Of course the devil is in the details and there's nothing in the board's announcements about teacher pay raises.

But it's clear that Rahm's strategy of posturing and refusing to bargain seriously has been upended. This in itself represents a victory for the CTU whose hand has been strengthened by growing community support and a solid 90% strike support vote of it's membership.